Achieving Happiness: Align Choices Now with Dreams for Future

By TOM MUHA

Having written for nearly a decade about the scientific breakthroughs regarding how to create higher levels of success and satisfaction, people often wonder: “I believe that it’s possible for people to become happier — but how do I go about making it happen in my life?”

I’ve seen many people improve their lives by applying the principles of positive psychology. But change only happens when people see a purpose for making the effort. Often that purpose arises from some aspect of our life that is painful. Psychic pain arises when your beliefs are inconsistent with your actions. Here are some examples:

• You believe that to be happy it’s essential to have a loving marriage, but are emotionally distant from your spouse.
• You believe that it’s important to have a healthy body, but your daily behaviors involve eating, smoking or drinking too much.
• You believe that in order to have long-term peace of mind you’ll need a substantial nest-egg for retirement, but you spend your money rather than save it.

Only by aligning your choices now with your dreams and desires for the future will you be able to achieve happiness.

The first step in the change process is accepting that where you are is not where you want to be. This produces an extremely uncomfortable feeling that it may be impossible to change your situation. But this is true only if you tell yourself it is.

Changing your behavior begins by changing how you’re thinking. Your thoughts consist of the pictures and self-talk going on in your mind. Almost always this is an uncensored process, which means that you are not paying attention to, much less controlling, the way in which you’re creating the story of your life.

Without conscious control over your thoughts, you will be reactive to the events occurring in your life. You’ll spend most of your mental energy guarding against that which might bring you anger, sadness, disappointment, frustration and other unhappy emotions.

However, you are capable of being proactive in your thinking. You can learn to focus your mind on the positive outcomes that are important to you. You can create a story of your life in which you can envision a happy ending. You can picture a joyful journey of steadily progressing past challenges in order to get to that point.

It’s OK to also listen to that voice of doubt within you. It’s just not acceptable to allow that voice to dominate your thinking. When questions arise in your mind, learn to shift your thinking toward creating possible solutions.

When good things happen, be appreciative in the moment. Use the event to reinforce to yourself and others that you are progressing toward your goals. When setbacks occur, tell yourself that it’s temporary and focus on figuring out another approach that will start you moving forward again.

This trial and error method is part of a four-step model of what the research has shown to be the most successful system for adults to learn new skills. First, people hear new information. Second, they absorb it by determining how it’s relevant to their own life. Then people begin to experiment with how they can apply the new learning to their life, fully aware they will have to practice for a while in order to become good at using their new skills. They approach the new learning with the mind-set that they’ll try things out for a while, and then reflect on how well it’s working so they can continually make improvements to their efforts.

For example, you learn that happy couples have between six and 12 positive encounters for every interaction that leads to negative emotions. You want to feel better about your marriage, so you begin to monitor the number of times you have a good versus bad feeling with your partner. You realize that the two of you only have about three positive emotions for every negative one, and you begin to side step small issues that could lead to a negative exchange.

But that doesn’t produce enough good feelings to satisfy you, so you up the amount of appreciation you show to your spouse when they do something nice. He starts to reciprocate, and your relationship jumps up to 7:1 positive to negative. You’re much happier, which makes it even easier to let go of irritants when they occur. Because you’re feeling so much better about your spouse, you’re more receptive to any sexual overtures. Things get really good.

Dr. Tom Muha is a psychologist practicing in Annapolis.

The original article can be found here.