Happiness is a Choice?

What a great topic! Along with some fantastic responses and articles!

This topic has been one of the most eye opening and learning experiences I’ve had. I'd say that I am a happy person. or at least pointed in that general direction!( Reliah might disagree ) but I've always been in the camp of those that think you can choose to be happy. Which when you think about it.. why wouldn't someone choose to be happy? Like Mr. Avery says in the linked blog!

I think it boils down to training yourself to see good in all things, especially in your own self.(empathy) As well as understanding.

The ability to forgive yourself and others that may have wronged you(forgiveness).

And outward expressions of love to yourself and those around you. Even something as simple as a smile or a "how do you do" can change a person’s life. (love)

Truth is, life will suck from time to time. I like the coping skills and happiness skills that are talked about in the links. And they can help us with our core happiness. I would recommend anyone to read them.

As we live and learn we get to enjoy those around us, our friends and especially family. They become the icing on our core happiness cake!
Thank you Reliah for posting this! You’re a gem!

I suppose it depends on what the "happiness" is you're expecting to feel.

If happy for you is the absence of sadness, then maybe that's why you don't feel that you are happy. For me, there is no such thing as a total devoid of negative feeling. I think that would be living in denial.

Happiness for me is not a permanent state. It ebbs and flows around my day. I have moments where I'm irritated or sad or angry, but happiness is the general default setting of how you frame those experiences. Happy is finding things to laugh at regardless of whether there is sadness in my life. Happy is letting go of a crappy situation when its passed so I don't hang on to it and brood. Happy is is being moved to tears by something wonderful. And sometimes happy is bouncing around to cheap thrill pop songs while I work.

Im not happy all day, but I am happy every day.

Maybe you need to find out what happy is for you before you decide its not possible to chose it.

I think that you can choose to have a positive outlook and you can choose to unlearn the habit of knee jerk negativity just like you can learn or unlearn any habit (unless you're a nun).

I don't think that you can just choose to turn emotions on and off but you CAN choose to try and figure out what's blocking your happiness and you CAN choose to take positive steps to foster happiness. It's like you can't choose to have a beautiful bird live in your garden but you can take steps to make your garden an easier place for beautiful birds to live.

I've also enjoyed the answers, thanks everyone!! My thoughts are perhaps its like a boat, sure there is no boat really, but when faced with a stream it is good to be floating in it rather then sinking (but of course there is no stream either!)!! So in that context 'choosing' to be happy might mean choosing to face towards happiness consciously, rather then letting unhappiness dictate the direction of ones efforts to help oneself into a better state of mind. I tend to personally use the term orientation (as in a navigational sense), which I see as being a 3D type of 'compass heading'. Perhaps vector might be a mathematical term. Depending on what is causing unhappiness, I'll just assess where I'm at, pick a point where I want to be, get there and then reward myself - as a small step to rebuilding, say for example ones confidence in oneself. Further in that, the stream would be the emotion. I think there are lots of little tools and tricks which can serve to help. Some of them might be more suited to different circumstances... it is a very interesting topic.

Happiness, I've found, is a lot like Love.

See, Love is feeling you get. It's something that happens to you. It's something you don't really ask for, or look for, it just...becomes. Right there in your heart. And it changes the way you see the world, and it warms you on cold nights, and it's a fantastic thing, even if you didn't cause it.

But it's also a choice. Once it bites, once it takes hold in you, you have to keep it going. You have to choose courses of action that sustain it if you want to keep it. You have to make choices that will lead to it growing stronger instead of weaker.

Early man probably discovered fire through lightning strikes. A chance event would occur, and bring warmth and light to a dark night for some hapless ancestor. We couldn't control the lightning, so we had to kind of wait for the Universe to drop fire in our laps. But, once it did, we had a choice: we could enjoy the fire while it lasted, and then hope for another strike once it went out, or we could feed it twigs and leaves to keep it alive.

Happiness works this way often, too. You may not be able to force yourself to be happy, but once you are happy, it becomes a little easier to sustain it through proper thinking. It still won't last forever, you're still going to lose it for a while every now and then, and sometimes things genuinely get too hard to bear. And that's okay. What's important is that you try to keep the fire alive for as long as you can, and when it finally burns out, you hold onto the hope that it will strike again.

I guess it kind of depends on what is meant by happiness. Happiness, at least to me, isn't a feeling but a state of being. It's not something I can just do or think of to make happen.

When people tell me to "just be happy" it says to me that they do not accept me as I am and would rather I be someone else, someone who isn't sometimes sad or having negative emotions.

Russell Brand wrote: Happiness cannot forever be sustained, like some glistening bauble. It's a transitory thing like a butterfly alighting on Snow White's finger.

You're not happy because you're not being true to yourself.
I imagine right now you feel a bit like Alice as she tumbled down the rabbit hole. I could make a long response but I think this can best be expressed in a song by Jordis Unga and written by John Lennon:

It just so happens that I am reading a book by Kelly McGonigal called "The Willpower Instinct". In what I have read so far, she talk of so many of the issues that have been presented so far in this thread. Diet, exercise, and a host of other elements play into breaking down your ability to have the willpower to change yourself or to influence your own choices. We can tell ourselves all we want that we should be happy, but the bottom line is that unless we take control of how we take care of ourselves mentally, physically, and gastronomically, we don't stand a chance on "choosing" to be anything.


I wonder what choice you would make on the following images? It is a choice you may not have control over.

I don't know if it's probable, but it IS possible. I know, because I've done it.

I was in a particularly low point of my life, and one day a thought entered my mind. Why do I feel so miserable? What caused it? I couldn't think of any specific thing that affected my mood. That's when it hit me, that I was choosing to be unhappy, and that all I had to do was choose something else.

Now, I know that some things happen in life that seem to ruin your life/mood, and the natural reaction is to be unhappy. Despite my inability to think of anything at the time that was bothering me, like many of you, I have plenty to be unhappy about. But most of the time I try to choose to accept it, absorb it, and make it a part of me, so that it doesn't "bother" me, it just IS.