Happiness?
That’s the simple word which is not very simple to be
translated into the real world. Many psychology experts have done many
experiments to understand the meaning of this word. Is it a destination or a
process? If it is a process, then why
many people still chasing for this? You cannot chase the process right? For me,
happiness is a process as it always changes from time to time. The things that
used to make me happy in past time maybe wouldn’t make me happy now.
So what will drive the happiness?
Based on the Global Happiness Research conducted by Ipsos in
2013, it is driven by living conditions, security, environment, income, health,
education and family harmony. The research which was conducted in 21 countries
showed that some countries are significantly happier than other countries!
Indonesia?
With the traffic
Big flood
Where do you think Indonesia would be?
We are number 1! 55%
of Indonesian respondent said that they were very happy with their current
state of life. Because they considered their national economy to be 'good' with
last year economy grew by 5.6%. Although the wealth was unevenly spread, with
11.4% of the population living in poverty and least satisfy with the education
level. But with the positive answers about time spent with family and neighbors
could overcome all of the concerns. Why?
Indonesian could always adapt to the situation.
Big float? Smile!
Traffic? Selfie!
However, this skill could be a double edge sword. As a
human, we can adapt to anything, it seems—you can get your dream job, marry a
wonderful human—eventually we acclimate and find new things to complain about.
Why? Because our needs are always changes. In his pyramid, Marslow
mapped the human needs into 4 different levels. In his theory, the movements should be from the bottom to the upper
level. But, based on my experience, it could be the other way round. When I
just graduated from University, I could say that I wasn’t really care about
money as I thought I had my parents to back up me and I didn’t had to support
anybody, so this first two level, I didn’t need this. I could say that I was
looking for Self-actualization so that by doing a job which always challenged
me and made me smarter that’s my happiness. But then a few years later when I
was getting older, the pressure of being independent and not be supported by my
parents was getting higher. Then, my need moved into this level, I started to
question whether I had been compensated enough? My happiness was
decreasing.
Sometimes, life is like a flappy bird game. In this game:
you need to control a funny-looking bird by tapping the screen. You need to
manage the force, if it’s too hard; it would jump all over the place, if this
this too weak, you would crash.
So, how we could manage the force to have a happier brain? : train our brains to appreciate positive experiences
by taking the time to focus on them and install them in the brain. It is
different with positive thinking. Dr. Rick Hanson, a neuropsychologist, a
member of U.C. Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center's advisory board said
that the fundamental distinction between activation and installation. In positive
thinking, the person is not taking the extra 10, 20 seconds to heighten the
installation into neural structure, so it would be wasted on our brain. We’re
not taking into account so that it doesn’t learn very well.
If we get back again into my story, I realized that maybe I
wasn’t took the extra time to install the positive experience when I did the
job e.g. the opportunity to always keep myself actualize. So that when i had to
face the negative one, i started to get unhappy.
The happiest
people do not necessarily have the best thing, they simply appreciate the thing
that they have. So when life is turning
into a Flappy Bird game where the forces pulling us down are just as strong as
the ones pulling us up, we need to make sure that we have enough strength to
manage the forces so that we wouldn’t crash sooner than we expect. Start by stop complaining and starting to
appreciate good thing in our life and installing it repeatedly to grow the inner strength.
Cheers,
Raisa
