How is happiness linked to a balloon and a bra?

It’s International Day of Happiness which means I get to roll up my sleeves, crack my knuckles and start typing about my favourite subject, I am the Happiness Ambassador after all.

We seek happiness without knowing what we are looking for.

I’ll let you into a shocking secret. Happiness is not one of my core values. I’ve said previously that when identifying my core values I rejected happiness in favour of contentment and inner peace. I also did not include fun. This is because the words happiness and fun both suggested surge emotions, short term experiences. More scientifically speaking they are caused by an exciting hit of dopamine, rather than a soothing release of serotonin. There’s room for both in life, but if I had to choose between happiness and contentment, I’d choose the latter. However, for the purposes of today, the word happiness is going to encompass all these things – peace, pleasure, joy, contentment, fulfilment and fun.

“So many people are interested in happiness and yet they don’t know what makes them happy.” – Mo Gawdat

If you are one of those people, then your current beliefs on what defines success and what will bring you happiness may not be serving you. The way to approach this is not to ask yourself ‘what makes me happy?’ but to consider the phrase ‘I am happy when…’. The first suggests that happiness comes from an external source – that it can be acquired, bought. Entire consumer markets depend on this belief, and yet really,

happiness comes not from a thing, but how we feel about a thing.

Let me show you.

A happiness activity.

Take a few moments to complete this sentence, as many times as you like. “I am happy when…..”

Look at your list. What do you notice?

We all tried this out at Team Boo, and we noticed four things.

We couldn’t just write one thing.
We smiled as we wrote.
We had some overlapping themes.
Everything on our list was small, and achievable almost every day.

“As we age and life grows more complex with more relationships, more advertisements, more bullies, more comparisons, we develop insecurities that convince us that our wellbeing is tied to having certain things or looking a certain way, and slowly the bar for achieving happiness gets higher and higher.” – Mo Gawdat.

If what Mo says is true, then over the course of our lives we will have accumulated all these assumptions about what will bring us happiness, that simply aren’t true once we take time to think about it. What makes Team Boo happy is a connection with nature, music, time spent with loved ones, being creative – even ticking off our ‘to-do’ lists came up more than once!

Money can’t buy happiness, but you can use it in the pursuit of happiness.

Recently I did something that met several of the criteria on my ‘happy list‘. I was on an adventure, I was outside in nature, I saw something beautiful and photographed it and I ticked off a bucket list activity. I went on a hot air balloon.

I understand what a privilege it is to have the means and opportunity to go on a hot air balloon. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, and the assumption might be that I have simply exchanged some of my time and money for a boost in happiness. Yet buying this experience for myself didn’t automatically lead to an increase in my happiness. The happiness came from my expectations of this experience being met. Had the weather been disappointing, had I been crippled with vertigo, had the pilot been rude, had the views been unspectacular, I might not have felt happy.

I felt happy because my expectations of this experience were met. This can be applied to anything in life, from parenting to a promotion to a picnic.

On my ‘happy list’ it does not say ‘I am happy when I’m in a hot air balloon.’ It says ‘I am happy when I am outside in nature,’ ‘I am happy when I see something beautiful and photograph it,’ etc. Can you see the difference? I achieved these feelings of happiness on the balloon, but I could also achieve them by going for a walk in the woodland near my home.

Happiness as the absence of unhappiness

Women often joke about the joy of removing an underwired bra after a long day of being constricted by it. Epicurus taught that pleasure is the absence of suffering. Therefore in its simplest form,“Happiness is the absence of unhappiness.” – Mo Gawdat

People who have been through a tragic event often look back to the time before that event and describe it as ‘bliss’. To them the mundane, the normal, the unexceptional, now seems the ideal; that time before was life as it should be. This is an interesting lesson in gratitude, we can’t be happy all the time, we can’t avoid pain and suffering forever, things do not happen the way we hope and expect – but we can revisit our ‘happy list’ often, and take notice every time these things happen. That way we can feel happy – if not all the time – then more of the time.

Three things to think about

Happiness comes from how we feel about a thing, not the thing itself.
Happiness is the absence of suffering.
Once we understand what happiness is for us, we are able to find it more easily.

Amy X

Interested in this topic? More on happiness here.

How is happiness linked to a balloon and a bra?