Knowing the secret to happiness, is it about being rich? Is it about having a loving family? Is it being healthy and living in an area of natural beauty? Is it all of those things? The answer is that it’s none of these listed things. It might surprise you that you might still be miserable even with everything going for you.
Meanwhile, someone living in the worst conditions with crippling hunger, illnesses, poverty and no family member can be one of the happiest people in the world. So what’s going on? It all comes down to how we perceive and think about our circumstances.
The secret to happiness is not attached to your possessions. Billionaires can be depressed incredibly if they don’t focus on what they’re grateful for. But if you learn to see the beauty in everything and if you can learn to calm your mind and shut out stress – then you can enjoy bliss wherever you are. How do you accomplish this? Like anything, it comes from training. If you can learn to control your mind, whether through meditation, Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) or other methods, you’ll find that you can start to decide how you want to feel and how you want to react at any given time.
What’s more, having the ability to control your mindset can help you achieve many other things. Overcoming stress, for instance, means you can stop ‘treading water’ and stop ‘putting out fires’. Instead, you can get your head above water and decide the trajectory you want for your life. You can decide on how you will best use your time. And better still, if you can learn to control your mind, you can tap into ‘flow states’. That means you’re so focused on the activity you’re engaged in that you manage to tune out everything else, and time almost seems to slow down.
Furthermore, flow states are the mental state most athletes find themselves in when they break world records or score winning goals. And when you put this state under the microscope and use a brain scanner, we can see that it’s very similar to meditation!
However, using CBT, you can decide that you’re not going to think, ‘What if I fall?’ anymore and that instead, you’re going to think, ‘I’m perfectly safe and secure’. Likewise, this can be applied to any other area of your life to maintain a state of happiness every day.
Changing our mindsets to maintain a state of happiness in our daily lives is crucial. Instead of thinking, ‘There’s so much I need to be stressed about right now’, you can guess, ‘I’m going to take this one step at a time’ or ‘I love a challenge’. You haven’t changed your situation, but you’ve changed your response to the situation. Suddenly, life will have more meaning, more colour and more excitement. That is the secret to happiness.