All It Takes to Be Happy Is Practice

Growing up, the message I got from the culture surrounding me was that happiness was a mysterious force of the Universe. Everyone wanted to be happy, and everyone experienced happiness sometimes, but whether and how much you did was up to mysterious forces beyond human comprehension. Some people were blessed with lifetimes of happiness and satisfaction, and the rest of us poor fuckers were not.

Many people carry this attitude into adulthood. They wish for more happiness, and sometimes they even see therapists to complain about why they aren’t happy, but ultimately, they don’t believe they’re in control of their own happiness. They’re not asking their therapists how they can become happy, they’re asking their therapists how they can cope with their shitty life until the Universe decides to bless them with a happy one.

Surprise: The Universe is never going to bless you with a happy life because it’s not up to the Universe to give you that.

Quote generators and insufferably philosophical people like to say “Happiness comes from inside.” They’re right. Happiness doesn’t come from external circumstances, it comes from a person’s internal thoughts and attitudes toward life.

There’s even better news. These “internal thoughts and attitudes” aren’t the result of a fluke of genetics. It’s not as if we’re born “happy people” and “unhappy people” and are doomed to our fate. The skill of being happy can be learned and practiced, just like the skill of riding a bike or playing chess.

In fact, that’s how any happy people became happy. They learned from their parents, culture, or maybe even taught themselves the skills they needed to find happiness. They practiced them diligently, even on days it seemed hard. Then those skills became second nature, and they found happiness.

The Art (and Skill) of Being Happy

There’s a whole field of psychology called positive psychology dedicated to studying what makes people happy. But we don’t need to wait for modern-day positive psychologists to tell us what makes people happy, because great thinkers have been considering the art of happiness for thousands of years. Ancient religions, philosophers, and naturalists have all covered this topic in exhaustive detail, and positive psychology is still struggling to catch up.

We don’t need a scientific veneer to understand the basics of happiness. All we need to do is study what’s already been said. And what’s already been said is things like…

Accept you can’t be happy all the time

Many people who are desperately unhappy imagine a fantasy land where they are always happy. They are always happy with their spouse, always happy with their house, always happy with their job, always happy with their friends, so on and so forth.

Life, however, is not a fantasy. Even if your life is filled with wonderful people, bad things still happen. Economic disasters bankrupt people, natural disasters destroy people’s homes, and loved ones pass away.

Buddhists acknowledge there will always be suffering. According to Buddhism, the enlightened one is not one who never suffers, but one who accepts the suffering life has to dish out.¹ Westerners picture enlightened monks as being perfectly calm and unperturbed at all times, but they suffer just like the rest of us. The only difference is they accept what the rest of us fight.

If you’re chasing the fantasy of always-happy, these disasters will completely upend you. Not only will you be losing your job, home, or friend, you will be losing the fantasy of your “happy life.”

Let go of the fantasy of always-happy and accept that sometimes, terrible things happen.

Practice gratitude

Every major world religion recommends practicing gratitude in one way or another. Each religion differs in which deity you should thank and what the appropriate way of thanking them is, but they all agree that you should be heckin’ thankful for all the good stuff in your life.

Positive psychology agrees. Gratitude practices are routinely found to alleviate depression, anxiety, and all those other modern psychological plagues. Researchers theorize that the act of practicing gratitude is akin to practicing noticing the good things in life, which increases our ability to notice the good things in life, which leads to more gratitude, which leads to more noticing, on and on in a virtuous cycle.

Practice gratitude, even when you don’t feel like it. Practice enough, and eventually, you won’t have to practice anymore.

Be kind to others

Turns out major world religions don’t preach charity just to enable mendicant preachers to proselytize at street corners. Being kind and charitable to others increases our own well-being. People who are kind and charitable to others are often much happier people and much more satisfied with their lives.

Psychologists theorize people who give money to others are behaviorally reinforcing the thought pattern “I have enough money to give away.” The more often you give away money, the more you think “I have enough money to give away,” and the more financially secure you feel.

Kindness, on the other hand, is a simple habit. Nearly everything humans do on any given day is a habit. You don’t get angry at people for walking slowly because you have to, or because of what they did, but because it’s your habit to get angry. Kindness is nothing more than building the habit of responding to the world in a kind way.

When wait staff comes to your table, do you say “please” and “thank you?” Do you open doors for others? If you don’t, build a habit of doing so. It will feel awkward for a week and a half, then the habit will be ingrained, and you’ll never think about it again.

If you’re an unhappy person, these tips probably sound like malarkey. “What, I’m supposed to write down three things I’m grateful for at the end of the day, and say thank you to restaurant servers, and suddenly I’m going to be okay with the fact that I work shitty 50-hour weeks and that my partner won’t have sex with me?”

No. You’re supposed to do those things, and much more, for a period of several weeks to several years.

If someone told me they expected to go to the gym three times and put on 10lbs of muscle, I would tell them they’re out of their mind. You have to go to the gym three times a week for months before seeing serious muscle gain. Anything worth having takes time.

Same goes for happiness. You can’t practice gratitude one time and expect your neurology to magically be changed. You have to practice over and over, even when you don’t want to, and even when it sucks.

If you do, you will see gains. You will find that, over time, you don’t mind your shitty 50-hour workweeks so much. They’ll still suck, but you’ll be more able to cope. As you increase your ability to cope, you may even come up with a way to shorten or change your shitty work week. And the partner who won’t have sex with you may start having sex with you again because you’re happier and less of an asshole.

“We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves happy. 
The amount of work is the same.”

— Carlos Castaneda

Which will you choose?

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Endnote: The happiness skills listed in this article are far from a complete list. Far, far from it. For more, I recommend starting with Nataly Kogan’s book Happier Now (affiliate link).

1: Among other things, of course. Enlightened people also do not create any additional, self-caused suffering for themselves. Self-caused suffering makes up the bulk of human suffering, so this is no small feat. The art of happiness we’re studying here is, essentially, the art of reducing self-caused suffering.