Stop Worrying About The Future and Increase Your Happiness Today
Happiness is within your reach. Start by losing the habit of worrying about the future.
Instructions
1. - Imagine a worst possible future event in your personal life.
- Imagine how you would feel if that event was to occur.
- Realize that much of our unhappiness is the result of worrying about how terrible we would feel if that event was to occur.
2. Use the research results from the relatively new field of Positive Psychology (also known as Happiness Research) to understand that we all make mistakes in predicting how bad we will feel if some terrible event was to occur.
Specifically, we tend to predict that we will feel far worse and for a far longer period of time than is actually the case, according to the research.
Researchers in this field have identified something that they call the "psychological immune system". We don't know that we have it but this mental mechanism allows us to continue with our lives in the face of even the unimaginable. It uses strategies such as rationalization and adaptation to help us cope with the new circumstances of our lives.
Take the example of a famous study in the field. When people are asked about their level of happiness one year after the occurrence of two radically different events (winning the lottery or becoming a paraplegic).
Would you believe that in both cases the individuals returned to about their same level of happiness as before the events? As unbelievable as it sounds, that was the finding of the study.
3. The take-away message from this field is that the circumstances of our lives have a far smaller impact on our happiness than we believe. Therefore, worrying about events in the future, that may never even come to pass, robs us of our happiness in the here and now.
Go ahead, try it. Start right now with the resolution to stop worrying so much about the future. Live, as much as possible, in the present moment. Still make plans to achieve the best possible future you can imagine. But realize that if you fall short of that ideal future, you will still be just fine. Live here. Live now. Live today. Good luck.
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