Pursuing happiness

We all want to be able to be happy in life, so why does it seem that some are happier than others? There’s a number of different factors which play a part: the first thing to identify is that happiness isn’t a destination, It’s part of the journey.

We get accustomed to looking for quick fixes, even when it comes to happiness, going shopping can give you a thrill, eating certain foods can give a feeling of satisfaction, buying new expensive cars/clothes can give you the same feeling. The problem with these quick fixes is that the feeling doesn’t last and you find that you have to go and repeat the process to maintain that feeling. You may find that your belief is that you will achieve happiness by achieving certain things whether this is tangible such as a nice car, your dream house or intangible such as inner peace, having more time, being content with yourself.

In today’s society, you can be accustomed to obtaining things quickly and acting on impulse such as purchasing an item you see online which catches your attention. This can instantly give you a high and feel good about your purchase until you come down from this high and may find that you regret your purchase. This doesn’t stop you from purchasing more things spontaneously, it may even result in you purchasing more items to feel good about yourself, which is always short-lived and it can easily develop into a vicious cycle which is difficult to break.

Happiness comes from within yourself not from material things, learning to be content within yourself will allow you to live life without conditions on your self-worth, as well as not being affected negatively by others around you.

You may be asking how you can achieve this contentment, firstly you’ll need to address any conditions you have placed on your self-worth, these conditions can be developed from childhood and still affect you as an adult. For example, you may feel that you’re only worthy of unconditional love when you’re helping others, or your only worthy/accepted when you’re behaving or thinking in a certain way. These conditions on your self-worth, are holding you back from accepting yourself unconditionally. Having conditions can result in you putting yourself down and or being ‘hard’ on yourself for not achieving these conditions. The conditions you have won’t necessarily be the same as someone else, as everyone’s experiences are unique and as such these conditions are too.

Conditions of worth when they’ve first created tend to go into your unconscious mind and effect you without you realising it. Without self-awareness you could easily be judging yourself based on these conditions, resulting in the way you feel about yourself being conditional; you’ll feel good about yourself when you’re achieving these conditions but you’ll feel bad when you’re not, rather than accepting that your human and will make mistakes (it’s inevitable) and you can still accept yourself despite having flaws.

The key is to learn to undo the conditions if they don’t serve you well, why have them there? There’s no real purpose to them and they’re not helping you in the long term, so what’s the point of them? It’s not as easy as waking up and suddenly having no conditions, it takes time to notice them (raising your self-awareness), to then implement a change (challenging those thoughts) and for those changes to take effect. It can take anywhere between 1 week to a few months for you to see the results of your changes however you will see them at some point, keep going, you’ve made it this far.