Happiness. The elusive goal of waking up in the morning with no worries in the world. You wake up and have your partner, maybe kids, and your home. You are happy. To many, this sounds like happiness. We all have a version of this vision, and we equate that with happiness.
Problem: Life has to continue when we achieve happiness
Happiness is a noble goal. Yet given the fact that we are future oriented means that we will always have a vision of happiness to achieve. This means once we have achieved our vision, there will be another vision of happiness to strive for. This means we are perpetually stuck wondering how things could be better. Here is the idea put forward here; lets strive for meaning!
How to do this? Envision yourself when you woke up this morning. It may be that you had some idea of what a good day would look like, and what a bad one would look like. This might be the seed for achieving meaning for our lives. That is, we need something to strive for, but we also need to envision a situation for our lives we really want to avoid. Finding meaning for our lives requires us to have a goal, but also what we don’t want for our lives.
Negative emotion is at least as strong a motivator as positive emotion. It therefore doesn’t make sense that we wouldn’t incorporate a fear of the worst of ourselves as a tool to live our best lives. To move forward, we need a positive thing to strive for, and also a fear of what we don’t want for ourselves.
So how do we go about this? Picture yourself in 5 years’ time. Picture the best possible version of what things could be like. Now, picture the worst possible outcome if you did the things you know you shouldn’t do between now and then. Write these down and remember these are both possible for you. Here, you have a framework in which to live your life.
Remembering what the best and worst of yourself is, and the consequences of both in 5 years’ time: this is the difference between being optimistic and being integrated.
Why is it important to be integrated? Once you have achieved your vision of happiness, you will be able to continue to move forward into a meaningful life. That, we say, is true happiness.
Want to know more about how to achieve meaning in your life? let us support you in your quest. Book an appointment with Holistic Psychology today.
Sleiman “Slayman” Abou-Hamdan
