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Long time ago I heard/read somewhere that true happiness/happy life/being in general happy at all times is not possible and people who are not in a great place get frustrated by never achieving this and seeing that it feels like everyone else has something they don't.
What true happiness often seems to be (for most happy people) is actually being content
Happiness comes from being content with your life, not constant feeling of joy. When you are content with your life and situation, you'll enjoy your life more. You'll be "happy" with your life. And if you are content with your life you suddenly enjoy small things that add up to it.
I'm probably not explaining this very well, but hope you get something out of this comment!
That makes sense. Happiness is a state of mind.
It's like when you hear about people going through tragedy who come to terms with their circumstances. Some people might find that delusional, but does it matter if the person truly feels content?
I like what you said about it not being a constant state of joy, too.
I track my mood in a journal and each day and I've given myself four options for my overall mood was for the day. The options are:
Happy Okay Tired Bad
Perhaps counterintuitively, I mark the majority of my days as "happy" for the very reason you've described.
The vast majority of days, I'm not "happy" by most people's standards. I am content. But I think it's actually quite useful to call contentedness happiness.
For me, marking a day as anything other than "happy" requires some negativity to enter and for it to persist long enough that it spoils the overall contentedness.
For example, even if I wake up exhausted, depressed and otherwise miserable, if I take a nice long shower, have a cuddle with my husband and watch a show I love, I might still be able to salvage that day from "bad" to "okay"
I think it's important that people don't treat mood as a fixed immovable state. It's almost always a signal that should be acted upon.
Do you find that a mood journal is helpful? Why do you track it to begin with.
It sounds like a decent idea to simplify it like that. So many days I think that my life sucks when really everything isn't so bad and I am happy quite often.
Only problem if I were to apply your scale to myself is I would mark every other day as tired lmao. Why do you have that one as a separate category if you can be tired while experiencing these other moods?
I use "tired" for any physical stuff that affects my mood, so if I didn't sleep, or I'm sick, or on my period, those are the days I'm most likely to mark as "tired"
I can't remember why I started tracking (I think I was just curious) but I'm going on four years now and it helps a ton with trends and feeling like I'm not just lying to myself when I want to say something like "I've been feeling tired a lot lately"
Like, before tracking, I don't think I was even comfortable saying I experience depressive episodes because I just straight up didn't believe it was that bad, but with real data I'm able to see my "happy" levels declining month to month.
And "tired" is a useful metric in this context because it denotes days that "tiredness" was interceding on my happiness.
For example, let's say I didn't get a lot of sleep. I struggled through the work day. But I went to see a movie with friends in the evening. If I spent a solid portion of my day not aware or caring that I had been tired, I would mark that day as "happy"
But if I was tired in the morning, went to work, came home, lumped around for a few hours and went straight to bed, I'd mark that as "tired" and if over 50% of my month is days like that, I would want to take action.
Because I've had months with 80%+ happy days, so if I'm noticing my happy levels falling (Ie. 60%, 50%, 40%) I want to do something about it. I want to be doing counselling again, or I want to be going to the gym more, or seeing my friends more often.
So I guess for me, tracking helps make mood signals more obvious?
And on a daily level, I think it's also useful to do that little bit of self-reflection. Like, "yeah, there were some sucky things that happened today, but was it day "bad"? Or was it a good day with bad parts?
I'd advocate for anyone to try it, with whatever words/ moods make sense to you.
Thanks for asking too! It's fun to get to talk about it with someone.
Thank you for this! I never thought about it that way before.