The illusion of being able to avoid unpleasant emotions by removing them from our lives is the biggest obstacle to achieving happiness.
“Happiness is like coke — something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.”-(A.L. Huxley)
"It is you who are choosing, in any moment, to be happy or choosing to be sad, or choosing to be angry, or forgiving, or enlightened, or whatever. You are choosing."-(Neale Donald Walsch)
It seems like a chimera: many seek uncontrollably happiness, without ever being able to reach it. There are thousands of self help manuals and training courses that promise to provide the right recipe.
It seems that for some people happiness is something unattainable.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, of which we have already written in this Blog, considers happiness as a passing condition that is connected with the achievement of the state of "Flow".
This is a bit special we come to when we are totally taken from an activity that we commit ourselves to the mass and, after experiencing it, we create the conditions for this situation to reappear. So, according to Csikszentmihalyi, happiness does not come from luck or chance, and is not determined by outside events outside of our control.
What are we missing to be happy?
People often say that they lack something to achieve happiness: economic quiet, a safe job, a better couple relationship ... However, we know that many people, while fulfilling these desires and having all these things, have found no peace Nor happiness.
Numerous researches show that, for example, wealth does not increase the level of happiness, if not below a minimum threshold. If a person is poor, having more money makes her happier, but if a person enjoys a certain degree of economic wellbeing, an increase in wealth will not bring him a significant increase in happiness.
Other studies reveal that victims of tragic events, such as, for example, remain paralyzed, suffer a lot for a while but recover their habitual level of happiness soon enough. The opposite happens for those who experience an unexpected wealth: psychologist Philip Brickman has conducted a study in this regard. He asked "how happy you are?" To twenty-two lottery winners, immediately after winning. All the winners declared themselves very happy, but the investigation continued.
Six months later Philip Brickman returned from the same people and asked them the same question. Meanwhile, these people had traveled, bought villas with pool, had fulfilled many of their desires. But the responses obtained leave them in doubt: the lottery winners, six months apart, declared a level of happiness equal to that of a random sample of US citizens.
"It is not true that happiness means a life without problems. Happy life comes from overcoming problems, from struggling to problems, from solving the difficulties. You have to face the challenges, do your best. Happiness is achieved when you realize that you are able to control your challenges."- (Zygmunt Bauman)
Emotions and happiness
Happiness does not seem to be related to external events (see also the post on inner self-care), and is therefore a condition linked to our inner being. It's linked to our emotional state: we feel happy when we experience pleasant emotions, and unhappy when we experience emotions that we do not like.
In this regard, Paul Ekman identified seven primary emotions; Defined them in this way because the non-verbal expressions of these emotions are universal and can be found in all known populations, even those isolated from the rest of the world:
1-rage
2-fear
3-sadness
4-joy
5-surprise
6-contempt
6-disgust
He also identified some secondary emotions, which are the ones that arise from the combination of primary emotions and develop with the growth of the individual and with social interaction:
1-cheerfulness
2-envy
3-shame
4-anxiety
5-resignation
6-jealousy
7-hope
8-pardon
9-offense
10-nostalgia
11-remorse
12-disappointment
If we are guided by ideas of this kind, then we strive to avoid unpleasant feelings, but it is a lost battle. Also because any event that gives us pleasant sensations will also give you an opposite sign.
The illusion of being able to avoid unpleasant emotions by removing them from our lives is the biggest obstacle to achieving happiness.