How to Use Happiness to Cultivate Consistency
Do you know what being happy has to do with your consistency in performing healthy habits like exercising or eating a healthy diet?
According to happiness researcher Shawn Achor in his book The Happiness Advantage:
“Waiting to be happy limits our brain’s potential for success, whereas cultivating positive brains makes us more motivated, efficient, resilient, creative, and productive, which drives performance upward.”
Yes, you read that right: cultivating happiness can help you achieve goals by bolstering your performance because our brains perform at their best when we’re in positive mood states.
Therefore, when you’re consistently in a negative mood state, you cripple your ability to perform well.
To get to the heart of the matter and figure out how to be happier AND more consistent, first you have to look at where unhappiness comes from:
Why are we so unhappy?
Western ways of life have ripped through our collective sense of well-being like hurricane-force winds. The rubble is everywhere, with many contributing factors to unhappiness, but here are four places we can clearly see the damage done:
Low self-worth - Because of chronically low self-esteem, people feel a compulsive need to be more productive, achieve more, buy more stuff, and change their appearances. This desperate striving is, of course, ineffective at making us feel better about ourselves because the core issue is a lack of self-worth.
Lack of time - People are working longer hours to buy more stuff in an attempt to fill a sense of emptiness. As a result, rates of overwork, stress, and burnout have all increased over time.
Loneliness - For overscheduled working adults, the first thing to give is connection with friends and community, both social activities as well as volunteer work. As the sense of connection declines, mistrust in others rises. As for family life, parents often overschedule children as a competitive measure to get them “ahead” in life so they can earn more money to buy more stuff to fill their own inevitable voids. Not to mention that technology is taking the place of face-to-face interactions.
Lack of meaningful work - When people prioritize making more money to pay for the increasing cost of living and for more goods to self-soothe, they leave behind the work they find truly meaningful. The resulting stress from feeling that they’re wasting their life can grow stronger than the stress from feeling they’re not making enough money.
All of this paints a pretty grim picture, and the all-time high rates of narcissistic personality disorder, anxiety, depression, and other mental health concerns reflect how we’re feeling.
What’s more, in an effort to avoid the resulting negative emotions of loneliness, meaninglessness, burnout, and so on, people self-soothe using unhealthy coping mechanisms like eating, alcohol, shopping, watching tv, and social media, to name some of the more popular ones.
But these habits are all band-aid solutions that don’t even come near addressing the root cause of the problem.
In his book The Antidote: Happiness For People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, Oliver Burkeman writes:
“Our constant efforts to eliminate the negative–insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness–that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.”
In other words, by using food, alcohol, shopping, and screen time to smother or distract yourself, you’re actually making the problem worse because you’re not addressing the root causes of your unhappiness.
Let’s break this down. People make purchases like:
Cars and houses in an attempt to gain status and respect;
Diet programs, beauty products, and closets full of clothes to feel attractive and desired;
Electronics and games to feel a sense of entertainment and purpose
But what do all of these desires have in common? Fear.
People fear a lack of belonging, a lack of connection, and a lack of meaning.
We don’t need more STUFF to meet those psychological needs—we need to face our fears in order to feel happier.
Because fear is the root cause of our unhappiness.
In order to be truly happy, to have a strong sense of identity and find a sense of belonging, community, challenge, love, and purpose, we need to stop running and learn how to embrace our fears of uncertainty, insecurity, and failure.
Recovering from the cultural wreckage we’re looking at today doesn’t require food or material goods. Rather, healing requires us to change our mindsets and process the emotions we’ve been avoiding for so long.
Increasing Your Happiness
Advertisements try to convince us that we can improve our lives and happiness by buying more products, services, and experiences. The study of psychology tells us that we’re better off building relationships, connecting with nature, doing meaningful work, and being of service to others.
But while there are a few practical, behavioral changes you can make to increase your happiness, like performing altruistic acts, improving your physical health, spending more time in nature, and cultivating meaningful connections, I’m going to focus on five ways you can change the way you think to increase your happiness.
We’re going to talk about changing your mindset so you can feel empowered to stop buying shit and eating shit to make yourself feel better and instead spend your resources (your time especially) on creating a meaningful, authentic, connected life.
Openness to Failure
The most resilient individuals have a growth mindset. They stay open to failure because they view setbacks through a particular lens:
If you have a growth mindset, you believe that abilities can be developed through effort. This is in contrast to a fixed mindset, where you believe that you were born with certain abilities and innate talents that cannot be changed.
People with a growth mindset lean into risk, effort, challenges, and setbacks because they accept them as a natural part of the learning process. They believe effort is what makes you smart or talented. Success relies on the process of becoming, and not growing is the failure.
Blaming your innate abilities for your failures severely limits your resilience and thus your success because if your response to setbacks is, “There must be something wrong with me. I can’t do it,” why would you bother to keep trying?
Similarly, if you try not to think about failure at all, you’ll end up with a dramatically distorted vision of what achieving your desires requires.
Perfectionism is not a product of ambition, as is commonly believed; it is a product of fear.
Perfectionism is fear-driven striving to avoid the emotional experience of failure.
But why is failure something to be feared?
Because of the judgment you lay upon yourself for failure—because of what you’re choosing to make failure mean.
When you wrap your identity up in your achievements, failure becomes a criticism of who you are. You become attached to certain outcomes.
When you remain open to the emotional experience of failure and shift the lens through which you view failure to that of a growth mindset, you’ll increase your resilience, consistency, and success AND open yourself up to a much richer emotional experience of happiness.
2. Optimism
To be clear, I’m not using optimism to refer to relentless, delusional positivity. I think of optimism as looking realistically at hardship to determine its causes and how to move forward and grow.
Optimism is intimately related to hope. Hope and optimism are both beliefs that a better future is possible. Optimism is also the belief that a better future is within your control.
An optimistic mindset can benefit you in virtually every area of your life.
Optimists are more likely to perform better at school and in college, at work, in athletics, have better health, and potentially even better longevity. They cope with stress better, and have higher levels of well-being under adversity. Optimists also tend to have more social support, which we know to be crucial to your well-being. In leadership positions, people are drawn to optimistic individuals.
And more broadly, optimists set more goals, more difficult goals, and strive harder to attain those goals. When faced with obstacles, they are more engaged and overcome them more easily.
Psychologist Martin Seligman describes pessimistic beliefs as being explanations for past adversities that might be categorized as personal, permanent, and pervasive. In other words, a pessimistic thinker believes bad events are their own fault (personal), will last a long time (permanent), and will undermine everything they do (pervasive).
In order to develop a more optimistic mindset, some of the ways Seligman suggests disputing your pessimistic thoughts are by looking at evidence for contrary options (e.g. are you always irresponsible, or do you act responsibly sometimes but made a mistake in this instance?) and exploring alternative possibilities to explain what happened.
I both practice and teach this strategy, building on it by encouraging my students to look for thinking errors (also known as cognitive distortions), which are irrational or unhelpful beliefs. We seek to correct thinking errors in both their explanations for past adversities as well as in their expectations for future events (which, when exaggerated negatively, contribute to anxiety).
A simple way you can get started with what I call thought examinations is to write down your thoughts about either a past adversity or predicted future occurrence.
When you review what you’ve written, for each thought, ask: Is this a fact or a belief? For the beliefs, you can use Seligman’s technique of looking for evidence to contradictory ideas and alternative points of view.
I like to end each thought examination by asking, “What are my opportunities for growth?”
3. Gratitude
Gratitude, by definition, is a feeling of appreciation or thankfulness for generosity or kindness shown to you. Although, I feel compelled to point out that you can also feel gratitude toward yourself, or simply things you have in your life.
But knowing what gratitude is doesn’t help you feel it.
Gratitude is something that you can cultivate though, by focusing on things you appreciate or feel grateful for. And there are a lot of reasons to do so:
Studies have shown that consistently feeling gratitude can lead to: decreased depression, anxiety, loneliness, headaches, and chronic illnesses; feeling more relaxed, happier, more optimistic, more socially connected, more forgiving, more fulfilled; increased resilience, productivity, productivity, emotional intelligence, energy, sleep quality, cooperation, patience, self-esteem, and trust; and faster recovery from injuries and illnesses.
While gratitude is a feeling you can cultivate more of, doing so is easier said than done. At first, you may feel a great deal of resistance towards feeling gratitude, as I did. Or, when using the commonly recommended practice of gratitude journaling, you may fall into the trap of making lists of “things I like” rather than practicing feeling gratitude.
Gratitude journaling, writing down a few things you feel grateful for each day, is still a practice I suggest trying, but if you struggle with reaping the benefits, you might try adjusting your practice in one or both of the following ways:
First, rather than making a list, choose one thing you feel grateful for that you want to practice cultivating the feeling of gratitude for. If you’re writing, write a whole paragraph about why you appreciate this thing rather than simply naming it. Try to connect to the feeling of appreciation, especially any changes it arouses in your body, such as a feeling of warmth or an increase/decrease in the pace of your heart rate.
With each of the items on your list, or the one single one you’ve chosen, you might also try the practice of negative visualization: remind yourself that you might lose this thing. What would your life be like without this thing in it, be it a person, animal, object, position, or circumstance?
4. Direction Over Goals
Setting a specific goal with a hard deadline (like “I will lose x lbs in y weeks”) can sometimes be more harmful than helpful, particularly if you get overly attached to the goal.
Specific, measurable, time-bound goals can encourage:
Short-term thinking such as taking a drastic approach that doesn’t have sustainable results, like crash dieting for a weight loss goal
Irrational behavior such as investing effort and resources even though the goal no longer makes sense to pursue
Pursuing the goal at the expense of other parts of your life, leading to physically and emotionally painful tradeoffs
A fear of uncertainty. When you invest in a vision of the future that you feel you have control over, it gives you a false sense of security that doesn’t address the underlying anxiety.
A lack of self-worth or tying your self-worth up in your accomplishments
So if setting specific goals can sabotage your success, what should you do instead?
Research shows that having a broad sense of direction, or what I like to call a North Star, can drive greater levels of happiness than setting goals.
5. Acceptance
I’m using the term “acceptance” as a catch-all for a few different concepts, the first being the Buddhist notion of non-attachment.
Non-attachment represents a release from desire and fixation of achieving specific outcomes. Non-attachment includes attachments to positive emotion—including happiness—expectations, outcomes, experiences, and circumstances.
A similar and more contemporary concept is psychologist Albert Ellis’ “musturbation.” This habit of mind possesses beliefs that we “must” have certain things, expectations that “must” come true, or ways that other people “must” treat us. When reality falls short of our desires, it becomes a catastrophe.
And finally, we can experience acceptance when it comes to our emotion-states. This means allowing ourselves to feel whatever emotions arise without judgment.
One of the foundational (and exceptionally powerful) skills I teach my Food Body Self® students is how to accept and process their emotions in a healthy way, not only because healthy emotional processing eliminates behaviors like emotional eating, binge eating, and chronic restriction, but also because they become able to live their lives more authentically and to get less swept away by negative emotions.
To increase your acceptance, you can practice meditation, especially mindfulness meditation to note any emotions that arise with nonjudgment, as well as compassion—and that includes self-compassion.
As you can see from the items on this list, your unhappiness—and happiness—don’t depend on what you have, but how you think and feel. No surprise there.
But knowing this doesn’t stop the majority of people from living their lives in a state of mindless striving for ineffective, material solutions to their psychological needs…which then leads to unhealthy forms of self-soothing.
When we turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms like eating, alcohol, shopping, watching tv, and social media, it’s in an attempt to alleviate the unease we feel.
Unfortunately, most people have no idea how to soothe that uneasiness without those aforementioned habits. That’s why my Food Body Self® program teaches our students:
How to increase your mindfulness (which serves as the foundation for all thought, feeling, and behavior change)
The skills of distress tolerance and self-compassion (so that you no longer need to self-soothe)
How to change your mindset (so that your thoughts are always working FOR you rather than AGAINST you)
When you change how you think and feel, you give yourself the opportunity to enter a virtuous cycle: you feel happier, which increases your consistency, which increases your success, which makes you happier. (And as a bonus, you still feel happy even if things don’t go according to plan, because you’re not attached to a specific endpoint.)
Your ability to be truly happy, to have a strong sense of identity and find a sense of belonging, community, challenge, love, and purpose, depends on your thoughts. And changing your thoughts is a skill you can learn.
Happiness and success await you. Are you ready to find them?