Name: If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t you Happy?
Rating: 4.5 (89 reviews)
Author: Raj Raghunathan

What’s in it for me? Find your way to happiness in life and love.

Many people today have given up on finding love, fulfillment and happiness. And yet, people still continue to watch romantic movies, featuring passionate love and someone finding real joy in their professional pursuits. So, deep down, most people probably are still longing for such things.

But when one starts thinking seriously about achieving happiness, the mind often focuses on the negative: there are dirty dishes in the sink, you never learned how to play the guitar and, sure, you may have a nice partner, but that person isn’t exactly a passionate lover. It would seem that something will always be missing. So how can happiness be discovered when the human mind tends to focus on what’s lacking?

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why you should value happiness more;
how to connect easily with other people; and
why you do have control over your happiness, just not in the way you think.

Don’t devalue happiness; instead, focus on it by identifying where it comes from.

You’re a smart person, right? So why do you always end up falling into the same depressing ruts?

It might have something to do with the seven deadly sins. Now, we’re not talking about biblical sins, but rather the bad habits that get in the way of happiness.

The first sin is the human habit of devaluing happiness.

Despite our desire to be happy, we tend to ignore happiness as a goal and not give it the priority it deserves.

The author, along with fellow professors Sunaina Chugani from City University of New York and Ashesh Mukherjee from McGill University, conducted a study to determine what things people associate with happiness.

Participants were asked to make three wishes for things that they believed would lead to happiness. The researchers found that generally, people wish for things like money, fame and success because they know what they’re getting. Meanwhile, they tended to ignore happiness itself because it seems too abstract a concept to wish for.

But if you think about it, shouldn’t happiness be everyone’s top priority?

Of course different things make different people happy – so before you can prioritize happiness, you need to define it.

Ask yourself what emotion you associate with happiness. This way you can learn to better understand where it comes from. Perhaps you associate happiness with love; if this is the case, your relationship with your partner is probably central to your well-being.

With this in mind, try creating a journal to record all the different things that bring happiness into your daily life. Recall all the memorable moments of happiness and write down what you were doing, who you were with and what led to those positive feelings.

Maybe you were traveling with someone you love, and seeing the world, or maybe you were spending time with your family during the holidays.

Once you have these events written down, you’ll have a clear picture of the kind of things you should be focusing on and making time for in your life, thereby letting in more happiness.

In order to be happy, we must learn to let go of our desire for control.

The fourth deadly sin is wanting too much control.

A lot of people feel most comfortable when they have total control over their environment and everyone in it. But the truth is, this is always going to lead to unhappiness and increased tension because we can never truly be in complete control.

Overthinking distracts us from our intuition, but mindfulness can help.

We now come to the last, but not the least, of the deadly sins: mind addiction – that is, the very natural tendency to overthink – which can distract us from our intuition.

When we make rash or poor decisions, we often blame our instincts, yet instinctual behavior is far from random. Our intuition is connected to our evolutionary past and can pick up on details we might not be consciously aware of.

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Worum geht es in If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t you Happy??

If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy (2016) offers wisdom to help you put an end to the bad habits that are keeping you from being happy. We often think that happiness is an elusive emotion, but that’s just because we often get in our own way. Believe it or not, there are simple steps you can take starting today to become a happier and healthier person.