Happy or Not Quite? See for Yourself!

We humans are sometimes given a chance to make sailing through life slightly easier. Rose-tinted glasses offer us one of those chances, so does suppression, and turning a blind eye to the truth. These coping mechanisms can be useful in moderation. As long as our focus is on the right priorities, and we don’t lose sight of what’s important, then these little tricks are a good thing, in our opinion. However, long term, any type of denial can only mean one thing: We are avoiding a truth that we’ll have to face sooner or later. It can’t be swept under the rug, just like our emotions. Sometimes we want to be happy. We literally demand happiness from our lives with all our might. It happens a lot in relationships that, if we were brutally honest with ourselves, are a waste of time. But even at work we can get to a point where we have to face the facts, because we can’t deal with the consequences, and there's no other choice. In this article, we’re going to show you 7 signs that you might not be as happy right now as you could be.

1. There’s a lack of gratitude

Everyone knows at least one person around them who is deeply unhappy. These people are exhausting and difficult to be around. They don’t miss an opportunity to tell people just how hard their lives are and wallow in their ‘woe is me’. Talking to these self-professed unlucky folk, you quickly realize that, objectively, they actually have no reason to be so down and out. They have family, kids, a house or a decent career. The problem is that they don’t recognize all of these great things. And therein lies the root of all evil. If you don’t recognize the things that are worth being grateful for, you might as well open the door for misfortune and welcome it graciously to your home. The key to happiness is gratitude. Everyone has something that they can be grateful for. The more we remind ourselves of this, the more often we choose contentment over unhappiness and steadily bring joy into our lives.

2. Happiness is a question of averages

Nobody’s life is all sunshine and rainbows all of the time. Basically put, every life is a mix of highs and lows. The sum of all of these events is then equal to our happiness level. So, if we, on balance, were to experience more joy than sorrow, the scales would tip in our favor. We hear the term ‘work-life balance’ more and more often these days. If this magic formula is the key to a higher quality of life, and incidentally, hopefully more happiness, then we need a balanced serving of both sides of the happiness coin. If all we had was bad luck, then it’s logical that being so down in the dumps wouldn’t bring us much happiness. But it’s also important to realize that constant happiness wouldn’t be good for us either, as strange as it sounds. We need a balance, a healthy mixture, a well thought out mix of joy and misery to be truly happy on balance.

3. The way you think determines how happy you are

It is so easy to become a happier person. The key is in our own head. If you can keep your thoughts from drifting into the deepest darkest depths of despair, you will experience so many more happy moments in your daily life. Every day, we are exposed to a vast amount of information. We’re constantly confronted by new people, situations, and experiences. If we let every one of these things have free reign to stir up worries and doubt in our minds, we would soon find ourselves sucked back into a merciless spiral of negativity. In theory, with each one of these visual cues and every piece of information that we receive, we have to decide whether this is helpful or harmful to our pursuit of happiness. If the neighbors have a new car, we can either celebrate with them or give in to jealousy. The decision is ours.

4. Outside of work, how much do you actually socialize? 

If you don’t count the world of work, and all the other annoying obligations you have to keep to but don’t really want to, how much social interaction is left? Everyone needs a different amount of social contact in their life, but very few of us can go without any at all. Happiness sometimes comes in the form of the people in our life, but that doesn’t mean that we should expect other people to make us happy. Socializing is a potential source of contentment that we should scoop up if the opportunity presents itself.

5. Stress displaces joy, and vice versa

Neither of these things can co-exist in the same place at the same time. Where there’s stress, happiness waves goodbye. But where there’s flourishing, thriving joy to be found, stress has no chance to take hold. Take a close look at what things in your daily life cause you to feel stressed, and whether they are truly worth the immediate dip in happiness that they cause. Rejecting high levels of stress is often more within our control than we might think. It might mean making a few difficult choices, and perhaps a crash course in time management, but stress reduction is definitely possible if we really want it.

6. You’re all over the place inside

If you think you’re happy, but you can’t stand the idea of spending some time alone with your thoughts, then you’re lying to yourself. The party people, the ones constantly juggling too many things at once, are so often the ones who are just numbing the emptiness they feel inside. If you need constant outside distractions, then it’s all the more urgent that you deal with what’s going on inside your head. That’s where you’ll find happiness, nowhere else.

7.  You constantly compare yourself to others

Alongside being ungrateful, comparing yourself to others is another sure-fire way to put an immediate end to your happiness. If we keep the focus on our lives and our existence, then we’ll really be at peace with ourselves. What your neighbors, colleagues or friends are doing should barely affect you, if at all. If we’re always keeping one eye on the grass that isn’t necessarily greener, then we’re not 100% happy with our life. And the worst part? Comparing ourselves to others makes us even more unhappy because we only ever see the good, never the bad and the ugly.

Today’s Conclusion: Happiness will find you if you just stop looking so hard

Lots of people think that their quest for happiness will finally come to an end when all their dreams have come true. Unfortunately, this delusion pushes us forward, assuming that happiness does not come from within, when in fact, it does. Happiness lives inside of us. We won’t be able to find it in any other place in the whole universe. Desperately trying to pursue our dreams is nothing but a distraction. It just allows us to run away from the responsibility of working on ourselves. Put simply, all of this just means that if you choose to be happy, that’s exactly what you’ll be. That’s all for today. Thank you and see you soon.