03 Dec Beware the myth of everlasting, constant happiness!
Here at The Happiness Institute we're constantly working towards helping people gain a greater understanding of what real and meaningful happiness is AND, at the same time, busting many of the myths and misconceptions about happiness that unfortunately, can cause misery and frustration.
No one, for example, can be happy all the time. No one, for example, will laugh and smile their way through every minute of every day.
Despite this, we're still big "fans" of happiness but we encourage you to definte happiness carefully and to be realistic about what you can have and what's possibly, boyond our reach.
With this in mind, we thought you might enjoy this interesting article from The Huffington Post. Read it, enjoy, and as always, let us know what you think (you can comment HERE on The Happiness Institute's Facebook page)…
by Nancy Collier
We want to be happy. Everyone, everywhere, is trying to find — and hold onto — happiness. We do everything we are supposed to do, follow the experts' advice, practice the techniques — and still, more often than we should be (given the amount of effort we are putting in), we are not consistently happy. As a psychotherapist, I have spent the last two decades watching people feed their addiction to happiness; they get their short-term fix here and there, but end up "back on the street" searching for happiness yet again, even more desperate. The thing we want most and spend the majority of our time trying to accomplish, eludes us.
We human beings are remarkable creatures. We can do anything we set out to do. So why not lasting happiness? Why is there such a gap between our desire for happiness and our ability to hang onto it? After many years of listening to people talk about their failed attempts to hang onto a state of happiness, I began asking myself the following questions: What is this thing we call happiness? Is it achievable? Is it reliable? Is it sustainable?
As I studied happiness, I became intensely aware of its fragility. When our life circumstances change and the thing that was making us happy goes away… Poof, our happiness goes away with it. When uncomfortable feelings appear within our state of happiness or the object that was bringing us happiness no longer works, happiness is lost again. We are constantly acquiring and losing happiness.
It is not our efforts to create happiness that are flawed, but rather our choice of happiness as a goal. Happiness is the wrong goal for this life. Happiness relies on our ability to control circumstances that, no matter how hard we try, we cannot control. Happiness relies on circumstances staying the same. Nothing stays the same. Uncomfortable feelings always arise, and what we want is always in flux. This nature of life is transitory. We should be grateful for happiness when it is here, but as a goal for life, it is inherently flawed.
Normal life is not easy for anyone. Why then do we expect ourselves to be happy all the time? This foolish expectation is responsible for tremendous suffering…
…keep reading the full and original article HERE