What Does Happiness Feel Like: The Happiness Myth

By admin November 12, 2014 06:00

Warning: explode(): Empty delimiter in /home/arizonalatinos/public_html/wp-content/themes/allegro-theme/includes/single/image.php on line 35

Dr. Nicolas Porter
Founder Risas Dental and Braces

Dr. Nicolas Porter

Over the past few months, as I’ve battled through many of life’s challenges, I’ve found this question popping up in my mind on a frequent basis.

As I’m just about to plan a trip and get that surge of excitement that comes from the planning of another fun, future event, I ask myself, “Is this what happiness feels like?”

Standing on the top of one of the most beautiful buildings in the Italian city, Florence, in pops the same though, “What about this?”

Or, what about the feeling you get when your favorite team wins the football game. Is that happiness? “If not, what does it feel like?!” I ask myself frustratingly.

You see, for years, I’ve recently learned, I’ve associated happiness with the feeling of excitement – the jolt of energy that we get when we are just a few miles in to a last minute road trip or on the climbing up to the top of the roller coaster drop. This surge of energy that makes us feel amazing and invisible.

But then all of a sudden that idea came crashing down when the surge of energy got weaker and weaker because I became a person who could do pretty much anything I wanted. The idea of looking forward to the weekend and the feeling you get Friday morning at work, knowing that your week was over and you had those two amazing days to rest, no longer applied to my life.

I stopped having the normal stuff to look forward to and because I was able to feed myself with as much of the exciting stuff as I wanted, that, too, became diluted and the surge of excitement went away.

So what now? Since most of my life I had associated happiness with new, out of the ordinary, unreachable novelties that had become hollow and empty nuisances, I struggled big time to get my footing. No longer did I have moments of excitement that made up for the hard times that I was dealing with. I began to walk down a path of life where I didn’t feel happy – at least not how my brain viewed the word.

This is what I call The Happiness Myth.

The Happiness Myth is the process described above where we link a feeling of excitement or pleasure to telling ourselves that we are happy. And, just like taking a drug, when the pleasure is no longer there because we’ve either become too tolerant of the effects, as in my case, or we no longer have the stimulant, we have what I call, The Happiness Myth Crash.

There is nothing like the feeling you have when you realize your entire life you’ve been telling yourself the wrong story about what something is or isn’t. When I

realized that what I was feeling wasn’t happiness, but just a temporary surge of emotions that the body creates with its fight or flight response called adrenaline, I was in a dark place trying to redefine what happiness felt like so that I could start to not only feel the feeling of happiness, but also tell myself that I was feeling happy.

Have you ever tried to explain to someone what happiness feels like? It’s a very difficult task and one that is usually very personal and different one person to the next. I mean, I know what happiness IS or at least what the idea of being happy looks like. However, describing how your body feels when you are happy is an impossible task.

I’ve said multiple times that the most difficult answers to life’s questions come when you least expect them and they are typically in the form of something very subtle as opposed to something in your face and blatant. Well, the answer to this challenge came the same.

One day, after a relatively long weekend with my three princess daughters, I was driving them to their mom’s home. After dropping them off, I usually feel a sense of sadness mixed with self inflicted guilt and a nice side of “you should be doing better.”

However, not this time. Driving home, I caught myself feeling calm and peaceful. In other words, it wasn’t negative or sad like usual. I thought, “I kinda just don’t want to move from this moment.”

Folks, in a world of turmoil and chaos, I found that happiness feels like nothing more than peace and calm. It’s NOT excitement! It’s contentment. It’s balance. It’s saying NO to the moments that get you upset. It’s remaining stable when the world makes you wanna scream. It’s screaming at the world and then laughing at yourself. It’s finding solace in the face of pain; moments of silence in the midst chaos.

The Happiness Myth is about realizing that other things do NOT control your happiness and peace, you do. Only you can decide if you want to live a life of chaos and edginess or, on occasion, tone it down and experience the peacefulness of life as you contemplate the many things you have to be thankful for, the growth that is yet to come in your life and the beauty in things that surround you.

This realization has changed my life. I wish I could say I was perfect at it, but I’m not. Being happy takes practice. It’s a pursuit for finding peace with yourself, with your life and then finding it over and over again as life hands you difficulties that get your off track again and again and again.

Death, Divorce, Loss, Robbery, Moving, New Job and so many things have a tendency to set us back to square one and it usually happens after we’ve figured out a thing or two and have found the peace and calm in our life.

Don’t give up. Keep fighting. There’s a reason for everything. Face the Happiness Myth and change if you are like I was. Stop letting the hollow and empty pleasures take up space in your personal story. Those things are amazing and fun and certainly have a place in life and the memories we create with others, but don’t let those things become your happiness. Stop believing that story because it is not true.

Until next week… Keep your chin up and be happy.

This article is a feature from the series, “From the Mouth of Dr. Nicolas.” You can listen to “El Show del Dr. Nicolas” every Wednesday from 8 a.m. – 9 a.m. on 1190AM. Visit the official website at www.DrNicolasShow.com

If you have any questions regarding this topic, and would like to make an appointment for a free consultation, visit RisasDental.com, or follow Dr. Nicolas on Twiiter @DrNicolasShow or “LIKE” his page on Facebook at Facebook.com/DrNicolasShow