15 Apr 4 Statistics That Will Change Your Entire Life Perspective
Perspective is a mightily powerful tool for tackling anxiety and depression, and in many instances for boosting happiness.
Perspective is a common component in many interventions from CBT to Positive Psychology Coaching and happiness enhancement.
There are many ways to reflect up and to change perspective, but the statistics in this article will almost surely make you think …
via Your Tango by Akshad Singi
Mothers from the Piraha community don’t know how many children they have. Do you know why? Because their language doesn’t have any numbers. While English and other languages have words like one, two, ten, and a billion, they just have words that roughly translate to few, some and many.
Meaning, if you give them a basket full of 15 apples and another with 13 apples, they literally won’t be able to differentiate between the two. To them, both baskets have many apples. They’re probably the only community on earth without any numeracy. And they do just fine without numbers.
However, the fact that they don’t have any numbers also means that they’ll never be able to build skyscrapers or electrical devices. Such complex feats require the use of numbers. The fact that our languages have numbers is what ultimately enables me to write this on a laptop and you, to read on your device.
Without numbers, humanity would never have reached where it is today. Skyscrapers, aeroplanes, and the internet would have been entities we couldn’t have even imagined. Numbers have given us a lot in the physical world. And yet, there are some numbers that may provide us with amazing perspective shifts as well.
Here are 4 statistics that will change your entire life perspective:
1. 23,849 days of your life will be boring
The global average life expectancy in 2019 was 72.6 years. Taking 365 days for each of those years, the average person will live about 26,499 days. If we assume that about 10% of those days will be special days — which, let’s face it, is a bit overambitious — 23,849 days of your life will be absolutely boring. They’ll be mundane and uneventful. They’ll be days you will forget.
We’re kind of obsessed with accumulating special days. We think we need to accomplish our huge goals and have many special days in life to be happy. However, we fail to realise that these special days are unbelievably transient and quicker than we can recognise. The high will shrink, and we’ll be back to our boring days.
This is the principle of the Hedonic Treadmill. The hedonic treadmill is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes. The special days are fun to have. But they’re rare and hence cannot serve our day-to-day happiness. For that, we’ve to learn how to extract joy from our boring days.
In one of his articles, Niklas Göke shares something similar that struck a deep chord with me. He says more than chasing those special days; life is about learning to love the boring days. In an article on Psychology Today, even Dr Nancy says that not learning to find happiness in little things is what robs us of joy.
But how do you learn to love the boring days? Niklas offers a beautiful perspective shift. He says, to be happy, rather than chasing highs, we’ll be better off if we cultivate an aversion to misery. “Long-term, everyday happiness lies in not being miserable.”, he says.
For him, each day when he’s not sick, not stressed, and there’s no drama, is a good day. In essence, he has psychologically upgraded all his neutral days into good days. Isn’t that a great shift? And that’s something we should all practice in our lives as well. If nothing goes wrong in our day, instead of labelling it as a boring and neutral day, we can mark it as a good and happy day …
… keep reading the full & original article HERE