Start by doing this: Spend less time thinking.

“Homo sapiens” means thinking human. But for the great majority of our species’ development, we did very little serious thinking.  Most of our brain activity was directed toward survival.

You might think that a lifetime spent searching for grub worms and running from predators would be an unhappy one. The evidence, according to Yuval Arrari, writing in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humanity, suggests otherwise. Prehistoric man seems to have led a reasonably happy life, in part because he had very little time for thinking.

I remember reading about an experiment in England, where a group of volunteers went off to the woods and lived prehistorically. Their lives were very simple. They spent three or four hours a day hunting and gathering, and 20 to 21 hours sleeping. And what did these intrepid volunteers have to say about their experience? They said it was the happiest time of their lives!

There have been several significant studies on happiness in recent times, including the famous Harvard Study that spanned more than 70 years. Most of them came to the same conclusions:

* If you ask young people what they think will make them happy, they will name the usual suspects – wealth, fame success, etc.

* But when you study the actual data, it turns out that happiness comes from experiences rather than things and relationships rather than accomplishments.

These sorts of studies dovetail with the teachings of the Stoics and Transcendentalists and Buddhists. Their view was that wellbeing comes from living “in the moment” and not fretting about the future or the past.

It takes a fair amount of thinking about oneself to achieve success, acquire wealth, and/or become famous (when fame is the goal). But achieving happiness in life is mostly the result of caring about others and living in the moment, which is almost impossible to do when your mind is active with thought.

As someone that spends 98% of his waking day thinking about anything and everything other than what I’m actually doing, I could be a poster person for the deleterious effects of living in one’s head. My bouts of anxiety come, at least in part, from thinking frantically about the future. And dredging up thoughts of the past only exacerbates my bouts of depression.

I believe in the positive effects of meditation. The practice is meant to bring the mind away from transient thought and toward a more grounded state of consciousness – one in which your essential self somehow stops paying attention to the thoughts and feelings that race through the mind and focuses in on the present moment, in all its wonderfulness. But perhaps because I’ve spent so much time thinking, I find it difficult, if not impossible, to meditate in any serious way.

I don’t seem to have much trouble thinking and caring about others. I don’t do it naturally, but I can do it. And when I do it, my mood improves – sometimes into the happiness zone.

But it’s not just caring about others that stimulates a sense of wellbeing. I find contentment, too, whenever I’m working well on something I care about. A building project, for example, or landscaping my botanical garden or a writing a book or playing the French horn.

So what does that all mean?     READ MORE