Conditions of Happiness: Happy vs. Unhappy - Do We Have A Choice?

Everyone is in the process of seeking greater happiness. We are each involved in the search for feeling good inside our bodies. What may come as a surprise is in the midst of a binge, anorexia, bulimia, or other addiction process, Happiness is essentially at the core of what is being sought. The individual is experiencing some feeling of unease in their emotional state and physical body and is attempting to seek an alternative state of feeling better.

There is no crime in wanting to feel better. The body's natural state is meant to be aligned with feeling good. So what do we do when we don't feel good? Certainly, continuing on with an addiction is one choice. And if addiction is the singular lonesome tool a person has in their tool box, than hallelujah! The self-loving survival instinct is alive and functioning as one coping mechanism is chosen in an attempt to feel better.

Eventually though, we find that the addiction or fix from the outside doesn't last too long. It's more of an external short-term fix that doesn't work too well in the long term. And the consequences become more than we wish to bear. Eating to cope can lead to excess weight and associated health problems. Bulimia can lead to heart arrhythmia. Anorexia can lead to impaired mental processing. All can lead to an untimely death. So the outcomes may not be wanted, but the often unconscious and underlying intent was love, self-preservation, and feeling good.

If we could take all the emotional judgement, shame, and sense of failure off the eating behavior, we would be able to see the deepest desire as an attempt to feel good. Using food (or the lack of food) to cope does not mean that we are sick or defective. Indeed, we are competent managers of our lives. Perhaps stuck in one method of coping that has become complicated and no longer works so well, but none-the-less still coping and still managing life.

New solutions are possible and we are capable of creating new strategies for feeling good. Changing behavior does not so much require a deep understanding of what happened in the past, or even how dysfunctional our families were. Change requires us to engage in the effort of developing new patterns of thinking and acting.

WHAT IS Happiness?

What exactly is this thing called happiness? We know it when we feel it and we certainly know its absence. Just what constitutes happiness? Scientifically speaking, Happiness is a basic sense of satisfaction with your self and your environment.

Did you know that, as stated by psychologist Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky in a study in 1994, "Happy people do not experience one success after another and unhappy people, one failure after another. Instead surveys show that happy and unhappy people tend to have had very similar life experiences. The difference is that the average unhappy person spends more than twice as much time thinking about unpleasant events in their lives, while happy people tend to seek and rely upon information that brightens their personal outlook."

Chronically happy and unhappy individuals differ in the specific thought and motivational strategies they use. For example, happy individuals interpret life events and daily situations in ways that seem to maintain their happiness, while unhappy individuals interpret experiences in ways that seem to reinforce unhappiness. Happy individuals are more aware of the joy and Happiness while unhappy people register more sorrow and difficulty.

Wow! This is important information. The implication is that greater Happiness can be learned. We can decide to take our own unhappy situation into our own hands. We can stop analyzing, stop blaming our parents, our childhoods, even stop hating ourselves for our troubles, and determine instead to focus on changing our thoughts and actions. Instead of focusing on the problem, we can learn to focus on the solution.

UNHAPPY IS A NORMAL STATE

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