Hey everyone, and welcome to TopThink.
Today, we are going to learn about the one habit that will make you happy
Now, let’s begin.
Most of the world is searching for a secret formula for happiness.
They want some sort of magical solution to make their wildest dreams come true.
Because that’s what many people think happiness is.
In their minds, happiness is synonymous with those extravagant fantasies you like to daydream
about.
You know which ones I’m talking about.
The dreams where you’re rich, famous, and living on top of the world.
Where every day is filled with new and exciting experiences.
You might be surrounded by people that love and admire you.
You might have accomplished every goal you’ve ever set for yourself.
In these dreams, negative emotions like fear, doubt, and loneliness become a thing of the
past.
While it would be nice to spend the rest of your days laughing, smiling, and enjoying
life, that’s the not kind of happiness this one transformative habit is going to bring
you.
Because that’s not what real happiness looks like.
First of all, being happy isn’t some medal for you to win.
It’s not a finish line for you to cross.
There’s no switch in your head that suddenly makes you happy forever.
Happiness will never be a permanent part of who you are.
Happiness is a temporary state of mind.
It’s fleeting, situational, and can disappear in the blink of an eye.
You might be happy for a few weeks until suddenly you have a rough day.
You start feeling sad or lonely.
You’re stuck in a rut, and you don’t know why.
But that doesn’t mean you won’t feel happy again tomorrow.
You just have to learn strategies you can use to pick yourself back up.
So how do you make yourself happy as often as possible?
Even though happiness is a state not a trait, you can still create a happier lifestyle for
yourself.
Think about it like cleaning your room.
What happens if you stop cleaning for an entire year?
Obviously, your room gets really messy and gross.
It becomes harder and harder to the clean the longer you ignore it.
So what if you didn’t wait until the end of the year.
What if, instead, you set aside a little time each week to straighten things out?
Wouldn’t your room be much easier to clean?
My point is that happiness is something you earn bit-by-bit, day-by-day.
But to make sure that positivity stick around, you need to set yourself up for mental and
emotional success.
This is actually an extremely well researched subject in psychology.
A 2016 research summary, which draws from over a dozen studies, explains in detail how
happiness is influenced by context.
Of course, in the scientific community, happiness isn’t really a useful term.
It’s way too vague.
Everyone you ask will have their own definition of what it means to happy.
That’s why these studies focus on something called subjective well being or SWB.
It’s essentially the same thing as happiness.
It just concentrates more on life satisfaction, which makes it easier for researchers to define
and measure.
But let’s go back to that summary from 2016.
The recent research discussed in this paper reveals a number of new discoveries about
subjective well being.
One of the most important is that SWB is very flexible and malleable.
In other words, happiness is substantially affected by the decisions you make and the
environments you choose.
You can see evidence of this in a 2005 study.
Here, researchers investigated how happiness fluctuates over several years.
As their stations in life began to change, researchers noticed that happiness followed.
But no one gave these participants the tools to live a happier life.
All the researchers did was observe their contexts and choices.
Yet it was the people who actively pursued their happiness that showed the most significant
improvements.
Another study from 2012 honed in on the impact that major lifestyle changes on subjective
well being.
Turns out, marriage, employment, and a number of other personal factors are some of the
best predictors of general life satisfaction.
And these aren’t the only studies out there.
There are plenty more that echo how much control you have over your happiness.
Yet so many people still sit around waiting for happiness to fall into their laps.
That’s why the one habit that will improve your subjective well being isn’t getting
more sleep, taking breaks, or spending time with happy people.
All of these changes will make you feel better, but they’re passive.
Remember that subjective well being is something you can and should actively develop.
That’s why the one habit that will improve your life is to grab it by the horns.
It’s internalizing the fact that your happiness is always your responsibility and no one else’s.
Now, let’s look at exactly how this one habit creates both positivity and satisfaction
in your life.
We’ll start with “gaining control,” because that’s the first thing responsibility
gives you.
It provides a much needed sense of power over how your life pans out.
According to a 2018 study, maintaining personal control keeps your mind feeling stable and
balanced.
In other words, you feel better about something when it seems like it was your decision.
Researchers tested this by measuring emotional responses to increased and decreased levels
of personal control.
Sure enough, increased control effectively mitigated negative emotions.
But even more interesting is what they discovered by decreasing control.
You’d think that if more control makes you feel better, less control would make you feel
worse, right?
But decreasing personal control didn’t cause a spike in negative emotions.
Without any agency, participants just didn’t care.
This is the same trap that many people fall into on a daily basis.
They go through life feeling apathetic.
They don’t think they have any control over what’s happening.
Unfortunately, their indifference turns into long-term pessimism, which leads to hopelessness
and low self-esteem.
If you didn’t already know, these are two of the most difficult emotional states to
recover from.
By taking control of your happiness, you’re not only getting rid of that toxic apathy,
you’re also giving yourself the opportunity to genuinely improve.
While perceived control is important, it’s not the primary reason why this one habit
is so effective.
That has more to do with self-acceptance than anything.
When you take responsibility for something, you also take ownership, right?
You’re claiming that something is yours, no matter how positive or negative it turns
out to be.
In this case, the thing you’re claiming… is yourself.
Believe it or not, this is something very few people actually do.
Think back to those daydreams you had about fame and fortune.
In those dreams, are you actually yourself?
Or are you some imaginary version of yourself that couldn’t possibly exist.
We spend so much time wondering what it would be like to be another person that we forget
to make the best of who we actually are.
That’s might be the most impactful product of this one life-changing habit.
It gets you used to accepting the things you can’t change.
And making the best of the things you can.
That brand of acceptance will work wonders for your confidence and self-esteem.
Why?
Because it relieves the constant frustration of butting heads with things you can’t control,
which take shape in your fears and insecurities.
Say you’ve always been unhappy with your appearance.
Since you don’t like the way you look, you often envy more attractive people.
You see their confidence and charisma, and you assume they have those things because
of their looks.
You stop trying to find those things for yourself, because you’re too focused on something
you have no control over.
Taking responsibility means changing your focus.
It’s about identifying a problem and finding the avenues where you can actually improve.
For example, if your goal is to enhance your appearance, it’s tempting to concentrate
on your height or the shape of your face.
But you’d never get anywhere.
By shifting your attention toward things you can control like health and physical fitness,
you can make real progress that you can be proud of.
Finally, controlling your happiness decreases one of the most common and detrimental vices:
rumination.
Rumination isn’t a fundamentally harmful thing to do.
It just means thinking deeply about something.
Much like self-reflection, rumination is completely harmless most of the time.
You might ruminate after finishing a test by wondering how you did.
There’s nothing wrong with that.
But, if you’re feeling nervous or insecure, a little rumination can spiral out of control.
You might panic that you missed a full page on the test or that you forgot to write your
name on the paper.
You start doubting every move you’ve made, no matter how illogical it sounds.
You become mentally and emotionally stressed out, all because you’re convinced something
will go wrong.
This kind of rumination is like giving up responsibility.
You’re panicking about things you have zero control over without taking any action.
Whether you like it or not, you’ll never be able to change the past.
Taking responsibility for your happiness means turning your attention toward your future.
You spend less time ruminating, because you’ve made a habit of finding ways to change things
you’re not happy with.
So don’t spend another day waiting for someone to hand you a lifetime of happiness.
Play an active role by accepting yourself and taking control of your well being.
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