Boosting Happiness

Separation from your emotions and thoughts are the biggest influences on boosting happiness. We want to stubbornly hold on to ideas that we were taught in the past or we think defines us in some way. When these ideas become challenged, we take it as an insult and this begins negatively impacting us. We walk around thinking the whole world is against us. In reality, everyone has their own unique variation of ideas built from a unique historic sample path (growing up). This sample path is a combination of deep family genetics and personal experiences to date. Boosting happiness is all about coming to terms with this truth that everyone is experiencing this attachment to ideas. We want to understand the world, understanding the world makes us feel secure. When there are events that challenge our ideas, we become scared.

Information is Making you Sick

Separating yourself from thoughts is powerful and crucial for a healthy life. We become in love with our thoughts, but they really aren't who we are, they're just information we're exposed to on a daily basis.

Information is making you sick because there's more noise than signal on a daily basis. The amount of information we consume on the internet is too much to handle. Even water will harm us in too large of quantities. Removing yourself from information to recover and heal is a necessity. Take time to meditate, be in nature, and be still. Enjoy the world around you without constant exposure to stimulating information.

System 1 vs System 2

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky did studies on our mind and determined that there are two systems of the mind, system 1 and system 2. System 1 is the most common state because it's quick and easy to use, runs on emotion, and is operated by heuristics and biases. System 2 is the hard working system. It's the system we need to use to learn and grow. System 2 is hard work and thus isn't fun or easy to use.

We need to separate ourselves from our thoughts and emotions because most of these reside in system 1. A lot of our thoughts are someone else's information presented to us through some medium (tv/internet/etc) and we become emotionally stimulated by it. This emotional stimulation leads to system 1 errors because of our cognitive biases. In a way, we aren't even ourselves during some parts of the day. When you interact with someone else, there's a certain amount of empathy you need to possess (for your own mental health) in realizing that we operate in system 1 too much, and system 1 is often misguided.

Boosting Happiness through Separation

In conclusion, happiness is really about separating from this representation of ourselves we've formed based on emotions and ideas. In other words, we hold ourselves hostage by our thoughts formed from past experiences. We've imprisoned ourselves in our mind and we get upset that others aren't seeing our thoughts the way we do. Be patient with yourself and others while focusing on growing your own understanding. Be thankful you have the opportunity to learn, grow, and think.