How to Start Being Happier in Your Life and Career This Summer
Ah summer. The perfect time to unwind and find a little more pleasure in your life. This will surely make you happier, right?
Yes, but increasing your pleasure is only half the story.
The other half is finding the opportunity to pursue and appreciate those activities that bring you fulfillment, that bring purpose to life. These two elements, pleasure and purpose, go hand in hand and together they create and improve your level of happiness.
When I was researching for The Career Playbook, I scoured the literature on happiness to find the right anchor for what we’re all trying to achieve with our careers. If you’re like many people, you might think that the greater your career success, the greater your happiness. Even if you haven’t thought about this explicitly, chances are you are organizing your professional life so that most of your time and energy is spent pursuing success. If so, read on, be happier.
It turns out that there is an entire field of research on the surprisingly complex topic of happiness. Defining happiness in the first instance is tricky, as is measuring it accurately across time and cultures, and controlling for individual personalities. The guru on happiness is Paul Dolan, a renowned behavioral scientist at the London School of Economics. He is author of a great beach read that I heartily recommend, called Happiness by Design. Professor Dolan believes, encouragingly, that the pursuit of happiness is the very objective of human existence. His definition of happiness is “the experience of both pleasure and purpose over time.”
I truly love this definition. On the one hand, it captures the sense of fulfillment that you realize from challenging but meaningful endeavors at work—projects that move things forward, breakthrough ideas and products, sales that genuinely satisfy clients, and difficult but original creative work. Outside of work, there are scores of things you can do that increase your level of satisfaction from doing purposeful things – volunteering, caring for those in need, pursuing continuing education, exercising, learning a new skill.
But on the other hand, Dolan’s definition of happiness also encompasses a wide range of activities that bring you joy, which is fundamental even if their outcomes don’t produce measurable results—listening to music, hanging out with friends, eating, traveling, dancing, going to the movies, playing sports, going for a walk in nature. Some activities, the ones you want to maximize, are high on both pleasure and purpose. Others are high on one of the two and are worth doing, with some degree of moderation. And of course, there are activities that are painful to experience, that do not contribute to something meaningful, and that bring you neither joy nor meaning. These, of course, are the ones you want to avoid at all costs. The other distinctive aspect of Dolan’s definition is “over time.” Underneath these words is research that suggests that our happiness is a function of how many experiences we achieve and how much time we spend on activities that are both pleasurable and purposeful. In other words, happiness is less a static measure or snapshot of your state of being, but rather an amalgamation of our experiences over period of time. The reason why this is so important is that with this insight we are all in much greater control over our level of happiness than would otherwise be the case if it was genetically programmed.
How to Pursue Happiness
Paul Dolan suggests that you start a daily log of your experiences and activities and rate each activity on a scale from 1 to 10, on the basis of the amounts of both pleasure and purpose it brings you. Begin logging your activities in this way today. At the end of the summer, take a step back and analyze your log. How much of your time are you spending on things that rate higher than a 5 on each dimension? How much on activities that rate a 3 or less? Develop a plan to spend more time doing the activities that you’ve rated highly. Think about what activities you are not currently doing that you would rate highly if you had time to work them into your schedule. Take control and organize your time and your schedule so that you have a balance of activities that rate highly on pleasure or purpose and find some that rate highly on both dimensions.
Often our routines and activities get established not by our conscious decisions but by the people and responsibilities that constantly compete for our time and attention. If you focus on the pleasure-purpose framework and keep a log of your daily activities, it will help you gauge whether the life you’re living is the one you want to live. And it can help you to begin shifting your efforts in the direction of things that bring you pleasure and purpose.
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Human Resources Director/Trainer/Consultant
9 年Start by making up any bed you have, so that you can turn it down at bed time and have peaceful dreams. It's all up to you.
???? | Product Marketing Executive | Digital Marketing Executive | Marketing Campaign Executive | Email Marketing | Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement
9 年I read it just because the title has two amazing words "happier" and "life" .. very nice article.
Enjoying Life
9 年I love the definition of purpose and pleasure, and I concur that tracking what you do and the satisfaction it provides is a great place to start assessing where you are in life. I also think it is important we remember that the foundation of a happy life is the relationships we build which give us the opportunity to be ourselves, and to talk about our most intimate thoughts without fear of judgment. Why is this so critical? Because we self-discover as we self-disclose, and we won't self disclose if we feel we are being judged.
I teach people to use their brain more intelligently | Consultant | Speaker| BIZCATALYST360° | Forbes | HuffPost
9 年Nice article and the technique (journaling and then increasing time spent in pleasurable pursuits) will increase happiness--some. The key to real happiness, predictable happiness comes before our actions. It comes from our mind. We cannot avoid every situation that you "...want to avoid at all costs." Loved ones die or become ill, relationships end, and we'll all eventually die. Our minds are able to find different perspectives about the situations we live in. Some people hate their jobs while others find great purpose and meaning in the same sort of job. It is possible to re-frame how one perceives a job and find more meaning in the work without changing jobs. Learning how to use our minds to feel better (not via suppression) but through adaptive agile use of our cognitive abilities greatly increases our enjoyment of the things we have to do as well as increases the joy in the things we want to do.
Orthopath, Economist, Buteyko Educator & Plantrician at TotalHealthMatters!
9 年I teach people to breathe normally! Why? Because 90% of us in the West are suffering some degree of Chronic Hidden Hyperventilation due to stress. How do I do it? Using the Buteyko Method, usually combined with the MyButeyko App to allow people to do their exercises on their smart phone anytime and anywhere. Using the internet I can teach anyone in the world from my office in Kent, UK. Learning better breathing is about breaking a "bad habit" hence the power of having someone keeping an eye on your efforts this way; as soon as someone has done an exercise I can see their result on my computer immediately and get back with support instantly. Who could benefit? The 200 million asthmatics worldwide, people suffering anxiety and panic attacks, hypertensives, ME sufferers, people suffering from sleep apnoea and a few million more by learning to cope with stress better this way. Want more info? Look at <www.thebreathconnection.com>