The Skill of Being Happy

1. What is happiness?: Welcome to the course, how to learn to be happy. How to learn to be happy, not how to be happy. Or hacks, tips and tricks or anything like that. You need to understand the core idea with this course. It's the skill of happiness. And like any skill, you have to cultivate it. To get it, you have to practice, learn, iterate, grow the way you would any other skill. Most people don't think about happiness this way. They think it's about things they have or things that get, or maybe even just the way they are, genetics or whatever, those can all contribute to happiness, but they're not what actually causes happiness. What causes happiness is a choice and a skill. And like any skill, the more you invest into the skill, the better you get. And for every little shortcut or hack you try to implement. On the other side, you're going to be giving up some happiness. You're going to be short cutting some happiness or hacking away some of the happiness. It is directly proportional to what you put into this skill and then maintain that skill is exactly what you'll get on the other end, just the way it is for any other skill. My name is concentrated on the founder host of the better human podcasts. I'm obsessed with helping humans think better, live better, and then make the world a better place. The more better humans we have, the better the world, a better future for my son's. That's why I do what I do. And that's really what the world needs is as many better humans as possible. And as it relates to this course has many better happy humans as possible that will then spread their betterment and their happiness, and that will infect others. And it'll be a ripple effect. Monkey see monkey do to the fullest effect to make the world better, happier place? I chose the worst for this course carefully, because I want you to understand that happiness is a skill. Most people don't think about happiness as a skill. If you think about it as something that they have or that they get, it's about some external reward or validation or fame or money or success or whatever. And some people might think that it's more of a genetic thing. And genetics can play a role in it. It can make it so that it's easier or harder for you to be happy. But genetics themselves could not explain. For happiness. Happiness is something you cultivate. Happiness is something you build and develop and then you maintain. Throughout this course, we'll get into that. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about strategies for helping you figure out how to be happier self and the skills that you need for your life. Because this is very much independent journey. What's going to work for me? It's not going to work for you and vice versa, but we might be able to learn from each other. We're also concerned about the responsibility of taking ownership of your life and your thoughts, and your feelings, and thus your happiness and how it's the most empowering thing though not necessarily always convenient. Lot of people don't really want to take responsibility. But the same time, a lot of people don't necessarily realize that maybe they want to be happy. And the way to do that is to first take responsibility, accept that, and then make the choice towards the anode. Give me some of the foundational principles for human biology as it relates to mental health and physical health and how that is very much intertwined with happiness. And will also give you some strategies for silencing the mind, quieting the mind meditation, mindfulness, not next thing, not always being in the past or the future and ending the suffering that is the monkey mind, as Buddhist says. So it can give value to this course if you want to reach me, you can always find me in the profile area or conduct coach, I got a better human newsletter and go there as well. Let's get to it. 2. Choice: Get started on happiness. We're gonna go to part 2 of the Almanac of Laval and uses as a guide to run us through how to think about happiness, what it is, what it isn't. So in here, I've got a few highlights. Don't take yourself so seriously. You're just a monkey with a plan of happiness has learned ten years ago, if you would've asked me how happy I was, I would have dismissed the question. I didn't want to talk about it. On a scale of one to ten. I would have said two or maybe three, maybe four of ten on my best days. But I did not value being happy today. I'm a nine of 10 and yes, having money helps, but it's actually a very small piece of it. Most of it comes from learning over the years. My own happiness is the most important thing to me. And I've cultivated it with a lot of techniques. So that's the first idea. Happiness is learned. You have to make an important, you have to consider it. You have to have a strategy for. And you probably need to try a bunch of different techniques to find out what works for you. That's the most important thing. Maybe happiness is not something you inherit or even choose, but a highly personal skill that can be learned, like fitness or nutrition. Now I think it is something you choose because if you want to get good at a skill, if happiness is a skill, you have to choose it. So maybe that's not the right word to add there. But it's point remains the same. A lot of people think of happiness as it's something you have or you don't, or if you're successful and have money and whatever, then you're happy. As we dig into this course and to realize that that is completely not the case. So the first most important thing that you need to form as a foundation to truly become a happy person. If you want to actually have control of your happiness and be able to dictate it would be as happy as much as you can, as long as you can, as often as you can, then you need to realize it is a choice. Any skill, choose that you're going to do the work to be happy. You choose to be happy. So when those arable bat, so when they invariably bad things happen in life, when we're stressed out, when we're overwhelmed. You always come back to the foundation. I can choose to be happy. I can choose how I respond here. And if you've studied stoicism, which I'm a big fan of, fundamental premise of stoicism, is that everything is a choice. How you perceive everything, how you respond to everything is a choice. And happiness is no different. 3. The Ebb and Flow: From the book, Happiness is a very evolving thing. I think like all the great questions when you're a little kid, you go to your mom and ask what happens when we die? Is there a Santa Claus? Is their god? Should I be happy? Who should I marry? Those kind of things. There are no glib answers because no answers applied to everyone. These kinds of questions ultimately do not have answers, but they have personally answers. So you can't ask somebody for this question. You can't ask somebody how to be happy. You can only ask them what made them happy. And maybe something resonates with you or maybe get some ideas that you can try for yourself. As he says here, the answer that works for me is going to be nonsense to you and vice versa. Whatever happiness means to me, it means something different to you. I think it's very important to explore what these definitions are. For some people, I know it's a flow state. For some people, it's satisfaction. For some people, it's a feeling of contentment. My definition keeps evolving. The answer I would have given you a year ago will be different than what I tell you now. This is why it is a supremely individual personal pursuit. So one thing is for sure you're going to ebb and flow in your life some things or make you happy back then, like maybe playing computer games all day long made you happy. That's what it did for me when I was teenager. Having girlfriend makes me happy. Having a partner makes me happy now that I have kids. I'm happy. My work that I was doing before that I stopped doing that and I'll do again is making me happy. And then I'm gonna do that until suddenly make me happy. Now, the problem with what I'm saying right now even is that these are very much an external things. But it just shows you how throughout life your preferences change. Some periods of your life. You want to work a lot more, you want to grind, you want to be busy. And some periods your life, you want to have an open schedule and literally had nothing on it. And the same is for happy. Some things will bring you joy, satisfaction. You slow down. Well, it could be in the moment and some things won't, or somethings will lose. That affects some things that used to call me, you might stress you out. Now, it's very, very important that you accept like and less than one. Happiness is a choice, and it is your responsibility, yours alone, and that you have to do the work to continually refine what is happy for you. You have to be self-aware. You have to pay attention if the listened to your mood, your energy, how the things in your life are interacting, how the people in your life are interacting and bring value and operating value, et cetera. It's an ever changing ebb and flow. That's what happiness is. So you have to stay on top of it and you have to have techniques and strategies and most importantly, self-awareness to be able to do that. 4. Desire: Let's talk about desire. So he has here, we are highly judgmental survival and replication machines. We constantly walk around thinking, I need this or I need that, trapped in the web of desires. Happiness is a state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan for something. In that absence for a moment, you have internal silence. When you have internal silence, then you are content and you are happy. Feel free to disagree again, it's different for everybody. So Lao-Tzu said, if you're depressed, you are living in the past. You're anxious, you were living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present. And the Buddha talks about this all the time. His theory of mind that he figured out after boss lots of Mediterranean thing about it was that if you're not surprisingly in the moment, If you're not only empty minded focusing on what's in front of you, then it's very likely you're suffering because you're living in the past or the future. You're worrying about something that has happened, or you're wrestling with something that DID or whatever, you're anxious about something that may happen, it may not happen. Buddha's answer to suffering, he believed was being supreme in the moment. And then meditation was the most powerful tool for being able to do that, for training your mind, to be able to silence itself, to remove everything that's past or future so that it can be supreme me in the moment. And his answer was, as the ball is saying here, if you can get to this moment right now, default state is then happy. The default state is not suffering. And the second you drift into the future or into the past or in some kind of worry or dread or stress, you're then suffering. It's a constant that anytime you are too much in your head and not in the moment, you are likely, likely suffering. Maybe it's a little bit, maybe its a lot, maybe your extra reminiscing, right? So I guess you could say that there are good ways to be in the future. You're hopeful, you're excited. Good ways to be in the past because you're reminiscing and you're appreciating and you're grateful. Unfortunately though, those are things that we actually have to work pretty hard to do. Most of us when we think about the future, or think about things we want or we need or whatever, we're trapped in a web of desires as an impulse said. And if we're in the past, it's usually we're ruminating over something or how could they are why did this happen to me or whatever? And yeah, maybe sometimes we're grateful. But it seems like the default is generally some kind of negativity bias anytime you go into the past to the future. And that's why the Buddha was so focused on meditation and being in the moment because that was his answer to what he saw was suffering. 5. Choice: There are no external forces affecting your emotions as much as it may feel that way. This is the foundation of everything and the human existence. And it's also something that people who ignore so readily. It's the personal responsibility for every single thing you feel or don't feel, it is your responsibility, your choice. If you let something affects you and it causes emotional turmoil. If you let something make you unhappy or happy, It's all choice. Obviously, you optimize for happy good feelings when those come to you, you probably revel in them and you enjoy them and you want to get them more and you accept them. Now on the flip side though, most people don't realize they have a choice, and it is their choice as a responsibility to choose how they respond to the negative emotions and experiences in their life. This is the foundation of Stoicism, which I believe is probably the most important practical philosophy there is. And it very much is the foundation of happiness. If you don't, except this foundational principle. And you think that all these other things in your life, and if things get more money, more fame or this more, whenever, you're always going to have this wide gap at the base that things are going to fall into. And you're never going to truly reach happiness, fulfillment, et cetera, because it will always be connected to something else. You will be a slave to something outside of yourself, rather than starting inside and then deciding and having full, complete control over your mental state and thus your happiness and potential and happiness. Everything is a choice. 6. + and -: What about positive and negative thoughts or positive and negative experiences? Is that what happiness is about is happiness about having as many positive experiences as possible and having no negative as we've already talked about, the duality implies that everything that is good is defined by a bat and everything that is bad is defined on the other side by good. So you can't actually have one without the other. This is why so much of happiness by default, Buddha got right when he focused on removing suffering by being in the moment as much as possible. It wasn't about having great experiences. We're having joy or whatever. You're going to have that in your life and you should try to get that in your life. Sure. But it's about making sure that baseline has removed as much of the suffering as possible by being in the moment when you are in the moment, you're not suffering, when you're living in the future. You're anxious when you're living in the past. Your I think it was depressed or sad or whatever you said. It's about getting to the moment. So back to the book here. To me, happiness is not about positive thoughts. It's not about negative thoughts, it's about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things. Now you could actually say the absence of desire for external things isn't just tangible, physical things. A lot of time, it's a desire to feel better about something or to want to get even with someone, or just to want to like work through the pain or the suffering, or to remove the fear that you have about something that may happen or something that's happened in the past, etc. So much of your desire is to somehow resolve those things, come to some kind of neutral place in your mind. And there's techniques to do that. Like you want to obviously resolve anxiety and fear and anxiety as much as you can. But for as long as you are focused on resolving them or thinking about them, or ruminating on them, you're going to be stuck somewhere else. That's not the moment, and that's where suffering comes in. So when you have a desire for a thing, success this, that whatever, or you have a desire to keep being stuck in the past or angry or frustrated or resentful or whatever. They're all desires, their desires that remove you from the present moment. And that's why again, the foundation is moment to moment being emitted. Now, letting go of as much of that as possible, it doesn't mean that you just ignore it or forget it. But maybe allocate some time to figure out why you're afraid. Maybe you can remove the fear through logic, through hard thinking about it rather than just letting your monkey brain your subconscious kind of takeover, which it does for so much people. Same thing about the past. Come to terms with the thing. Maybe talk to someone about it. Have a therapy session, journal to yourself. Do something other than letting your brain, your monkey mind r1, ramp it back to the book. Fewer desires I can have. The more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving. Because the mind really exists in motion toward the future or the past. The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be. If I latch onto a feeling and say, Oh, I'm happy now, and I want to stay happy. And then I'm going to drop out of happiness. Suddenly my mind is moving. It's trying to attach to something, it's trying to hold on to that happy moment. And as a result, fear comes in that you might lose a happy moment. And then you do. You literally reach forward too hard and it goes away. Your brainstem to create a permanent situation out of a temporary situation. So joys and highs and lows, it's all temporary. And what we do is we try to cling to them or we try to push them away as much as we can. And what we do is we actually invest energy into the push and pull, the duality of life. So the more we try to get something and we go after it directly and forcibly, the more likely it is to actually allude us. And the more we're worried and fearful, the more likely we are actually in our drawling, those things that we don't want to happen to us. It's a very strange phenomenon, but it's the law of energy and attraction. The more you focus on being afraid of this very thing, and the more you invest energy there in your mind there and your subconscious there, the more likely you are to actually get that very thing or to make mistakes that you get something even worse or whatever because you're so worried about it. Removing desire is being supreme in the moment and then having a strategy for taking care of the past stuff in the future stuff. I'm not suggesting you just ignore it. I'm not suggesting you just meditate all day so that your brain doesn't go there. Because obviously if you have unresolved issues, if you have unresolved for years, they're going to keep coming up. So you may as well do the necessary work to approach those in a constructive manner, try different things, come to a resolution in an agreement with them, and then return to the present moment, which is the default of happy life. 7. Super simple health overview: All right. I would feel like it would be a disservice to you if I didn't at least cover some of the principles of health, things you probably know. But just a quick reminder, if you want to be happy, you have to get your biology as finely tuned as possible, as up to parse possible. I'm going to breeze through these. You don't have to do with the research on your own if you want to dive into them, I'm going to give you the quick to liner for each of these. This is from my seven principles. This is from my seven principles of human health PDF. And these are the big things that you need to focus on. So the first one is real food. Obviously processed food, bad, real food, good, cook your meals at home as much as possible. Pretty obvious, you probably know this, but what are you actually doing better? That's a question. Principle number two is sleep. Sleep 79 hours a night. The more the better. Go to bed at night when you're tired and wake up when your body's rusted, don't complicate it. Get outside, get sunlight during the day and ideally at night, that'll set your circadian rhythm. The rest take care of itself. Principle 3, movement, obviously move as much as possible. The more movement, the better we live in a sedentary culture where we have cars and escalators, elevators and this and very few people take the stairs. Very few people park at the end of the parking lot, and most people will spend five minutes driving around the parking lot to find a spot that's closest to it as walking. It's bizarre behavior. But this is the addiction to comfort that our species is actually biologically programmed for it because in the wild, calories were scarce. And in our modern environment, we actually need expend calories because we have so many calories. It's a mismatch of biology and it's very hard for the human brain to consciously consider that nature. The more you get out in nature, the better, the more you get out in nature, the better. Take walks, lie in the grass, do yoga, get sun, whatever, do whatever you can to be in nature as much as possible. By the way, the mood boosting effects of nature. More and more research is coming out on a daily basis with how important it is and it should be any surprise. I mean, we're humans were born in the wild for elliptic them out for hundreds, thousands of years. Social, this is something that people don't really talk about a lot. It's integral for mental health. It's integral for happiness. Humans are social creatures. They say the worst form of torture is solitary confinement because you remove human interaction, prioritize relationships, spend time with friends and family, call it friends you haven't talked to in a while. Make sure you prioritize your relationships and in-person interaction and deprioritize fake human interaction, which is done through a screen. These are the big important principles of health that will be the foundation for your happiness as well. 8. Super simple meditation: Very, very simple way to think about meditation. There's a lot of ways to meditate. There's mantra based meditation, which I'm going to show you right now. There's breath meditation, there's mindfulness activities like THE things like that. I recommend trying all of them and finding what works for you, what comes most natural. Now for me, I like to do kind of a mantra meditation where I visualize a number that corresponds with my breath. So in my mind I'll see a one that kinda comes into view with my in-breath and then goes out and shrinks. And then I do a two a visualizer getting bigger. And then as my out-breath, I visualize getting smaller. Do that for 30 counts or 60 or whatever you want. Do it for 10 in the shower, do while you're driving. Do it to calm yourself in the middle the day because you're stressed out. A 5 In and Out slow breath with the focus on internally visualizing the number is meditation. It doesn't have to be complicated. It's as simple as that. You don't need special pillow. You don't need to sit in a special lotus position. You need to become aware of your mind and how it's running rampant. Create a purpose for it, a directed purpose. Then do that exercise slash purpose. And the more you do it, the better you'll get at silencing your mind. Controlling the monkey mind is a Buddhist say. And your stress and anxiety and happiness and all the things that you want to improve, look better. 9. Now what?: I hope you've got some things to think about in this course is a short course on happiness. And really you could say the responsibility of happiness or the agency to happiness or some other word like that. Because the core idea is that it's your choice and your fault for better or worse. So our lives are a blink of a firefly in the night. You're just barely hear. You have to make the most of every minute, which doesn't mean you chase them stupid desire for your entire life. What it means is every second you have on this planet is very precious and it's your responsibility to make sure you're happy and interpreting everything in the best possible way. We think of ourselves as fixed and the world as malleable. But it's really we who are malleable and the world is largely fixed. Now that doesn't mean that you can't go out and change things and alter things and get things you want and don't want in life you very much can. But the foundation of that is how you respond to anything about it. Because so much of our effort in trying to change the world around us cause a suffering because we want it to be a certain way. And if you've looked at all, you know, that it doesn't matter what we want. Most of the time, things don't just change every whim. And if we really, really want to make change, it's usually more work than we're willing to put in or even maybe something worth it. And that's fine. But sometimes it is. And for the things that really are worth it, we're gladly making the investment of energy and time to make it. So I hope you have some ideas to help you become happy. And at the very least, a foundational principle for your life that you can apply is agency, control and choice. It's all yours, it's yours and yours alone. And for as long as you believe in the fairy tale, that is, things in my external environment and world are what determine whether I'm happy or not for as long as you believe that narrative that lie, you will forever be at the whims of the massive amount of things in your environment and the massive amount of things that can go wrong. And then the people that are going to be people. And the reality is you're setting yourself up for a lifetime and Missouri and failure because the world is very hard to make exactly the way we want. So for every little checkbox that you think the world around it needs to be, each one is a potential not going to get checked. And for as many of those, not gonna get sexes you have, you start telling yourself, well, things don't really go my way or I'm Mr. Ahmed and it just creates needless suffering. That doesn't have to be that way. Because you don't have to have the boxes in the first place, manifests your reality by first taking responsibility for choice, deciding how you're going to spend every precious moment on this planet. And then have a growth mindset with the Personal Responsibility. And you really can't be happy almost always. Not always, but almost always. And those times when you're not happy or you really are suffering, you're going to learn from them and they're going to be fueled to be happy in the future and prepare you for the inevitable that's going to come. Have you evaluated this? I will see you in the next one.