Stop and Install

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