In an article I read recently, focusing on happiness actually causes unhappiness. But don't we all want to be happy? Yes, but how can we be happy without focusing on it? So I thought a little bit about this topic and decided to write something.
First of all, we may focus too much on ourselves to be happy. This can cause us to miss opportunities and events around us. Taking the focus away from ourselves will definitely make us feel better. One of the biggest causes of unhappiness is definitely aimlessness. When we are aimless, when we don't have a goal, we feel very uncomfortable. It's like constantly falling in an endless void.
Turning on the reward mechanism in our minds can make us happy. At some point in our lives, we must have realized that a little shopping for something we like, or following a shipment, makes us happy. For example, shopping for a book. This is all about activating the reward center and doing something we love. But of course, this kind of shopping is only a small action for happiness. It's not a permanent solution. The effect is short-lived and therefore it is not enough on its own.
"There's only one thing he knows: He's very happy when he's not himself."
In terms of focus, we said that focusing directly on the concept of being happy is a bad action. Instead, focusing on the things that will make us happy and striving to achieve them and bring them to life is both the right way and a situation that can give us purpose.
We can actually think of it like this. When we try to focus on the lyrics while listening to music, the music we love doesn't make us feel as good as before. Because focusing on the lyrics of some music is not a good choice. Instead, softening our focus and surrendering ourselves to the music allows us to continue feeling good.
"Those who think that human happiness lies in facts are greatly mistaken. Happiness depends on one's delusions."
Let's talk about one of the biggest factors that negatively affect the reward mechanism. Expectations. Yes, this word is not as innocent as it seems here. Just like alcohol in a bottle. :) Here, too, it's all about the dose. Expectations actually have a huge impact on our lives and most of us are not aware of this. This is the whole point of having huge expectations, wants and desires (I'm not talking about our goals and dreams). The effect of these concepts on our brains is like a small child crying in the grocery store, asking for things that will never happen. So much so that one of the ways to overcome this situation is to manage our emotions and be a realistic person. Or we can simply call it being satisfied. So what is being satisfied? There is actually a formula for being satisfied. Yes, it is really a mathematical formula: Satisfaction= What we have/ What we want
The bigger what we want, the less satisfied we are.
"But how beautiful happiness and joy make one beautiful!"
Another issue is that we are exposed to too much stimuli. We are in the age of consumption. We consume too much and too fast. We are exposed to too much input, especially on social media. Think about how many times you scroll the homepage during the day. The point we need to pay attention to here is to be selective about what we are exposed to. It would be more positive and beneficial to follow content that is relevant to our interests rather than unnecessary, tiring, out of our interests and poor quality content.
Or let's ignore everything. As Erasmus said in his book In Praise of Madness. The less conscious we are, the happier we are. Happiness is not an action but a result of our actions. It is an outcome.
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