We can’t wait for happiness to always fall in our lap like that perfect parking spot - although, that does create a happy feeling. So how can we manufacture a little happiness on our own? Today’s episode breaks it down.
Transcript:
Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in 2 minutes a day, through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life.
We can’t wait for happiness to always fall in our lap like that perfect parking spot - although, that does create a happy feeling. So how can we manufacture a little happiness on our own? Today’s episode breaks it down.
Transcript:
Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in 2 minutes a day, through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life.
I'm your host Katie Jefcoat and I’ve been thinking about happiness and still being happy when we don’t get what we want. When we want something and we get it - for a minute, we get that boost and that’s called natural happiness. It’s the mood, the feeling of happiness. We’re searching for a parking spot and we find one, we feel happy.
But how can we feel happiness even if we don’t get what we want? That’s where Harvard psychologist Dr. Daniel Gilbert’s research on synthetic happiness comes in. It’s this idea that we can manufacture some of our own happiness, we don’t have to wait for it to come to us, like that perfect parking spot. Because, let’s face it, that perfect parking spot may never show up for us today.
As Dr. Daniel Gilbert puts it, “...we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience” over materiality.
That commodity is happiness and with practice, he says, we can find more happiness through choice than we ever will through selfish pursuits and material acquisition.
This is where our frontal lobe part of our brain comes into play. This is the part in our brain that allows us humans to have reasoning, executive function skills and even more mind blowing is that this part of our brain allows us to experience things even before going through them - or maybe never experiencing it. Thanks to the frontal lobe you can be happy even though you didn’t get that pay raise.
If happiness is not a thing, but a state of mind, then we can create synthetic happiness. Now, I am not talking about toxic positivity, which is a whole different thing and one we don’t have time for today. What I am saying is that the science indicates, we humans have the ability to synthesize happiness - we don’t have to wait for happiness to happen to us. And that I think is incredible.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you have any experience with creating a glass is half full scenario when it otherwise might have felt completely empty? Send me a message or tag me in your stories post. We’re over at everydayhappiensswithkatie.
Inspired by thisTED Talk, The Surprising Science of Happiness and the follow-up blog fixing some mistakes, over at Ten years later: Dan Gilbert on life after “The surprising science of happiness”.
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