In life, is the attainment of personal happiness an achievable goal?
In my psychology practice, when I ask clients what their goals are for the New Year, many say that they “just want to be happy”.
This is, of course, quite a natural and normal aspiration, and one with which most of us can identify. It seems such a simple and straightforward hope – yet when one explores it in more depth it turns out to be a lot more complicated as it tends to opens up an existential can of worms!
Questions that come up are: What is happiness and what makes me happy? When last was I really happy and why is it so difficult to hold on to happiness? Isn’t wanting to be happy quite a selfish goal? Are other people happy and if so, how do they do it?
Happiness is a feeling consisting of positive emotions and often accompanied by a sense of well-being. It is based on a personal judgement about life. If you were to ask yourself to rate your happiness in this moment on a scale from zero to ten, with ten being absolute happiness, where would you rate yourself and why? How do you think you will rate in five years’ time?
There are many benefits to being a generally happy type of person. Research has found that happy and optimistic people tend to be healthier. Happiness and low levels of stress are good for the immune system. Happy people even appear to be luckier and more fortunate in life, largely because they tend to take up opportunities when they present themselves. They do well because they expect to do well (and of course the converse is also the case due to the nature of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Why is happiness as a permanent state of mind to hard to achieve and is being happy always a good thing?
These two questions will be explored in future posts.