Happiness vs Time
Stabilizing your happiness as life progresses
I received an email the other day from a business-related newsletter I belong to. It briefly talked about happiness and how it should look if graphed over time. I thought it was an awesome concept that deserved its own dedicated post, so here it goes.
When was the last time you stopped to consider your happiness and how it’s changed over the course of your life?
If you’re like me, I’d bet never. Or, maybe one time you thought about it and then quickly forgot and went on living your life. Whatever the case, let’s do it now.
I thought back through the last 15 or so years of my life and drew a super high-tech graph of what my happiness curve might look like.
As you can see, my happiness throughout the years has been anything but constant. It’s fluctuated — dipping and climbing quite rapidly over the years.
Two important points to take away from this graph:
1. My happiness, though sporadic at times, is trending up and to the right
“They say there is no light without dark, no good without evil, no male without female, no right without wrong. That nothing can exist if it’s direct opposite does not also exist.” ― Laurell K. Hamilton
It’s tough to admit, but happiness wouldn’t be the same without sadness. And if you look at my graph, there certainly is no lack thereof. I’ve had PLENTY of times in my life where it’s felt like things were never going to get any better, but you know what?
They always got better.
For some reason, life has a way of throwing tons of shit your way, but as long as you’re able to take it, learn, and move on, your happiness can’t be stopped.
Some things I credit to having helped my happiness trend this way over the years:
- Experiencing things and making memories, each adding to my happiness bank.
- Setting goals and achieving them. Life is never stagnant for me and I’m always striving for my next target. As long as I make progress, I feel happier every day.
- The 1% rule. On a similar note to above, making progress — no matter how slow — is key. For example, today I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been in my life, and I suspect tomorrow will be another record-breaking day for me. This is true for my health and many other things. It’s somewhat easy to be happy when each day you’re setting new personal bests for yourself.
- Learning new things. I used to hate school and learning while growing up. Turns out, I just hated what I was learning. I LOVE learning about things that interest me, and it’s made me happy over the years.
- Continuing to surround myself with amazing people.
- Never giving up and fostering that kind of attitude. Roll with the punches.
And then my second point…
2. My happiness has stopped fluctuating rapidly in my later years, but it’s still climbing
While part of the reason for this is that I’ve grown up and have become “more mature”, I contribute the majority of this to mindfulness.
I’ve put in a lot of time learning about myself — exploring the inner workings of my mind and studying that little troublemaker known as my ego.
Before, I used to let a lot of problems get to me. This was a great way to turn already bad days into worse ones. Younger Jason wasn’t wise enough to understand this. He had a low capacity for dealing with that kind of stuff, and as a result, my happiness would fluctuate wildly.
As I’ve grown older and through my mindfulness practice, bad days have had less and less of an impact on my mood.
Let me be clear, I absolutely still experience sadness; however, I rebound much more quickly. And before long, my happiness is back on its usual climb.
Overall…
I’d say that my life, even with:
- Anxiety
- Sadness
- Heartbreak
- Anger
- And all other “bad” feelings…
…is still pretty darn sweet because it means that I also have a really good idea of what their opposites mean:
- Faith (the opposite of fear, aka anxiety)
- Happiness
- Love
- Serenity
- And all other things awesome
No matter what, my happiness graph keeps trending up and to the right. What’s more, I’ve gotten better at stabilizing my happiness and not letting life’s brutal moments get me down.
