Catching Happiness by Joshua Go Tian
In recent times, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be truly happy. My happiness was inconsistent. It depended on acts like eating, enjoying the latest Marvel movie, or listening to music. These are all stimulants. Later I questioned: to what extent does stimulation equal happiness? Should I learn how to be happy without the presence of stimulation?
(Something to ponder on is asking, is our whole life just simply a stimulation?)
Recently, I came across an idea that the way people try to achieve happiness is seen through an analogy of the sea: wherein the sea’s height is happiness. The sea’s height (happiness) is composed of the regular sea level and waves, and the concept explains that people too often focus on the spikes of happiness – the waves – instead of increasing their baseline happiness – the sea level.
I find the analogy of the sea applicable in when I watch movies – inside the theater, I’d be transported to an entire world of heightened emotion and beauty, BUT, once the movie ends, life begins to feel dull. Applying the analogy of the sea, I realize that movies are a form of waves to me, and exiting the theater is my regular sea level. I want to make it so that, when I snap back to reality coming from a movie, I’d try to make my regular sea level a movie of its own. I’d make the sea just as high as its waves.
But how?
Gratitude!
Movies have all these scenes where we realize the beauty of life, however, some (including myself) fail to realize the beauty in the same scenes that occur in our daily lives. Why is that so?
An experiment by Dr. Emmons and Dr. McCullough (“Giving thanks,” 2021) explored the effects of gratitude on one’s well-being, and found that gratitude indeed had benefits on the participants.
Each participant was asked to write sentences each week, either on what they were grateful for, what irritated them, or what affected them (neither negative nor positive). After 10 weeks, those who wrote about what they were grateful for:
Were more optimistic and looked at life positively, as compared to those who wrote about irritations, and exercised more!
If you’d like to read on gratitude, many more researches were conducted on the phenomenon, supporting its relationship with one’s well being.
How can we cultivate gratitude?
Cultivating gratitude in the pandemic may prove to be challenging, and so what I’ve personally been doing is keeping a gratitude journal, wherein I write about what I was grateful for each day. In doing this daily habit, I’ve found myself to be subconsciously more attentive towards small details that I find beautiful during the day, just like the way the sun creams the living room, or the grace of a fish swimming in the aquarium.
I recently came across another method to cultivate gratitude: “awe walks.” These are 15-minute walks where you let go of distractions and focus on the moment as you walk in a new and vast environment, like a city street you’ve never been to, a garden, or a river. Research suggests that awe walks improve one’s well-being and make people feel the vastness of the world, and as a result, awe walkers benefit from:
Being able to focus less on themselves (hence, worrying less!)
Improve their mood,
And becoming more generous.
If you’d like to try it out, read here for more instructions on how to do an awe walk!
These two are my personal methods to cultivate gratitude, and feel free to start here! If you’re curious about other methods, you can try out:
Praying,
And meditating!
Aside from these aforementioned affirmations, don’t be afraid to experiment and explore on the concept of gratitude. Keep exploring and trying new things that work for you!
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Words by Joshua Go Tian, Copy Edited by Jacob Tambunting
Photo by Macy Castañeda Lee
