Happiness Is a Myth… but have you heard this secret?

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, I’m your happiness expert, and you know, I make videos like this every Sunday morning, and sometimes, I think people forget why I make them. It’s not just that happiness is a good emotion, and obviously it is, we all want to feel a positive sense of well-being. But it’s more than that. Happiness has been proven over and over again through great research that it leads to more success in life. The abundant positive emotions that people can learn to have leads to greater life success. Whether it’s career income, better health, better relationships, there’s all kinds of really clear, proven benefits, cognitive benefits to the way we think that come from having positive emotions.

So, this week’s video is to help us get positive emotions, but it’s also specifically going to talk about the myths that we chase that, when we’re not feeling very positive, our society basically conditions us to pursue things that don’t actually lead to greater happiness. So, I’m going to talk about that, and also a tiny little secret that actually will lead to greater happiness even when we’re down. As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So, stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful.

So, there’s a whole bunch of myths that we’re often confronted with about when we’re feeling down. If we pursue certain things, we will become happier, and we’re led to believe that this is true, and of course there’s a ton of social conditioning that makes us pursue certain paths to get greater happiness. You might guess intuitively what some of these are. We pursue a lot of extrinsic things like more money and material things in general, fame, and status, and we think that that’s going to help us feel better about ourselves. Even beauty, the way we look, you know, maybe I need bigger, stronger shoulders or, if I’m a woman, I need my makeup to be just perfect, and all these kinds of illusions of things that will make us satisfied and happy, and they don’t. They simply don’t.

The pursuit of these things, these extrinsic rewards, are taught to us by a million sources, including our parents, tragically, well-meaning as they are. But especially in advertising where they’re creating a want for something that’s outside of ourselves, that if we could just go and get that want fulfilled, then we would become happier, then we’d be more satisfied. So if you just get out your wallet and spend some money and get the things that they want to sell you, these material things should in fact, quote unquote, make you happier. And of course, they don’t. There’s tons of evidence that materialism, which all of these extrinsic things I’m talking about, don’t make us happier. David will put a link in the video to a video we’ve done in the past about materialism. You know, it’s basically what the Buddhists have taught for so long, and that’s that suffering arises from wanting things. Whether it’s wanting things to go away, having an aversion to something I don’t want, or whether it’s clinging to things that I really, really don’t want to go away. All that stuff is just a source of suffering.

So, if there’s this myth that pursuing these extrinsic things will make us happy, and we accept that it’s a myth, then when we are down, what do we do? Well, we often want some kind of instant relief. We want to feel better right away. And pursuing something that’s going to make us happy in the midst of being unhappy might not be very successful. The first thing we have to do, the tiny little secret that I want to share with you, is the first thing is accepting that we’re down right now, that we’re anxious, depressed, sad, whatever it is, we’re having a negative emotion and get to come to terms with that, and accept it. And once we’re there, once we fully accept that that’s the current emotion, then try some tiny, tiny little change. A little change with an expectation for only the smallest little increment of greater happiness. It could be anything.

There’s so many happiness interventions I’ve taught in the past that we could apply, because sometimes just distraction is good. Watch a good movie, read a good book, a call a friend. It might be starting a gratitude journal. We know the science is fantastic on this, that practicing gratitude makes us happier incrementally every day, and it builds new neuronal connections in our brains where happiness comes more readily to us. It could be, here’s one I haven’t talked about before, but just behaving 10% more extroverted. No matter how introverted we might feel or extroverted you are, just being a little bit more social makes us more happy, and it makes tons of sense, right? The science again is really, really good on this, that we know that we are hardwired to connect with other people. We’re tribal animals, we need to be in our hearts and in our minds with others. So just being a little bit more extroverted might work. Try meditation, any one of these things, whatever you want to pursue, expect tiny little incremental changes and in fact, we will become happier.

We can get over the down, anxious, sad periods in our life by just seeing little incremental changes. Now, look, if you like this kind of video, please click the like button, share it with your friends and family, and subscribe to my channel. You get a new video every Sunday morning. Thanks so much for watching, bye for now.