28 Aug It might seem counterintuitive but science says if you stop doing this one thing you’ll be happier
via Inc.com by Jeff Haden
Conventional wisdom holds that happiness is a result.
Sonya Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at University of California, Riverside, and author of the popular, The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want (Penguin, 2008), says, “Becoming lastingly happy demands making permanent changes that require effort and commitment every day of your life.”
Elizabeth Gilbert writes in Eat, Pray, Love, “Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it… and once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever.”
Want to be happy? You have to try to be happy.
Or not.
Research shows the desire for and pursuit of happiness can cause you to focus on your own feelings instead of the people around you, leading to a sense of disconnection and loneliness.ADVERTISING
Other research shows a constant pursuit of happiness can cause you to feel time is slipping away from you. “Because pursuing goals (i.e., happiness) requires an investment of time,” the researchers write, “and because happiness is a goal that is often never fully realized, the pursuit of happiness should cause people to anticipate needing to dedicate more and more time toward the continued pursuit of happiness and, as a result, to feel as though they have less and less time available to them in the present.”
Or in non researcher-speak, “I’m not happy because I don’t have enough time to work on being happy.”
Other research shows that the more strongly people agree with the following statements…
- “How happy I am at any given moment says a lot about how worthwhile my life is”
- “To have a meaningful life, I need to feel happy most of the time”
- “I value things in life only to the extent that they influence my personal happiness”
… the less content they are with their current lives.
And the less happy they feel…
…keep reading the full & original article HERE