Understand the reasons why we are unhappy

Now that we went through the six steps-suggestions that can help us to be Happy, another necessary and important step is to identify and understand the reasons why we are not happy and most of all, question if these reasons are real and worthy of our unhappiness.

In case you ended up on this page, I have listed below the six previous steps:

Now I would like to start with my reasons why years ago I was struggling to be a happy person.

What were the reasons for my unhappiness and why I couldn’t be happy most of the time?

The main reason was very simple, in my mind I used to look for a reason to be happy and also I used to associate happiness with everything I wanted, like money, health, popularity etc. which is probably what most of the people do and I wasn’t seeing anything wrong in doing that. I thought it was the way to reach my happiness.

I was also imaginIng a happy life as an idyllic situation, where everything was perfect as I wanted.

Unfortunately, there was always something that it wasn’t as I wanted and that was preventing me from being happy. Even if I was working hard to try to achieve what I wanted the moments of happiness were not really frequent as I would have liked and as you can imagine some times I felt really frustrated and down, I was living in a sufferance way, just waiting for one day to be happy.

But I never gave up, I wanted to become a happy person and nothing could have stopped me.

Later I realized that my determination played a big part in all of this, in fact, if there is someone who can prevent us being happy, it’s only ourselves.

As I said before I used to give myself some goals, thinking when I would have achieved them I would have been happy but I was wrong… it was just a temporary happiness, in fact, I was confusing joy and pleasure with happiness. Pleasure is normally temporary, happiness lasts.

I was also wrong because in my mind I was waiting to become happy and when I had achieved what I wanted I was happy just for a while and then I was back to square one.

You can imagine, it was really frustrating.

Here is a short video “Is society training us to be unhappy?” by Srikumar S. Rao

Now it’s your turn to understand the reasons for your unhappiness…

Stop reading for a moment and think of the main reason why you are not happy.

Do you think there are other minor reasons for your unhappiness?

Take a piece of paper and list all your reasons and next to each one write why they make you feel unhappy.

Let’s make an example.

Reasons why I am not Happy

1. I don’t have enough money. Not having enough money, it makes me feel embarrassed and/or inferior to my friends
2. I am too short. I would have liked to be a professional basket player instead people look at me in a weird way
3. I hate my job. It’s boring and I feel wasted

Anyone of us can have various different reasons, we are all unique, the world probably would be boring if we were all the same.

Now the next step is to question the reasons for our unhappiness.

1 Are they really mine? Or just things imposed by others or by society?

It’s important to understand the reasons why we are not happy and question them because sometimes we don’t feel good enough or we feel to be below the standards created by our society, so in this case, they are not our reasons. We have in our mind how things should be, a sense of perfection which has been created over the years by absorbing it from people around us, from the media, from our society etc. So if we don’t reach these standards that we have in our mind, then we think we are not good enough and so we are not happy. That’s why is very important to learn to question our reasons and our beliefs.

2 There is nothing I can do it about that, so is it worth spending an unhappy life?

If you think there is nothing you can do about it, then you need to learn to accept things how they are and change your attitudes through them.

3 Is there anything I can do to change it?

If you think there is something you can do about it, then question yourself why you haven’t done anything about it so far. Ask yourself, is it because I am scared to change or because I don’t know what to do. If you question yourself, you will be able to find the answer to everything.

Remember “Sometimes questions are more important than answers.”

Here we are at the end of the seven steps of “What is happiness and how to be always happy in life?”.

Now let’s resume quickly the How To Be Happy 7 steps: Happiness is a choice, we need to make a decision to live a happy life and we need to change our attitudes accordingly. Happiness is also a mental state and since we can create our mental state we can create our happiness. We also have some tools to work with to keep staying in a happy frame of mind, like gratitude, living the present which is the only moment we are alive and we can be happy.

It all might seem like hard work, but it’s not, it’s all about how to creating a habit, so we can have a pleasant journey and the magic starts…

You might also like to read:

Happiness is a journey, not a destination, we need to be happy during our journey.

Even this Blog is a journey, which is a continuous working progress with the aim to inspire and help people to live a happy life.

I hope you enjoyed my suggestions and you find them useful to help you live a life full of happiness.

Remember: If you are at peace with yourself, you feel happy and in harmony with the surrounding world.

I wish You a Happy Life!