What on Earth is Happiness?
Happiness cannot be pursued. Every person must have a reason to “be happy.”
In this article, I will write the lessons I got from the course in Coursera — A Life of Happiness and Fulfillment, which was recommended by my friend Maria Navas. It helps you to find out what things makes you happy and unhappy from a scientific point of view. By creating habits that make you do the actions that make you happy, and stop doing the ones that make you unhappy they demonstrate that everyone can increase their levels of happiness. You will find a lot of articles, researches, and experiments that support all their advice.
This article is part of a bigger one where I try to define some rules to guide my life and actions. What I am really trying is to define my own Philosophy of life. You can check the rest of the articles here:
To summarise a bit why I am doing this (you can skip this part if you read the intro from the main article), for the previous 2 years, I had been working and studying full time. I had been also traveling and joining every event and activity there was like crazy. I think I had the famous feeling of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), or maybe I was just trying to find some meaning and no matter how many things I did, at the end of the day, I didn’t feel accomplished nor really truly happy. I wanted to do everything at the same time and this was starting to burn me out. I became very anxious, nervous and stressed… and I knew I had to put a stop to this lifestyle. So as soon as I finished the master I decided to also quit my job and go for a gap year in search of purpose and meaning.
First of all, what does happiness mean to you?
The first thing that is needed to do is to make our own definition of happiness. As happiness is a subjective thing everyone should try to define it in his own words. When you know what it means to you, only then you can try to aim for it. Some people define happiness as the feeling of abundance, joy or serenity. The feeling that you have everything that you need, and that life is perfect with its imperfections. In my case:
Happiness for me means serenity and tranquility, having a peaceful state of mind as well as feeling connection with loved ones and amusement in life.
What things make you happier?
The first rule in this course was a very simple one, but one that apparently we forget to do. Prioritise happiness: Don’t devaluate happiness sacrificing it for other things. Start making happiness enhancing decisions right now and don’t postpone it. For example, imagine you love french fries on top of anything else. Imagine also that you go to an ‘All you can eat’ restaurant. You might try to eat the foods that are usually more costly, to take advantage, even if you don’t like them as much, leaving out the cheap french fries for another time. In this case, you would be sacrificing your happiness (eating french fries) and prioritising money (eating maybe some expensive shrimps).
To be able to prioritise the things that make you happy it could be useful to know what things make you happier in the first place. Try to make a little list of these things and try to keep them in your mind, so whenever you can, or the opportunity comes, you can choose to prioritise them. In my case:
— Having a routine brings me peace
— Seeing and playing with a dog
— Seeing the sunset / sea / nature / sky
— Hanging out/talk with good friends and family
— Taking ethical decisions in daily life (recycling, being vegetarian…)
— Seeing animated movies
— Showing people something I know, like tour guiding or teaching
Finding happiness
According to the course, we need three things to be happy once our basic necessities are met. Mastery, Belongingness, and Autonomy.
— Mastery: we need to feel that we are good at something. Dancing or painting, teaching, whatever. We all can find a purpose in life by training our inherent talents and experiencing flow (to have flow means to be really involved in a task, which is just above your level of skills, not too easy to become boring and not too difficult to bring you frustration). In my case, I have to admit that I usually experienced the flow mindset while developing mobile apps, so although I quit my job to have a rest, I will probably end up doing a very similar role in my future work.
Another point of view about mastery is about mastering own mind or feelings. This is, trying to control our thoughts and feelings by taking responsibility for own happiness and our attitudes. We can call this personal mastery. As a general rule, you should always remember to be compassionate towards yourself, as you would do with any other human being, by practising mindfulness (acceptance), self-kindness and common humanity. For some reason, we tend to be very harsh with ourselves and not accepting our own imperfections of failures.
— Belongingness: we need to feel a sense of intimacy or connection with at least one other person. We feel good when we are kind and generous to others. We also feel good when we trust others and our trust is reciprocated. One common problem is that we take things for granted and we don’t let the people we love know how much we love them. Express your gratitude towards them and you will both feel happier.
— Autonomy: we need to have a sense that we are free. That we are the authors of our own judgments and decisions and that we are not under somebody else’s control. Although we feel good by controlling others, others don’t feel good about being controlled. We should try to transform our need for external control (unpredictable and cause of unhappiness) into internal control (autonomy over our thoughts and feelings is up to us and up to no one else). A very useful methodology to improve this is by practising mindfulness, which I have to admit sounded very boring to me, but I am giving it a try.
Another tip is to try to stop relying on outcomes for our happiness, like for example, you think you can't be happy if you don't get that promotion at work (again an external circumstance we can’t always control). This doesn’t mean that we should stop pursuing our goals or become disinterested in our daily life. De-linking happiness from outcomes refers to not judging outcomes after they have occurred. One something has happened, it has happened, it's in the past, learn from it without judging yourself, and move on to your next goal.
So, am I happier now after I did the course?
I do think I am happier than when I was working and studying at the same time. The course has been worthy because now I have a clear definition of what happiness means to me, meaning that now I have some goals or objectives to look for. It is really useful to put into words what makes you happy and to abandon this abstract idea that we can have when we generally talk about happiness.
I am also trying to change some attitudes in my daily life, like expressing gratitude more often, being more honest with myself, or being aware when I start the circle of thinking about what worries me or about things that I can’t control and trying to rephrase those worries into things I do have control over.
I am also taking some very big steps in my life, for example, my boyfriend and I are thinking about moving to a city next to the beach so we can have nature closer to us. I am keeping with my vegetarian diet and we wrote a book about vegan recipes Tradivegan. I am also now actively trying into living a 0 waste life without plastics.
All these little steps make me happier.
Extra tips
Following this course, I learnt a lot of techniques that can make everyone increase their levels of happiness. However, I also read the book a Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. In this book, it is stated that happiness cannot be pursued because you must have a reason to “be happy”. Once the reason is found you will become happy automatically. This reason is what we call meaning or purpose. The author was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp and through his experiences explains how everyone can find a meaning or purpose in life and gives advice about how to achieve this.
I have also written a short article with lessons I got from this book, recommended to me by my friend Vincent Aubry, if you would like to also read it, click here:
This article is part of a bigger one where I try to define some rules to guide my life and actions. What I am really trying is to define my own Philosophy of Life. You can check the rest of the article here:
