Happiness is a state of inner satisfaction by the existence, completeness, and meaningfulness of life, theoretically, people experience sometimes. To live happily, you need only two things, one of them is very difficult, but the other is simple: live and happily. So if you want to be happy – be happy (Kozma Prutkov).
Happiness is the awareness, but not the external factors:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, happiness was to lie in a boat, drifting aimlessly, feeling like a God (not exactly the picture of productivity). That if only you had a bit better in your life, then you would be happy. It seems like a straightforward way to think about feeling better. First, improve your life, then you will feel better, but it doesn’t work like that. The lesson to be learned from happy people in bad circumstances is not that good circumstances lead to unhappiness, it is that being happy is really just your choice. Hold a moment, catch its happiness, that it is, unattainable by anyone but You.
Happiness can't be forced:
Focusing on happiness can actually make us feel less happy.
Happiness can become a utopia or used against us:
Happiness is a convenient idea that looks good on paper (the aesthetic part). But it’s also an idea that helps us shy away from more serious issues. It can be exhausting, make us overreact, drain our personal life of meaning, increase our vulnerability, make us more gullible, selfish and lonely. Most striking is that consciously pursuing happiness can actually drain the sense of joy we usually get from the really good things we experience.
Happiness is a surprise:
Happiness is coming when the reality is better than expected. It follows that to expect too much is not worth it, there is a risk to stay miserable. And maybe the less we seek to actively pursue happiness , the more likely we will be to actually experience a sense of joy in them — a joy which is spontaneous and pleasurable, and not constructed and oppressive. Scheduled happiness is utopia. Maximum that you will get the pleasure of anticipation with the planning. Happiness from the event is possible only if it is spontaneous and you did not expect more than got. And for not to lose the sense of happiness, it is important not to think that something was missing for complete happiness. It is important to just enjoy the here and now.
Real happiness is when you have someone to share happiness:
«The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier.» Robert Waldinger, director of The Harvard Study of Adult Development may be the longest study of adult life that’s ever been done. Social connections are really good for us, and that loneliness kills. It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they’re physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected. And the experience of loneliness turns out to be toxic. People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely. Results of the analysis* were striking: Loneliness and social isolation increased the risk of coronary complications—heart attack, angina or coronary disease—by 29 percent, and the risk of having a stroke by 32 percent. There were no gender differences noted among the study participants.
Many of our men when they were starting out as young adults really believed that fame and wealth and high achievement were what they needed to go after to have a good life. But over and over, over these 75 years, our study* has shown that the people who fared the best were the people who leaned in to relationships, with family, with friends, with community.
Happiness may go unnoticed.
People tend to forget, or if to tell more precisely, to stabilize self-emotional state to background levels obtained at birth. It's a defense mechanism, through which human can eventually "survive" the severe shock, but as a side effect, it leveled positive emotions too. Emotional experiences of a high level, or in other words, going beyond the emotional background - is something that people subconsciously feels permanent hunger, only once have experienced. Such feelings are born in the mind at the junction of the oncoming waves of cognitive dissonance in a dramatic shift of consciousness from one "deep dive" into the other - the opposite. It's like "War and Peace". An unusual way of initiation of these "waves" is the shift of the "assemblage point". One of the most difficult things to work on yourself is learning to change your emotional background without external stimulants.
Happiness has the norm, too:
When an excess of happiness, it is possible to "stretch receptor of happiness" and then what before was happiness, will cease to be such. Climbed on the top of the mountain of happiness, will be very painful to fall from there. It is impossible to have joy and be happy all the time, continuously. The alternation of tension and relaxation is the key to happiness. Happiness through the alternation is found everywhere: in music - escalate, relaxation; in work - weekdays, weekends; in nutrition - fasting, holiday meal.
The physiology of happiness:
Research shows that a smiling expression sends feedback from your face to your left frontal cortex, which in turn triggers the release of the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine into your brain. In addition, smiling increases your charisma. (это же в поддержки мозга)
Economy vs happiness:
Healthy, happy people don’t feel like they need much they don’t already have, and that means they don’t buy a lot of junk, don’t need to be entertained as much, and they don’t end up watching a lot of commercials. Well-publicized problems, including obesity, depression, pollution and corruption are what it costs to create and sustain a trillion-dollar economy. For the economy to be “healthy”, World has to remain unhealthy.
One story:
A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life. The professor brings out the coffee in various types of cups; some made of plastic, others made of glass, and still others are made of porcelain or crystal. Although the video doesn’t spell this out, it becomes clear that the ex-students make a beeline for the crystal, porcelain, and glass cups, leaving behind the plastic cups for the laggards. When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said: “If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups have been taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. Be assured that the cup itself adds no quality to the coffee. In most cases it is just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink. What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups... And then you began eyeing each other’s cups. Now consider this: Life is the coffee; the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, and the type of cup we have does not define, nor change the quality of life we live. Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee. Savor the coffee, not the cups! The happiest people don’t have the best of everything. They just make the best of everything. Live simply. Love generously. Care deeply. Speak kindly.