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We all want to be happy, right?<\/p>\n
We\u2019re constantly looking for the next big idea, the next big promotion, or the next new person in our life who is going to make us happier.<\/p>\n
But for thousands of years, wisdom traditions across the world have been telling us that happiness comes from within ourselves, not outside.\u00a0In other words\u2026<\/p>\n
Happiness comes from how we think about the world, not the world itself.
\nAs a psychologist, I see evidence of this every day in my work with clients. Specifically, I see first-hand how how destructive mental habits can sabotage even the best external events, achievements, and relationships in our lives.<\/p>\n
If you want to be happier and more at peace in your life, try to recognize these psychological habits in yourself and work to correct them.<\/p>\n
1. Using Emotions to Make Decisions<\/strong> For example:<\/p>\n You feel frustrated with your spouse, so you decided that it\u2019s a good idea to immediately air all your biggest grievances against them. But here\u2019s the thing about feelings:<\/p>\n The strength of feeling is a poor indicator of its truth or usefulness. If it\u2019s so obvious in the abstract that acting impulsively on how we feel isn\u2019t a great idea, why do we all do it so often?<\/p>\n The short answer:\u00a0because it makes us feel better.<\/p>\n Strong painful emotions like anxiety, shame, irritability, sadness, etc. are aversive, which means we want them to go away, quickly if possible. And acting on these emotions often helps quell them temporarily.<\/p>\n The problem is, you\u2019re getting into the habit of trading your values \u2014 what you believe is true and genuinely helpful in the long-term \u2014 for how you want to feel in the moment:<\/p>\n Staying on the couch instead of going to the gym is trading a temporary feeling (relaxation) for a long-term value (physical health). When you\u2019re overcome with any strong emotion, ask yourself,<\/p>\n What do I really want in this situation? He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.<\/p>\n \u2015 Friedrich Nietzsche<\/p>\n 2. Unrealistics Expectations<\/strong> For example: You expect your boss to be compassionate and constructive in her report on your performance and then you\u2019re shocked and outraged when she\u2019s critical and harsh with you.<\/p>\n Psychologically, expectations are a form of\u00a0wish fulfillment\u00a0\u2014 briefly satisfying a desire through an unconscious or habitual thought process.<\/p>\n Because you wish for a compassionate boss, you expect that she will be, which, for a moment, makes you feel good.<\/p>\n Expectations feel good because they give us the illusion of certainty. In the long-run,\u00a0unrealistic expectations do more harm than good. They lead to perpetual irritability, strained relationships, anxiety, and even depression.<\/p>\n The trick is to see expectations for what they are \u2014 a relatively primitive defence mechanism against the anxiety of uncertainty and our fragile egos.<\/p>\n Because once you do, you\u2019ll be much better positioned to cultivate healthier ways of managing your fears and insecurities, like:<\/p>\n Embracing uncertainty and ambiguity instead of masking it. When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.<\/p>\n \u2015 Donald Miller<\/p>\n 3. Negative Self-Talk<\/strong> You\u2019re narrating the events of your daily life, some of which are boring and ordinary (\u2018What type of pasta should I get for dinner?\u2019) and some of which are epic (\u2018He\u2019s always so negative, I never should have married him).<\/p>\n But in addition to narrating the events in our lives, we also talk to ourselves\u00a0about\u00a0ourselves:<\/p>\n We comment on our recent performance in front of the sales team. Maybe you\u2019re in the habit of worrying about how you look anytime you\u2019re around other people? How you habitually talk to yourself determines how you habitually feel about yourself. Suppose a nasty little monster follows you along everywhere you go every hour of the day. Even though you know intellectually that you\u2019re not a terrible person who always fails and nobody likes you, if that\u2019s how you talk to yourself, that\u2019s how you\u2019re going to feel.<\/p>\n If you want to be happier \u2014 or at least a little less unhappy \u2014 a great place to start is your self-talk.<\/p>\n Get into the habit of paying attention to how you talk to and about yourself. Take notes. Look for patterns. Start to identify your typical forms of self-talk, especially the overly negative or judgmental types.<\/p>\n Once you start to see and identify the most common patterns, you can then begin to change them.<\/p>\n The stories we tell ourselves are far more powerful than we realize. Learn to see these stories for what they are \u2014 mental habits \u2014 and then you can learn to change them.<\/p>\n Why not train your self-talk to work\u00a0for\u00a0you, rather than\u00a0against\u00a0you?<\/p>\n Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.<\/p>\n \u2015 Jos\u00e9 Ortega y Gasset<\/p>\n All You Need to Know You can\u2019t always control the world, but you can control yourself.<\/p>\n If you want to be happier, work on these 3 psychological habits:<\/p>\n Be helpful, not negative, in your self-talk. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We all want to be happy, right? We\u2019re constantly looking for the next big idea, the next big promotion, or the next new person in … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2042,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tipsforahealthylife.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tipsforahealthylife.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tipsforahealthylife.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tipsforahealthylife.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tipsforahealthylife.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2041"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tipsforahealthylife.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2043,"href":"https:\/\/tipsforahealthylife.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2041\/revisions\/2043"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tipsforahealthylife.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tipsforahealthylife.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tipsforahealthylife.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tipsforahealthylife.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nEmotional reasoning\u00a0is the habit of using how you feel as evidence for how you should act.<\/p>\n
\nYou feel lazy and unmotivated, so you decide you need to stay in and rest instead of exercising or hanging out with friends as you promised.
\nIt\u2019s tempting to follow our feelings because they\u2019re so loud. And because they\u2019re loud \u2014 because we feel them so strongly \u2014 they seem persuasive and convincing.<\/p>\n
\nFor example: The anger and outrage you feel after reading your sister\u2019s Facebook post argue loudly in favour of commenting back with a snarky and sarcastic comment that you feel is sure to show her the error of her ways. Of course, we all know how helpful snarky Facebook comments are\u2026<\/p>\n
\nTaking those three shots before going to the party alleviates your anxiety temporarily but in the long-run only reinforces the self-destructive belief that you need something in order to function in social situations.
\nMaking that sarcastic comment to your spouse feels good in the moment because it boosts your ego with a little hit of self-righteousness, but in the long run, you\u2019re eroding trust and intimacy in your marriage.
\nTo avoid the trap of emotional reasoning, get in the habit of clarifying and elaborating on your long-term values.<\/p>\n
\nWhat\u2019s going to make me happy in the long-run?
\nPlay long-term games, not short-term ones.<\/p>\n
\nExpectations are an assumption about how things\u00a0should\u00a0be.<\/p>\n
\nBut the world is far from certain. And the people in it, even less so.<\/p>\n
\nTolerating disappointment and regret, allowing it \u201calong for the ride\u201d instead of trying to expel it.
\nCultivating healthy income streams for your identity and sense of self so that you don\u2019t have to rely on criticalness and high expectations to feed your ego.
\nNothing is certain. Accept that and you\u2019ll be happier for it.<\/p>\n
\nWhether you realize it or not, you\u2019re constantly talking to yourself.<\/p>\n
\nWe tell ourselves how good we look in those new jeans.
\nWe worry about how we\u2019ll handle the upcoming exam.
\nThis inner speech about ourselves is called self-talk. And whether you realize it or not, you probably have certain patterns or habits of self-talk. In other words, you tend to talk to yourself in a certain way.<\/p>\n
\nOr maybe you\u2019re in the habit of nitpicking small mistakes you\u2019ve made, ruminating on them endlessly for hours, days, even years after the fact.
\nIn any case, your habits of self-talk matter a lot because they\u2019re one of the single biggest influences on your mood.<\/p>\n
\nHere\u2019s a quick thought experiment:<\/p>\n
\nAnd all this nasty little monster does is throw insults at you \u2014 he tells you how bad you look, how dumb you sound, and reminds you constantly that nobody likes you and you\u2019re bound to make a fool of yourself sometime soon.
\nNow, even if you knew for sure that none of the little monster\u2019s speech was actually true, think for a second about how you would feel if this was your life \u2014 to be constantly berated and insulted every minute of every day. Pretty awful, right?
\nWell, that\u2019s literally what you\u2019re doing to yourself when you\u2019ve developed a habit of judgmental and negative self-talk.<\/p>\n
\nOf course, it\u2019s not all in your head. Material well-being does contribute to happiness. But a large portion of your potential for happiness lives inside of you. Specifically, your habits of mind \u2014 how you look at and think about yourself and the world \u2014 play a dramatic role in how you feel.<\/p>\n
\nLet go of unrealistic expectations.
\nUse values, not feelings, to make decisions.<\/p>\n