Do you like pie? How about happiness pie? In this mini-series, I am sharing with you how our happiness pie chart is broken down into three unique sections. Today, we talk about the second slice, circumstances.  

Transcript:

Welcome to Everyday Happiness where we create lasting happiness, in about 2 minutes a day,  through my signature method of Intentional Margins® (creating harmony between your to-dos and your priorities), happiness science, and musings about life. 

I'm your host Katie Jefcoat, and we are continuing our chat from yesterday. Today, we are expanding to discuss the happiness pie chart, which I learned from Sonja Lyubomirsky’s How to Happiness book. Now, keep in mind that this book was published in 2007, and since then they have revised some of their ideas due to more research. I talked about that news briefly in episode 350, but all the information here is based on that update. 

Moving on. Let’s take a quick moment to review. Your happiness pie is cut into three slices. The first slice is your pre-determined happiness range, which we talked about in the last episode. 

The second slice is your circumstances. This slice takes into account your current circumstances, whether you are rich or poor, healthy or ill, beautiful or ugly, successful or jobless, married or divorced, the list goes on and on. 

What I find astonishing is how little your current circumstances affect your overall happiness. Having all of the luck and riches in the world won’t make you much happier. On the plus side, that also means that negative situations like becoming ill, losing a job, getting divorced, or crashing your car have little impact on your long-term happiness. 

Let’s say you do have a happy circumstance change. The happiness it does give you is short-lived because hedonic adaptation will send you right back to that happiness range we discussed earlier. That is…unless you take active action to prevent hedonic adaptation. As a part of their update, Lyubomirsky notes that the Hedonic Adaptation Prevention (HAP) model demonstrates that you can continue to interact with a new life changes past its normal influence. To do this, you must actively act in one of two ways. First, you can continue having positive experiences with the change to feed that happiness fire, such as hosting dinner parties at a new home. Second, you can appreciate what you have instead of quickly moving on to dream of the next big thing. For example, you could actively think about all the awesome features of your new car, rather than wishing for the newest model. 

What’s so incredible about this is that you can influence how big this slice of your happiness pie is simply with the HAP model. 

So, what about the last slice of the pie? That last slice of the pie is your choice for intentional activities. This is the part of the pie that we have the most control over as our daily choices in what we do and how we think to determine our happiness levels. 

Want to learn more? Check out our next episode of Everyday Happiness! 

Get Everyday Happiness delivered to your inbox by subscribing at: https://www.katiejefcoat.com/happiness

And, let’s connect on social at @everydayhappinesswithkatie  and join the community on the hashtags #IntentionalMargins and #everydayhappinesswithkatie on Instagram

Links:  https://onamission.bio/everydayhappiness/

Inspired by this article in http://sonjalyubomirsky.com/files/2019/11/Sheldon-Lyubomirsky-2019.pdf