Research shows that happiness is a choice, and unhappiness is also a choice. It is up to you to decide how you are going to live your life. Here at ShareHappinessNow, we believe that you can make the choice NOW to join the happiness movement. Extensive scientific research backed by positive psychology experts like Shawn Achor proves that happiness leads to success if you reverse the formula by pursuing happiness first. Many of us believe that in order to be happy, we have to have the dream job, the dream house, the dream car, and then we wind up with greater happiness and greater success. Wrong. Look for happiness first. Success will follow.
All of us have bad days, where we don’t want to count our blessings and be grateful. We get caught up in everyday situations, where life continues on its natural path and we have to deal with stress, disappointment from the people we love, the constant feeling of being overworked, exhaustion, lack of sleep and we feel like we have time for nothing. This is the point where we realize that being happy all the time is a myth. It is something we should thrive for, however, we know that we have to realistic.
It was one of those beautiful September days when everything had gone wrong. From the moment the electricity went out, to having one of those horrific days at school with the kids where they wouldn’t listen to a thing you say, to getting a speeding ticket because you were in a rush to get to your next appointment.
Going through this horrible experience turned into an unexpected reminder about happiness and the importance, above almost all else, of being authentic — true to yourself and true to others. It’s really easy to get caught up in seeking and wanting to feel happy all the time and chasing this nirvana. Happiness is probably one of the most universal of human desires, but what most of us fail to understand is that happiness almost never exists in an absolutely pure form: it almost always has a slew of other emotions mixed in with it. It took us years to get to this realization, and we find ourselves lucky that it only took us this long. Some people spend their life’s fortune on therapy, treatments, exploring different jobs, and different spouses, all in search of one thing: constant happiness.
Life is filled with ups and downs, with sadness and laughter, with excitement and boredom and stress and chilling out. If we learn to adjust our expectations of happiness away from thinking of it as a constant perfect state of pure contentment and toward an understanding that it’s created from an imperfect combination of emotions and a collection of moments that we notice, appreciate, and cherish even the less positive ones. Happiness will become a more realistic, authentic, and achievable goal.