Happiness Plateau

Happiness Plateau August 3, 2015

I think I can safely say that we all want to be happy. What we pursue in life, whether a career or God or a hobby or other passion all comes down to an attempt to feel content, fulfilled, and happy. America was founded on the principal of every individual person’s right to pursue happiness and I don’t think that meant in a selfish way at all. Pursuing happiness doesn’t have to mean doing things to please yourself and focusing on your desires. It means that we are uncomfortable with the restless discontent within us and we want to find what makes that give way to inner peace.

It’s strange to me how elusive happiness is.

What I’m finding is that I often feel very good after I’ve made a change in my life and that good feeling lasts for a few months but eventually it becomes the norm and I go back to the same baseline level of happiness I had before, which is not nothing but it’s not as happy/content/peaceful as I know I can be. Once something new settles into routine my baseless anxiety resurfaces. I find things to worry about even in a life that is nearly perfect.

I’m not the only one who has noticed this effect. Experts are saying now that we all have a baseline happiness that we tend to come back to again and again after periods of greater happiness or lesser happiness depending on circumstances.

The joy and energy that my grocery store job gave me has now faded to the usual anxiety all the time I’m not at work, worrying over going into work. Even though I enjoy my work there, I feel dread whenever I’m not there, anticipating having to go in.

Each change I make in my life to increase my happiness only works for a short period of time.

There has to be a better way. I’m certain that we can fight back against our baseline happiness level and elevate it more of the time, maybe even create a new baseline. I think that is part of being enlightened, having a peaceful joy at all times

But what makes me happy? In my mid-thirties I still don’t know.

There are things I’ve tried that have worked for short periods or not worked at all and it’s challenging to admit that something I thought was going to make me happy doesn’t and let it go.

I like this idea of a Happiness Project. The book tells the story of the author’s happiness project and also gives tips on how to create your own. Another book that I think can help is The Magic. It is a sequel to The Secret and while I have a lot of issues with The Secret and its philosophies, I like The Magic’s focus on gratitude. I found that its gratitude exercises helped me to feel more joy. I’m also rereading Finding Joy one little section at a time. It’s a book that my mom and I discovered when I was about 11 and we found it very comforting and peace-inducing. Nearly every time we get a copy we end up giving it to someone as a gift!

I believe that we can live free from baseless guilt, listlessness, and melancholy. I believe that we can raise our personal happiness baseline. I believe that part of what we are aiming for with enlightenment is to be full of contentedness and contagious joy all the time. That is a gift not only to ourselves but to everyone around us.

So I’m going to be exploring ways to raise one’s happiness level.


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