Your First Steps Towards Happiness

Introduction

We often think that if we work hard to have a great job and make a lot of money, we can finally be happy. But what if after we get the job and the money, we still don’t feel the happiness we’ve been aiming for ? Or we only feel it for a short period of time then it vanishes? We humans keep seeking happiness and we set up plans thinking that it will lead us to it, but why do we work on secondary goals to reach the main one? Aren’t there shortcuts or actions that we can do in order to achieve happiness?

I know these are a lot of questions. Although they kept spinning around in my head, I didn’t take action. I always scratch the surface but never the core, but now I decided to dig deeper and learn about the human psychology. And since I know you can relate, here I am sharing thoughts and what I have learned with you in this blog so we all, hopefully, achieve happiness. It’s going to take some efforts and time but now is when we should act.

For this specific article, we‘ll discuss some things we need to do and others we need to think more about. Let’s get started!

Measure your Baseline Happiness

In order to detect if we’re actually making a progress while working on improving our happiness level, we need to measure our current level, whether using surveys made by psychologists like the Authentic Happiness Survey which will give us a score from 1 to 5 based on the answers for 24 questions, or, if you don’t like surveys, you can ask yourself about how happy you are and rate it from 1 to 5. Either ways, please focus, be truthful to yourself and memorize the result.

Find your Signature Strengths

Signature strengths means our top 5 strengths, the characteristics that make us feel energized and engaged. Research shows knowing and using our character strengths can strengthen relationships, boost happiness and improve well-being.

Now, it’s not easy to identify those so we can take the free, online, research-based character strengths survey by the VIA Institute on Character. The survey comprises 96 questions and takes about 15 minutes to complete. There are no right/wrong answers, and there are no better/worse answers. The key is to be authentic, so that we can derive the most from the experience. After taking the survey, we will get the ranking of our 24 strengths. Print it out if you can and keep track of your signature strengths.

Daily Habits

1- Savoring

It’s the act of stepping outside of an experience to review and appreciate it. Often we fail to stay in the moment and really enjoy what we’re experiencing. Savoring intensifies and lengthens the positive emotions that come with doing something we love. The experience could be a nice shower, a delicious meal or a great walk outside… it doesn’t have to be something out of the ordinary to be appreciated.

To practice savoring, you can share the experience with another person, keep a souvenir of that activity you enjoyed and making sure you stay in the present moment the entire time.

Start making a list of the things you savored and everyday add the one or several activities you savored to that list. It would feel nice to see the list of the happy events we experienced gets longer.

2- Gratitude

Gratitude is a positive emotional state in which one recognizes and appreciates what one has received in life. Research shows that gratitude can increase our mood and lower our stress levels, it can even strengthen our immune system and lower our blood pressure. Also, it can make us feel a stronger social connection which itself has this whole list of positive effects.

Take the time daily (like 5 to 10 minutes) to write down some of the things you’re grateful for and focus on it so you live the full experience.

Things we Think Will Make us Happy (But Don’t)

Now take a moment to think or write down the things you think will make you happy… Are you done? Ok.

I hate to break it to you but most of those things, if not all, won’t actually make you happy. Let’s take two obvious examples:

1- A Good Job

A study by Gilbert Et Al. (1998) took place in order to determine how much effect getting a good job has on our happiness level, so they had this question: How do college students feel when turned down from a paid job they want?

Before applying for the jobs, the students were asked to evaluate their current happiness level on a scale of 1 to 10 AND to predict the level they will have if they DON’T get the job they wanted. Here are the results:

We can see that the survey found that students did not experience a significant decrease or any decrease in their ACTUAL level of happiness upon learning that they did not get the job they wanted.

2 - Money

Have you ever wanted to get paid a specific amount of money and thought it would make you extremely happy but once done, you didn’t feel as happy as you expected or or maybe you even felt neutral about it?

Actually there is quite a lot of work on this “Does a bigger income increase life satisfaction?” one of which by the psychologist Ed Diener, it shows that there is only 0.1 correlation between income and life satisfaction.

Conclusion

To summarize, there are things we can do which can bring us happiness but we don’t focus on it. On the other hand, there are things for which we’re almost sure they will, but actually don’t. That brings us to another question: how to know which is which?

We will discuss that and more in future articles. I hope you enjoyed this one and that you now have a better understanding of happiness. Stay tuned 😄