Happiness: Exactly What is it? Dr. Marty’s “Happiness Formula”.
I believe that happiness is the distance between what you have and what you want, the closer the distance between the two the happier you are.
The key to making ourselves happy can come from working on things from three directions:
(1) Shifting your perspective on what you have;
(2) Dealing with things that you want
(3) or working on both sides of the equation.
In terms of things that you have, the field of positive psychology has done a great deal of research on happiness and one of the essential elements to feeling happy is having or developing the ability to be grateful.
In fact, a simple effective technique to deal with anxiety and depression is: keeping a gratefulness journal. The idea here is to make three entries a day. You can even make the same entries. The point of this exercise is to be appreciative for what you have and in my model of happiness lessen the gap between “having” and “wanting”.
In terms of what you want, it is important to think about your goals. The key to happiness here is to look for small things that you want, even if there is something big, like making more money, break that into short “doable” activities. Effective goals give you something to shoot for but are still possible to get to.
There’s lot more to say about happiness and in future entries I will talk more about finding and creating your own happiness