An article recently in the New Yorker reviewed a couple of books on happiness. It turns out that we’re hard-wired to see the bad in life over the good. Quoting from a book called The Happiness Hypothesis: “Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures.” To seriously paraphrase it, the fearful cautious cave dude had a better survival rate. Life for him*was* nasty, brutish and short as Hobbes described it. And we’re more likely to be his descendents than the happy-go-lucky cave dude who wasn’t concerned about going hungry or being eaten by a lion. And it does appear to be hard-wired – “This is a matter of how our brains are wired: most sense data pass through the amygdala, which helps control our fight-or-flight response, before being processed by other parts of our cerebral cortex. This is one of the reasons that human beings make heavy weather of being happy. We have been hardwired to emphasize the negative.”

We also have a happiness ‘set point’. A study found that whether people won the lottery, or became a paraplegic, they were back to their happiness set point in a year. The only variable here was poverty. So if our happiness levels are less dependent on outside forces than we often think – it means they’re alot more within our control. Does this mean I can’t blame the shit happening around me, I have to take more responsibility for my own happiness? How exactly do I do that? Well here are two ways and there are probably more:

Do what you love (or at least like):

The article said that a study found that people were more content when they were experiencing what Csikzentmihalyi called “flow”. That’s the state you’re in when you’re totally immersed in a task that you enjoy doing. It’s just challenging enough to keep your attention, but it’s not outside the realm of your abilities. A good yoga session is the perfect example of this. If I can stop focusing on the thinking (lord knows the thoughts still happen) and get immersed in the feeling of the poses, I can contentedly flow like a river.

Do what you do more mindfully:

I think another good strategy is to become more conscious of the life you have. This is where your yoga training comes in handy. If we can calmly experience what’s really happening, we sneak by the flight/fight tendency and really appreciate what’s going on. Neale Donald Walsch describes something called the Stopping Meditation that involves appeciating the smaller detail of your life at various times during the day. I think any kind of ‘sit and breath’ time is beneficial. Being more mindful keeps you from skimming over the details of your life to focus on what’s missing, what’s ‘wrong’ or what’s unfinished.

It helps you notice what might make you happy when you take the time to appreciate it.