Once, there was a young man in his early twenties who was heartbroken after a breakup with a woman who he was sure he was going to marry. Lamenting to his friend in a letter, the heartbroken fellow wrote that he didn't "believe that our creator created us to attain happiness. Rather, for us to pursue it as a part of a lifelong journey." If that sentiment sounds familiar it is because the heartbroken young lad was Thomas Jefferson and his belief in pursuing happiness found its way into our Declaration of Independence. It is a phrase that still drives our behaviors today.
Many of us struggle to achieve holistic well-being. In some ways, we are still being driven by this idea of pursuing happiness. For most of us, this means identifying some objective, pursuing and achieving it and then quickly moving on to the next objective. The problem with a life-long pursuit of happiness is that we spend very little time actually being happy. Not that anyone should feel any blame for that. The truth is none of us were really taught how to be happy. Instead, we are only taught the pursuit.
We've been chasing the horizon unaware that there is no way of actually getting there. So where is happiness? It is right where you are sitting. Or at least it can be. However, it's also worth considering that happiness isn't a destination. It’s akin to plasma where it exists between two distinct states, inheriting traits from each but also existing as its own state itself. Happiness is both a destination and a journey.
Happiness is a destination in that you can indeed be happy. So yes! By all means, pursue that. Happiness is also a journey. Like all of our emotions, happiness is very fleeting. You may arrive at happiness as if your GPS was somehow capable of getting there, but there is no real expectation that you can get out of your car, pitch your tent, and stay there. So in between being happy and not being happy, you have the journey. Here's the thing about the journey. You may increase your speed or incline and make that journey more challenging and you hit a spot where you feel like you made it. You're there, finally happy. Yet, before you know it, you find yourself back on that journey looking for happiness.
Psychologist Michael Eysenck coined the term the hedonic treadmill to help explain this phenomenon. You most likely experienced this with the last car you bought. That smell, the feel of those seats against your body, all the new gadgets……this is it. You are happy. Then a few months later, it's just another car. Last month, driving by the car lot couldn't distract you from your commute. This month, you find yourself strangely eyeing the shiny new hunks of even more happiness sitting there like sirens calling from the sea. Again, we spend our time in pursuit of happiness partly because it is just how our brains are wired but also because we just don't know how to be happy.
I wish this were a blog that provides all the answers on being happy. If I had that figured out, I'd be somewhere being happy (and probably getting paid a ton of money to teach others to do the same). I want to introduce another idea for you to consider as you embark on your life-long journey in pursuit of happiness. As I mentioned, happiness is indeed a destination you will reach from time to time. Whether you are on the journey or are feeling like you are truly happy now, I think you might find value in protecting your joy from the thieves constantly on the hunt to steal it from you.
The truth is most of us are on autopilot. We are literally living our own Groundhog Day each and every day. For the major parts of our day, we need no tool to help keep us on track. We go to work, we come back home, we engage in our familiar relationships (regardless if those relationships bring us joy or not), find one or two things to do for ourselves in the evening and then it's off to bed to do it all again tomorrow. Looking back on my life, I have realized that there were five things I was consistently doing when it came to my efforts associated with protecting myself from the joy thieves. I have noticed that when I’m engaged in these activities, the fight is much easier than when I’m not. That said, I am under no illusion that I’ll be successful 100% of the time. However, I have become aware that there are indeed things you can do that will help be more successful than not.
Here are the five things that have helped me.
1. Ask yourself if you are really happy
The first thing we can do to build up our fortifications against the joy thieves out there is simply asking ourselves if we are happy. If happiness is a destination you can reach and I am telling you can do things to build up defenses against the things that want to come and take that joy from you, let's make sure you are in a place worth building those fortifications to begin with. When we are forced to stop and ask ourselves if the things we are doing, the live we are living, and the relationships we are expending our effort in maintaining, it forces us to turn off the autopilot and become conscious of the decisions we are making. Once you are off autopilot, you can use this new awareness to then become intentional about expending that energy on the things that are bringing you joy.
2. Are you a human being or a human doing?
This is another gift from psychology. Most of us spend our time as humans doing instead of humans being. When it comes to protecting your joy, knowing which one you are in even given moment is going to be critical. You can't spend all of your time as one or the other. This is an area where you oscillate between the two but here again, we are forgetting the 'being' part as we are constantly doing. This constant pursuit of happiness will have us looking back on this era of human existence defined by constant exhaustion with wonder. Why didn't we just stop and savor our success a bit more instead of willingly engaging in this never-ending process of pursuit. One might logically conclude that the blessing we have to be living in a time of modern conveniences unlike anything seen before should mean we all have no problem relaxing. Yet, despite our technological advances and convenience, we are living in a time defined by the highest levels of anxiety, depression and generally poor mental health ever seen. Along the spectrum of being and doing, we have forgotten that there's something more than just doing. Make sure you are spending time being so that you are fully equipped for your doing. This is especially hard to do for high achievers who by their nature of high achievement find themselves quickly moving on to the next unachieved goal on their list. Learn how to pause and celebrate your wins. Celebrate the wins of those around you and encourage them to savor those moments as well. A life lived at the edge of exhaustion is short and unfulfilling life.
3. Cultivate a positive attitude
Look, I'm not going to argue with your eyeroll here. This is hard. The thing is, if your epic eyeroll made you a little dizzy, you may have lost sight of a hard truth. You can find something positive in everything that life has thrown at you. And I'm a person who actively avoids absolutes like always, never, nothing, everything, etc. However, I have not found an exception to this statement. I know you have your "what abouts" and multiple examples of terrible things that can and have happened. Maybe the truth here is that you can find something positive in everything but it's just harder with some things than others. If you are willing to entertain that possibility, I am convinced it is a key to unlocking your ability to protecting your joy. If you want joy and positivity inside of you, it will be nearly impossible to get that without putting joy and positivity outside of you. Achieving positivity takes positivity. Achieving joy takes joy. If someone or something is constantly putting out negativity around you, be relentless about excising them clean out of your life. If you are looking to add more positivity into your life, here's a pro tip. It most likely isn't coming from a screen. Dr. Jean Twenge has dedicated her life to researching generational differences. She is often bombarded by questions on why generation Z seems to be suffering from a historic mental health crisis and she has a simple explanation for that question. It's their phones. In her book, iGen, she highlights research that goes all the back to 1975 that studies the type of activities that teens engage in and the impact on their happiness. The research is clear in that teens who spend more time than average on digital platforms are far less happy than their peers. Teens that spend more time engaged in non-screen activities are more likely to be happy. If you are finding it hard to cultivate a positive attitude, evaluate your own screen time and see if less time there helps.
4. Connect with the power of optimism
In their book, The Gap and the Gain, Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy relay the findings of a study that began in the early 1900s involving 100 nuns from the School of Sisters from Notre Dame. The nuns were asked to stick to daily journaling that would chronicle their days but with the understanding that they would be sharing their journals for the research study. The researchers theorized that people who had a more optimistic and positive outlook in their 20s would go on to live longer lives than those who didn't. It only took willing participants and little patients to see if their theory was right. More than 60 years later, the research revealed that the nuns who were more optimistic and included moments of joy, happiness, positivity and perseverance in their journals did indeed outlive their peers who were neutral in the journaling. In fact, at age 85, 90% of the nuns with the highest levels of optimism in their journaling were still living compared to only 34% of those who were identified as having the least amount of optimism in their content. The nuns in the study received no feedback on their content and were unaware that writing about the things that brought them joy would lead to living longer. They simply displayed the ability to retain optimism despite the moment they were chronicling in their journals. There's an entire field within biology called epigenetics that studies how our behaviors and environment impact the way our genes work. This research has found that unhappy people are generally sick more, get sick easier, and on average, live 10 years less. Most of us are aware that the way we filter our thoughts in relation to our experiences shapes our emotional response. There is also a clear link between our interpretation of events and our biological response as well. In fact, our perceptions of events is the biggest contributor to how we biologically respond to those events. If how we interpret what we are experiencing shapes our emotional and biological response, you are better served cultivating the ability to maintain your optimism. Please don't misread this as pushing a false happiness doctrine. I openly admit that controlling our initial response to events is impossible. However, somewhere between the events you experience and your final assessment of those events, you will find an opportunity to develop a less reflexive and more intentional interpretation of those events. Make sure you are taking full advantage of those opportunities.
5. Get and stay 'unstuck!'
Even during our pursuit of happiness, we tend to forget the pursuit and journey entirely. Instead, we just feel stuck. Words like pursuit and journey are reminders of the active nature of such endeavors. Feeling stuck is entirely possible when we are indeed stuck. That is to say, when we forget about the journey part and we aren't moving towards anything or actively working on something, feeling stuck will be the outcome. And trust me, I have yet to meet anyone who hasn't felt this way before. The trick to getting (and staying) unstuck is to reconnect to the journey. With that said, remember that there is still a need to spend time in both doing and being. That is to say that you can always put the work towards pursuing happiness, but you have to remember to also put in the work when it comes to being happy. Most of us find ourselves feeling stuck when it comes to our work. In those times you feel stuck, I find reflection and introspection work best. In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear relays some key questions that can get us reconnected to our joy. Those questions are:
What feels like fun to me but feels like work to others
When are you enjoying yourself and your work when others appear to be in pain
What work are you doing where you seem to lose track of time
Where do you seem to get greater returns than others
Those questions are heavily skewed towards helping get unstuck professionally. The reason for that is there is nothing more impactful on our lives than our work lives. Typically, when things are clicking there, they are clicking in all aspects of our lives. Conversely, when things aren't in sync at work, it is very hard for them to be in sync anywhere else in our lives. For staying unstuck in and outside of our work lives, I have found that consistent effort there is also vital. I have developed six commitments that I try to stick to on a daily basis. Like the work we do vocationally, I look at these commitments as the work I do for my own wellbeing. The work boils down to six statements that I call my "I WILL" statements and each day, I try to get as many of them checked off as I can. My "I WILL" statements are:
I WILL
Write something creative
Do something I love
Do something that challenges me physically or mentally
Spend time in meditation or quiet reflection
Be intentional about finding joy in my day
Reflect on and affirm how I was able to use my own unique strengths, gifts and abilities
Together, these things have truly helped me fight against all the things trying to steal my joy. Last thing. Notice that I said my goal was to fight off the things trying to steal my joy versus be joyful. The truth is every day is not going to be filled with joy. In fact, most days are not going to overwhelm you with a sense of joy. The people you work with are frequently going to make you feel undervalued. You are going to feel like your family and the people that are the closest to you are taking you for granted. And there will be many days where just getting through the day is a win all by itself.
These five tactics and sticking to my own "I WILL" statements are a gentle reminder to myself of that reality and how engaging in the activities I have identified are going to best equip me to handle the not-so-great days. There will also be plenty of times when they are directly responsible for putting a little more pep in my step as well. The point is that if we are going to spend our lives in the pursuit of happiness, if during that journey, we notice we aren't happy, we have to have a response. Achieving joy as a result of our pursuits is a worthy endeavor. Finding joy during our pursuit is ultimately what makes the difference.
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