Happiness is an inside job.
My childhood dream was to be a professional dancer. When I achieved that goal at the age of 20, I found myself massively depressed and wondering if this was it. It was cool but day to day I felt anxious, lonely, and uninspired. In Will Smith’s memoir he talks about his hugely successful career, fortune and fame - all of the things we are told by society will make us happy. He says he achieved all of this but there was no amount of it that made him happy. He refers to reaching for more and more as “the subtle sickness” and it’s easy to see why - it’s ever so tempting to keep our eyes fixed on the horizon rather than looking inside. In fact, the phenomenon known as “hedonic adaptation” shows us that life shifts like relocating, getting married or changing jobs can make us happier for a time but we adjust but then adapt to the new normal.
“We’re running faster and faster, but we seem to end up in the exact same place.” - the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland
No matter our circumstances, at the end of the day, we are still ourselves. It is how we feel on the inside that colours our perception of the world around us. We can have a view of the ocean from our house but if we haven’t slept well, feel lonely in our social lives, challenged by a colleague or a manager we may take for granted all that we DO have leading us to feel unhappy in our life. We are moving quickly from one thing to the next, thinking about 15 different things all at once, having moments of remembering something that made us feel upset - all of this means that we rarely pause long enough to consider the beauty of our life. Happiness is something we find on the inside but what does that process look like?
If happiness is a goal then we have to choose it every day. If you find yourself ruminating over all of the things you don’t have or as I like to say “carrying hurts around in your back pocket” making a choice to stop the endless chatter in your mind and saying to yourself “I am ok right now” can shift you into a more peaceful mindset.
Find happiness activities that fit your interests, values and needs. Just like we need a strategy for improving or maintaining our physical health, we also need a strategy for our emotional wellbeing. Joining a pickleball league, learning to play the piano or attending a weekly ballet class gives us an experience of happiness that can sustain us long after the activity is finished.
Redirect your negative thoughts into neutral or optimistic ones. We can become happier by learning how to disengage from overthinking about major and minor experiences - stop searching for all of the leaks and cracks (meditation is a tool for this) and not let them affect how you feel about yourself and your life as a whole.
This intentional slowing down and attention shift opens up more space for awe, wonder and gratitude and these are some of the keys to having an overall happier life. Spring is a really nice time to practice this. As we get warmer and brighter days, taking walks outside to listen to the birds, feeling the sun on our skin and smelling everything in bloom creates these pockets of time for us to tap into this space.