New Happiness Tip-I've previously written about happiness in one of my Evil Rants and even did a video version of it featuring many tactics and strategies to help you capture the elusive hobgoblin of happiness. However, for anyone out there who is still chronically suicidal, wallowing in the depths of your own despair (or maybe just feeling a little bit down occasionally), I have another basic insight for you that might help you on your journey towards becoming happier. The thing to understand is this- we suffer when our blueprint, meaning our ideas, values and beliefs about how reality and our lives are supposed to work, don't match what's actually happening. It's about the incongruence or contradiction between the way we think things are supposed to be going for us, and the way they actually are. If you believe that a part of your life is supposed to be happening a certain way, that you were supposed to have certain things, or that certain things are supposed to be going well and they aren't, you are going to be unhappy about that. If you have the belief that you are supposed to be fit and in shape, but you are 100 pounds overweight, you are probably going to be miserable in regards to that. If your story is that you think you should be making "X" amount of money, and you're making significantly less than that, you are going to be frustrated about that area of your life. Simply put, when reality doesn't live up to our expectations, we get pain. On the other hand, when things are going way better than we thought they would, and some area of your life is exceeding expectations, chances are you feel great about it. The challenge is of course that life often doesn't give us exactly what we want. So how do we deal with this? The old school spiritual approach is to detach yourself from ego and other earthily and material concerns. But this kind of philosophy doesn't sit well with the ambitious, achievement oriented villain in me. I like material and earthly concerns. So instead I have another suggestion. In fact there's 2 ways that you could go about dealing with this, depending on the situation. The first is to start to move your life in a direction where it begins to more closely resemble your blueprint of how it should be. Basically you need to take action to improve. This is something I'm very passionate about. If you're not getting what you want, then you should go find a way to get it. Change what you're doing and you will change your results. The really cool part is that if you begin to make that change and start on the journey to improving that situation, you will already be happier. You don't even have to fully accomplish what you're trying to do or arrive at the point where you want to be, you just have to begin the journey and you will see an upswing in your happiness. Just the progress you made will make you a lot happier. But sometimes we can't get exactly what we want no matter how hard we try. This is because there are many aspects of reality that we simply cannot control. In fact the only 2 things in this entire universe that we have any direct control over are our own thoughts and actions. In cases where it is impossible to have what we think we need to be truly happy, we must change our own story about what it takes to be happy. We have to realize that happiness is the ultimate goal of getting that thing that we thought we wanted anyway, and even if that doesn't measure up with reality, we still have the power to make ourselves happy. To do this you have to examine yourself, question why you wanted that thing, and what you thought that thing would give you. Then you have to get creative and find another blueprint, another way to meet that need to feel the way you need to feel in order to be happy. If you are truly depressed it is because your life doesn't match the way you think it should be. And if you are suffering this way for a long time then you probably feel like you're helpless to change it. That feeling of powerlessness is what leads to a lot of suffering. So in order to remedy that you simply have to find a way to get your life to match your expectations for it. And that means you either have to change your life, or change your expectations. Either way it's worth it, because either way will make you happier. And another quick hint is that often this requires changing a little bit of both. - False Prophet |
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