How to Be Happy and Successful
Guidance for and from the mildly incompetent on how to be happy and successful.
How to Be Happy and Successful
Ep. 2: What Is Happiness?
Learn the two types of happiness that psychologists talk about, several important errors people make when they think about happiness, and key ideas to keep in mind as you do this work (like remembering that our goal is to reduce how much time we spend in the grip of unhappy emotions).
Hi, my name is David Murphy. Welcome to how to Be Happy and Successful, the podcast you've been waiting for All right. Welcome to the second episode of how to Be Happy and Successful, where we talk about what is happiness, and the unwritten subtitle. Can I Really Get More of it? And spoiler alert the answer there is yes, you can.
Speaker 1:Now it may seem like a silly question. What is happiness? You probably know pretty much what happiness is. You have a good idea of that. You know happiness is a good feeling. It's feeling excited or eager or just pleasure, and that good feeling is at a completely blocking out bad feelings that might arise normally, or at least outweighing those bad feelings. Right, and that sounds like a fine definition. I'm not here to tell you that you don't know what you're talking about when it comes to happiness. No, no, good thing you're here because you have no idea what happiness really is. I'm not here to say that, but since we're going to be working on your happiness and, as I said in the first episode, you know what is this podcast we're ideally going to be working on it for years.
Speaker 1:It's good, I think, to take a little bit of time to talk about different types of happiness and also a couple of errors in your idea of happiness that most people have. So, while the idea of happiness is not some mystery to you, there is a good chance that you don't understand a couple things about it that's going to make a big difference to our work. Now, before I even get to those errors, I'd like to say that there are people who think that they feel what they believe they've experienced in their life. Is that the level of happiness? It's really quite random. It's really entirely up to what happens in the world, what happens to them, and this is it's not totally wrong, but it is somewhat wrong. So I guess there's an error which is not one of the two errors that I want to talk about later in the show and you know this comes up both with things like you know, things like financial success, and it comes up here in happiness, the idea.
Speaker 1:Well, which is it? Is it you know someone's, you know personal, personal efforts, or is it a matter of luck? In the world, people sometimes take very strong views that it's one or the other, when the truth is, both have an effect. It is true that you can get people. You can give people very similar opportunities and they can have very different outcomes. That is largely due to their efforts.
Speaker 1:On the other hand, to say that everything is a matter of mindset and personal effort is obviously ridiculous. You know, luck and random events play tremendous parts in our lives and I'll talk more about that idea in the gratitude episode. But you have to realize that both are a factor. The randomness luck, good or bad has more of an effect, frankly, on your success in life certainly things like financial success than it does on your happiness, because we can actually largely overcome our circumstances and be happy people if we practice the right behaviors, and here I mostly mean internal behaviors, as I mentioned in the first episode, things like gratitude, things like self-compassion, things like living for this moment. We'll get to that more later, but I just want you to understand that it is not entirely your happiness, is not entirely a matter of just you know, put your mind to it and get happy. I'm not going to say that. You know, if you have a sick child, if you have been unable to have a child, if you, you know, have suffered some kind of a terrible loss, if you've been had opportunities taken away from you, those things are going to affect your happiness, naturally, and yet to say that everything is up in the air, everything is the whim of fortune, or my happiness is entirely a factor of how other people treat me that is incorrect as well. You can work on your happiness and be remarkably successful, and that's what we're here to do Now.
Speaker 1:There are two kinds of happiness that psychologists who study happiness talk about, and I'm going to use the words that these psychologists use so that I can use big words and sound like I know what I'm talking about. So the first kind of happiness is happiness in the moment. That's probably what you mostly think of If someone says you know, are you happy? At least are you happy right now. You know. It's that happiness in this moment, and they call that happiness these people who study it. They call it hedonic happiness. Hedonic happiness. You don't need to memorize that word, but it just means happiness now, this experience of this moment. So someone were to text you and say are you happy right now, at this moment, how do you feel? If you look, I feel pretty good, then that means you're scoring well on the hedonic happiness scale. If you're feeling angry or anxious, well now you're scoring poorly on the hedonic happiness scale. So hedonic happiness is happiness now and in scoring poorly on the hedonic happiness scale. So hedonic happiness is happiness now and in this moment.
Speaker 1:And the other kind of happiness, the big word for it, is eudaimonic happiness, and that is happiness with your life overall. It's looking at your life and thinking are you happy with your life? So if you have food poisoning one night, if someone were to ask you, are you feeling happy, the answer is almost surely going to be no. I am not happy right now, but you still might have a life that you really appreciate. You might have great relationships, you might have a career that both satisfies you as far as the work goes and also helps you pay for everything you need to pay for in life. You might be living in a safe environment that provides you opportunities to do things. So you might have lots of good things in your life and you still might know it. So that is eudaimonic happiness.
Speaker 1:And that word again, not only to memorize it, but it's worth noting just that it comes from the word eudaimonia, which is an idea that Aristotle discussed more than 2,000 years ago, and it has to do with living your life to its fullest potential and sort of achieving your true potential as a person, as a human being, potential as a person as a human being. And I just mentioned that because on the website and here in this podcast, I talk about happiness, I talk about success, but really both sides are about happiness. The happiness articles and episodes are about hedonic happiness you being happy in the moment, feeling good experiences, and the success side of things, achieving your goals, which can mean living life to the potential that you see for yourself. That is actually a kind of happiness too. It's a eudaimonic happiness. So in a way, both sides work on a form of happiness. But I'll talk about that eudaimonic happiness a little more in the what is Success episode.
Speaker 1:Naturally, and to go back to the first kind, the in-the-moment happiness, I think people often think that thinking about that too much, certainly spending time working on it, it's a trivial enterprise. That term hedonic happiness well, there's a word, hedonism, that doesn't have good connotations in the English language. You know it means just, you know just going after pleasure all the time, regardless of what's important in life. But I'm here to tell you that your happiness and I talked about this in the first episode, and so I'm repeating myself, of course your happiness does matter. It is not at all trivial to make yourself happier in the moment. To do the work that means that every day you spend more of your time living a happier experience. If you need convincing that that is a worthwhile goal, I'm telling you right now that it is.
Speaker 1:And if you can't think that it's important for your sake, realize that you becoming a happier person and learning the skills that make you a happier person will mean that the people around you also will become happier people. You will not be able to do anything but share some of your happiness. Ideally, you could do that consciously, but even unconsciously, you will spread happier feelings to people around you by you working on your happiness. I'm not trying to convince you that your happiness is the most important thing and it's the only goal that you should set for yourself. It's not the most important thing. Your happiness, I'm here to tell you, is not as important as, say, the health of my children. That's just the truth. My children's health much more important than your happiness, or even more important than my happiness, if you can believe that. But happiness is a goal worth working on, not trivial, important to you and important to people around you.
Speaker 1:Okay, error number one, remember. I want to talk about two errors here. Here's the first one that people make with happiness, and is that people think that happiness, when you achieve it, it's a place that you go and you never come back. If you're really a happy person, you're just always going to feel good, that life will treat you well, and this is false. Just so you know, you could be the happiest person on earth and you are going to have bad days, bad moments, maybe bad weeks or months. You can have good moments even in those bad months, but you are going to have bad times because you're a human living a human life and people don't understand that. And it might sound frustrating that I'm saying that almost like I'm I don't know writing a get-out-of-jail-free card for myself. Here I'm trying to teach you about happiness, but saying whoa, whoa, whoa, you're not really always going to feel happy.
Speaker 1:The goal again, as I said before, is to spend more and more of our time having a happy experience. You're not caught up in these very angry and frustrated and scared emotions. In fact, it's a very important part of our happiness that we can look at moments of joy, anger, frustration, sadness, etc. With equanimity, realizing that we're going to have these moments and they are going to pass. It's important to understand this idea because, first of all, when we have disappointments, we often want to give up on a project.
Speaker 1:You know, we work on our diet right, we're trying to eat well, and then we have a day where we turn aside from our diet and we eat bad. You know, eat junk food, stuff that gives us pleasure, but then doesn't give us pleasure because we feel guilty about it and we think, well, I'm a loser, I can't diet, I blew it. And then we give the whole project up, don't? Of course you're going to have days or moments where you break your diet. If you don't do that and some people don't do that but if you don't ever do that in your diet, you're actually a strange person. I'm just going to tell you. That's not criticism, it's just the truth.
Speaker 1:In general, we break our diet. The people who succeed eventually go back to it. It's the same thing. It's similar with happiness. It's that we can work on behaviors that make us happier and when we have bad moments and bad times, we can say, okay, how can I apply the behaviors to make me happier? Now we do not say, well, look, this whole thing's a fraud, and that is a part of it as well. Is that we feel like fraud when we have this idea that happiness, once you achieve it, as a place where you're just always feeling good about yourself and your life and enjoying your moments, it makes it very easy for us to separate the world into winners and losers, and we put ourselves in that losers club. Yet this, of course, is tremendously amplified by social media, but it occurred before social media.
Speaker 1:For sure we would look at other people's lives and see them and see the good sides of them and think, man, they've got it together. Every time someone we know does something that we haven't done, has achieved something we haven't done, or seems to have a good relationship that we don't have, or seems to have a relationship with their children that we don't have, we feel inside they've got it and I don't have it. That is very easy to have. It's a great line, you may know, by Gore Vidal. Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little, and that is.
Speaker 1:It's a natural feeling that we want it to be us and we feel more importantly, more to the point here, that if it's not us, it's because something is wrong with us, but you got to understand that when you hang out with your friends and they tell you good stories, good for them, that's great. It's not always great for them. I'm telling you Certainly, when you see people on social media and that could be friends of yours, it could be friends of friends of yours, it could be celebrities you know and they're posting great. You know, events happen in life an amazing wedding they just had, or an amazing wedding they just went to. A great trip they just took, or just a great meal they had at home. You know people post anything.
Speaker 1:You don't have to think like, oh see, those people are happy. I don't have those kind of experiences. What's wrong with me? It's not even that those people necessarily are lying, but they don't, in general, want to share the bad moments they have. They don't think all right, someone just insulted me. Let me put this right up. Unless it's a chance to rant, that's a whole different thing.
Speaker 1:So understand happiness as we work ourselves forward is not about getting ourselves to a place where it's just always giddy, always in a great mood. Never have bad experiences. I hope that you get to live a long life and as you live that long life, you're going to face tough experiences. Just bad days in traffic. Things are going to fall on your toe you know who knows what, but also much worse things. You'll be sick. People you care about and are close to will become sick or will pass away, or you'll look at the world and you see how many people in the world are suffering. These things are going to work against your happiness, so don't always think you need to be there and still call yourself a happy person or a happier person than you were before. All right, lesson number two, or error number two this is a big one because this is going to affect the work that we do, you know, going forward, and it captures the way in which we sabotage our own happiness and sabotage our efforts to achieve happiness. And here's the error.
Speaker 1:We think that finding happiness is about chasing and grasping exciting moments, pleasureful moments, and we don't understand that happiness is actually about reducing the grip that unhappy emotions and experiences have on us. It's about reducing how much time we spend dwelling on feelings of anger and anxiety and regret and self-criticism. There was a monk from Myanmar who died, actually fairly recently, and I don't want to give the impression that I am some expert on Eastern meditation masters because I'm not but his name was Sayadaw Upandita, and he said we mistake excitement of the mind for happiness. Okay, so we mistake excitement of the mind for happiness, and this is true. It's exactly what we do. It is natural that we do so because if we think about happy moments, they're going to be the great moments.
Speaker 1:If I tell you right now think about a happy moment in your life, you're likely to think about the time your child was born, or the time that you got married, or when you graduated from school or you got into a school, or when you bought a really nice car, or when you bought a cool pair of pants. But the somewhat logical idea, then, that the way to become happy is to fill our lives with more and more of those moments just won't work. You know, first of all, you can't do it. You cannot make it that every five minutes, you feel like you're at a birthday party, or that you know you've had some great event happen in your life, or that you bought something new. If you try to create that every five minutes, you're going to go bankrupt very quickly, and this is one of the big problems with carrying these phones around in our pocket With access to YouTube and Instagram and TikTok and whatever the next versions of those things are.
Speaker 1:It gives us the belief that we can just constantly get these happy moments. You know, it's not as good to watch a really funny clip as to be at your wedding. You know when you're getting married to someone you love, but it can feel pretty good and so we think it's right there. I'm just going to pull it out and I can get a great moment happening, but it doesn't actually work. But almost worse than the fact that it's actually impossible is that the striving for doing it makes us unhappy.
Speaker 1:The striving for getting those happy moments actually makes us unhappy. First of all, trying to recreate these moments ends up making those moments not as pleasurable, if we do manage to repeat them again and again. But, more importantly, going after it, going after it, going after it just leaves us unhappy. It's just constantly searching for happiness. Instead, the way to make yourself a happier person is to relieve yourself of all of the negative thoughts and feelings that try to swap us frankly all the time, and feelings that try to swap us frankly all the time, all those emotions that just come to us and try to ruin the moment that we're living right now. Now I'm not criticizing you here or calling you a miserable person. Now there are people in this world maybe people listening to this podcast who are so crippled by, let's say, anxiety that they really do feel miserable almost all the time, and they know it. I sincerely hope that you listener do not suffer from that experience. But even if you don't, even if you would say that you live a life that is functional and, in fact, generally happy, let's think about parts of your day. Let's say you're at work, right At work.
Speaker 1:How much of your time do you spend thinking, oh my God, I'm so behind, I've got to get this thing together and, of course, this disaster struck or this other issue. Maybe that idiot over there put us behind, so now we've got to catch up with this and that and forget even this thing we're working on. What is with so-and-so and that attitude? They're towing with me, they're towing with everyone in the office. What's up with that? They don't even deserve to be here, let alone talking to people in that way.
Speaker 1:How much of your time is spent running thoughts like that through your head, instead of thoughts like you know? Of course I expect to have problems and of course people can be a pain. That's how it is and I feel lucky to have a job Now. It might seem to you like, well, that's a crazy naive person who thinks thoughts like that, but you could think thoughts like that, it's okay. It will not stop you from doing your job well. To think thoughts like a lot of people don't get to have a job. I get to have one. I'm lucky to be here and of course, what I signed up for when I took this job is having problems and what I signed up for by leaving my house in the morning is dealing with people who have attitude issues. That's all part of the game. I'm not interested in letting it screw me up and making me unhappy. You can have this kind of perspective on life and achieve things perfectly well probably better than you do if you're wrapped up with just that running narrative that often goes through our mind, that negative, unhappy narrative about lots of different topics that goes through our mind as we go through our day and actually do our job.
Speaker 1:The example I gave in the first episode was let's say you receive an insult right Insult for someone at your job or in your family or out in public, and that insult could be intentional or totally unintentional, but you feel slighted somehow. The question is unintentional, but you feel slighted somehow. The question is, how long are you going to stew on that and let it make you unhappy, and a lot of people first of all. It's not even a question to them that of course they're going to let it make them unhappy. It's not their fault that it makes them unhappy. It's going to make them angry and you should feel angry and you should, you know, carry that anger forward, because that's how you stand up for yourself. You can't walk all over you. So you're going to get angry, you're going to stay angry.
Speaker 1:Now let's examine this logic. Does it actually make sense Is it actually you looking out for you, that you let somebody else screw up your whole day or half your day, or even an hour of your day, that you let someone else come and take your happiness away by something they said? Is that you protecting yourself? I don't think so. I mean, I get it, but that anger is not making you happy. All those thoughts you get of like I can't believe that happened to me. It's so humiliating in front of people. I can't believe that person dares even speak like that to me, because how dare they? They're not so special. And also I should have said this and what about all the crap that they do that they deserve to be insulted for? And I wish the moment could come again, because if it did come again I think I'd say this but in truth I don't want to see that person ever again. I hope I. I know I'm going to run into that person in a while. What am I going to do then? These thoughts go on and on and on.
Speaker 1:And if you think it's making you happy, you're confused about what happiness is really. And it is natural to turn to anger in that kind of situation, because anger does give us a little bit of happiness. It gives us a feeling of being in the right because of that self-righteousness. But that is frankly. The unhappiness completely outweighs the happiness. So you get this insult. How long are you going to spend on it? Well, if you're some kind of divine being, maybe zero time. But I'm not asking that and I swear, I'm not promising that you'll ever get to that point.
Speaker 1:But the question is, is it going to be half of a day that just insult burns away at you, or maybe you're able to step away from it for a few minutes on a phone call, but then it comes right back as you get off the phone. So half a day or an hour, 60 minutes it's just running through your mind. You can't believe that I'm so embarrassed or angry, whatever. Or is it going to be 30 minutes that you go through that, or can you get it down to 10 minutes? If you can just get it down to 10 minutes? Frankly, you're an unusual person, but you're an unusually happy person and it might seem, oh well, the last time I spend angry after getting an insult, that means the more I let people just walk all over me, not true?
Speaker 1:You can't stand up for yourself without taking things personally. I'm a nurse, believe me, I know what that's like, because you get patients who have dementia or they're not confused people. They just have issues that make them very angry, and we have family members who get very angry and they lash out. You can't take it personally. You have to deal with a problem without thinking to yourself okay, well, this person really hates me and I'm going to let that bother me, and let's forget about an insult that comes to you. Let's say instead you know you don't get a promotion at work or someone doesn't want to go out with you, or somebody breaks up with you, you know, or anything small happens. You plan to go out all week to your favorite restaurant and you go there and they're closed for the day, which is so annoying, and end up eating some crappy dinner somewhere, which is very frustrating.
Speaker 1:How long will you let these things bother you? And let's say it's not an event that happened to you right now. Let's say it's something you did. You screwed up yesterday in some way, or you screwed up 20 years ago in some big way and that came back to your mind. How long are you going to run it through your mind, making yourself feel bad and criticizing yourself? How long? The longer it is, the less happy you will be and understand again. You are not solving problems by reliving these events and by making yourself unhappy. It's not helping you get somewhere, and that is just the truth of it.
Speaker 1:The secret that the people who are the happiest people on earth, the secret they have, is learning to let these things go. It doesn't mean they don't experience them. As I said a few minutes ago, you're going to have bad moments and bad feelings. You're going to experience anger. You're going to experience regret and self-criticism and anxiety about the future. You can experience these things, but how long will you let them run your mind? That is the real answer as to how happy you're going to be in your life.
Speaker 1:To give maybe a silly analogy, imagine you're sitting in a car and it's 15 degrees Fahrenheit outside, below freezing, and all the windows are open in the car. So the heat from your body is just being sucked out of you. First job is to roll up the windows. So in your life right now, it's almost a sure thing that your happiness is being pulled away from you, and your job is to just lessen it. You Just roll the windows up, stop it running away from you. And when these experiences or these negative thoughts come up again, see them for what they are and let them go and find other things that can make you happy, like gratitude, which I will talk about in a couple of episodes.
Speaker 1:Now it may seem to you somewhat negative, almost pessimistic, to say. The way we're going to try to become happier is not to gain more happiness, but just reduce the negativity. That might not seem very impressive to you. But there's a couple of things going for it. First of all, it actually works, so that's nice. First of all, it actually works, so that's nice. And secondly, you should realize that what that indicates is that you have a baseline of contentment. There is a happiness in you that will present itself to you when it's not pounded down and overcome by all those negative feelings that are so quick to spring to our mind and to handle an objection that might be coming to mind for you.
Speaker 1:You do not need to be unhappy to be motivated. You can be motivated to change your life, to change the lives of other people around you, to change the world without being miserable. Misery is, in fact, not the only motivation in the world. It's not even a very good motivator. So if you think, ah, if I make myself totally happy, I'll never get out of bed in the morning, I'll never leave the house, trust me, that is untrue. So free yourself of any belief you have that you will no longer get things done once you reduce the hold in your life of anxiety or envy, etc. It's just not so.
Speaker 1:All right, we're getting close to the end here. So I want to remind you of the mantra, as I call it, that I brought up in the first episode, which goes like this you matter, this work matters, and you can do this work. And if you want a fuller explanation or breakdown of that mantra, go back and listen to, or re-listen to, the first episode. But the truth is that you are important, your happiness is important and you can make yourself a happier person. Your happiness is important and you can make yourself a happier person. That's the truth. Okay, take care until next time.
Speaker 1:Here comes the outro. All right, this has been the how to be happy successful podcast. Thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed it and found it useful, or just one of those things. I would just take one. That'd be great. As I said, we don't need to be perfect all the time. We'll just do our best.
Speaker 1:So if you're interested in reading an article that goes with this podcast episode, you can go to the website. The website is www happy dash and dash successfulcom. So it's happy and successfulcom, but there's hyphens in between the words. You can read articles there. You can also sign up for the mailing list there. So when I put out new content, you will get an email saying hey, there's new content, go listen or go read. If you liked the episode, please go write a nice review about it wherever you listen to it, and if you didn't like it, well, you just keep that to yourself. And if you really liked the episode and the podcast in general, feel free to go to the Patreon page and become a supporter. That would be awesome. If you have any questions or comments or complaints, go to the website and send me an email. I will do my best to respond, though, frankly, I barely have time to put this thing together, so I won't promise, but I will try. Okay, I think that's it Until next time.