Want To Be Happier? Stay In The Moment.

So, people want a lot of things out of life, but I think, more than anything else, they want happiness.

Aristotle called happiness “ the chief god,” the end towards which all other things aim.

According to this view, the reason we want a big house or a nice car or a good job isn’t that these things are intrinsically valuable. It’s that we expect them to bring us happiness.

Now in the last 50 years, we have gotten a lot of things that we want.

We’re richer.

We live longer.

We have access to technology that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago.

The paradox of happiness is that even though the objective conditions of our lives have improved dramatically, we haven’t actually gotten any happier.

Maybe because these conventional notions of progress haven’t delivered big benefits in terms of happiness, there’s been an increased interest in happiness in recent years.

People have debated the causes of happiness for a long time, in fact, for thousands of years, but it seems like many of those debates remain unresolved.

In fact, in the last few years, there’s been an explosion in research on happiness.

For example, we’ve learned a lot about its demographics, and how things like income and education, gender and marriage relate to it.

But one of the puzzles this has revealed is that factors like these don’t seem to have a particularly strong effect.

Yes, it’s better to make more money rather than less or to graduate from college instead of dropping out, but the differences in happiness tend to be small.

Which leaves the question, what are the big causes of happiness?

I think that’s a question we haven’t really answered yet, but I think something that has the potential to be an answer is that maybe happiness has an awful lot to do with the contents of our moment-to-moment experiences.

It certainly seems that we’re going about our lives, that what we’re doing, who we’re with, what we’re thinking about, have a big influence on our happiness, and yet these are the very factors that have been very difficult, in fact almost impossible, for scientists to study.

A few years ago, Matt Killingsworth came up with a way to study people’s happiness moment to moment as they’re going about their daily lives on a massive scale all over the world, something we’d never been able to do before.

Called trackyourhappiness.org

It monitors people’s happiness in real-time.

How does this work?

Basically, it sends people signals at random points throughout the day, and then I ask them a bunch of questions about their moment-to-moment experience at the instant just before the signal.

It collected 650,000 real-time reports from over 15,000 people.

1. People from a wide range of ages, from 18 to late 80s,
2. A wide range of incomes,
3. Education levels,
4. People who are married, divorced, widowed, etc.

They collectively represent every one of 86 occupational categories and hail from over 80 countries.

From this, we might be able to discover some of the things that really have a big influence on happiness.

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Another thing I wanted to discuss is how as human beings, we have this unique ability to have our minds stray away from the present.

One day, which is today, I was sitting at my desk working on this article, and suddenly I was thinking about the vacation I had last month, wondering what I’m going to have for dinner, and when I’ll be able to attend a BTS concert.

This ability to focus our attention on something other than the present is really amazing.

However, you’ve probably heard people suggest that you should stay focused on the present.

“Be here now.”

You’ve probably heard it a hundred times.

Maybe, to really be happy, we need to stay completely immersed and focused on our experience in the moment.

Maybe these people are right.

Maybe mind-wandering is a bad thing.

On the other hand, we can’t change the physical reality in front of us, but we can go anywhere in our minds.

Since we know people want to be happy, maybe when our minds wander, they’re going to someplace happier than the place that they’re leaving.

So, for example, me thinking about attending a BTS concert was utter happiness. I walked myself from a dull present to a happy future which I’ll be looking forward too.

It would make a lot of sense.

In other words, maybe the pleasures of the mind allow us to increase our happiness with mind-wandering.

But there’s the other side too.

People might be in a happy situation and their minds might wander to a place of anxiety or worries.

I had this experience myself when I had just finished my exams and I was so happy that the months of hard work were finally over.

But my mind for some reason went back to the moment I was writing my exam, and I thought about the questions I might have gotten wrong and things I could have done differently if I were to go back.

I know I had given my best shot at the exam, but my memories just kept rewinding to that moment. It was horrifying and brought me a lot of worries.

And as it turns out, people are substantially less happy when their minds are wandering than when they’re not.

So how could this be happening?

I think part of the reason, a big part of the reason, is that when our minds wander, we often think about unpleasant things, and we are enormously less happy when we do that.

Our worries, our anxieties, our regrets.

Yet even when people are thinking about something neutral, they’re still considerably less happy than when they’re not mind-wandering at all.

Even when they’re thinking about something they would describe as pleasant, they’re actually just slightly less happy than when they aren’t mind-wandering.

The happiness only lasts a second or two.

I described that I will be looking forward to attending concerts, but if I deeply think about it, I will be less happy thinking about it because I can’t attend the concert and it depends on my future.

Or thinking about my last weekend vacation brings back memories and I want to go back, which is impossible. That makes us less happy.

See what I did there. You might have to go up and read again if the concept seems hard to grasp.

The basic idea is that mind-wandering causes unhappiness.

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In my article today, I’ve told you a little bit about mind-wandering, a variable that I think turns out to be fairly important in the equation for happiness.

My hope is that over time, by tracking people’s moment-to-moment happiness and their experiences in daily life, we’ll be able to uncover a lot of important causes of happiness.

And then in the end, a scientific understanding of happiness will help us create a future that’s not only richer and healthier, but happier as well.

Be present. Be in the moment. Admire what you have. Be happy people!!

Thank you for reading this post!! 💜

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