I know that finding and sustaining happiness is the ultimate goal and the infinite struggle for most of us. It causes so much anxiety and frustration that it can bring you to your knees if you let it.
And when it does, all you’re left with is to cope through life.
This isn’t the way! “One day,” —you say to yourself.
So many people think that reaching your big goals, dreams and aspirations are exactly what will make you happy.
I hate to break it to you, but it couldn’t be far from reality. Why do you see so many famous people dealing with depression and the same problems as you are?
If you think about it, they’ve got everything going for them — they have the world at their knees. And yet some of them are just as miserable as they were before they made it big.
Unhappiness and misery like many things compounds. It can get to a point when it’s simply unbearable. You hate to see that, but it happens.
They leave beautiful wives, kids, career, their fortune — everything they had.
It seems that they had everything going for them. And yet, they weren’t happy.
You Can’t Buy Happiness
Money is important, don’t get me wrong. But only to a degree. They won’t make you happy. They might make you less worried.
They might reduce your overall suffering and improve your quality of life.
But once you have enough to take care of your basic necessities — anything beyond that threshold won’t have as much impact on your level of happiness as you might think it will.
Every Person Has a Reservoir of Happiness
It’s just like a fuel tank. At least that’s what I imagine it to be.
Every time you have a new experience your brain taps into the reservoir processing it in one way or another, depending on the type of fuel it taps into.
So what it does is it enhances the good experience tenfold and neutralizes the bad one(it substantially diminishes the negative effect it would otherwise have on you — to a degree that it can, of course.
Some things can really crush you, and no amount of happiness (accumulated up until that moment) will help you then. I’ll cover that in a later blog post why happiness as a goal is severely overrated.)
I bet you know some people who seem pretty happy and grateful, and every little thing that happens in their life —they get so excited and pumped about it as if it was a miracle or something.
And I bet you know others, that no matter how good the things get for them, they always seem to find something to be miserable about…
Your mindset is important. You gotta make a choice.
Happiness is the Fuel That You Run Your Life on
Just like with a car, you wouldn’t want to keep the tank low when you wanna go for a ride, right? And you don’t wanna use a poor quality fuel either. It won’t get you far. Eventually, it will break your car.
REMEMBER: You are using the same “reservoir” to store regrets, faults, failures, tragedies, anything you dwell on, toxic behaviors, and so on, leaving less space for the good things to come.
If you store misery, regrets, resentments, etc. that’s exactly what you are gonna run your life on, being miserable and resentful. By the way — that’s highly contagious!
Stop spreading it! In fact, that’s what many people do. You don’t need to go far, just take a look around.
You have only one “reservoir” to store the good and the bad. Too much bad and you get misery. Too much good, you get happiness, leaving not enough room for the bad.
That’s the idea! There is not enough room for both. The negative things can’t squeeze in. Or even if it does, let’s say tragedy happens, it can’t stay there for long.
Because the abundant amount of good will push it out. Snowball effect! Even though it might make you feel terrible at the moment, you will know that YOU ARE a happy person, and once you grief properly, and move on(depending on the tragedy) you will get back to your baseline of happiness.
I oversimplify things making them look silly, but I do it so you can understand the concept behind happiness.
More importantly, what you CAN actually DO with what you already have in your arsenal.
The Baseline of Happiness
The reservoir of happiness has a certain threshold. It’s that tipping point, where one day you wake up in the morning, and suddenly realize:
“Woah, my life isn’t so bad after all. Actually, It’s PRETTY good. Hmm…It’s even GREAT at times. Nooo way! Did I hit the bullseye? Am I really happy? Wow!”
That tipping point is where your baseline of happiness is.
Every time you reflect on your life to see if you’re happy or not, you essentially just checking your baseline of happiness.
What I noticed is that every time I go through a tragic moment of my life, It takes some time to recover and get it together.
Sometimes, real tragedy happens. That can severely hit you where it hurts most.
It takes an enormous amount of time and energy and commitment to recover and grow from it.
Human beings are powerful creatures, WAY more powerful than we give ourselves credit for.
You can and must withstand anything life throws at you, and you WILL come out stronger and wiser than you have ever been before.
In my own case, once I recover, I always seem to come back to that same point of how happy I was before it all went south. That’s what I see as the baseline of happiness.
Important to Know:
The baseline of happiness is never steady — It constantly fluctuates.
Therefore, your job is to keep that base level high enough, so when a tragedy or misfortune happens (and it will!), it doesn’t crush you.
It happened to me when I had one of the darkest moments of my life – a devastating soul-shattering break up after being together for over 9 years.
It was a dire situation. Everything just seemed to lose its meaning. Overnight.
Excruciating pain, in contrast with periods of not giving a crap about anything and not feeling anything at all.
However, what helped me to get through and get my life back is my strong belief.
I knew I was happy BEFORE I met her. I was happy when I was WITH her. And I knew I will be just as happy AFTER I grief and move on. This mindset gave me so much strength to collect myself from little pieces and fully recover. Time heals.
10 months later, I am the happiest I’ve ever been in years. It’s because your happiness doesn’t depend on other people. They do not make you happy. On the contrary, you create happiness yourself and then you get to share it with everybody else coming your way.
Having this baseline of happiness pretty high is of the utmost importance.
Since Your Happiness Doesn’t Depend on Other People, It’s on You
That’s the beauty of it. For me personally, appreciation of what I have does it best. Every time I feel confused, lost, overwhelmed and sad, I come back to the basics – gratitude.
I make sure to remind myself of how damn lucky I am to be alive and have what I have!
Appreciation is an Important Skill to Master
I regularly spend about 15 minutes a day to appreciate the things and the people I have in my life and everything else I am grateful for.
That’s something I’ve been doing this for 20+ years – it does magic! Try it.
I used to do taking long walks which I love. Nowadays I do it in the sauna or during biking through the park.
If there is just one thing you’re gonna take away from this post – make sure it’s the importance of gratitude!
It’s never too late to learn to appreciate the world around you.
You can start by learning to appreciate some of these:
- Being healthy.
- Working in the desired field, even if you just starting out.
- Living in the first world country: having food/water/sanitation.
- Making progress or taking control over cancer, diabetes, cancer, allergies, or anything that is wrong with you.
- Having an amazing family: wife, kids, brothers, sisters, parents.
- Having friends and people who care about you.
I can promise you this if you learn to be grateful and appreciative of things and people around you, sustaining happiness will be like a walk in the park.
The next step:
You Want to Understand How to Sustain Happiness
We already broke down that the container of happiness needs to be fueled with feeling good moments and gratitude until it reaches that happiness threshold – the baseline of true happiness.
So what do you do to sustain happiness?
First of all, sustained happiness comes as a result or by-product of living a meaningful and fulfilling life.
But nonetheless, you can improve your current state dramatically with effort and the right mindset.
Figure out a way to revolve your life around those happy moments maintaining the baseline high enough.
Schedule and prioritize them just like you would your job. It’s of the utmost importance!
That’s one of our big issues, right? You feel so busy with life, your job, and responsibilities, that you can’t possibly find some “me” time. It’s hard as hell out there!
You Don’t Find Me-time, You Make it
Even if you are exhausted and overwhelmed – you make the time!
And I know you don’t. You are too busy…too busy doing what?
Your life is passing you by…
Do you not understand that by not prioritizing your “me” time, you are slacking off at the expense of your happiness?
Make sure to have at least an hour a day just for your me-time, ideally more.
Use that hour to spend with your wife and kids, or meditate, or read a book, or take a sauna(like I do), or play your favorite video game. Do whatever floats your boat!
It Has to Be Deeply Meaningful for You
Those things that make you happy, make sure you put some meaning into them. Make them extremely important. They are vital for your mental health.
They reduce stress, improve concentration, and bring fulfillment.
How do you think people find their passion?
They create it. And so will you!
Make it very important and let others around you know about the 60 minutes you do not exist for anybody else but yourself(unless they play a part in your me-time.)
It’s your thing and nobody can take it away from you. Stand your ground. GUARD IT!
You will be amazed at how it will make you feel every day, once you put some meaning and importance to what floats your boat.
Having something important and meaningful and enjoying doing it every day, appreciating what you have will improve your overall quality of life tenfold.
Because that’s what happiness does!
