The Pursuit Of Happiness (Part 1: The 3 Initial Key Secrets To Happiness)

This is Part 1 of the series study 'The Pursuit Of Happiness' - the 3 initial secrets to happiness. This study goes further with Part 2: why comfort doesn't necessarily make us happy, and Part 3: why long-term happiness goes beyond our own initial survival needs. 

We often think happiness must be found in a magic formula of rules or tricks – if we just follow the same structure through life, or if we tell ourselves to be positive, if we seek to avoid negative aspects of life, or if we find some modern trend like biohacking or fad diets.

We tend to put a lot of pressure and expectations on ourselves to try to be happy all the time – like if we aren’t we must be doing something wrong in life.

Yet all this does is just create a sense of insecurity that only leads us further away from being happier in the long run.

We humans are great at overcomplicating things.

However, we can simplify our quest for happiness by realizing, accepting and remembering 3 secrets to happiness (or 3 simple truths if you will) to a longer, happier life, which we look into in this article.

Listen To Those Who Have Had A Lifetime To Figure Out The Secret To Happiness

Don’t take our word for it, this isn’t about our ‘feelings’ of what happiness should be. It’s our findings from a recent study we undertook:

When asking 100 people over the age of 75 what was their secret to a long life they overwhelmingly answered these 3 truths. If your mind is mentally focused on things within your control and you connect and share life with others, then you will be very likely to live a longer, happier life.

What was interesting was the correlation between the answers and the ease of answering. Despite their age, there wasn’t hesitation or deliberation over what helped them reach over 75 years old. It was a no-brainer to nearly all of them. Very few said money or security, many noted experiences and memories.

Those who had more experiences and memories of times with others or goals with meaning rated themselves as happier than those without. When you think of your life as a flashback the images that jump out are often personal memories shared with others, and rarely of events out of your control. You try not to remember the difficult experiences, but cherish the more positive ones.

It wasn’t just about having pleasant memories though, we found that 3 particular trends of wisdom emerged as a bedrock to those who considered themselves happier in life over time.

Something interesting emerged though. Oftentimes people’s happiness at the time didn’t seem so apparent to them, but more in retrospect when they were focused on practicing these 3 secrets to happiness (which we will uncover during the course of this article).

Some participants willingly discussed both good and bad memories to our team. When none of these 3 truths were present in a memory they tend not to remember it as a particularly good memory, and they had to dig deeper to uncover a positive element to it.

The Psychology Behind False Happiness

A strong mentality is a key factor to a better life. Those who had little confidence to go after something meaningful to them in life were often less satisfied and happy through life, and more bitter and resentful as they aged.

It wasn’t a case of trying and failing and being miserable. Even those who tried and failed were simply more content with the fact that they tried to go after something that held meaning to them, rather than playing it safe but avoiding the more meaningful path. It wasn’t about being ambitious or headstrong in a goal-getting manner either.

Often through our lives when we think we are growing and learning towards things that matter to us, we are actually being pulled in meaningless directions to make us feel safe (to appease our limbic system rather than to learn to manage our neocortex).

For example, when we chase material goals and climb ladders we think the more we achieve the happier we will become in life. It seldom happens though as we just want more.

The Perfectionists Dilemma

A perfectionist is always on an impossible path to perfection. We’ve been programmed to chase things we think will lead to happiness by actually chasing things to fulfill a bogus dream of perfection.

It’s our social being need to fit in which triggers this where our limbic system (where our immediate reactions and decisions are based) is then supported by our cautious neocortex (our more measured, but also easily ingrained processor) to reinforce this needy behavior.

What a perfectionist doesn’t realize is just how important it is to accept that failure is a healthy part of the game of life, and that connections aren’t about enabling or extending their own ego, but about factors like shared experiences, embracing differences, and wiring our minds to be less worried about the unknowns of life.

A perfectionist finds it hard to accept differences as it might take them off their own track or ladder of what is deemed as successful or happy in their minds. Instead, they seek to fill the voids by seeking validation in areas they aren’t so secure in, thinking that will appease them of worry, yet it ends up just coming back as it’s only covering cracks in our logic rather than dealing with the actual fear of failure looming underneath.

If you were to accept that life doesn’t have to be a competition to climb a ladder against others you may be told you are weak or have low status by those governed by it, but the survival of the fittest really isn’t the same as it was in the days when our physical survival was at stake each day.

The Change Of Survival

Today, when we are in survival mode it pays more to embrace connection and opportunities that arise from that than it does to seek to be the strongest. Although to simply rely on others or fall prey to the potential influence, bias or peer pressure isn’t enough on its own to thrive in life – you can easily be tred upon if you don’t have value or competence to offer too.

That is the true status game of today’s world – knowledge (even if it appears to be about popularity). Yet, we don’t acquire knowledge to just fit in to specialist roles or find an illusion of comfort in life (specialism is something that is becoming an old game compared to the need of smart generalists today).

We are simply happiest when we are learning for the sake of learning. We are creative creatures of curiosity underneath. When our curiosity is allowed to flourish we have purpose or passion and are in the flow of life where we forget about the needs of survival (such as earning an income or being led by the need to fit in or stand out), and we just find extra layers of motivation and productivity we didn’t even know we had in us.

The irony is this productive value is what we often wish we had when we fight so hard to try and find it, yet when we let our mind away from fears or expectations we often find our creativity will find a way to get lost in things it really enjoys (and every human enjoys learning about something), and it will help us find solutions more efficiently than if we cast it aside.

To share that joy with others, to learn from others, and to do so for the pure joy of learning in life rather than feeling we are being lectured or have to learn something to climb a ladder, sees our performance peak. We find a flow state that encompasses happiness at that moment.

Why Do We Find It Hard To Be Happy All The Time?

The secret to happiness is something we all already know subconsciously, but we often restrict ourselves from being so as we expect to be on that high all the time. We forget that the most rewarding feelings came after initial hard work.

Retrospectively we look back and see that we enjoyed something as we see the improvement, yet at the time we can actually feel pain stretching out muscles we didn’t know we had.

We Will Take The Path Of Least Resistance

Our limbic system signals pain as a threat and seizes to stop it. It seeks instant gratification instead. A different way to feel good, but more easily, quicker, without the pain.

It’s like being offered a piece of cake now or a bigger cake later. Most of us take the cake now as it’s there and will make us feel good instantly (this being the famous Marshmallow Test).

We fail to connect our happiness with the need for pushing ourselves through pain, through failures, and to see where the curiosity will lead when we do. We replace it with Youtube binges or social media ‘likes’ for quick dopamine rushes instead.

Companies know this and reinforce that behavior in you. Our weak limbic gets manipulated for cash.

We Think Happiness Is At The End Of An Upward Rainbow

We too often set ourselves up for failure though as we tell ourselves we have to be happy all the time, or that life should be a permanent, constant upward curve of progress and joy, but life seldom works like that. If it did then we would never feel the pain, or the down of a rollercoaster (and then never feel the rush of coming back up again – or vice versa).

You won’t find true happiness at the end of an extensive CV or in a job title. You won’t find it in a romantic ending movie, or in a perfect honeymoon. You might experience that temporarily but it won’t last, and it’s more relief rather than happiness, but to be happier more often than not, you have to let the fairytale go.

We Don’t Accept Failure

That doesn’t mean being negative, but it means accepting that toxic positivity, vicarious living, or seeking out perfectionism won’t help you find long-term happiness.

You won’t find it in criticism either, ones that dampen the soul to give up. You won’t find it in trying fight with others to climb ladders or be validated.

You will find it in accepting failures as part of a variety of learning.

That way you will accept that happiness has to go down at times for it to have its emotional effect. To be happy you have to have felt less happy before the emotion was triggered. It’s no coincidence that we feel better after hard times.

When you try and you fail at something, you are simply learning and knowing more about life, and feel better after as a result. So, fearing failure is really preventing happiness.

When Are We The Happiest In Life?

There seems to be a happiness curve as demonstrated by Johnathon Rauch in The Happiness Curve.

We build up crystallized intelligence from varied repetition that in later years serve us well. We also open up fluid intelligence as we make mistakes and learn to problem-solve without fears stifling our ability to do so.

If we consider why people are generally less happy during their 40’s and 50’s, we assume it’s because they are in the peak years of being busy, looking after young and old and sacrificing a lot on the way, yet if we were to reset our minds to consider challenges as opportunities to learn then we would embrace the busy cycle of challenges as an important part of life.

We wouldn’t fall into auto-pilot as much doing repetitive chores. We would find ways to mix things up and engage our problem-solving capacity which wouldn’t sap our energy as much.

It’s a mistake to think we are saving energy on auto-pilot. We simply aren’t firing any neurons which we need in order to boost energy or adrenaline.

Instead, what happens is we just drone out and find we fall into the pattern of not really listening, being overwhelmed by so much noise, influence, and responsibility, and at some point simply burnout, as we haven’t diffused anything.

It’s like being lazy and letting all the plates pile up. It only takes more energy when we do eventually clean them, and until we do we simply drain energy looking at them pile up thinking about yet another job we still have to do.

This form of procrastination on small tasks is a huge energy drainer, and we do it as we already cram our minds with so many tasks that pile up like dishes. We haven’t learnt to let go of those that don’t matter.

Studies suggest people generally become happier in their 60’s again as the load has been lifted, yet it’s also as they find more time and energy again to engage in real social interactions and connections that aren’t so work-based.

How many times during your peak working years did you meet up with other people and end up talking about work? It happens as there’s not an off-switch that is easy to hit compared to when you truly have finished work (and today’s Zoom-ready remote work change is only making people take work further into every area of their personal life).

Yet having no other focus and switching your mind off completely in your 60’s (and beyond) is hardly going to benefit your longevity. Social interactions help give some focus and structure, but so does keeping your mind sharp and finding other ways other than work to find purpose or meaning.

Thankfully, when people hit their 60’s they know the feeling of ‘use it or lose it’, and the survival mechanism for learning kicks in again. You know the years left compared to the years gone are increasingly fewer, so you know the meaning of making your life count, and as such happiness can blossom in the smallest of things.

When we are younger we are on a search to figure life out. We may be slightly apprehensive about all the things we have to figure out (where a 60-plus-year-old looks back with the wisdom to wonder what we were worried about). Yet, this doesn’t mean older people are the happiest.

People in their 20’s and 30’s are generally seen as happier too. In our younger years, with so much still to learn, our fluid intelligence is at a high activating our problem-solving capability, and we are likely to be more optimistic about all the new experiences we are having (or yet to have). Opportunities for social interactions are generally much higher also, so it should come as no surprise that our lives are generally happier in our 20’s and 30’s.

When we become much older in wisdom we tend to look back and wonder what we were worried about. The excitement of a 20-year-old with the shoulder of a 60-year-old has the ingredients for a very happy person.

However, what we often fail to recognize in our 20’s and 30’s is that our blind quests of climbing ladders can lead towards tunnel vision, and our social interactions can become dependent on peer pressure which prevents us from thinking for ourselves (a lack of crystalized intelligence or wisdom to know better).

We develop a notion that we must keep fighting for survival to simply be heard and fit into our peer’s expectations, or we become obsessed with the most trivial of issues and think happiness always has to be an upward curve.

We are so used to adding new experiences to life that we assume life has to keep getting better, so when we taste failure it burns. We take it personally rather than accepting it as a part of life, so over time, we tend to learn to avoid failure or pain as a defence reaction to the point of end up safety boxing or comfort zoning ourselves.

In time we may take fewer risks and fall into comfortably numb surroundings. Our original thinking wavers (lower fluid intelligence), our lives get busier, instant gratification continues to ostrich ourselves away from reality, and our dependency on a routine structure heightens.

This all sets us up nicely (or horribly) for the 20 approaching years of constant responsibility of young and old (although it doesn’t have to be like this in our 40’s and 50’s as researched in another article).

If we are honest, life is both joyful and challenging at all different ages, so what do we do if we want to weigh the happiness scale in our favor?

So, What Are The 3 Secrets To Happiness?

We already know the answer deep down, and they surfaced as quick-as-a-flash when we questioned our elderly participants about what they thought were the 3 secrets to happiness.

If after so many years of ups and downs people can get to that age and be optimistic about the future still and happy in pondering memories, then it shows there is hope for anyone, at any age, to have a happy base in life (even the 40’s and 50’s!).

The 3 secrets to happiness unraveled by our participants, and made quite obvious through this article, are:

• A curiosity to keep learning, and aiming to do so with variety and purpose.
• An acceptance of failing and letting go of things that out of our control.
• A desire to keep connecting with others.

Notice the word ‘keep’. Happiness isn’t a constant, it’s an emotion that fluctuates and our best bet in life is in our quest to simply keep going and to accept the dance of learning, failing, and connecting in life.

Happiness is when we allow our curiosity to wander we find more goals and solutions in life than if we hold ourselves back. It’s when we accept that it’s not about the highs of happiness but ensuring the lows won’t curb our happiness (they are simply enabling our happiness to be felt stronger when we come up again). It’s when we connect with others we allow ourselves to share our woes too and this makes them easier to overcome.

We all need to spark our curiosity, change our surroundings, interact with different people, develop a deeper relationship with a few, take a few more risks again, and be prepared to fail, as that is what life is, a journey of chapters, a rollercoaster that with have ups and downs.

Yet, these three secrets (or principles if you like) will put us on the upswing even when life is throwing us on a downswing.

It’s our curiosity and willingness to change our surroundings, take a few more risks and be prepared to fail, let things go, interact with different people and build shared connections that are absolutely key ingredients in our overall happiness in life.

No matter what our age we can all find ways to do this, even for a short while each day. Happiness is not a fleeting emotion, it’s a build-up of many fleeting moments of putting these 3 secrets to happiness in motion.

Look after those 3 truths and they will look after you!

How To Unlock The Secrets Of Happiness

As well as following the 3 secrets to happiness above you can also apply these actionable suggestions to help you unlock your potential for happier moments in life.

Rethink The Power Of Meditation

Pretty much every article on meditation or mindfulness out there promotes it as the cure to life, yet when it comes to embracing our flow we don’t find it through practicing mindfulness (despite modern popular belief) or when seeking to be less stressed or more comfortable.

Mindfulness can calm us down, yes, and channel our energies in a positive way, but it often doesn’t send our minds into a flow state of curiosity because we need more active stimulus for that. Meditation can make us more open towards seeking active stimulus, but it’s not the stimulus in itself.

Find Our Flow

Flow tends to work the best when our minds are challenged rather than comforted. We are at our most active when we are forced to adapt and to create. It’s about not relying on our past knowledge that our logic keeps in our memory bank, but to seek new or rewired knowledge that our creativity explores that counts.

It might not feel comfortable heading into the unknown. Our limbic jumps out and says ‘wait a minute, is this safe?’, but we have to push through this to find the flow that comes from learning something new, from failing at it, from getting up again, and from pushing for a new personal best, taking in a new surrounding, failing once more, and getting up starting again.

When we fail in flow we don’t mind (like we would if our stubborn logic was in control). We don’t imprint a message to our limbic to ‘not do that again’. Instead, we see the growth that came from exploring new territory or getting lost in the moment.

We begin to stretch our boundaries and open up more room for more memories and experiences.

Spice Up Variety

However, we must be careful. We need balance. When we keep doing the same thing though it just gets pushed into our long-term memory. It makes it easier to recall, but it also loses its power, its magic.

It’s like growing a new muscle. At first when you start working out after lots of time off you feel a lot of pain, but you also see good results fairly quickly, which motivates you through the pain.

This can be like the ‘flow’ state where you then keep going and enjoy it whether it’s painful or not. Then the repetition fatigue kicks in. You do the same thing again and again and before you know it you have lost the spark, you don’t see more gains. It’s easier to do now but it feels like a routine, a chore even.

So, what do you do?

You try to mix it up. You workout different muscle groups, you turn it into a social event. You play different sports, you challenge friends to beat each other’s best etc. Your motivation is found again, as are new states of flow.