You’ve been told wrong. Happiness isn’t a place. It’s a way of life. Learn how to find happiness in the backward approach to living with joy.

There’s a healing benefit to happiness. Research has shown happiness boosts your immune function, heart health, and productivity. It also changes the way people experience pain. The question is, is it happiness that changes your biology or happiness that leads you to engage in healthier activities?

The answer is both.

Happiness seems to be the elusive emotion most people strive for, but few experience it. Unfortunately, finding happiness is more complicated than it should be. One, because our definition of happiness is wrong. Two, because the backward law proves the more you try to be happy, the more unhappy you’ll be.

In this podcast, my husband Payton and I dive into happiness and why you should stop trying to find happiness and learn to create it. We also talk about the energetic frequency of emotion and how to use ‘glimmers’ to create safe patterns inside your brain.

What you were taught about happiness isn’t true

Like health, we have a faulty perspective of what happiness is. We’ve linked it to a place or destination you reach, like making a certain amount of money or hitting your goal weight. But happiness isn’t a destination you can arrive at.

Happiness is fleeting, like all emotions.

I know you always want to feel happy, but that’s against how emotions work. They’re temporary. Believing you can achieve a state of happiness makes you more unhappy. As the backward law proves, the more you try to be happy, the more unhappy you will become. Not because happiness is impossible but because striving for it makes you miss it.

If you want to create happiness, you have to be willing to experience a range of emotions. You have to understand pain and frustration to understand joy. It’s not one or the other, but lasting happiness comes from feeling a range of emotions and learning to let go of what doesn’t serve you to create the feelings that do.

Redefining Happiness

I had a flawed perspective of happiness. I thought it was the epitome of life satisfaction. If I could check a few boxes, my life would be forever and always fulfilled. But that gives a fleeting emotion like happiness all the power to dictate my life. It gives emotions the ability to determine my actions.

It created the monster inside me that forced me to live at the mercy of how I felt.

That’s why you can imagine how much I changed when I realized happiness is not a destination nor life’s fulfillment. I started to live differently. Really, I began to live.

Happiness is not a place. It’s a state of mind. And one you don’t need to be in every moment of every day. Not only is that impossible, but it’s also unhealthy.

Happiness is one of many emotions that humans are hardwired to experience. But it’s only one of many. Experiencing happiness fully requires you to experience all emotions, even the hard ones you try to avoid. How do you know what happiness is if you don’t know sadness and pain? Feeling pain is a prerequisite to feeling happy.

Stop Trying To Find Happiness And Create It

Emotions do not stand alone. They exist in cohesion with other feelings. You can feel fear and happiness simultaneously, just like you can experience pain and joy. These are called combined emotions. 

Combined emotions can feel complex, making them feel unsafe. But that’s only your perspective. The beauty of combined emotion is that it creates emotional freedom. It lets you understand that just because you feel something doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. Nor does it have to last.

The key is emotional intelligence, being able to experience a range of emotions and feelings without needing to act based on them but choosing what you’ll do with them. It’s feeling what you feel while controlling them. That is very different than being controlled by emotion. 

Remember, you have the power, not the emotion. You can learn to find happiness even in the hard things. In fact, that is the epitome of happiness, being present, experiencing life, and living fully.

As Penny Locaso defines happiness:

“Happiness is being able to ride the wave of every emotion that life throws at you, knowing that you can come out the other side just a little better than what you were before because you have the skills (focus, courage, curiosity), the resources (a positive mindset), and the support structure (a community) to make that happen.”

Happiness is a choice and one that changes your health.

Using Happiness to Heal

Happiness is a healing emotion. All emotions contain an energetic frequency that interacts with your personal frequency. Biologically speaking, higher energy emotions are more healing to the body, filling its energy tank. Low-energy emotions drain it.

Positive energy emotions like peace, love, joy, and courage enhance the body’s natural energy, boosting the immune function, healing, creating focus, and enhancing libido. It stimulates the body’s parasympathetic state, helping you heal, relax, digest, and connect.

Conversely, low-energy emotions like shame, guilt, fear, and apathy downregulate the body, shifting it into a sympathetic state produces a flight or flight response. Over time, this can lead to a freeze state leaving people stuck in a low-energy state.

Emotions are powerful sources of healing energy or draining energy. Research has estimated upwards of 70% of your total energy is emotional. Learning how to rebalance your emotions and working into a positive state even while feeling hard things helps the body achieve balance. It’s not just necessary but critical.

Making happiness necessary for health.

Find Happiness By Creating It

There is no formula or perfect system for happiness. In fact, humans are pretty terrible at estimating what will or won’t make us happy. But one thing is necessary for all of us, changing our view of happiness from a destination you achieve to a feeling you create.

Creating happiness tends to be a skill that requires just as much practice as any other skill. Happiness is learned. If you don’t learn it now, you’ll never be happy no matter where you arrive.

Perhaps the best place to start is to stop trying to prove yourself to others. Conforming to the world means you lose a sense of who you are. That is a recipe for disaster.

Instead, live out your purpose. Spend more time doing things that light your soul on fire and ignite your passion. Things that help you connect with others and the world. You’ll find the most happiness here, even on the most challenging days.

Get curious. Connect with others. Express creativity. Stay focused. Live meaningfully. And love deeply.

If you’re still struggling with happiness, try using glimmers to create safety in happiness. Glimmers are the opposite of triggers. They are micro-moments of joy that ground you and keep you focused on the positive. Glimmers are things like how the sun hits your skin or hearing the birds sing every morning. Learn more about glimmers here.

The bottom line; don’t wait for happiness but create it daily.