Wrote my first Medium article today! Here it is in full:
“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” ~Napolean HIll
If one thing’s for sure, we are all on a quest for happiness. The founding fathers were brilliant to state our rights are “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” because for some reason we, as a society, are always in a constant pursuit of that elusive, ephemeral, diaphanous entity.
It continually escapes us each and every day.
I’ve been reading and researching a lot of books on Happiness and recently stumbled upon a deeper level of it that we all know as “Joy” which we’ve all heard but never have fully understood.
Dictionary.com defines Joy as, “the emotion of great delight or happiness caused by something exceptionally good or satisfying; keen pleasure; elation.”
As you can see, they are very similar, but in my many years of delving into books and hours of listening to YouTube/TED Talks/experts on happiness that JOY is actually the long-lasting version of happiness. For we are on a life-long quest to find happiness, but what we really should be striving for is longterm joy and contentment.
What’s interesting is that we all WANT happiness, and we spend most of our days trying to achieve it, only to finally not choose it because we are too busy chasing it. It’s a very strange and weird paradox that we find ourselves in.
So we fall into different ways of achieving it, which leads to both good and bad ways of “getting” it. And a lot of us go the chemical route, whether through stuffing our face out with our favorite foods, or going shopping, or doing drugs, or having sex, etc. Our brains get flushed with dopamine and we suddenly think that this is happiness. Our current culture lives on this temporary “instant gratification” strata that tricks us into believing that this is what life’s purpose is and that we should all live in constant state of hedonism because that’s what “happiness” is all about.
But, even though I’m a huge advocate of the positive psychology movement, I’ve been exploring this concept of JOY and how to find and cultivate THAT state of mind, and maintain it. Rather than searching for moments of fleeting seconds of pleasure, why not focus attention on building a support network of things that will sustain a longer-term period of contentment. That is what experts are now calling JOY.
It’s a word that has been around for centuries and is now being looked at with new light. And the jury is still out on how to ultimately achieve it, but some recent findings have found things like building a close network of friends that you can trust with your life, having a weekly game night, finding some silence and solitude, etc.
I’ve begun my own journey and will now actively choose to do things that I know will bring me joy in the long run. The easy low-hanging fruits are eating healthier and doing more exercise. Of course those are cliché and we all know those, but I haven’t actually been doing those because I give into the lizard brain of gorging myself full of pizza and fast food.
My 10,000 year old brain, back in the hunter gatherer days didn’t know when the next meal would be, so it learned to eat as much as possible and crave sugar, salt, fat. But now our neo-cortex’s can help us think much longer term and rationalize that we will actually be more unhappy if we stuff ourselves.
So following the “Eat, Move, Sleep” model, we have to return to our basics and re-train our minds and brains to think in the 21st century. It’s going to be a long journey, and building habits take at least 67 days, but starting is half the battle and it begins with a single step.
https://medium.com/@chewnami/finding-joy-d452331eefb#.zg0likrhg
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