01 May Avoid the happiness trap
I hope you enjoy this interesting article from Prevention magazine…
Caught in the Happiness Trap?
You can't buy it, force it, or find it in the pursuit of pleasure. But you can find out what happy people know that you don't!
By Dan Baker, PhD, and Cameron Stauth
The man sitting in front of me (let's call him Chris) was one of the wealthiest people in the American Southwest, rich in the resources that should bring happiness. He had everything: money, freedom, friends, and family. But I could see that he did not have the one thing he needed most: simple happiness.
His biggest concern, as he put it, was "keeping what I've got." His home life would horrify most people: alienated kids, a wife who bitterly resented his obsession with work, and never any time for just kicking back and feeling good.
Chris had lost his love for life. If you haven't met many wealthy people, you might think he was an aberration. You're probably thinking "Give me that money, and I'll show you how to be happy!"
The fact is that wealthy people, despite Madison Avenue's fairy tales about them, are unhappy just as often as people without much money. That's one important thing that happy people know: Money doesn't bring happiness.
You've heard that before, right? So you're probably thinking "Yeah, that must be true" (while secretly thinking "But it doesn't apply to me").
But it does apply to you, as the new, emerging science of happiness proves. The myth that money brings happiness is one of the happiness traps that I'm going to tell you about, along with the happiness tools that will free you from these traps.
Happiness doesn't mean being in a good mood most of the time or experiencing the emotion of joy. Happiness is a way of life, an overriding outlook composed of qualities such as optimism, courage, love, and fulfillment. It's not something that changes every time your situation changes.But happiness is surrounded by traps. One of the cruelest paradoxes of life is that the things we so often seek to soothe our souls are the very things that ultimately feed our fears and cause happiness to forever recede before us, just out of reach.
Over the past 3 decades, as I've listened to thousands of life stories about the central drama of life–the battle between fear and happiness–I've found that there are five primary traps that ensnare people who are trying with all their heart to be happy. Chris was a sucker for the money trap, but each of these traps is uniquely seductive, and each has been capturing people for thousands of years…
…keep reading the full and original article HERE