Finding Happiness In A Pandemic: 4 Practices For A Happy Life
I almost feel reluctant to write about happiness in the midst of COVID-19, the world has come to a temporary close as countries sink deeper into a lockdown with no definitive end in sight.
Yet now more than ever, we have an opportunity to really dive into our wellbeing. A pandemic in our lifetimes, terrifying isn’t it? A time of anxiety, uncertainty, depression, a time of fear.
Fear is something we all experience, the difference becomes apparent when we choose what to do with fear. Fear does not have to be the monster that we avoid at all costs, at it’s most basic level fear is just another emotion. You may not be able to control the flow of emotions in your mind, but you can always control how you perceive, and react to them. Fear is not the enemy, it is an opportunity — in this case, an opportunity to discover a more real, and long lasting happiness.
TWO PHILOSOPHIES FOR SUSTAINED HAPPINESS
Faith, Religion, and Philosophy of all types have understood the importance of happiness for thousands of years. Recently, in the past three decades, Science has decided to join the party. We now understand that happiness, the pleasant sensations we feel vibrating through our body, is basic biology. These sensations are caused by a release of chemicals; serotonin, dopamine, and oxytocin, into the body.
It is good to understand the fundamentals of Biology, but the real question worth pondering is, “How do I create an environment which allows these pleasant sensations to flourish?”
Psychologists conceive of happiness in two different ways: Hedonic happiness, or pleasure and enjoyment over suffering and pain, and Eudaimonic happiness, what we consider purpose or meaning (Vinney, Cynthia. 2020). Some psychologists champion one philosophy over the other, but most agree that a balance of both is necessary for pro-longed happiness.
HEDONIC HAPPINESS
Hedonic well-being is the type of happiness that comes from experiencing lots of positive emotions. You would have experienced hedonic happiness with friends and family during holidays, or perhaps not depending on how close your family ties are — we will touch on that later.
The problem with hedonism is how we perceive it, many use material assets to feed their need for happiness. This allows people to fall onto a hedonic-treadmill, endlessly chasing down a level of happiness which continues to allude them. Think of it like chasing a butterfly, you can never catch it, only when you stop does the butterfly choose to sit gracefully on your shoulder.
Hedonic happiness should not be measured by what we can accumulate, it should be measured by the joy we can experience with what we already have; laughter with a friend, coffee and a catch-up with mum, a game of Chess with Granddad, or a kiss shared between lovers.
EUDAIMONIC HAPPINESS
Eudaimonic well-being is the kind of happiness which relies on a sense of purpose, or meaning. In this sense, edaimonic happiness is harder to attain for most people, not because it is suited to a specific biological make-up. Creating purpose and meaning in your life is scary, requires hard-work, and a dedication to your own personal development.
For millennia philosophers, religious figures, and even politicians have declared the importance of creating purpose and meaning in your everyday life. Only recently science has shown the chemical, and molecular benefits of edaimonic well-being (Nerurkar, Aditi. 2019).
Steven Cole, a professor of medicine and psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that high levels of eudaimonic well being, more so than high levels of hedonic well-being, was correlated with a more favourable genetic expression profile. What does all this mean?
Those with scores of eudaimonic well-being showed high levels of antiviral response, with low levels of inflammatory response (Nerurkar, Aditi. 2019). Happier cells = A happier you.
What can you do with this information? Research shows us the path, now it is up to the individual, up to you, to walk that path one step at a time. I want to share four steps that you can implement in your life today, regardless of what state the world is in these steps will nurture a lasting happiness within.
4 PRACTICES FOR A HAPPY LIFE
1 — CREATE THE HABITS THAT CREATE YOU
Routine is the best friend you never new you had during a pandemic. It is easy to fall into the trap of Netflix, and chill for a full 12 hours before lying in bed wide awake flooded with anxiety, uncertainty, and fear of what you cannot hope to predict.
Enter your superpower. When you commit to creating positive habits, then your habits will create a more positive you. Your routine does not have to be set in stone, in-fact it is essential to make small improvements every day, because little by little, a little becomes a lot.
Don’t go find the most high performance human on the planet with the intention of copying their routine on day one, you will just disappoint yourself and likely give up. Rather, compile a list of the things you want to work on, it can be anything at all. What have you always wanted to learn, create, or build? Cooking show on Youtube? A book about dragons, wizards, and giants? A podcast about music? Building lego cities, or weight racks that you can sell on Amazon? Learning about psychology, economics, or architecture? Don’t let fear stop you, write it down.
The list might be short, or intimidatingly long, that doesn’t matter. The important point here is that you have made a start, congratulations, now go back to Netflix… JOKING!
Now, build a routine that will take you one tiny step closer to accomplishing just one of those ideas listed on your sheet of paper. Use google calendar or a diary, it doesn’t matter, just make a plan for week one. The simpler your plan is the better, Day one’s great success could be as simple as waking up without hitting snooze, taking a stroll in the morning, and having breakfast. Day two might have the addition of 30 minutes podcasting time, in order to build upon your mental resilience. By the end of week one you might consider introducing a time slot dedicated to one of your ideas.
Just aim for 1% improvements each day by adding a little bit more to your routine, strengthening your purpose and meaning little by little. This is how you build eudaimonic happiness.
2 — THE 3 F’S: FAITH, FAMILY, AND FRIENDS
I think this is the first time I have written a blog without saying fuck… well fuck, there goes that concept. The 3 F’s are not a series of fucks, in this context the 3 F’s relate to: Faith, Family, and Friends.
Thousands of academic studies suggest the importance human relationships have on lasting happiness, and yes the importance of some form of faith.
Let me clarify the term in this context, faith in anything will simply not do. You can have faith that your football team will win the championship once games re-commence, faith that your children will behave confined to the four corners of home, faith that science will discover a vaccine so that life can resemble some form of normality. To me, and my definition may differ from yours, those all all examples of hope, faith needs to be something significantly more involved. I choose to base my faith around numerous religious texts, with the overarching belief in a greater force we don’t fully understand. In my eyes we are all just echoes of the universe as a whole, my beliefs are based on scientific theory with a pinch of philosophy, and a dash of religious teachings for good measure.
I build my faith around these beliefs, around the teachings of philosophers, and religious types alike.
“The key is to find a structure through which you can ponder life’s deeper questions and transcend a focus on your narrow self-interests to serve others.”
- Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic -
Your faith and love transcends into the relationships, you build with family, friends, and your community. There is no magic formula allowing you to cultivate the perfect relationship, the key is to approach every relationship with love, empathy, compassion, and kindness.
People who build strong loving relationships with family and friends thrive; those who don’t, don’t. Commitment to serving ideas greater than yourself, offering up your love and sacrificing your time for others, these actions will serve you with lasting happiness in return.
The laughter and joy you share with loved ones, while building a relationship greater than yourselves will increase your hedonic, and eudaemonic scores.
Don’t forget about work. How could work be a significant contribution to happiness; it can’t be. Productive human endeavour is pivotal in creating a sense of purpose, this is a central pillar in happiness literature. Building a powerful relationship with work is just as important as strengthening the bonds with family and friends. Of course it is important to pursue work that is more meaningful to you, some jobs are better, or worse than others, but most research suggests unemployment brings nothing but suffering.
If you build a life around the 3 F’s, you are destined to live a life full of joy, purpose, laughter, and happiness.
3 — WHAT YOU HAVE VERSUS WHAT YOU WANT. GRATITUDE.
There is much disagreement over the statement, “Money doesn’t buy happiness.” In some situations this statement has weight, in other situations it has no relevance whatsoever. Money could buy crucial medication to save your child’s life, or the food needed to improve your gut health, your sleep, and as a result your happiness. Money might be responsible for improving the lives of billions living under the poverty line, so can money buy happiness? The answer is, sometimes yes, sometimes no, it really depends on the context. What we can say is “Money doesn’t buy satisfaction,” our internal equilibrium sees to that. Psychologists refer to this as the hedonic treadmill: People never feel like they have enough, because they get used to their new normal incredibly fast, using money in an attempt to buy more happiness, the equilibrium balances once more and the cycle continues — round and round the treadmill they go.
“We need to learn how to want what we have not to have what we want in order to get steady and stable Happiness.”
- The Dalai Lama -
This statement is not just spiritual nonsense, it is real and practical advice which many never fully comprehend. People get stuck in the cycle of work, buy fake happiness, work, buy more fake happiness, rinse and repeat. The timer always resets, and satisfaction continues to escape our grasp on the hedonic treadmill.
Satisfaction relies on how you manage your wants, as opposed to obsessing about having more. Don’t try to increase your possessions; list out the possessions you have and try to decrease them. Take a look at your bucket list, now throw it away and make a new one — not of romantic getaways, expensive material possessions, or vacations. List out the attachments in your life in need of discarding, now make a plan to do just that. As you remove more wants from your mind, the clearer your focus will become, and the easier it will be to build upon the satisfaction for what you have.
It becomes easier to feel gratitude as you de-clutter your mind of all the pointless desires for more, in doing so your focus will turn to building upon greater projects outside of yourself. You will begin to see money as a tool for giving, and creating purpose, rather than a one way ticket to the hedonic treadmill.
4 — MEDITATE
Meditation is the single greatest tool in your pandemic arsenal — it is your single greatest happiness tool for life in general.
I like to think of meditation as the tiny bolt that keeps the entire bridge from collapsing in upon itself, it should be constantly maintained and strengthened in order to keep the bridge functioning, and to increase the weight in which the bridge can hold.
Happiness is but one tiny part of your emotional spectrum, and just like Covid-19 emotions do not discriminate. On any given day you will experience moments of; sadness, despair, anxiety, depression, frustration, anger, and fear. What do you do with these emotions? Bury them under a fake smile, and a can do attitude, ignoring the necessary maintenance of that crucial bolt?
No matter how much meaning, love, joy, connection, and purpose you have in your life; if you choose to ignore the emotions that scare you, with time your metaphorical bridge will collapse in on itself — good bye happiness.
Mastering your emotions requires work, a lot of it, and meditation is that work. Steven Cole’s research into happiness linked meditation to reduced negative inflammatory activity, increased positive antiviral response, improved function of specific strains of immune cells, and higher antibody productions (Nerurkar, Aditi. 2019). Perhaps the most promising theories, indicate that meditation can alter genetic material.
“Speak to me in words I can comprehend Jacques!” Meditation can improve your mental state, allowing you to build comfort in all emotional states. Further, meditation can make you happier, and more satisfied for longer; constant practice can repair your cells, strengthen your focus, and improve your relationships with self and others.
In this time of isolation you have a real opportunity to asses what is important to you, the things that make you truly experience a long lasting happiness. My hope is that you take this opportunity, and continue your journey into the new world. We can be certain that the world will look very different post covid-19, it is up to all of us to improve starting by improving ourselves.
Jacques Massie is one half of Massie Bros, and host of the Couple A Lattes Podcast.
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