The 3 Mindsets That Secretly Ruin Your Happiness

This video is about how to be happier for the rest of your life. Starting today, we're going to cover three common mindsets that lead to unhappiness. Most people don't even realize they have these mindsets, or if they do, they don't know how to stop them. We'll also discuss some lessons from stoicism so that you can feel more joy every day. The first common cause of unhappiness is unmet desire. To most people, this seems both obvious and unavoidable. Of course you get unhappy when things aren't the way you want them to be. There are things you want. More money, fame, a different job, a better body, a better romantic partner, Whatever your thing is. You think, I'll be happy when I get that. That four word phrase, I'll be happy when can make you miserable. Because when you do get what you want, you'll experience something called hedonic adaptation. You'll feel a very short lived increase in happiness followed by a quick reset right back to your old baseline. Even worse, now the bar is raised for what you have to get in order to experience the next little burst of happiness. Dan Bull's Aaron explains it well in this clip.

When I got out of the boot camp, I'll use that as an example. I go to Outback Steakhouse. I'm at a 10 right now. If I go to the best restaurant in the world, I mean, I'm like maybe at like a six or a seven. I'm just like satisfied. I got three chefs. Like, I eat the best food all the time, you know what I mean? So like, that doesn't make me happy anymore.

The best food in the world, and it's a six or a seven. That's what hedonic adaptation does. Now, one caveat here is that Dan's always been rich. He doesn't know what it's like to live below the poverty line. That would obviously change his perspective, right? Do you feel that you're happier right.

Now than when you were broke or not really.

Sometimes it's a sometime thing, but I feel like the way that I have money kind of took away a lot of my happiness.

If you think a lot of money will make you happy, you never had a lot of money before.

At a certain level of poverty, more money can definitely increase your quality of life. But the amount you need to be happy is a lot lower than you think. For, for example, one of the most famous Stoic philosophers, Epictetus, was born a slave. Yet he found joy and inner peace through the Mindset that wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants. Now, maybe your desire isn't for material things. Maybe you just want to achieve your goals. That should make you happy, right? Unfortunately, if you aren't careful, this will just replace the hedonic hamster wheel with the achievement hamster wheel, and you'll find yourself continuously moving the goalpost for what you need to achieve in order to feel like your life is good enough. If it's success, you can never get enough of that. I realize that it's like it doesn't stop. It keeps calling you. It's like a drug. This doesn't mean that going after what you want or getting what you want is destined to make you unhappy. But if you can't be happy while you pursue a goal, you won't be happy when you achieve it. In fact, you may be really screwed when you achieve it because you can no longer pretend that that thing will make you happy.

I had bought into the not uncommon notion that when I taste success, when I get over there, then I'll be happy. But the strangest thing happened. As the show got more successful, I got more depressed.

So what's the solution? You learn to be happy today with what you already have. One tool for this is the stoic practice of negative visualization. It's a quick exercise to feel gratitude for your life as it is. Sam Harris describes it well. Here you can think of all the things that could happen to you, right, that haven't. And if any one of them happened to you, you would consider your prayers answered. If you could just be returned to this moment. By spending just five to 10 minutes meditating on the ways that your life could be worse, you will naturally start to feel more grateful for what you already have. Another secret to happiness is realizing you have the ability to experience happiness right now without needing anything external to trigger it. You are the happiness gatekeeper. You are the only person telling yourself that you aren't allowed to be happy. There's an amazing eight minute meditation called Uncaused Joy that can help you learn to tap into this internally generated joy that's always available. The meditation is on the Waking up app. That's something we have no affiliation with. We aren't sponsored, they aren't paying us, but I highly recommend it. Now, I wanted you to be able to experience this meditation for free, so I hunted down a free trial link for you. That link is in the description below. In addition to feeling happier, if you can accept that you need nothing external to be happy, Your fear of failure, rejection, judgment, it all basically disappears because. Because you know you can be happy no matter what. Now, onto the next common happiness killer that is sure to make you miserable. Isolated, upward comparison. This is when you focus on one thing about yourself and then compare it to someone who you think is better than you in that area. For example, listen to this clip of Alex Hormozi. Alex is a brilliant businessman. At the time of this clip, he was worth about $35 million.

I'm not Kylie Jenner, you know what I mean? And Kylie's younger than me and wealthy than me, which I'll tell you another one. When I found out she was a billionaire and she was younger than me, I literally, like, had a day where I was like. I just felt like. I felt horrible about myself.

Many of us spend our time envying other people. As our life improves, we simply find new people to envy. The cure to this happiness killer is, again, gratitude. You have to realize there are many, many people who would love to have your life. If that's hard for you to imagine, there are two YouTube channels you need to watch. Special books by special kids and invisible People. Both do important work bringing awareness to people that society tends to ignore. And both can remind you that you have a lot to be grateful for. A quick warning for this next clip. It's emotional.

After we interviewed last year, you went into housing. You had a house. Yeah. Me and my. My fiance, we had a house together, and she passed away, and then you. You ended up back outside. Yeah. I was like, I can't be in that house. And you had other bad news.

Yeah.

Got pancreatic cancer, stage four. I can't do anything about it. It's already spread from my pancreas all the way to my right side. So I'm looking at a year.

Even when things in your life are hard, you still have a lot to be grateful for. And if you think your life circumstances are so bad that it's impossible for you to feel grateful, listen to this.

I'm happy, though. I am so happy that I met so many people around here. Ms. Jane, I love her with all my heart. She always helps people out. The volunteers here at Jubilee, a lot of people that are on the street. That's what I'm proud of. I've had a good run. 43 years. Good run. It's all right.

There is something important to remember when you're thinking about the people living in tougher conditions than you. You are doing this to help you appreciate your life, not to negatively judge or feel superior to other people. Negatively judging other people is a poison. Judgmental people don't know how to feel good about themselves or so they tear down other people in their mind to give themselves a temporary feeling of superiority. This is extremely self damaging because the way you think about other people informs the way you think about yourself. If you are harsh towards other people, then when no one is around, your mind will turn that same habit onto you. Now on the other hand, if you get into the habit of thinking kind thoughts about other people, showing them compassion and empathy, you're much more likely to do that to yourself too. There's another great tool for recognizing that you are already living the dream life. It's a quick audio titled you are living the Dream Life. It's also on that Waking up app, but for this one I actually found a free link so you can listen to it without even having to sign up to the trial. That link is in the description below. Now there's one more habit we'll cover today that almost everyone allows to ruin their expectations. One of the quickest ways to make yourself miserable is with the phrase supposed to, or alternatively the word should. If you have a habit of thinking that someone should have treated you better, or things were supposed to go differently in the past, you are creating a happiness gap between reality and an imagined reality. Epictetus has a lesson that will change your life here if you let it. Happiness and freedom begin by understanding one Some things are in your control and some things are not. When you learn to distinguish between what you can and can't control, inner peace and outer effectiveness become possible. This doesn't mean you have to pretend everything that happened to you was great. It simply means it happened. You can't undo it. So instead focus on what you can do now. Sometimes life feels hard when you spend time telling yourself that things should be a different way. You don't make those hard moments easier, you just add extra suffering on top of whatever you're going through. The author Byron Katie has a great quote here that I love for this the only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with reality. So how can you stop resenting something that has happened to you? This isn't a cure all, but one thing that has personally helped me a lot in tough times is is recognizing you don't know your future. There's a great Chinese parable that explains this better than I can. It's about a farmer whose only horse runs away. His neighbor sees it happen and says to him, I'm so Sorry, that's a terrible loss. And the farmer responds, we'll see. A few days later, the horse comes back and brings seven wild horses with it. His neighbor exclaims, seven horses. You're rich. What good luck. And the farmer says, we'll see. The next day, the farmer's son is trying to tame one of the wild horses and breaks his leg. The their neighbor comes back to offer condolences. That's just terrible luck. And again, the farmer responds, we'll see. And on the last day of this story, the emperor's men come to the village to draft all the young men into the army. The farmer's son, with his broken leg, can't go. And when his neighbor congratulates the farmer on his good luck, the farmer responds, we'll see. As Roman emperor and famed Stoic Marcus Aurelius said, if you are pained by external things, it is not that they disturb you, but your judgment of them disturbs you. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment. You might think that's easy to say when you're the most powerful person in the world, but this same mindset helped get Epictetus through slavery. He taught we suffer not from the events in our lives, but from our judgment about them. To end this, I just want to say thank you so much for watching this video. When I do my own gratitude exercises, I feel grateful for you. The lessons I picked for today have all had a great impact on my own life, and I hope they can help you be happier.