Breaking your Upper Limit

 

Most people hold themselves back from real happiness. Most people don’t want to be happy, which is why they aren’t. They just don’t realize this is the case. People are programmed to chase their foremost desire at almost any cost. (Imagine the adrenaline-fueled superhuman powers people develop in life-or-death emergencies.) It’s just a matter of what that foremost desire is. Often enough, it’s comfort. Or familiarity.  There are many reasons people thwart the feeling of happiness, but a lot of them have to do with assuming it means giving up on achieving more. 

Nobody wants to believe happiness is a choice, because that puts responsibility in their hands. It’s the same reason people self-pity: to delay action, to make an outcry to the universe, as though the more they state how bad things are, the more likely it is that someone else will change them. Happiness is not a rush of positive emotion elicited by random events that affirm the way you think something should go. Not sustainable happiness, anyway. The real stuff is the product of an intentional, mindful, daily practice, and it begins with choosing to commit to it. Everybody has a happiness tolerance—an upper limit. It is the capacity for which we allow ourselves to feel good. Some psychologists call it the “baseline,” the amount of happiness we “naturally” feel, and eventually revert back to, even if certain events or circumstances shift us temporarily.

The reason we don’t allow those shifts to become baselines is because of the upper limit—as soon as our circumstances extend beyond the amount of happiness we’re accustomed to and comfortable feeling, we unconsciously begin to self-sabotage. We are programmed to seek what we’ve known. So even though we think we’re after happiness, we’re actually trying to find whatever we’re most accustomed to, and we project that on whatever actually exists, over and over again.

#HumanNature