Most of us today have the view that happiness is something that happens to us. This is a common sense way of thinking about happiness. After-all when good things happen we feel happy and when bad things happen we feel sad, depressed, anxious and unhappy.
It is this idea people often have in mind when they say things like: “you can’t wait around to be happy”. What many people have in mind when they say this is that we must go out and make good things happen us. They agree that happiness happens when good things happen to us but believe that we must go out and make good things happen.
Now I do think it is a good thing to been committed to bringing about good in the world but I think that we must rethink the view that happiness is something that we can make happen in this manner. We are scratching the wrong itch when we strive to become happy by making good things happen for ourselves. We have to come to realize that happiness does not happen, happiness is cultivated by learning to control experience.
This is true particularly when we keep in mind the negative bias that comes as part of the human condition. Negative experiences stick and over-rule positive experiences. Studies have in fact proved this. One such study was conducted by Allison Ledgerwood. The negative bias has the consequence that we are in fact very bad at appreciating it when good things happen to us. This shows that we are in fact very bad at being made happy when good things happen to us. We very quickly find something to complain about. If we have not cultivated the capacity to appreciate the good, which by the way involves the cultivation of gratitude, then we are in fact numb to the good things that happen to us and they don’t make us happy.
Now this is not to say that they cant make us happy. We can be deliberate about cultivating our experience of things such that the good things that happen, even the very small ones, stick with us and provide us with an over-riding sense of happiness and well-being. Dr. Rick Hanson makes precisely this point in this TED talk.
As a neuro-scientist Dr. Hanson has come to understand that, as he says, “neurons that fire together wire together” which mean to say that passing mental states literally become hardwired into our brains. If you habitually think negative thoughts, the habitual negative thoughts will become a neural trait hardwired into you brain.
Dr. Hanson does have a suggestion for us. It is possible to hard-wire positive thoughts into our brains such that we come to possess inner strengths such as stable happiness, resilience, gratitude, trust. In other words it is possible to hard-wire happiness into our brains. What he say we must do is be deliberate about our appreciation of good things. Allow those experiences in and sit with them for a while and absorb it. This will result in the experience becoming hardwired into your brain and will give you stable happiness.