Walt Hampton, J.D.

Creating the Work & Life You LOVE

Happy Now, Bitch?
January 6, 2011

The Mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

John Milton

They’ve all been lying to you.

Make your New Year’s resolutions.  Write out your goals.  Make your mind-maps.  Plan your year.  Work your plan.  Achieve success. And you’ll be happy.

It’s not true.

We’ve been inculcated with the notion that happiness is the brass ring; the carrot on the stick.  If I lose weight, then I’ll be happy.  If I get fit, then I’ll be happy.  If I become successful, then I’ll be happy. If I get rich, then I’ll be happy.  If, then.

The problem is that someone keeps moving the stick. Maybe we get happy for a fleeting moment. But the carrot keeps disappearing.  The brass ring is some Tolkien epic that never ends.

The endgame, the goalpost always seems to be just over the next hill, somewhere else. We make resolution after resolution. Goal after goal. Year after year. But it forever eludes us.

Here’s why: we’ve had it backwards all along.  Success doesn’t lead to happiness. Happiness leads to success.

Extensive research in the area of positive psychology conducted by Shawn Achor at Harvard University demonstrates “that happiness and optimism actually fuel performance and achievement.”

“We become more successful when we are happier and more positive,” writes Achor in his brilliant new book The Happiness Advantage. “It turns out that our brains are literally hardwired to perform at their best not when they are negative or even neutral, but when they are positive.”  And happy. “Happiness causes success and achievement, not the opposite.”

But where do we find this thing called happiness? How do we get happy?

Here’s the scoop:  happiness is here and now.  It exists only in this very moment, Thich Nhat Hanh teaches. Not somewhere else; not at some other time or some other place. But here before us. Here in our present experience. Here before our very eyes. Right in our own back yards, Dorothy might say.

Happiness is a choice. We choose happiness.  Or not.

Sure there is chemical imbalance.  Sure there is clinical depression. But by in large, our generalized unhappiness – our willingness to defer our happiness until some indefinite “promised land” – is a cultural bias, a kind of learned helplessness, a societal brainwash.

We have the capacity to retrain our bad selves. And get happy.

And by getting happy, I’m not talking about engaging in being some kind of Pollyanna-like charade. We are surrounded by challenges every day of our lives. And bad shit happens. Rather, as Achor suggests, the principals of positive psychology ask us “to be realistic about the present while maximizing our potential for the future.  It is about learning to cultivate the mindset and behaviors that have been empirically proven to fuel greater success and fulfillment.  It is a work ethic.”

And isn’t it worth the effort? Isn’t it what we want?

Think about the changes we could bring about in ourselves and in our world by cultivating happiness, by committing to happiness. Think about how contagious happiness is; think about the impact it could have on those we love, on those we serve.

Happiness is success.

Will you commit? Will you make the choice to be happy?

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

—  Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

1 Comment

  1. Johnna

    Nice notion! Isn’t this a bit cyclic? Can “happiness” be a goal or is it a perception or are goals just a perception? I think I am happiest when I am working hard toward my summitless mountain–experiencing perception or perceiving experiencing–humm wrote a whole dissertation on this. Thanks for keeping mindbodyworld experiencing alive!

    Reply

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