Looking For Happiness? It’s Simpler To Find Than You Think. Here’s Where To Start

What does it actually mean to be happy?

Is happiness merely a product of good luck or fortune — of our companies succeeding, or of our relationships thriving? Of circumstance? Is it merely a feeling, in other words, which we sometimes experience — one totally outside of our control? Or, is happiness instead something that exists inside all of us and which we, with practice, can get better and better at tapping into?

The answer, I believe, is the latter.

You must choose to be happy.

Here’s the truth. All of us have mental baggage — traumatic past experiences, persistent anxiety, loss — which, if we allowed it to, could at any given moment torpedo our happiness and make us depressed.

Yet all of us also have things to be thankful for. Earlier this morning, I hiked up a mountain. I felt thankful for my functioning legs, the hardware of my lungs. I struggle with anxiety, yet in that moment, breathing that fresh air, I wasn’t thinking about the book chapter I’d been struggling over the night before, or the sleep I lost, but how good it felt to be alive.

And happiness, in this sense, really is a choice. We choose whether to focus on the positive aspects of our lives that bring us happiness, or the negative which don’t.

Of course, this act of choosing is hardly easy. And that’s why truly happy people do something which less-happy people don’t do: they work hard, every day, at making the choice to be happy, to dwell on the light instead of the dark.

That’s the key.

You also can’t allow frustration to compel you to make the wrong choice.

Now, let me reiterate: making the conscious decision every day to focus on the positive rather than the negative is difficult. And it’s hard whether the negatives in our lives are overwhelming — like the impending loss of a loved one — or seemingly insignificant.

We all hate traffic jams. We hate stubbing our toes, or catching our clothes on a nail in the doorway. But we all from time to time exaggerate these moments of small frustration with power that’s similar to that of serious loss and hurt. Subconsciously, we choose to.

The bad news is, humans are sort of hard-wired to focus on negatives — on potential threats, on reasons to be unhappy and on edge.

The good news, though, is that we can rewire this impulse. When someone cuts you off in traffic, you can protect your happiness and choose not to let that stranger rob you of it. In doing so, we disempower the small frustrations.

It’s not always easy, but the key is committing to trying.

You can’t change the past — but you can choose what to remember about the past and what to focus on moving forward.

Now, it should also be said that what compels many of us into depression is sorrow, regret, and guilt.

The past, after all, is powerful, not to mention persistent.

But we have a choice here, too. We can choose — across every waking moment, if we have to — what about our pasts we let bother us, and what about our pasts we by and large forget.

I think about it like this: we choose every day what kind of path we want to blaze. Which is to say, we choose what the story of our life is going to read like. We then select elements of our pasts to continue weaving into the story — elements that inform the path — and which elements to instead disregard.

Again, this isn’t easy.

But the key thing to remember is that we all have the potential for happiness — for telling positive stories and for living a happy life.

Happiness lives inside us. The key, ultimately, is how holistically — how purposefully — we commit to tapping into it.

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