The Happiness Question

Confession: I am a secret iPad Scroller. I can sit  browsing for hours; Facebook, Twitter, news channels, online shops and just about anything on the internet generally.  Give me a spare hour (and I don’t have many) and they pass in a blur of moving through those pages, swiping down and up.  My favourite place for this is the sofa, whilst lying down. Normally with only one eye open.  It tends to take place on a Sunday afternoon, shortly before a small afternoon nap, though (subject to work levels) it can be any day of the week. Recently, my scrolling has focused on what I call ‘The Happiness Question’.

You might recall back in the Spring, Milla and I talked about how ‘Happiness Is an Inside Job’. In that Podcast episode and  blog, we talked about whether you choose to be happy, how you become happy and what happiness is.  ‘The Happiness Question’ for me is something that I have wanted to find out more about.  Some days I find it hard to find it and  I know that I want to find more.  And so I have been scrolling away to see if I can find the solution.

I’ve found out that I am not alone.  The words ‘how to be happy’ are googled by over 45 million people per month and the word ‘Happy’ is googled some 902 million times per day.  That’s a lot of times.  It’s a lot of people. There are a lot of people out there that are wondering, like me, what the answer to ‘The Happiness Question’ is.

The results have been interesting.  Firstly, I have discovered that there is a section of Psychology that really does study happiness.  It’s called happiness research (or positive psychology if you want to be a bit more formal).  The science of happiness is a big thing.  There are a load of Psychologists that exclusively work on this.  They are referred to as ‘a movement’. Over eight thousand studies have been carried out.  It’s massive.  It’s also a little worrying that although all this work has been done to find the answer to ‘The Happiness Question’, no one conclusion has been reached. Yet.

Back to me and my scrolling. I have come across a blog, called ‘Barking Up the Wrong Tree’.  It is written by Eric Barker (see what he did there?) and it is full of posts about resilience, being productive, making your memory smarter, dealing with pain.  It’s very good and really funny.  Take a look when you can. The link is here.

Two of the posts that really caught my eye are titled ‘5 Rituals to Keep You Happy All the Time’.  The first introduced to me to the work of Martin Seligman, a Professor of Psychology and one of the Happiness Research movement bunch who have been trying to work out what happiness and well-being is since the 70’s.  He came up with the acronym  PERMA:

• Positive Emotions
• Engagement
• Relationships
• Meaning
• Achievement

These are the five elements that make up well-being – and I assume, as a consequence, lead you to find happiness.

Eric Barker says that positive emotions are those that you create for yourself; memories that make you smile. Engagement is being involved, being present, taking notice of what you are doing and being wrapped up in whatever you are doing so that you forget the time.  The relationships you have are critical to your well-being.  We need to be with others and more importantly we need to be with others that we like and want to be with. The things you do should have meaning to you.  Whatever you do should matter and be important so that when you do it, you will  feel achievement. It doesn’t have to be something that you sweated blood over.  It just needs to be something that makes you feel good once you have done it and crossed it off your to do list.

The second of Eric’s posts talks about the things that you can do to feel happier.  They are: 

• getting off autopilot – it’s estimated that during your day only 5% of what you do is intentional. Now spin that on its head. It means that 95% of your day is spent on auto-pilot, going through the motions and not really paying attention.  You just react to what is happening (or over-react). I find that staggering, though also highly likely.  It’s what I do.  It’s time to stop it though and notice the negative emotions and thoughts as they pop up, rather than letting them engulf you.

• being open to the bad feelings (or unhappiness) that you have – this goes back to the way that the voice in your head operates and how you deal with it. Pay attention to what you say to yourself. Notice what is causing the negativity and the feelings it is creating.

• accepting that you have those feelings – you aren’t giving in to them, you are just saying ‘yes, I know you are there and I know this is happening’. 

• detach yourself from those feelings – after you accept that they are there you can then choose to say ‘I know you are there but I don’t agree with you’.  Or ‘I know I feel like this but I am going to choose to be another way’.   

• Finally, you then tell yourself how you want to be.  You make an active choice not to follow those emotions, you decide you want to do something different.

None of this is easy.  I think that being able to recognise when you know those bad feelings happen and the voice in your head is telling you that you are sad or angry it is really difficult to just stop, accept that this is there and choose not to let it overwhelm you.  The key seems to be practice and being kinder to yourself. 

So, what have a I learnt from my scrolling?  Happiness is a not just a choice; it needs mindfulness, kindness and learning.  More research is probably being carried out as I type this. This question will run and run.