Are You Still Discontent Despite Everything You’ve Done To Be Happy? Perhaps You Have The Wrong Idea About Happiness

by Marci Shimoff

Does it seem that there’s something missing in your life?

Whatever that is, you suspect it’s the key to why you’re not as happy as you wish you could be.

Do any of the statements below sound like you?

Every morning, you go through the motions. Your energy is stagnant and your mood is pulled downward by worried or anxious thoughts. What if your partner doesn’t love you enough? Is your health as good as it can be? Will you be able to live up to people’s expectations today?

You’re bored with your work, but not motivated to make any drastic changes. You wish you had a greater sense of purpose, but you can’t seem to mentally combine the things you like with making a living.

Generally, though, your life seems fine “on paper.” You should be content, but dread seems to creep in every once in a while, for no good reason.

You try to figure out why. You get hard on yourself…for not achieving more, for not following through on your dreams. Although you may have already achieved so much.

You tell yourself that you have many reasons to be happy: a loving family, wonderful friends, or a beautiful house. Maybe you also have a great career and a decent savings account, or you travel and have plenty of adventures, near and far.

You’ve come a long way to get where you are, and may have even done a lot of “personal work” and still…it seems like it’s not enough.

Something is still missing. But what?

You want to feel more alive.

You want to wake up each day with a sense of purpose and joy.

You want life to feel easy and pleasant instead of like an uphill battle so much of the time.

You just want to be happier, every day.

Maybe you’ve started to wonder, “Is there something wrong with me? Why am I so sad? And crabby? Am I just ungrateful?”

No, there isn’t anything wrong with you.

You just have the wrong idea about happiness.

I Was Wrong About Happiness, Too

I’m happy now, but I wasn’t born this way. Nope, I was a low-energy, sullen child.

You can pick me out of my old family photos, no problem. I’m the one who isn’t smiling.

My dad was my happiness mentor. I aspired to be like him.

He was the person who’d bound out of bed each morning, happy to be alive. He loved his work (he was a dentist) and he loved life. He laughed all the time. He was a constant ray of sunshine in our family.

As a child, I didn’t understand why my dad was happy and I wasn’t. I even asked him about it once. I wanted to know what his secret was. He said he didn’t know.

And that’s when I realized that some people are just born happy.

They don’t need everything in their life to be perfect in order to feel content, at peace, and satisfied.

I wasn’t one of those people, so I had to figure out what I could do to be happier.

In hindsight, I see that I had the wrong idea about happiness.

It’s no wonder. We all do.

I thought that happiness was the result of achieving certain goals and having an endless stream of pleasures in life. I had this idea that temporary pleasure—in the form of a fat paycheck, falling in love, and fitting into a small sized pair of jeans—was real happiness, and that if you could stack enough of those goals and pleasures together, you could feel happy all the time.

So I did what a lot of people do. I set goals for myself and I figured that once I reached those goals, then I’d be happy.

I set five goals:

1. have a successful career helping people
2. have a great husband or life partner
3. have wonderful friends
4. have a comfortable home
5. have the equivalent of Halle Berry’s body

By the time I was in my 30s, I had four out of the five goals. I don’t have Halle Berry’s body, but I have a healthy body for which I’m very grateful.

I worked really, really hard to get all my ducks in a row.

I had three books in the top five on the New York Times best seller list. I was giving speeches to thousands of people. I had the comfortable home. I had wonderful friends, a life partner I loved.

I even enjoyed staying in luxury hotels with gorgeous views on my book tour. I had arrived. Or had I?

Because despite having done everything “right,” despite attaining my goals, despite being surrounded by pleasure (comfortable accommodations, gourmet meals, compliments about my writing, and more), I should have been happy…

But I wasn’t.

You May Actually Be Programmed To Be Dissatisfied Most Of The Time

It wasn’t until I started doing extensive research on the topic that I learned the truth about happiness.

You see, all of us are born with a certain happiness set-point. That means our emotional thermostat is “set” along the scale from content and joyful most of the time, to unhappy most of the time—despite our circumstances and genetics.

We go through life thinking we can be happier if we just set certain goals for ourselves and achieve them: if we start a business, quit our stressful job, find our soul mate, get married.

And sure, we may have a temporary feeling of pleasure or positivity if we finally meet our goals, but that feeling won’t last, because we will inevitably default back down to our happiness set-point.

That’s what happened to me. I spent all those years going after goals I thought would make me happy, but the truth was that my happiness set-point was low from the time I was born.

The other thing I didn’t realize until later was that spending your life going after goals or pleasures won’t make you a naturally happy person every day—and in fact, may make you even MORE unhappy than if you weren’t doing all that striving and struggling.

In trying to reach certain goals, you may be wearing yourself out. You may be sacrificing quality time with your family for a better paycheck. You may be losing touch with the people you care about most. You may be putting yourself in a chronic state of pain, discomfort, or anxiety because you’re focusing so much on some health goal that’s irrelevant to your sense of happiness.

In other words, in doing the things you think will “make” you happy, you are actually making yourself UNHAPPY.

Isn’t that ironic?

After spending years interviewing hundreds of naturally happy people, and scouring the research on happiness, I’ve concluded that happiness isn’t found at the end of some goal.

It is something you can LEARN, by emulating specific habits and practices that actually raise your happiness set-point, the way they raised mine.

Here’s how…

Learn The Truth About Happiness And What To REALLY Do To Have More Of It

The way to feel happier every day, no matter what circumstances are going on in your life, is much easier than you think.

It involves practicing 21 specific habits that anyone can learn and apply in their daily life.

These are habits that raise your inner wellbeing, make you more resilient to setbacks and disappointments, and promote an ongoing sense of inner peace.

These habits not only raise your happiness set-point, they “train” your brain to have more positive thoughts, naturally raise your serotonin levels, and allow you to discover greater purpose and meaning in life.

You can learn these habits in a matter of about 10-20 minutes a day through my video program, 30 Days to a Happier Life.

You’ll also learn:

• 4 simple ways to train your brain to hold on to happy moments longer and have them “burned” into your memory bank easier, so you can look back on your past with joyful nostalgia instead of regret and longing
• What research says is evidence that your thoughts, emotions, and capacity for happiness has physical effects on your body and what to do to prevent unhappiness from damaging your vital organs
• The 3-day sleep challenge that allows you to tap into your body’s natural “healing time” every night, so you can maximize the amount of time you have to rest and rejuvenate every day
• A powerful reflection exercise with 5 questions designed to help you get more in touch with your life’s passion, so you can stop doing the work that drains you and live your life with a greater sense of purpose

And more!

In the years since I put these concepts into practice, I’ve helped hundreds of thousands of people attain a level of happiness they never thought was possible before.

You can start learning these habits to raise your happiness set-point right now, by watching the first day’s video risk-free here:

Look, I’m not saying that goals aren’t important. Having goals and meeting them can certainly give you a sense of accomplishment and bring you closer to the kind of life you want to live.

But attaining goals won’t make you a happier person. Raising your happiness set-point will.

Let me show you, step-by-step, how to do that, starting today.

With love and happiness,

P.S. Only a tiny part of happiness has to do with your circumstances (where you live, what you do, who you’re with). So stop driving yourself crazy trying to attain the “perfect” circumstances. It’s pointless!

Instead, focus on making yourself happier, no matter what. That’s what you’ll learn through my 30 Days to a Happier Life video program. Find out on Day 1’s video how being happier has been shown to make you wealthier, healthier, and live longer: