How To Find Happiness Blog

One of the difficulties we face in our industrialized age is the fact we’ve lost our sense of seasons. Unlike the farmer whose priorities change with the seasons, we have become impervious to the natural rhythm of life. As a result, we have our priorities out of balance. Let me illustrate what I mean:

For a farmer, springtime is his most active time. It’s then when he must work around the clock, up before the sun and still toiling at the stroke of midnight. He must keep his equipment running at full capacity because he has but a small window of time for the planting of his crop. Eventually winter comes when there is less for him to do to keep him busy.

There is a lesson here. Learn to use the seasons of life. Decide when to pour it on and when to ease back, when to take advantage and when to let things ride. It’s easy to keep going from nine to five year in and year out and lose a natural sense of priorities and cycles. Don’t let one year blend into another in a seemingly endless parade of tasks and responsibilities. Keep your eye on your own seasons, lest you lose sight of value and substance.

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Article by Jim Rohn, America’s Foremost Business Philosopher. To subscribe to the Free Jim Rohn Weekly E-zine go to here.

Not having fun? Don’t worry, everyone feels a little meh sometimes. But what if you never have fun? Well, you’re not alone there, either.

It’s called anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure. “If you have anhedonia, it doesn’t mean you’re a curmudgeon or miserable,” says Ann Kring, an associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley who studies the condition. Still, for people who have it, the bright peaks of pleasure we spend much of our lives chasing are flattened out.

Anhedonia can be temporary — during a period of mourning, for example — but it’s also a central feature of many depression and anxiety disorders, as well as schizophrenia. Kring’s work with schizophrenics has yielded a compelling paradox that may apply to others with anhedonia: “When you ask patients, ‘Do sunsets or good meals or time with friends bring you pleasure?’ they will inevitably say, ‘No, not so much,’” she explains. But when the researchers provided something pleasant such as a funny novel or a tasty drink, the subjects reported enjoying them a great deal. So it’s not that they can’t experience pleasure — it’s that they can’t anticipate it, or recall later having enjoyed things they’d actually enjoyed quite a bit.

Their pleasure thus trapped in the present, anhedonics rarely seek enjoyment. After all, anticipation, as any advertiser could tell you, is a key part of fun. Sometimes it even trumps the thing itself. “Looking forward to a meal at Chez Panisse, you think it’s going to be a ten, but when you get there it’s an eight or nine,” Kring says. “It’s not that it’s not a great meal, it’s that we tend to overestimate how much pleasure things will bring us.”

The desire to keep the Fun Meter cranked to ten is a particularly American trait, says Dr. Jeanne Tsai, an assistant psychology professor at Stanford who studies cultural influences on emotion. “Fun is really an American ideal,” she says. “We always ask ourselves ‘Are we having fun yet?’ and are always seeking entertainment and having a good time.” We’re supposed to be enthusiastic about our leisure time and passionate about our work, and studies of child-rearing books show we’re expected to make school and chores fun, too. Yet fun is open to cultural interpretation. Tsai has found that Americans equate “happiness” with feelings of elation and euphoria, while respondents from Hong Kong associate it with peacefulness and security.

With Americans, Tsai says, it’s not enough to just feel good — you have to express your elation, too. “If people ask how you’re doing, it’s not enough to say ‘Fine,’ you have to be ‘Great,’ and even if you’re not feeling that way you have to engage in the cultural script,” Tsai says. “If you don’t have the Julia Roberts smile, people think you’re depressed.”

She’s not kidding about the smile: Studies done by her Stanford lab comparing Caucasian and Hmong Americans found that not only did the white people smile more broadly and frequently than the Asians, but that depressed white people smiled as much as perfectly content Hmong subjects. We think of our smiles as clues to our secret inner state, when we’re actually on a sort of culturally preprogrammed autopilot.

What if you try to have fun, but don’t? Dr. Jacqueline Persons, director of the Bay Area Center for Cognitive Therapy in Oakland, says that when patients come to her complaining of a loss of pleasure, she introduces them to a therapy often used to treat anxiety disorders. Cognitive therapy is based on the idea that thinking patterns influence mood and behaviors — Persons says clients with anhedonia often stop pursuing activities in favor of holing up at home. “Like the anxious person who has predictions about catastrophe, the depressed person has predictions like, ‘I won’t enjoy it,’ or ‘It won’t be worthwhile,” Persons says. “The therapy is to help the patient identify those cognitions and to do an experiment and test if it’s true.” In other words, Persons sends anhedonics to a party. Beforehand, the patients rate how much they think they’ll like it, and once there, they rate it again. They often enjoy it far more than they’d expected.

All three experts agree that there’s a sort of natural gradient between people who want to grab life by the horns and those who prefer a cozy evening at home, and that too much pressure on people to feel good can make them feel … well, bad. “There’s a particularly high premium on happiness and getting out there and doing things in the Bay Area,” Kring says. “When you go back to work on Monday and people are like, ‘What did you do over the weekend?’ very rarely do you hear people say, ‘I sat at home and watched TV.’”

It wouldn’t hurt, Tsai says, if our fun-loving culture adjusted its view of happiness to recognize that not every good time has to be on the business end of a bungee cord. “If we broaden our definition to include those times when we’re feeling calm and peaceful,” says Tsai, “maybe you’ll find you’re happier than you thought.”

(info by Kara Platoni from http://www.eastbayexpress.com/Issues/2005-07-20/news/fun6.html)

Most successful people can be characterized as having very high levels of energy. Since energy is the fuel with which everything is achieved, there seems to be a direct relationship between energy levels and levels of accomplishment. It is hard to imagine a tired, burned-out person achieving much in life. On the other hand, energetic, positive, forward-moving individuals seem to get and enjoy far more of the things life has to offer than does the average person.

Physical Energy Is Basic

We have been led to believe that there is basically one kind of energy. We supposedly replenish this energy by sleeping at night, and during the day, we use it up again. It is as though we are machines powered by batteries, and each night we recharge our batteries for seven or eight hours. However, there are some problems with this view of energy. The biggest problem is that it does not deal with the fact that there are actually three different kinds of energy, each of which is necessary for maximum performance.

The three main forms are physical energy, emotional energy, and mental energy. Each of these energies is different, but they are interrelated, and they depend on each other.

The Sweat of Your Brow

Physical energy is raw energy, coarse energy, bulk energy, what we call “meat-and-potatoes” energy. Your physical energy is what you use to do physical labor. It is the primary energy applied by men and women who earn their livings by the sweat of their brow.

The Source of Enthusiasm

The second form of energy is emotional energy. This is the energy of enthusiasm and excitement. This is the energy that lends sparkle to the life of an individual. This is the energy that is necessary for feeling love, happiness, and joy. Largely, it is your emotional energy that makes life enjoyable for you. In fact, almost everything you say and do is determined in some way by an emotion, either positive or negative.

The Requirement for Creativity

Mental energy is the energy of creativity, of problem solving and decision making. You use mental energy to make sales, write reports and proposals, plan your day and your week, and learn new subjects. Your level of mental energy is a major determinant of the quality of your life.

Conserve Your Best Energies

The reason why most people fail to realize their potential in life and work is because they burn up their energy at the emotional level, or the physical level; therefore, they have very little energy left over for mental activities. Most people burn up their emotional energy through the expression of negative emotions. Negative emotions are like a fire that burns up their energy so quickly that they have very little left with which to think positively and constructively. In fact, one five-minute uncontrolled outburst of anger can burn up as much energy as an average person would use in eight hours of work.

Your job is to think continually about how you can stay calm and positive, and work smoothly and efficient, so you can have more mental energy to do the things that are most important to you in life.

Action Exercises

Here are three things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action:

First, take time to identify the different ways that you either use up or deplete your levels of physical, emotional and mental energy. How could you improve in each area?

Second, be sure to get plenty of healthful, nutritious food so you can keep your physical energy at high levels. This is the key to all other energies.

Third, look for ways to conserve your emotional energies by being more relaxed and optimistic in the face of daily problems and disappointments.

The more energy you have, the happier and more productive you will be.

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Article by Brian Tracy

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