Research shows that there are 4 basic sources of our happiness: being healthy, being engaged, being connected to others, and being good - having a relationship with a Higher Power. Since we know all of these sources, we need to commit to pursuing them every day.
Haiku:
there are 4 sources
of our happiness – health, work
connections and God
The 4 Sources of our Happiness -- health, challenge, connections, higher power
Hi -- Marc with the Gunnar Project here, I want to talk to you about one of the paradoxes that I’ve come across as I’ve looked at a lot of the research on happiness and some of the studies that have been done out there.
The interesting thing with all these studies is -- they come back to the same basic thing -- what they are pointing toward is that there are really FOUR sources for our happiness. I think as I tell you these, you’re going to say, “Wow -- that seems really obvious!”
The research out there, this vast body of researchers out there for short-term studies and long-term studies have shown that healthy people are more happy than unhealthy people. Again you look at that and you say “Wow, I think that’s pretty obvious.” So Health is definitely a source of happiness.
Another source of happiness is the fact that people who are living a life where they’re engaged, they’re challenged, they feel like they are adding some purpose to their career, they’re creating new things, they’re teaching others -- people who are in that sort of environment are much more happy than people who are bored. Very obvious, again.
People who are connected -- people who have strong relationships with a few friends where they can really sort of trust and they know that person has got their back, and a strong family unit -- those people are much happier than people who are lonely. Again, very obvious.
The fourth bucket, the fourth source of happiness is people who are good -- people who feel like they are contributing to society, who have a relationship with a Higher Power, however they want to define that, those people are much more happy than people who are bad -- who do bad things and are sort of always flitting with that in those grey areas.
So those are sort of the 4 sources of happy:
Healthy people are happy people.
People who are engaged, or are creative, are happy people.
People who are connected to others, those people are happy.
People who are basically good, and grounded, those people are happy.
Again the interesting thing with this is that none of this is very exciting. If you would have asked anybody -- if you would ask yourself, “wow, I wonder who’s going to be happier, a healthy person or an unhealthy person?” It’s super obvious, right? The healthy person is happy.
So the point of this is, if you’re going to go out every day and pursue happiness, you know those things that create happiness -- you can see them and observe them in others and in just kind of life as life is going on. So we all know what it’s going to take for us to pursue happiness and to make us happy, but there’s still a bit of a disconnect there, because there’s some feeling that “oh, I can’t, I just can’t be happy…” or “I’m just not happy enough...” Whatever that, whatever that might be -- but the obvious thing with this is -- 4 Sources -- we all know what they are, we just need to commit to going out there every single day and pursuing happiness. Again -- that’s the mission of the Gunnar Project.
Thanks for listening to me today and I look forward to talking to you again soon! Bye.