WAKE UP: Escape the Comfort Cycle and Live Happier, Your Way
This Week in Happiness
You don’t end up with a life you don’t like by making hard decisions and doing hard things. It happens when you make the easiest choice over and over without even realizing it.
Comfort is static, unchanging non-awareness.
Discomfort is constantly evolving deep engagement with life.
without this realization you’ll be lying in your king-size bed one day and ask, Where did all the time go?
this is literally what happened during the pandemic, time felt like it was moving faster because we were forced into little comfort bubbles by a worldwide pandemic, that prevented us from being active in the ways humans need to be to thrive. (Kosak, 2022)
There’s an attack on the life you could live from two sides, and one of them is inside the house. Where does your mind wander when you’re going about your routine?
Are you working through your to-do list? Are you comparing yourself to others? Are you craving something or wishing you hadn’t done something?
This is how we mess things up for ourselves. Your mind keeps going back to work , comparing yourself to others, or feeling guilty. This constant mental noise is self-torture.
A Harvard study by Killingsworth and Gilbert closely looked at how people spent their days, tracking:
How happy certain activities made them.
How their thought patterns affected their happiness.
You can see their data visualized in the graph that follows. It shows how happy people are based on the activities they do. The horizontal axis shows happiness, and the size of the circle shows how often the activity occurs.
Mean happiness reported during each activity (top) and while mind wandering to unpleasant topics, neutral topics, pleasant topics or not mind wandering (bottom). The dashed line indicates the mean of happiness across all samples. Bubble area indicates the frequency of occurrence. The largest bubble (“not mind wandering”) corresponds to 53.1% of the samples, and the smallest bubble (“praying/worshipping/meditating”) corresponds to 0.1% of the samples.
A few interesting points:
Work is pretty common, but it doesn’t really make people happy. It would be interesting to distinguish between meaningful work and work people don’t enjoy
Making love is comparatively rare, but it’s a really positive experience.
Want to spend your day happier? Try to focus on activities like conversation, play, or going for a walk.
The bottom half of the graph looks at what is going on in our heads during these activities and how this affects our mood. The findings are pretty clear. The most common mental state recorded was being present in the moment, and it consistently made people the happiest. If you’re thinking about something else, you’re not as happy. If we’re always distracted by our thoughts, it’s hard to stay happy. Even when we’re just mindlessly wandering, we’re not as happy as when we’re enjoying or even suffering through the activity. Being present is what matters.
The bottom line is that thinking, even nice daydreaming, doesn’t really add to happiness.
When you’re in the moment and your mind isn’t wandering, that’s peace. But this peace is constantly under pressure from the outside. Our phones buzz pressuring us to fill every second with content or stimulation.
Here’s a striking paradox: Stuff that’s out of the ordinary can actually make us happier, while the easy options usually have neutral or negative results. It’s easy to spend time on your computer, but it won’t make you happy. It’s easier to listen to the radio than to spend time with yourself, but it won’t make you happier.
It’s interesting that the data shows time spent on the computer, which is often a form of procrastination, ranks lower in happiness than actual housework. We are extending the unhappiness we will feel by just not doing what needs to be done.
There’s this idea in systems theory that things can be fragile, robust, or antifragile.
Things that are fragile break when they’re stressed. Things that are strong and sturdy can handle it, but under enough pressure they will break. They’re both on a sliding scale of breakability.
But what about antifragile things? They grow stronger because of stress.
This is something special about nature and humans, our cells constantly are formed and die so that we can live. What doesn’t kill you can make you stronger. When a stressor is high enough to challenge you but not enough to cause lasting issues or take you out of the fight you can grow muscles, learn and become more ready for the next challenge.
When you bubble wrap yourself, you make your bed. You’ll end up with weak muscles. A belief in lacking problem-solving skills will become a true inability without practice. But when you push yourself to the limit, to that line between what you know you can do and what you’ve never done before, you’ll become stronger.
Exercise and having a conversation are harder choices than relaxing or watc
hing TV, but they make you stronger and happier. Rest isn’t inherently bad, and neither is TV, but without moderation and novelty, they can replace the life you could have with momentary comfort.
Here’s the issue: Our thoughts can be unsettling, and no one enjoys being bored, so we turn to the easy option, the comforting, fleeting excitement of hollow entertainment on our screens either in our pockets or in our living rooms.
It’s pretty simple: The Blue Pill or The Red Pill.
Do you keep taking it easy, or do you push yourself to live the happier life you know you have in you?
At the end of the day, it’s your call.
Better vibes exercise
How do you put this into practice?
If you’re feeling bored, try being mindful. Don’t give in to easy pleasures. Embrace that boredom and try to understand what you want or what you could do. Pursue the inspiration that comes from it. Do you feel sedentary? Go for a run. Feeling lonely? Reach out to a friend. Make art. If you’re constantly sedating yourself, you’ll forget about your real human needs.
get bored, and feel uncomfortable. Use that to change your life.
Source
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9070960