How do you feel today? With Diwali just a day away, a long-weekend beckoning, endless shopping trips and tempting sweets ? odds are, that you must be feeling happy and good about life. Would you feel the same a week later? As much as you would like to, chances are, you may not feel nearly as happy.
?There are a lot of aspects to happiness. Take festivals for instance… the mind instantly correlates happiness with them. They offer an opportunity to celebrate, a change of routine. And when the causes cease to exist the state of happiness gets milder,? says Dr Samir Parikh, Chief of Department, Mental Health and Behavioural Sciences at Max Healthcare.
Find it within you
Consider this. How long did the euphoria of your last appraisal last? Probably a couple of months. And before you even realised you began to feel overworked and underpaid again. So, if you are looking for lasting happiness, seek it within you. Psychologist Martin P Seligman found specific interventions that make people lastingly happier. He operationalised and compared five happiness interventions to a placebo control in an experiment and found that two interventions ? writing about three good things that happened each day and why they happened and using signature strength of character in a new way ? made people happier up to six months later.
Agrees corporate philosopher Rohini Singh. ?We tend to equate happiness with excitement. That is the wrong approach. Instead, happiness is about a feeling of well-being and contentment immuned from what is happening around you. It is about feeling ?this too shall pass? when you are going through an awful phase. You would obviously feel good about your child getting into a prestigious university, a marriage in the family or say festivals. But what about other ocassions? Happiness should?nt be like diwali crackers ? going bang and then whoosh.?
Rohini would know. She has experienced and studied the phenomenon in several workshops she has conducted with corporate executives. When asked what makes them happy, Singh gets multiple reasons from the executives… financial situation, promotions, relationships. ?Life happens to change and parameters shift. The shifting of even one parameter leads to a state of unhappiness. The person becomes vulnerable. Think of it, even when eight out of the ten parameters are fulfilled, the person becomes unhappy. He feels that he is at the mercy of situations,? explains Singh.
But is there any way we can find happiness within ourselves? Is there a formula for that too?
?Accept that life will have its highs and lows. Try to balance work and life well. And above all take out time for your own self. That is one thing that most people fail to do and end up feeling miserable,? says Parikh.
It pays to feel happy.
For one, your heart loves it when you feel happy. Research conducted by a team from University College London found that happiness leads to lower levels of stress-inducing chemicals. Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it showed that people who were generally unhappy had higher levels of a bloodstream chemical associated with inflammation ? called plasma fibrinogen. Cortisol, another stress hormone related to abdominal obesity, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and autoimmune disorders, was 32% lower in people who reported more happy moments.
?The first advise I got from my doctor when I was detected with diabetes was to try and keep myself happy. He could figure out that my stress level was high and feared hypertension,? says marketing executive Ashutosh Singh. That was a easy thing to follow and I promptly joined the laughter club in my colony, adds Singh.
Yet another study published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine by Carnegie Mellon University Psychology Professor Sheldon Cohen, the role of happiness in determining the health of a person had been far underplayed. Researchers found that people who are happy and exhibit positive emotions enjoy a far greater resistance to the common cold virus. And when they do come down with a cold, happy people report fewer symptoms than would be expected from objective measures of their illness. All this irrespective of the levels of optimism, extraversion, purpose and self-esteem.
So, if you thought that the pursuit of happiness was a futile exercise, maybe it is time for some serious rethinking.
It?s not all about money, honey
From the Buddha, through the human potential movement of the 1960s, through the pioneering work of Michale Fordyce, through the self-improvement industry of the 1990s, at least 100 ?interventions? claiming to increase happiness lastingly have been proposed. Martin P Seligman, a psychologist, along with his colleagues collected and distilled them to a mere 40 with the help of 5,000 participants. In one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken, Seligman found that happiness was strongly associated with 24 character traits. Creativity, zest, love, teamwork, self-regulation, forgiveness, hope and gratitude figure in the list amongst others. In a nutshell, the findings assert more on one?s internal qualities than external events. To make your happiness last follow the three routes they have chalked out. Feel positive: List down the good things that have happened to you each day; Identify an engagement: figure out what interests you. It can be learning to play the piano or even reading; Have a meaningful life. Research suggests that having a purpose in life leads to lasting happiness, far more than materialistic achievements.