Proven ways to pursue a lifetime of happiness

The author shares the pearls of wisdom he gathered while studying a lifetime of happiness for 25 years to write a book.

It is easy to be unhappy, but being authentically happy is one of life’s greatest challenges because of the many adversities that inevitably occur in our lives. I have studied happiness for 25 years to write a book, and I am sharing what I have learned here.
In this short article, we will first seek the low-hanging fruit and then work our way through the weeds to explore the more complicated ways to be happy.
Happiness can simply be defined as what you get from what you do to get it.
Happiness and problem-solving seem to be intricately intertwined. Two keys to successful problem resolution are to (a) understand the real problem and its real causes and (b) vary your approach until you get the right results.
My pointers are for the pursuit of happiness that lasts a lifetime.

Dealing with Unhappiness

Our first point of departure on this journey is to clearly identify, understand, and do something about the things in life that make us most unhappy. This isn’t quite as easy as it sounds though because it takes honest introspection to uncover the core causes of our unhappiness. More importantly, it requires frank ownership of our role in contributing to the things that help create an unhappy state of mind. Exposing this vulnerability takes courage and trust about where life is taking us. Ironically, some of the causes of our unhappiness are the cures for it, as I will show.

Fun and Enjoyment

There are several simple and easy ways to have fun and enjoyment and be happy. Here is a short list:

Physical Health

Now, let’s move on to the paths that require more effort. Physical illnesses, pain, and injuries often encourage us to drift into a serious state of depression, anxiety, and unhappiness, which we must overcome to get happiness from other sources.
Good health depends largely on genetics, a little luck, and a whole lot of healthy living, including a proper diet, regular exercise, stress-reducing hobbies, and temperance in substance use.
The greatest challenge in life seems to be how to grow old gracefully, especially when the annoying limitations start showing up. This is where you must step up to the plate and become the person you have been pretending to be all along. The challenge here is to separate those things you can and can’t change with the right timing, resources, and effort. At the end of the day, this often turns out to be our reactions to the things that happen to us. This translates to the mantra of “control the controllables and let go of the rest.”

A significant source of happiness in the lives of most of us comes from finding our unique vocational purpose and developing our special gifts to achieve competence in our chosen profession. Sometimes, you can find this purpose by asking yourself what you do best and having the most fun doing it.

Personal Development

Personal growth is a life-long journey of learning, growing, and improving into our best selves. It is a process of climbing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs from safety and security to belonging, self-esteem, and self-actualization. Life has many roadblocks to personal development, and these mainly involve trying to resolve three main conflicts that continually confront us: us vs. life, us vs. others, and us vs. ourselves.
Like all the other sources of happiness, a positive or negative approach has the corresponding outcome and progress or regression comes from all the input from these other sources. Mindfulness, or staying present in the moment and controlling one’s mind’s wandering back to memories or future expectations, is a useful skill to help advance personal development.

Mental and Emotional Health

Good mental health is basically like Mark Twain’s definition of common sense, or seeing reality as it is and doing something in the way it needs to be done, with smart thinking. It also involves learning how to see past the compelling illusions in life, such as time, self, and certainty, to free ourselves from the constraints the illusions usually bring with them. And emotional intelligence can overcome a shortage of IQ points, with the diligent effort to increase self-awareness, empathy, self-management, social skills, and intrinsic motivation.

Mental health and emotional intelligence are a major part of personal and professional development, which can also help develop healthy and satisfying relationships. But then again, so is spiritual development. Also, having beliefs that benefit us more than having harmful disadvantages is a good idea to consider. Oddly, the strength of our feelings about the truth of our belief, rather than the facts that support it, drives our behavior. If we don’t like the consequences of our behavior, then the belief that is part of it may need challenging.

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

~Mahatma Gandhi

Professional Development

A significant source of happiness in most of our lives comes from finding our unique vocational purpose and then developing our special gifts to achieve competence in our chosen profession. This applies to being a bartender, single parent, teacher, doctor, athlete, factory worker, or president of a country. Having a sense of making progress in our career quest to make a difference can result in much happiness, as do failures in building up unhappiness.
Efforts towards professional competency and confidence of purpose are very much intertwined with growing these other happiness sources. Sometimes, you can find this purpose by asking yourself what you do best and having the most fun doing it or asking trusted others about it. Financial stability is another big part of professional development and depends on balancing income, spending, and saving. Seeking free or at least inexpensive fun is the safety valve here.

Satisfying Relationships

Much happiness can come from enjoyable relationships with family, friends, and domestic partners. Of course, the opposite causes serious unhappiness. But satisfying relationships don’t happen by chance. It takes a lot of hard work, flexibility, mutual trust, and commitment to grow and improve together in resolving the inevitable conflicts that occur when building a relationship.
Relationships can flourish when the other sources of happiness are tapped individually or collectively.
Good communication is also a key to having good relationships. Active listening is required most to understand rather than just to respond. Sometimes, men need to control their need to fix things and just listen, while women may need to learn to live with the limitation that you can’t always have your cake and eat it, too.

As we grow old, the challenge is to separate what we can and cannot change with the right timing, resources, and effort. This often turns out to be our reaction to the things that happen to us. My mantra is, “Control the controllable and let go of the rest.”

Social Skills

Social skills are needed to do something we must all do to be happy: get along with other people. The main social skills include developing our likeability, improving our communication skills, and increasing empathy for others’ perspectives. Likeability means being positive, a good listener, trustworthy, accepting, agreeable, humorous, real, and humble.

The best communication usually occurs by intentionally avoiding defensiveness in creating a supportive tone by conveying the important qualities of equality, acceptance, sensitivity, tentativeness, freedom, and spontaneity. Empathy is having a genuine connection with other people to see the value of, understand, and accept their different perspectives from our own.

Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.

 ~Abraham Lincoln

Spiritual Health

Spiritual growth is a life-long process of growing your sense of belonging, obedience to a higher power, ability to love unconditionally, and understanding and acceptance of what appears to be unacceptable. More than anything, it is achieving a healthy balance between managing your ego and being humbly appreciative. This arduous path also involves embracing the only universal moral imperative there is, which is to do good and avoid harm.
Spiritual growth also requires an openness to experience without giving in to the temptation to make judgments that hide the interconnectedness of things. Life is made up of opposites that we have to learn not to further divide into artificial opposite qualities like good vs. bad, desirable vs. undesirable, or true vs. false. Again, the moral principle behind spiritual health is a consistent effort to do good and avoid harm.

Conclusion

The good news is that all these happiness sources interact to compound and grow happiness. The bad news is that the same is true for unhappiness. For example, personal relationships can be greatly improved when we strive to achieve better personal development, social skills, and spiritual health. However, unhappy relationships can quickly happen with physical or mental health problems, career difficulties, or poor use of social skills.
Now, there is one important caveat that applies to this happiness prescription. Realize that some conditions in life are impervious to change. Those are the few things we must struggle to accept and understand to reduce their inevitably negative impact on us. Accepting that you can’t accept the unacceptable is the light at the end of the tunnel.
In the meantime,
Be happy!

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