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So You Want to Be Happy?

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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

Thinking too much about yourself will definitely have a negative effect on your happiness. Thinking about other people, and sometimes other things, will usually leave you feeling good.

What else can be said?

Although thinking too much about yourself is probably the biggest no-no, there is another type of thinking that will definitely bum you out. That is, for lack of a better phrase, existential thinking– i.e., thinking too long or too deeply about the big four existential issues: death, isolation, meaning, and freedom.

The problem with thinking about the first two – death and isolation – is fairly obvious. Death is the certain end of happiness. And isolation, which we know from all the happiness studies – is the most significant symptom of unhappiness.

But meaning? Does thinking about meaning make for unhappiness? The answer is yes. If you don’t know that already, it’s because you haven’t tried it in a serious way, even though you think you have.

And what about freedom? How could that be antithetical to happiness? For many reasons, actually. But the most important one is this: The more freedom you have, the more time you have to think about meaning and mortality and isolation. And that’s why the average Indian or African is way happier than the average middle-class American.

Let’s sum this up with a listicle of Happiness Rules:

  1. Develop relationships – good relationships, which means caring about the other person and not worrying about your own needs.
  2. When it comes to spending your money and your time, recognize that you will get more happiness from experiences than you will from things.
  3. Recognize that if you are not happy with what you have now, you will never be happy with what you acquire later.
  4. Find things to work on that have value to you, and find ways to find value in the work you do.
  5. Intend to do things, but don’t care about the outcome.
  6. Don’t think about death at all. When it enters your mind, get rid of it.
  7. If you must think about meaning, realize that, ultimately, life has no meaning. So enjoy your theories, but don’t take them seriously.
  8. Don’t take yourself seriously.
  9. See yourself as a little cluster of atomic energy in a universal void.
  10. Read for entertainment and enlightenment. If it doesn’t bring you joy, read only what you feel you must.
  11. Take cold showers.
  12. Share, don’t hoard.
  13. Forgive, don’t hold grudges.
  14. Play. Don’t compete.
  15. Give up golf.