[SerycegeBunny]

dear friends,

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/ar...-be-happy.aspx

be well, be love.

david

the secret of how to be happy

harvard psychologist dan gilbert says that you ‘synthesize’ your happiness. that you have a ‘psychological immune system’ that helps you change your views about your world, in order to feel better about the world in which you find yourself.

not only that, he also maintains that when we imagine what could make us happy, such as new clothes or winning the lottery our brains are invariably wrong in advising us that those things will make us happy. in fact, statistics show that paraplegics are just as happy as lottery winners one year after the event of either becoming injured, or winning the lottery!

we tend to think that getting things such as a job, a new car, or a trip around the world is what will make us happy. however, studies have shown that we make ourselves happy by simply imagining that we are happy. so getting what we want doesn’t actually have anything to do with being happy.

why is this?

your prefrontal cortex works as an experience simulator, which means you can imagine an experience in your head before you try it out in real life. this ability is essentially what brought humankind out of the trees and into shopping malls – it allows you to desire things and events, imagining they will make you feel a certain way. the problem is that your simulator works rather poorly. in reality, gaining or losing something turns out to have far less impact and duration than you expect them to have. after about three months, the event (or item) has virtually no impact on your happiness…

so, your ability to create “synthetic” happiness is in fact your key to sustained happiness. which, by the way, is very real, even though it is not “natural.” synthetic happiness is a choice you make when you don’t get what you want, whereas natural happiness is what you feel when you do get what you want.