The 1 Habit of Highly Happy People

Posted by Steve Munroe | Under Life, thought Wednesday Jun 25, 2008

If you go to your bookshop these days you are likely to see several new books that all focus on happiness - what it is, how to get it, how we misunderstand it, the history of it and the latest research about it to name just a few of the themes.

Despite coming at happiness from many angles, one thing all these new books agree on is the difficulty in defining precisely what happiness is. One thing seems clear, they don’t mean pleasure. Pleasure seems too fleeting and too much linked to sensation and the physical body. Happiness on the other hand, while refusing to fit within a neat and concise definition, seems more related to a feeling of peace of mind and general wellbeing. More a kind of background emotion that can persist even in the face of physical discomfort or psychological or emotional strain. After all, people can report happiness in the most extreme places or situations, such as concentraton camps, or during severe illness.

The Gratitude Key

One thing appears to be key in being able to develop happiness as a steady and reliable feature of your life and not something that’s contingent on events: gratitude. But what do we have to be grateful for?

The obvious thing to say here is to repeat the kinds of things our grandmothers would tell us. That we should be grateful for the ‘relatively’ good fortune we have in comparison to other, less fortunate souls; that we’re not some starving baby in Africa, or that we live in a country that isn’t at war, or that you’re not one of the Jones’ kids down the road whose mother doesn’t know how to cook!

Then there is the approach that emphasizes the little things in life. Feel grateful if you have food in your belly, water to drink, a place to sleep and no clear and present threats to your physical wellbeing. While the food, water, bed and no predators argument is good, it is still contingent upon the truth of those statements. Happiness won’t be available to you if you are hungry, thirsty, tired and being chased by a salivating tiger.

What is There to be Grateful About?

I’m not going to re-hash all of that stuff because, as good as it is, it’s still contingent advice. What if you happen to be one of the Jone’s kids, or you live in Africa, or you show up on the menu of some carnivore? Sure, there’s always someone else you can compare yourself to to make yourself feel better about yourself but there has got to be a better reason to feel grateful than the suffering of others and the lack of suffering for yourself. If simply for the reason that the relationship between other’s and your suffering will not always be in your favour.

So, what is it that fundamentally, deep down we have to be grateful for? Something that isn’t about comparison with others less fortunate but is more fundamental about our situation.

Well, I think it simply comes down to this:

The number one reason why all of us should feel grateful is that for no apparent reason, we appear to have popped into existence! We exist! Out of nothing we have been sprung onto the world and, bonus!, we’re lucky enough to have been given a body with an amazingly large set of abilities and a mind that seems almost limitless in its learning capacity. Now who could possibly argue against gratitude as the only response to this seemingly excessive amount of good luck? Even if we don’t have the slightest clue how this came about - if we are atheists and non believers - the utter unexpectedness of our existence can only produce feelings of awe and gratitude.

I don’t know about you but when I really sit and think about the fact that I exist, there is really only one appropriate word for my reaction; I’m flabbergasted! It’s just so improbable and weird a fact that it’s actually very hard to grasp at all. But when I can grasp it - the significance of it - life has an incredible freshness to it and a tremendous quality of freedom. Gratitude seems the only realistic response.

A Simple Guide to being Flabbergasted

I want to share a few techniques to help get you flabbergasted all over again at the fact of your existence, so that you can experience the gratitude necessary for true abiding happiness.

Notice that, while everyone else you look at has a head -a roughly 8 inches in diameter, bony and quite solid object - on your shoulders, as it appears to you now from the first person perspective, you have…what? Try to forget what you know and just look. It’s certainly not a hard and solid object is it? Isn’t it in fact filled with the world? The scene your looking at now (including all those people with heads currently in it) totally replaces your experience of a head! I find that flabbergasting!

Drop all memory and imagination and just sit and experience yourself existing. Can you get to the point at which you don’t know what you are anymore? It’s quite neat and perhaps at first a little unsettling. But it is possible to experience yourself as you must have when you were first born. Totally without knowledge of yourself as human; just a raw, awake thing.

Think of all the things you can do with your body. How amazing an instrument it is. It can take you up mountains, under water and across land at speed. It can express tenderness, anger, happiness, love, and a multitude of other emotions. It effortlessly translates what’s in your mind into audible speech, and performs the opposite translation too. And it does all this while automatically looking after itself without the need of your involvement! It oxygenates itself, processes fuel and creates its own energy, shifts blood to where its needed, and even gets busy repairing itself when compromised.

If you can tune into the strangeness of the fact of your existence, you can’t help but to be amazed by it, and from that amazement will come a gratitude that will remain with you in the background through all your life’s activities. It is this background feeling of gratitude that I believe is the generator of real and lasting happiness.

Good luck with it!