Long time ago I heard/read somewhere that true happiness/happy life/being in general happy at all times is not possible and people who are not in a great place get frustrated by never achieving this and seeing that it feels like everyone else has something they don’t.
What true happiness often seems to be (for most happy people) is actually being content
Happiness comes from being content with your life, not constant feeling of joy. When you are content with your life and situation, you’ll enjoy your life more. You’ll be “happy” with your life. And if you are content with your life you suddenly enjoy small things that add up to it.
I’m probably not explaining this very well, but hope you get something out of this comment!
It’s like when you hear about people going through tragedy who come to terms with their circumstances. Some people might find that delusional, but does it matter if the person truly feels content?
I like what you said about it not being a constant state of joy, too.
I track my mood in a journal and each day and I’ve given myself four options for my overall mood was for the day. The options are:
Happy
Okay
Tired
Bad
Perhaps counterintuitively, I mark the majority of my days as “happy” for the very reason you’ve described.
The vast majority of days, I’m not “happy” by most people’s standards. I am content. But I think it’s actually quite useful to call contentedness happiness.
For me, marking a day as anything other than “happy” requires some negativity to enter and for it to persist long enough that it spoils the overall contentedness.
For example, even if I wake up exhausted, depressed and otherwise miserable, if I take a nice long shower, have a cuddle with my husband and watch a show I love, I might still be able to salvage that day from “bad” to “okay”
I think it’s important that people don’t treat mood as a fixed immovable state. It’s almost always a signal that should be acted upon.
Do you find that a mood journal is helpful? Why do you track it to begin with.
It sounds like a decent idea to simplify it like that. So many days I think that my life sucks when really everything isn’t so bad and I am happy quite often.
Only problem if I were to apply your scale to myself is I would mark every other day as tired lmao. Why do you have that one as a separate category if you can be tired while experiencing these other moods?
Long time ago I heard/read somewhere that true happiness/happy life/being in general happy at all times is not possible and people who are not in a great place get frustrated by never achieving this and seeing that it feels like everyone else has something they don’t.
What true happiness often seems to be (for most happy people) is actually being content
Happiness comes from being content with your life, not constant feeling of joy. When you are content with your life and situation, you’ll enjoy your life more. You’ll be “happy” with your life. And if you are content with your life you suddenly enjoy small things that add up to it.
I’m probably not explaining this very well, but hope you get something out of this comment!
That makes sense. Happiness is a state of mind.
It’s like when you hear about people going through tragedy who come to terms with their circumstances. Some people might find that delusional, but does it matter if the person truly feels content?
I like what you said about it not being a constant state of joy, too.
I track my mood in a journal and each day and I’ve given myself four options for my overall mood was for the day. The options are:
Happy Okay Tired Bad
Perhaps counterintuitively, I mark the majority of my days as “happy” for the very reason you’ve described.
The vast majority of days, I’m not “happy” by most people’s standards. I am content. But I think it’s actually quite useful to call contentedness happiness.
For me, marking a day as anything other than “happy” requires some negativity to enter and for it to persist long enough that it spoils the overall contentedness.
For example, even if I wake up exhausted, depressed and otherwise miserable, if I take a nice long shower, have a cuddle with my husband and watch a show I love, I might still be able to salvage that day from “bad” to “okay”
I think it’s important that people don’t treat mood as a fixed immovable state. It’s almost always a signal that should be acted upon.
Do you find that a mood journal is helpful? Why do you track it to begin with.
It sounds like a decent idea to simplify it like that. So many days I think that my life sucks when really everything isn’t so bad and I am happy quite often.
Only problem if I were to apply your scale to myself is I would mark every other day as tired lmao. Why do you have that one as a separate category if you can be tired while experiencing these other moods?
Thank you for this! I never thought about it that way before.