Three

Posted on August 31, 2017 by toddsattersten under Happier, Uncategorized

A friend wrote me today and said they were surprised by my last post.

They said they’d never associated the words sad or bitter with me.

I get that.

I am not sure I would have strongly associated those emotions with me either.

Brene Brown on her Rising Strong as a Spiritual Practice audiobook (see chapter five) asks her audience how many emotions the average person can recognize.

Take a guess.

The answer is three – happy, sad, pissed off.

That was the range of my emotional fluency. Sad and mad captured me more often than glad.

And without vocabulary, talking about what I was feeling was hard. Really hard.

Brene says what we really need is the ability to articulate thirty different emotions if we want to deal effectively with what is going on with our inner selves.

My vocabulary is larger now and there is still more work to do.

#happier

I am working on project about happiness, positive psychology, and ways to bring them into your life. You can subscribe for updates here.

Is Happiness The Right Goal?

Posted on August 30, 2017 by toddsattersten under Happier

Before we head too far down the path, I thought it was important to acknowledge that not everyone has agreed that happiness is something to be pursued.

George Bernard Shaw said, “A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.”

Author Eric Wilson believes melancholy should be embraced as an essential part of human existence, a quality needed to find truth.

“I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy,” remarked Franz Kafka

Albert Schweitzer, the man upheld for his lifelong missionary work, said, “Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.”

I have to admit that each of these quotes touches on a part of why I never gave happiness much of my attention. I thought happiness was overrated. It appeared in my life but not under conditions where I had control. I assumed there was something in my unchanging psychologic making that favored sad and bitter.

I don’t believe anymore that happiness is a pointless pursuit or a random mental state, but it took a long time to see that.

As we get started, let me suggest examining your beliefs about happiness. Happiness is a loaded word that conjures us complicated questions: Does happiness matter? Am I happy? Do I deserve to be happy? Why are everybody else so happy?

#happier

I am working on project about happiness, positive psychology, and ways to bring them into your life. You can subscribe for updates here.

Happier – A New Project

Posted on August 29, 2017 by toddsattersten under Happier

Today I turn 46 years old.

I am starting something new today.

I have gotten very interested in what makes people happy and what role happiness plays in our lives.

I started really thinking about my own happiness about six years ago. I am not sure I would have even said that is what I was doing. I just knew I was in a bad place and that something needed to change.

I don’t have foolproof plan or a twelve step process to share. I can only say that I have learned a lot about myself.

What I want to do is get more deliberate about being happier. From the work I have done to this point, I know it takes practice.

So, for the next year, I am going to share the deliberateness – the research I find that helps and the daily practices I use.

If that sounds interesting or you feel that same need to change something, I hope you’ll join me.

I am setting up an email newsletter for those who want a simple to keep up with the project. You can sign up here.