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Why Self-Help Might Actually Be Making You Less Happy
Reconcile ambition with self-improvement
We're obsessed with being ourselves, being authentic, being unique. This is sad because what if you find that you are just the average, boring, mean person.
It's better to emulate someone you look up to. If in doubt, ask what your role model would do.
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Key Ideas
Happiness
Happiness, like other emotions, is not something you acquire. It is something you are.
This implies that happiness is not a goal that you can reach. It is a side effect of a particular se...
Happiness is not the same as pleasure
While pleasure is correlated with happiness, pursuing pleasure does not cause happiness.
People who focus their energy on materialistic and superficial pleasures end up more anxious and less happy in the long run. Pleasure is necessary, but it's insufficient.
Lowering one’s expectations
Failing to meet your own expectations is not the opposite of happiness. Your ability to fail and still appreciate the experience is key to happiness.
The joy is not in getting what you want, but the process of working towards it, then raising the bar, and doing it again. If you fail, learn from it.
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Key Ideas
Chronically unhappy people
Not everyone knows how to be happy or how to deal with the bumps and annoyances of life. When people get stuck in temporary setbacks, they can easily forget that happiness is never out of reach.
Complaining a lot
When life throws a curveball, it's enough to make anyone complain. However, when complaining goes unchecked, it can become a habit that makes it easier to be negative than positive.
Tips for coping:
- Learn to use positive and encouraging language to the people around you and to yourself.
- Practice seeing the good in every situation.
- Celebrate the good times, and meet each day with optimism.
Becoming your own worst critic
Being overly critical of ourselves can increase anxiety about a situation. Mulling over what happened is like self-criticism on repeat.
Tips for silencing your inner critic:
- Stop expecting perfection from yourself. Learn to accept your mistakes, acknowledge them, then put them behind you and focus instead on continued growth.
- Stop looking for what's wrong about you and focus on what's right about you.
- Turn your attention to what could go right instead of what could go wrong.
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Key Ideas
In search of happiness
Throughout our life, we all have a common purpose: to be happy. Happiness is the ultimate level that has to be reached in order to perceive our journey on Earth as having been a successful one. How...
Cherish the current happy moment
Research has recently shown that people tend to feel unhappy whenever they focus on what brings them happiness in the long term.
However, if they chose to stay in the present moment, their happiness would not be in any way affected. Therefore, if you really want to feel happy, try focusing on the current happiness instead of thinking at a future one, because that can only bring worries and stress to your mind.
Tips to be happy
Being happy is, in big lines, a matter of choice. If you try to pay less attention to everybody else's life on social media and accept the unpleasant moments that life makes you face, you might as well discover that happiness is reachable, as long as you do not make a constant obsession out of it.