Are you happy right now? Happiness is utterly subjective and the steps in achieving it depend on one’s current situation and past experiences. What makes you happy can be a total opposite for others and it is absolutely unreasonable to expect to be happy all the time. That is neither possible, nor realistic. However, for John Locke, he believed that happiness is the natural state of humanity. Below, you will learn some of the steps in pursuing happiness.
According to Dr. Tchiki Davis, a Berkeley well-being-technology expert and a Research and Development (R&D) consultant and contributor to GGSC’s The Science of Happiness, there are three steps in pursuing happiness. If these are followed, true happiness will be gained and understood. The first one is goal setting. One must set realistic happiness goals. Do not set your standards too high. If high happiness expectations are set, you may end up disappointed and frustrated, impeding your successful pursuit of happiness. It can be hard, can take time, or worst, the result could be different than you expect. In order to at least achieve this, set realistic expectations about when it’s reasonable to feel happy. You can be happy with any small things you have in life – your daily achievements. The next step is to find what makes you happy and know it’s okay if it’s not the norm. Engage in activities that are productive to your goal and discover happiness-boosting strategies you enjoy. These might be different from everyone else, but unknowingly you are slowly depositing meaningful experiences to your happiness bank. The last one is monitoring happiness. Checking happiness should be done in a manner with control. Dr. Davis emphasizes that if one is obsessed about how things go and how he or should feel, the less enjoyable memories can become. This means that meticulously checking happiness can be a bad action sometimes. You can increase your chances of attaining it if you find ways to pursue without having to think about it too much. Just take a short pause in a day and look back to ask yourself what went wrong and try to make up.
Talking about challenges in finding happiness, Miss Stacy, a teacher on the series “Anne with an E” on Netflix said to Anne Cuthbert that “You can’t know joy unless you’ve known sorrow. Those of us who can soar to the highest heights can also plunge to the deepest depths”. This is a sort of reminder to everybody that life preserves a balance – and that’s a beauty of it. You own the game and you have all the chances to win it. Problems come to test one’s determination in life. Whether you are strong or emotionally challenged right now, you should always remember that you may be knocked down but not out forever. You need to get up and face those challenges that can help you make a better version of yourself. Like Anne who is new to Avonlea, many would display boundless enthusiasm but turn into despair when things go wrong. It is natural and this can be controlled. Positive mind setting is necessary to regain such positive force because you make and activate happiness yourself.