Why do some people look so miserable, as though only misfortunes visit them? And why some are extremely happy and treat every single day as a gift? Read on to find out the answer to the question many people seek to find – what’s the secret to happiness.
The mistake people make
Happiness isn’t to do with what you’ve achieved in life, who you are or where you live. You probably know people who say “If only I had…, then I would be happy”. In reality if they got what they wanted, they would still remain miserable and they wouldn’t realise why this is so.
There are many stories about people who achieved everything they wanted yet it didn’t fulfil them in the way they thought it would – namely it didn’t make them happy. Many describe this experience as getting an empty shell for which they’ve been working all their lives. They assign happiness to a certain goal and they strive to achieve the illusion they themselves created.
How horrible would you feel if you thought that you can become happy by having something, like lots of money or a luxury car or a house, and after 10 or so years of hard work, when you finally get it, it doesn’t make you happy? Wouldn’t you feel as though you’ve been fooled – fooled by yourself?
Happiness doesn’t occur if one or another condition is fulfilled. There are happy people who live in poverty, there are happy people who are sick or who experienced many losses in life. Happiness has nothing to do with material things, health or what you go through in life.
If it would be so, all healthy people would be happy and all wealthy people would be happy and all people who are loved would be happy. This is, of course, not the case. There are many miserable people who have excellent health and there are many rich people who, by someone’s standards, have everything they could possibly want, yet they are as miserable as it gets.
It’s a mistake to attribute happiness to any condition in your life, because happiness doesn’t depend on any conditions. I know, it seems logical to think that if you have nothing and you are miserable, as soon as you get what you want, you will be happy. Or if you live in a horrible place and if you would somehow be able to move to an excellent place, you would become happy. But that’s not the case.
So what is happiness? How to be happy?
You may be surprised by the answer. Sooner or later you will find out that…
Happiness is a choice
Happy people choose to be happy and miserable people choose to be miserable. If you’re unhappy, you may say that you didn’t choose to be miserable. Oh yes you did. Otherwise you wouldn’t be miserable. It’s a decision to find reasons to be happy as it is to find reasons to be miserable.
It’s easy to see which aspects – good or bad- you try to highlight in your life. Every single person experiences good and bad in life, but some focus on good and some on bad. When someone asks you how was your day and how your business/relationships/family life is going, how do you respond? You search through what happened during the day and prepare your answer. What memories you search through? Good ones or bad ones?
You see, happy people search through only what good happened during the day and if they had a really miserable day, guess what they do? No, they don’t talk about miserable things that happened to them. They take insignificant positive things and talk about that. They would rather talk about small good things that happened than discuss problems that they experienced.
Now let’s take a different scenario and ask a miserable person about his day. How do you think he would respond to the question “How was your day?” Do you think he would go through all the experiences of the day and pick the best ones to talk about? Oh no, he will take the most upsetting ones and discuss them in detail. And if he had a fairly good day, he may say something along the lines of “My day was not bad but I sense that something negative is about to happen”.
Positive people don’t search for the reasons for others to pity them. They don’t search for proof that they are victims of circumstances. They fully accept responsibility for everything that happens in their life. They know that they caused everything and if something bad happens, they perceive it as a lesson to learn from and become better human beings.
So as you see, happiness is a choice. You can choose to select to focus on positive things that happened to you or you can select to focus on negativity. It’s your choice, no one else can select it for you. So happy people are not lucky and they are not from another planet. You can be as happy as it gets and to do that you need to focus on positive things in your life.
Simplicity
I came to notice that when people have too much stuff in their lives, they become increasingly miserable. As though the stuff takes away happiness from them, although the purpose of it is to make people feel better. People who buy a lot of stuff do so because they feel some kind of void. Usually they lack happiness, so they think that buying more stuff will make the unhappiness go away.
Yet that doesn’t happen because they try to fix the problem with the tools that cannot be used for this purpose. Stuff can never make you happy. Stuff can make you feel comfortable, stuff can make the hunger go away and it can make you feel relaxed or energised. But stuff can never make you feel happy. No external thing can. The seed of happiness is inside of you and it can be nourished by focusing on positivity.
So if you think that stuff is all you need to be happier, you will buy more and more of it and then you will see that you are getting more miserable. It has an opposite effect to what you thought it can do for you. People get depressed and even commit suicides because they think that life is just against them because they cannot seem to feel happy no matter what they do.
If you see yourself in this scenario, follow these steps. Firstly, stop buying stuff you don’t need. And trust me on this because I used to make the same mistake. I used to shop non-stop and I loved the shopping experience, but as soon as I would get home I would feel as miserable as I did before going shopping. I wouldn’t even open some stuff I bought – it was as though it lost value after I bought it.
So to feel happy and heal yourself from the illness of misery, you need to stop buying useless stuff. Only buy essential things and no more. Throw away everything you don’t need, no matter how much money you spent to get it. Leave only the necessities and things that make you feel good. And get rid of things that have some kind of bad feeling attached or things that create clutter in your life.
The more you simplify your life, the better you will feel. People who lose everything sometimes say that they feel free for the first time in their lives. The more stuff you get rid of, the more free you will feel. It’s as though that stuff limited you in some way.
Two confliciting parts of you
There could be no white without black and there is no positive without negative. Everything in this world has its polar opposite, so do you. You have the opposite parts in the same being – you have the active part and the lazy part; You have the negative part and the positive part; You have the fair part and the unfair part; You have the courageous part and the fearful part and so on.
You are likely to experience unhappiness when you want something very much but you cannot achieve it. This happens because one part of you is holding you back. For example, you want to earn money but you feel too lazy to do anything about it or you want to exercise but your body gets de-energised as soon as you decide to take action.
These are the classic examples of two parts of you being in conflict. Both parts only want good for you, but they may be both interfering with each other in a negative way, causing you to stall and experience unhappiness as a result. So to bring these parts into harmony you have to identify what each one’s purpose is and what are positive intentions behind these opposite parts. Then you need to bring them together to see how they could work in harmony. It’s a similar process to when you try to find a compromise between two disagreeing people. I know, it may sound crazy but it works.
This process helped me to solve quite a big issue that I had. I used to feel uneasiness when I would take a break and that didn’t allow me to properly relax. I felt great when I took action but I couldn’t allow myself to take proper breaks. So I identified two conflicting parts in me that were causing this uneasiness. One part wanted me to succeed and constantly drove me to take action. This was (and is) a dominating part which was very positive and action-oriented.
Another part, however, was lazy and wanted me to take multiple breaks. It had a positive intention because it protected me from experiencing stress and getting drained. So I identified positive intentions of both parts and then brought them together. You can actually bring them together literally, by imagining both separate parts and getting them closer to each other until they merge.
This exercise allows you to see how these parts can compromise. So when I did it I realised that I could be more successful if I took many breaks throughout the day because that would allow my body and my conscious mind to rest and you know what happens when your conscious mind rests… The unconscious mind works out most of the things you could not, so you actually progress quicker. And when your body rests you get much more energy after that. So this exercise improved my understanding about my behaviour and removed the uneasiness I used to experience when I would take breaks.
This exercise can also alter your behaviour if it was negative in some way. For example, if you find it difficult to wake up, by merging the opposing parts together, you will find it easy to get up early.
Your inner voice
How you talk to yourself determines how you feel. If you beat yourself up when you don’t perform well or when you make a mistake, then of course you will feel miserable. Your inner voice therefore is largely responsible for your happiness or the lack of it.
You can train your inner voice to be positive by becoming aware of what it communicates to you. If it criticises you, then you should notice that and promise to yourself that next time you will be more easy on yourself. Awareness is definitely the key; The more you notice your negative self talk, the more chances you will have to educate this negative voice.
When you become aware of the negative self talk in action, it doesn’t do half the damage it used to. When you are aware of your inner voice, it cannot impact you in the way it used to because you know that it’s not who you are. When this voice is outside of your awareness, it seems like a valid part of you and you indeed listen to what it has to say. But as soon as you become aware of it, it loses its power over you.
So notice it, educate it and replace it with a positive voice and you will become increasingly happier until the negative voice is a thing of the past.
The root of unhappiness
Another reason why people become miserable or depressed is because they zoom into the problem and see nothing but a problem as a result. They don’t see anything else that’s happening around them, they place their undivided attention on a problem. So it seems that now their whole life is miserable because of such negative focus.
What you focus your attention on determines how you feel. So if you focus on a situation that seems hopeless to you, don’t be surprised when your whole life seems hopeless.
If you want to get out of the misery, you need to look at the big picture or focus on things that are going well in your life.
It’s absolutely right to ignore the bad that’s happening in your life and focus on the good. Because only when you take your mind off worries will you ever find ways of how to overcome them. So you should focus on the good and you will experience the good.
And to all who find all these ideas confusing and you don’t know what to do …
Give yourself a break
Maybe all you need is relaxation. Sometimes people work so hard to achieve happiness that they never do. Stop and enjoy the present moment. Be grateful for what you have. You have absolutely every resource you need to experience happiness. Pause and look inside you. Happiness is there, but you’ve been so busy searching for it outside that you never thought of searching for it in yourself.
So become aware of the happiness that you have. Don’t rush through life in the hope to find happiness. You have it at this very moment. It’s up to you to bring it out.
Thank you for visiting my site. My name is Simona Rich and my purpose in life is to help you reconnect with your core and create a life of your own design. I can help you do this with my coaching and articles. 
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