Have you ever noticed how many songs talk about finding love and happiness? 

Human beings are constantly searching for happiness. We even have a world happiness day on the 20th of March! First celebrated in 2013, the International Day of Happiness highlights the importance of happiness and well-being as an aspiration for people worldwide. So complete is our obsession with happiness, we even measure the happiest countries in the world, the number 1 being Finland at the moment.

I decided to do some research about what people think about happiness so I headed to AnswerThePublic.com - a platform that analyses search engines like Google and then quickly cranks out every useful phrase and question people are asking around the keyword you enter. Guess what? ’Happiness’ produced over 27,000 results! Here are some of the questions:

*How can I teach myself to be happy?

*How happiness happens?

*How happiness looks like?

*How can happiness be achieved?

*What happiness feels like?

There seems to be a strong belief that happiness is a place to get to, that other people make us happy, and that there is work to be done to achieve happiness. We search for it in other people, our ideal partner, buying one thing after the other - some even travel the world to find it. So what is it that really makes us happy? In this blog we will look at how we may be looking in the wrong place to be truly happy, and where we might want to look instead. 

One of the questions I saw from my Answerthepublic.com research was “How can I teach myself to be happy?” As humans, we have the tendency to ruminate more on “bad” experiences than on “positive” ones. Apparently, this is an evolutionary adaption to protect you and help you avoid hurtful or dangerous situations you may have encountered in the past. Quite a clever self-protecting mechanism, right?

I see this a lot in my clients - they worry about everything and everyone when they come to see me. This comes with a lot of self-judgment and overthinking, ending up with a very busy mind. They may have heard elsewhere ‘To just let it go’ or ‘Concentrate on the positive’ or even ‘Just try to think about something else’. “But Paola, it doesn’t work for me”, they say.

Have you ever felt the same? If so, you are not alone!

The fact is, comparing yourself to others will add a lot of self–judgment onto your mind, dragging you even further down until you believe there is something wrong with you and that you need help. Of course, sometimes that is a good idea and perhaps medication could help for a short time to break the vicious circle.

However, when you see your doctor, be aware that a diagnosis is a label, a new identity. Your low mood somehow turns into an identity. If you believe you are ‘anxious’ or ‘depressed’, then that is how you show up and you may start to behave differently as a result. 

I want you to know there is nothing wrong with you.

There is no need to think positively or to change your negative thoughts into positive ones. The truth is: it is impossible for you to control your thoughts. Consider this: thought on its own has no power. When you see thought as real, it turns into form. In that moment, it can get uncomfortable, perhaps leaving you with physical symptoms. However, when you can see it is thought you experience, it loses its power over you.

Let’s return to our search for happiness with this in mind. 

So what is happiness anyway?

The encyclopedia states: “happiness, in psychology, is a state of emotional well-being that a person experiences either in a narrow sense, when good things happen in a specific moment, or more broadly, as a positive evaluation of one's life and accomplishments overall—that is, subjective well-being.” When I ask 10 people what happiness means to them, they will come up with 10 different answers. It is a very individual experience, as we all experience life in very different ways.

In fact, circumstances and people cannot make you happy. Your happiness is coming from within you. The more you search for it, the less likely you are to see it. Happiness is within you. It is present in every moment, only thought tells you sometimes otherwise. Thought takes you out of this moment into what happened yesterday, or into worries about other people who are not even in the same room, or to the future, worrying about everything that could go wrong and all the things you need to do.

The key is when you notice you live in the illusion of thought 100% of the time. When I can see that circumstance, people, my past and my future have no power over me, I am free. I stop ‘trying’ to change my circumstances or incoming thoughts. What happens then is that my mind gets quiet and I experience that happiness is available to me in every present moment. 

It is this simple: you are one thought away from happiness!

Would you like to find more moments of joy and happiness ?