This copyrighted material may not be republished without express permission. The information presented here is for general educational purposes only. They see something negative in the news — a disaster, a crime, a political squabble — and they get upset. They may rant about how terrible everything is or frantically search the Internet for more details. They lose their job and feel like their life is falling apart. They get angry, blaming their boss, their coworkers, or the economy.
They panic about their future, go into victim mode, and become bitter and depressed. You do. Everybody wants to be happy, but most people give up their happiness for just about anything.
Well, yes and no. Practice Makes Permanent Not Perfect! Your Priorities Channel Your Energy When you choose to make happiness a priority in your life, you will notice that your thoughts are now focused and clear.
How To Prioritize Your Happiness Now that you hopefully understand why you should prioritize happiness, you might be wondering how to do it. We can be happy, not obtain happiness. Ah, that opens up a new set of possibilities. We could be happy while driving, while cooking, while playing with our kids, or while filing a tax return form.
If we are conscious of what we are doing and really experience the whole set of feelings that surround our actions, we discover that happiness is among them. So happiness is our state of being! It has been within us, intrinsic to our existence, this whole time.
Knowing this, we discover some other interesting things: When we are truly happy, we want others to be happy. So the more we make others happy, the happier we become. We are emotional beings and experience a wide range of feelings on a daily basis. Negative emotions — such as fear and anger — help us to get away from danger or defend ourselves.
And positive emotions — such as enjoyment and hope — help us to connect with others and build our capacity to cope when things go wrong. Trying to live a happy life is not about denying negative emotions or pretending to feel joyful all the time. To suggest otherwise would be to deny part of the human condition.
Happiness is about being able to make the most of the good times — but also to cope effectively with the inevitable bad times, in order to experience the best possible life overall. One popular misconception about happiness is that happy people are somehow more likely to be lazy or ineffective. For example, economists at Warwick University showed different groups of people either a positive film clip or a neutral film clip and then asked them to carry out standard workplace tasks under paid conditions.
Similarly, researchers at Wharton Business School found that companies with happy employees outperform the stock market year on year and a team at UCL has discovered that people who are happy as young adults go on to earn more than their peers later in life. In healthcare, doctors who are happy have been found to make faster and more accurate diagnoses , even when this happiness was induced simply by giving them the small gift of a sugary sweet.
Let me ask you a question. Would you say that you, like all humans, are complicated to understand? Of course you are. We all are. That complexity means that there are no simple, one-size-fits-all answers to what makes us happy. Our individual needs vary based on our genetics, how we were raised, and our life experiences.
That complex combination is what makes each of us unique, both in our exact needs, and in every other aspect of what makes us the person we are. We may each be complex but we are all human and that provides the foundation on which we can discover our essential human needs. Just as we are all born looking human on the outside, we all share common basic needs on the inside. Where we differ is exactly how strongly we feel each of those needs. I like to think of each of us like one of those big recording studio mixer boards, the ones with all the sliding controls and knobs, some of which interact with each other, some working separately, all working together to produce the final product.
0コメント