Is Chasing Happiness Making You Unhappy?

Seems like every where I turn I am reading or hearing people talking about happiness, are they unhappy, what makes people happy, blah, blah blah.  Now don’t get me wrong, I love to be happy.  I like to be around people who are happy.  Spending time with chronic complainers is not something I am good at, especially because those people don’t even know they are annoying.  I have the hardest time holding back from telling them what wet blankets they are, yet I do, or at least I walk, no, run away from them.

Is being happy all that you need in life?  And what is the time frame you are measuring to see if you are happy?  Is one good hour enough to be happy?  If I have a good day does that count?  What if I have five good days out of seven does that make a good week or do two bad days ruin the whole week?

Sometimes our loved ones are unhappy and that can change everything for us.  You know the old saying, “You are only as happy as your most unhappy child.”  This has to be a very twenty-first century thought because I don’t remember mothers when I was a kid who had of giant families being suicidal because at any one time some kid is unhappy.

Being grateful, kind, compassionate, optimistic these are things we can work on and I think that when you can be all these things happiness follows, but just going for happiness alone is a little self-centered.  My friend Molly sent me a study done by

Positivity Psychologist (Her title, not that I actually understand it) Sonja Lyubomirsky documenting the 12 things happy people do differently to increase their levels of happiness.  With the exception of “Taking care of your body and committing to your goal” the other ten were really about not focusing on yourself and nothing was about doing things that you think make you happy.  Happiness is a by-product of other things.

I think not worrying about happiness is the best way to go in order to actually get it.  Spend your time living your life not measuring your life and in the end you should be happier most of the time than not, that is of course as long as you are not one of those wet blankets.  But wet things can dry — It is never too late.