How to Check How Happy You Are

The question of what really makes us happy has been addressed by countless experts in science and philosophy. The problem is that most people measure their life satisfaction by the wrong things or by their scores at TonyBet login.

No one walks through the world grinning like a honey-cake horse all the time. But if we want to feel happy in the long term, some things in our lives have to be right. But some of them are different than we think. Because we often attach satisfaction to the wrong things – and thus prevent ourselves from developing further and becoming sustainably happy in our lives. 

Three signs of happiness

Here are three indications of how happy you really are.

1. The inside does not match the outside

On paper, everything is perfect: you have a happy partnership and/or an intact family, you live in your dream house, and your job sounds like a winner of the lottery. But inside you, the information that all circumstances on the outside are an A with an asterisk has somehow not arrived. After all, no amount of money or outwardly perfect family will make us happy if our psyche can’t keep up.

Selfcare is not just a buzzword, nor is it about drinking red wine in the bathtub. It is much more important that we listen carefully to ourselves and take an honest inventory: How am I feeling right now? Am I really happy? And if not, why not? What do I need to feel satisfied? Do I have any unresolved traumas or issues that I need professional help with and that are currently holding me back from moving forward?

Simply telling our brain, “I’ve done everything on the checklist, now please be satisfied!” will unfortunately not work. Instead, we have to look inwards and find out what we need individually to feel happy. Only then can we really enjoy the beautiful external circumstances.

2. Stuck in the comfort zone

Happiness means different things to different people. For one person it is fulfilling to have a big family, for another it is pure happiness to be committed to something important in a job or voluntary work. Still another may be happy above all when traveling and discovering new things. But happiness research agrees that for long-term happiness, we need to break out of our comfort zone and try new things. Even if we have the feeling that we are perfectly happy in the world we have set up for ourselves, we can all benefit from thinking outside the box.

It can be very small things in everyday life: For example, we could try a new restaurant instead of always going to our favorite shop. Or we could take a different route to work. If we regularly venture out of our comfort zone with such mini-steps, we might notice that we are also somewhat stuck in larger matters – and get the desire to grow and develop here as well.

3. The Wrong definition of happiness

Do you ever catch yourself thinking thoughts like, “If only I could finally get that promotion” or “If only I were slimmer”? This is usually a fallacy. True happiness is not attached to getting something, achieving a goal, and certainly not looking a certain way. We often look for satisfaction far too much on the outside and cling to old beliefs that we may have inherited from our parents and/or the media. Namely, that we find happiness in having a great job and lots of money or being flawlessly beautiful (newsflash: you are beautiful anyway, just the way you are now).

Such externals may make us happy for a short moment – but in the long run we need other things. This has to do with the way our brain works. When we get a new job, a pay rise or even a diet success, our brain releases the reward hormone dopamine, which puts us into a kind of frenzy for a short time. The problem: we need more of these things very quickly so that we can get the next dopamine hit. In the long run, this not only doesn’t make us happier, it can even make us more unhappy if the dopamine rush and the flimsy feelings of happiness fail to materialise.

Instead, we should strive for meaning, that is, something that corresponds to our personal values. Because if we align our lives and actions with these values, it can bring us real satisfaction in the long run.

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