Over the summer, I had the opportunity to take the Exploring Happiness course at Stanford University and thought of sharing my learnings and reflections, as happiness is a topic that isn’t openly taught or discussed. For decades, the topic of happiness was frowned upon and dismissed in the academic world, with little to no presence among our regular education. Today, happiness courses are being taught in more and more schools such as Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, and Stanford, and gaining popularity among students. There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about happiness. Hopefully, this article can provide some answers regarding the topic and provide you with tools to better understand and explore happiness.

What is Happiness?

Happiness is the state of being happy — which is not the same as pleasure. It is more of a constant state of mind rather than a specific emotion. It’s a subjective experience composed of a mix of emotions including joy, gladness, satisfaction, and well-being. Interestingly, unhappy and happy people usually have a hard time tolerating each other – the former usually perceived as being “insufferable” and the latter perceived as being “naive, and not facing reality”. There is no right and wrong, both types of people are just wired differently.

It’s not until recently that modern society allows more and more of us to explore the world of creativity, morality, and happiness, which are at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy. Previous generations have known war, famine, diseases and high child mortality, and were generally conditioned to focus on survival, spending the majority of their time and energy on trying to meet physiological and safety needs. The daily struggles and coping allowed few the luxury to think about happiness. With technological advancement, things are now different and we can observe a shift in the values and priorities between the previous and new generations: the former with a stronger focus on career and financial stability and the latter with a preference for life satisfaction and purpose. This difference is even more emphasized in developing countries, such as China, in which older generations’ survival and scarcity mindset still strongly persists, while the new generation of young Chinese was born into a more comfortable and abundant environment, and would think more about their own happiness.

Today, while resources are more abundant and previous life-threatening dangers are almost gone, the feeling of scarcity and the tendency to focus on negativity still remain in our genes. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective – resources were naturally scarce and the scarcity mindset has been a large contributor to our survival, pushing us to constantly gather, and screen for potential dangers. In order to ensure our survival, we are wired to be looking out for signs of threats (predators, tribal conflicts, traps, etc.). This is the reason why news reportings are mostly negative and can be addictive – they tap directly into our primal operating system and catch our attention. However, focusing on negative events can have a major drawback – it can lower our level of happiness.

There is a part of your brain called the Reticular Activating System (RAS) that brings whatever you are focusing on, positive or negative, to the forefront of your awareness. If you are dealing with adversity and its potential negative outcomes, your brain is going to be pulling data from your environment to support that belief system, to the point that it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is why focusing on negative news can bias your understanding of the world, and make you feel as if the world is a place filled with dangers and miseries. On the flip side, if you focus on positive things, then you are more likely to pick up more good and happy things in your environment. This is why practicing gratitude can be a life-changing exercise.

Additionally, happiness has more to do with your own decision than actual life events. It is very much internal and it’s about the way you interpret things and your self-talk. One of the most powerful examples is the survival of Viktor and a few others in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II (Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl). What allowed them to survive harsh conditions and environments, is the fact that they have crafted stories that they could live with. The key point to understand is that stories are not objective truth about you, and you can always reframe them at any point in time. Therefore, controlling your self-talk can have a huge impact on your own happiness.

Interestingly, among the people that the professor has worked with over the years, regardless of their level of wealth and success, most of them regret two things towards later in their life: 1) not spending enough time with friends, family, and loved ones, and 2) not allowing themselves to have more fun because they followed rules too much. Knowing this, what are some ways you could live differently? Minimizing future regrets is also a way of increasing happiness. Personally, I have scheduled more time for my loved ones and for doing things that I truly enjoy. 

And lastly, the most common unhappy memory that people have, no matter the social status, typically comes from previous intimate relationships (breakups, ex-lovers, divorce, etc.). The level of pain we feel towards past events often carries over throughout our whole life, causing us a lot of unhappiness every time we revisit them. The key to moving away from these negative memories is to practice forgiveness and release the grudges.

Some refrain themselves from pursuing happiness because they might feel that being happy could prevent them from achieving something important in their life. The latter is something that I was personally a bit struggling with as I have always seen grinding and enduring pain as parts of delaying gratification, which can ultimately reward me with greater success. Some might argue that focusing your life on happiness will incentivize you to work less hard and take a back seat. I believe that this is a misconception. Being happy and working hard to achieve something big are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I would argue that being happy would further help fuel your productivity, growth, and creativity as you are more likely to feel more motivated, less drained and take on more risks – happier people do more things and less happy people do less, blame more and are more likely to be in a living in a coping than thriving state.

The frame to think about this is that all your goals should go underneath the happiness umbrella. Instead of thinking that “I’ll be happy when I reach/get/achieve xxxxx”, you should strive to be happy now and your goals should fall underneath the happiness umbrella. For instance, if one of your goals is to become a doctor, then studying for medical school should go underneath the happiness umbrella, and you should enjoy and be happy in the process, instead of setting up the condition “I’ll be happy when I become a doctor”. While we will certainly face challenges in order to achieve our goals, enjoyment can be drawn from the process/engagement itself, instead of putting happiness on the outcome. Doing the hard work itself and being part of the journey to achieve your goal should give you a sense of happiness. Be happy with what you have now and be happy on your journey to attain something new.

Tools and practices

The equation is pretty simple: If you are happy most days of the week then you have a happy week. If you are happy most weeks in a month, then you have a happy month. This logic then leads to a happy year if you are happy most of your months, then a happy life if most of the years are happy. It’s possible to practice and rewire your brain to make happiness a default state. We will go over some tools and practices that can help you increase your level of happiness.

Audit your happiness:

Happy people know who they are, what they want and focus on what nourishes them. Most people don’t know what makes them happy, so here’s what you can do:

• Visualization technique to help identify what makes you happy. Close your eyes and imagine yourself being in a happy state. Ask yourself: when you saw yourself happy, what was there that made you happy? This will help you identify some key elements that affect your happiness (people, environment, activity, etc.)
• Use journaling to help audit your day-to-day activities. At the end of each day, list all the activities you have done throughout the day. Give a happiness score to each activity and rank the list. On the next day, do more of the things from that list that make you happy and less of the things that make you unhappy. This would help you be more aware of the contributors to happiness and unhappiness in your life.

Exercises to boost happiness:

• Appreciation of nature exercise (15 minutes): Leave your phone somewhere. Go to a natural environment. Pay attention to every single detail (sunshine, trees, the sound of the wind, the feeling of temperature, etc.). Take a moment to appreciate your surroundings. This will help you focus more on the present moment, and be less in your head.
• Self-love Meditation (5 minutes): Close your eyes and spend some time quieting your mind through deep and slow breathing. Think of someone you love. Focus on that feeling of love. Amplify that feeling of love and project it onto yourself, all over your body.
• Warmth Meditation (5 minutes): Close your eyes and spend some time quieting your mind through breathing. Imagine a sun appearing in the center of your body, growing larger and larger, filling your entire body with warmth, sunshine, love, and positivity.

Happiness in relationships:

• Spending time with loved ones (daily or weekly): A Harvard study has shown that the quality of our relationships is the number one reason governing our happiness. Not spending enough time with loved ones, family and friends is also the number one regret that most people have towards the end of their life. A simple remedy to minimize this regret is to schedule recurring time on your calendar to connect with your loved ones in person or over the phone on a regular basis. You are essentially carving out time for it.
• Compassionate listening: this will make you and whoever you interact with happier. 1) Give full attention 2) be centered 3) Reflect/repeat what they say so that they feel understood 4) Be caring, give feedback, and show some degree of concern. They don’t even have to love you back, but the feeling of love you project is contagious. If you are genuinely positive, it will transfer to others. 
• Notice the good in others. This will help you love and accept everyone you encounter.

Overcoming negative emotions and adversity:

• Positive psychology is about remembering that we have choices. Negative emotions are natural and have an evolutionary role in protecting us from danger. However, too much negative emotions can become detrimental to our mental health. At any point in your time, you can decide how to react to an external event and how to act. To some degree, the past is an illusion and only exists in your memory. Only how you act in the present moment influences the future. I found meditation to be a very helpful tool to become more self-awareness of my emotions and giving me a chance to control them. For beginners in meditation, I recommend using the apps Headspace or Calm for guided meditation. For more serious meditators, I recommend going through a 10 days Vipassana meditation retreat.
• Self-encouragement writing exercise: write down the challenge that you have in the first person. Then write a letter to yourself from a third party perspective (could be as a friend or family member), describing the challenge that you are facing, offering suggestions, and encouragements that you will overcome the challenge.

Cultural Limitations:

• Be culturally flexible: I grew up in 3 different cultures. From my observations, all cultures have their own belief systems. It’s important to be culturally flexible and choose the values that make you happier, instead of following cultural rules in a rigid way. Cultures usually have narrow mindsets and low acceptance towards non-local thinking and behaviors. Based on Maslow’s hierarchy, only 1-2% of people are reaching self-actualization, most are stagnant on the other levels. You have to be acultural to bypass cultural limitations and live more freely.

Reducing negativity:

• Practicing gratitude (daily): Our brain is evolutionarily wired to screen our environment for flaws, and negative things to help us better survive, so we complain. It gets worse as we age, hence why people say that “middle-age people complain a lot.” Our attention (Reticular Activation System) is focused on things that are wrong in our life which is why practicing gratitude is a great tool to train/rewire our RAS to screen for positive things in our environment.
• Audit your natural strengths/weaknesses: knowing your strengths give you stronger self-esteem and makes you happier. On the other hand, you should also identify the weaknesses that make you unhappy and work on them.
• Identify behaviors, fears and triggers that make you unhappy: If you can avoid them, avoid them. Else, work on being more desensitized about them through repeated exposure (exposure therapy). 
• Reduce cellphone, and social media usage: They can be a source of distraction that silences your inner voice and ability to reflect/be aware. A simple trick to reduce the usage would be to deactivate all the notifications from the applications (besides important ones such as text messages) and unsubscribe from all the email subscriptions that you consider spam (promotions, newsletters, company updates, etc.). Realize that social media subconsciously make you compare yourself to the highlights of others, which can bias your sense of worth and lower your happiness.