Dan Gilbert is a social psychologist, writer and professor at Harvard University. He became famous for his book “What Makes Us Happy”, which has been translated into more than 30 languages. He was also famous because, in his lectures and lectures, he guarantees to have found what all human beings, some incessantly seek: the recipe for happiness.
At first glance, Gilbert’s ideas may seem frivolous, the idea of a recipe for happiness seems more associated with the self-help market than a deep approach to man, however, this psychologist is strict in his conclusions.
- He is convinced that there is a recipe to be happy.
- But he also stresses that there are no shortcuts in the search for this goal.
He says the first problem is that there are many people who don’t know exactly what makes them happy. He also says you can’t and shouldn’t be happy all the time. If that’s the case, we might not even notice the difference between being happy and not being happy.
He points out that a compass that always points to the same place is useless, it must float, to be sensitive to change.
“The eye and brain are conspirators and, like most conspiracies, negotiate behind closed doors, in the backroom, outside our consciousness. “- Dan Gilbert-
Dan Gilbet ensures that being happy is an easier goal to achieve than most people think.
Happiness is not hidden somewhere, nor is it a treasure that must be found by chance, nor is it the result of reaching certain goals or a gift that arrives with luck or after winning the lottery.
Gilbert differentiates synthetic happiness from natural happiness. The synthetic is the one that appears after we have achieved something that we have undertaken. A job, a wedding, a trip, the first place in a contest, one?Like, on social media, whatever. According to him, this happiness is transient and strongly conditioned on a precise outcome.
On the other hand, we have natural happiness. It’s not a feeling, but a state that appears and becomes a model, it’s there when we achieve a goal, but also when we can’t achieve it.
It comes from the inside and what happens outside can’t change it substantially. And yes: there’s a recipe for happiness. Actually, it’s pretty simple.
The happiness recipe has only two ingredients and both are accessible to anyone who wants to own them. The first step is not to overestimate suffering.
There are many people who treasure the bad memories and negative experiences they have had in life, staring at them, and they also overestimate the suffering to come.
This ingredient is associated with the second stage of the recipe of happiness: trusting in one’s resilience, that is, we must convince ourselves that we can solve any situation that causes us pain.
Precisely, the lack of confidence in our ability to manage pain is one of the factors that feeds suffering the most.
Many times we do not embark on a project simply for fear of suffering at some point, in this way we end up limiting ourselves to anticipating suffering that may not come.
This is the worst: often suffering is not even concrete, it can already be happened or there may never be, in fact, fear, deep down, it is not about living suffering, but about not having the capacity to endure it. I can still stand it.
The recipe for happiness is complemented by some common practices that help us have more confidence in our own resilience and includes five simple activities that are available to all.
Dan Gilbert says learning to be happy is like losing weight: you have to make an effort. The day-to-day practices we need to focus on are:
Natural happiness is a state that we build step by step, day after day, the good news is that, within our possibilities, we will all be able to achieve that goal at some point.
In this sense, conviction and motivation are the energy that drives us, while skills such as emotional intelligence facilitate the transition. Somehow, the recipe for happiness is there, in the desire to want to enjoy life.