Stop Searching For Happiness, Then It Will Find You!

NOT many donkey years ago, I was once plagued with angst and dissatisfaction, a manifestation that was sometimes met with bemusement instead of sympathy.  HOW often you did hear parents retort to their teens LIKE:  'The problem with your generation is that you always expect to be happy'.  And even when observing from a distance, I was more baffled than informed because we all agree that HAPPINESS is the very purpose of living and we should strive to achieve it.  Stop Searching For Happiness, Then It Will Find You📗📙📘

The challenge is, many of us are NOT prepared that melancholy as something that was beyond one's control.  And the ever-growing mass of wellness literature would seem to suggest that many others share that same view.  This past decade, though, there has been a spike of researches about HAPPINESS and all studies point to the same conclusion that our obsession with HAPPINESS and high personal confidence may be making us LESS content with our lives and LESS effective at reaching and achieving our pre-set goals.  In fact, we may be often HAPPIER WHEN we stop focusing on HAPPINESS altogether.  Can we, dude???

Much as those conclusions seem unwelcome, it's been replicated in multiple studies, only reinforcing the opinion that those experiments do reveal the quite dark side of our pursuit of HAPPINESS.  Besides reducing our everyday contentment, that constant desire to feel HAPPIER can make people feel just more lonely.  In the end, we seem to be so absorbed in our own well-being and in the end, we tend to forget the people around us, and we may even resent them for inadvertently bringing down our mood OR distracting us from more important goals.  And our pursuit of HAPPINESS can even have strange effects n our perceptions of time as that constant FEAR OF MISSING OUT [a.k.a. FOMO] reminds us just how short our lives are and HOW much time we must spend on😊😊😊

There was this research from Toronto which concluded that simply encouraging people to feel HAPPIER while watching a relatively boring film meant that they were more likely to concur that 'TIME IS SLIPPING AWAY FROM ME'.  And the same conclusion was arrived at WHEN the research participants were asked to list 10 activities that might contribute to their HAPPINESS, a subtle reminder that they could all be doing to improve their well-being placed them in a kind of panic as they recognized HOW little time they had to achieve it all.  And a side conclusion of those studies showed that our human tendencies to be paying constant attention to our mood will likely stop us from enjoying everyday pleasures, WHICH in the end, will deprive us of that genuine HAPPINESS we deserve after all💚💛💜

Our takeaway:  Let us 'LET OFF' the pressure from ourselves.  If you're an aspiring, put on hold visualizing yourself with those gold medals around your neck.  If you're an up and coming entrepreneur, temper your visualizations of yourself with that sartorial elegance, chairing a board meeting of your directors in a swanky plush board room.  If you're a dieter, temper that visualization of yourself in that ideal svelte figure you have been dreaming of [maybe for a decade].  And researchers do support this hypothesis that those 'POSITIVE FANTASIES' [and even the 'POSITIVE MOODS' they create] may likely lead to a sense of complacency.  YES dude, STOP SEARCHING FOR HAPPINESS, THEN IT WILL FIND YOU!!!