By Madison Coleman
We all want to be happy. If you follow our research lab on social media or are reading this blog post, chances are so do you. Actually, if you’re alive and breathing, chances are you also want to be happy. Turns out, though, we’re really bad at being happy. Sure, we are prone to fall into habits that lessen our chances of being happy, but more than that, we just don’t really understand the nature of happiness. We think that it’s something that we need to chase or seek after, something that we deserve if we’ve worked hard enough for it. This kind of thinking leads to the “I’ll be happy when” syndrome.
You’ve had it, I’m sure. We fall all too easily into this pattern of thinking—“I’ll be happy once I’ve received or achieved this thing that I’ve always wanted.” Could be getting into a healthy, stable relationship, getting married, having kids, the kids moving out of the house, getting a promotion at work, making a certain salary, starting a new job, retiring… you name it.
Now, don’t get me wrong—there’s nothing wrong with having goals. If one of those things is something you want to do or achieve, working for it won’t necessarily diminish your happiness. The danger is when you come to think that there is no way for you to be fully happy until you achieve that thing. Basing your happiness on some external circumstance, condition, or achievement means that you will find yourself constantly chasing that ever-elusive feeling of happiness. What if you never get that thing? Are you going to waste your whole life being miserable because you don’t have it? Or even if you do—once you get married or have kids or get that new job, that “I’ll be happy when” syndrome will cause you to come up with something else that you need before you can be happy. Happiness will be constantly just beyond your reach, and before you know it, you’ll have lived your whole life chasing something you never got.
It’s important to acknowledge that our external circumstances (such as our relationship status, job, income, etc.) do play some role in how happy we are, but turns out it’s way less than most of us think. According to research by Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, external circumstances account for only roughly 10% of our overall happiness. Think about that: you spend years of your life working towards something, thinking that it will turn your life around and finally allow you to be happy, when in reality the most it can do is make you 10% happier (if that). Moreover, because of something called hedonic adaptation, we tend to get used to the new, external circumstances in our lives, causing a lot of the initial happiness that we may have gained from it to wear off over time, and we eventually return to a baseline level of happiness. For example, though people tend to report slightly higher life satisfaction for the first few months of marriage, it tends to return to the same base level of happiness from before the marriage.
Ok, so external circumstances only account for 10% of our happiness and the happiness that comes from those things even tends to wear off. So how in the world do we become and stay happy? This is what the field of positive psychology is dedicated to finding out. Lyubomirsky’s research shows that 50% of our overall happiness is accounted for by our genetic predispositions (which is pretty much outside of our control), but 40% is accounted for by our intentional actions. We have the ability to act and think in ways that make us happier right now. Not in the future, not once we’ve achieved something we’re working towards, not once we’ve captured that elusive happiness. Now! All because we haven’t made chasing happiness the focus of our lives, but instead have let happiness find us as we’ve concentrated on acting and thinking in healthy ways.
What are those healthy ways to think and act? They include increased gratitude, mindfulness, savoring, optimism, compassion, purpose, personal growth, and so much more. That’s why we’ve created the My Best Self 101 modules—to help people learn how to take advantage of that 40% by acting in intentional ways to improve the quality of their lives and help them to realize that they can be happy now. There’s no need to place our hopes for happiness in the future. All of those external goals that we may have (getting married, having kids, getting that new job), once achieved, can simply be icing on the cake to an already happiness-filled life if we know how to take our happiness into our own hands. You’ll be happy when…. you realize that your happiness isn’t reliant on some future circumstance.
“If you’re not happy today, then you won’t be happy tomorrow unless you take things into your own hands and take action.”