psychology
6 misconceptions about happiness we’ve all fallen for
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We can all learn something about happiness – after all, you can never know enough about it. So let’s start by clearing up a few misconceptions about this precious commodity…
Happiness is one of the most important concepts of all for many people – but what exactly it means can only be put into words by a few. Almost everyone is looking for happiness, but hardly anyone knows for sure where to find it. Everyone would like to be happy, but who knows what to do about it? If there were a guide to happiness, it would certainly have sold millions of copies and made the seller extremely rich, but obviously the question “What is happiness?” not just clear up. However, we can clear up a few misconceptions about happiness – and that’s a start after all.
6 Happiness Mistakes We’ve All Fallen For
1. “If I [beliebiges Ziel einsetzen] reach, I’m happy.”
We often set goals in our lives and believe that if we achieve them, we will automatically be happier. Lose 10 pounds, find and marry a man or woman, finally get promoted and get a raise. But if we make a habit of attaching happiness to conditions and events that happen in the future, our happiness at achieving a goal will always be short-lived. We will be happy for a moment, but quickly feel restless again and look for new goals and conditions that we think we need to achieve or meet in order to be happy. The American-Israeli happiness researcher Tal Ben-Shahar called this misconception about happiness “arrival fallacy”.
2. “Anyone who has everything I want must be incredibly lucky.”
We’ve all certainly envied people – for their relationship, their appearance, their job, their financial wealth and and and. However, the assumption that having what we desire will make them happy is a fallacy. Because happiness is highly individual. “What happiness is varies from person to person,” writes the physician Dr. Michael Kunze and the journalist Dr. Silvia Jelincic in her book “The Lucky Compass”. “Depending on your starting position, personality and attitude towards life, personal happiness differs from what the majority would consider happiness.” In other words, in the search for individual happiness, orienting oneself to others or to socially accepted life plans can, under certain circumstances, lead badly astray – and on top of that lead to unhappiness.
3. “Success makes you happy”
Success and happiness are considered by many to be closely linked, with the causality that success would be the prerequisite for contentment. That this is a mistake is proven by numerous examples of obviously successful people who were not happy – e.g. B. Michael Jackson or Robin Williams. Whether the other way around luck might make you successful certainly depends on how you define success for yourself. But maybe a person who is really happy doesn’t care much about success…
4. “I only need XY to be happy.”
Often we tend to see the cause of our dissatisfaction in things that are lacking in us. But in truth, the cause is more that we focus on these things. If we were to instead focus on the things we have, we would probably feel a lot happier – even though our external situation hasn’t changed and we’re still missing various things.
5. “Happiness is a gift of chance.”
Some people think happiness is not in their hands. But we can actually contribute to our happiness. Personal attitude, the way we see the world and what we expect plays a big part in our happiness. For example, we can get used to appreciating supposedly small things like our health or our lifetime and being thankful for them, which in most cases will have a long-term effect on happiness. If you are happy, you don’t owe it to chance, but above all to yourself. But …
6. “Everyone is the architect of his own fortune.”
… the opposite is not true: If you are unhappy, it is usually not your own fault. Luck cannot be forged like a horseshoe, but depends on both external and internal factors. Some people find an easier access to themselves and can feel happy thanks to their mindset even despite severe blows of fate, others do not succeed, although their life situation looks quite relaxed from the outside. Sometimes certain events lead to the fact that a person suddenly gains a realization and the path to happiness opens up before him out of nowhere after a long and confused search. Sometimes a change takes away someone who was always happy forever. Everyone may be lucky enough to be a blacksmith – but whether we have the necessary equipment that we personally need for forging is not in our hands.
Sources used: “The Happiness Compass. All the World’s Knowledge in One Book”, psychologytoday.com