The Ultimate Source of Happiness: Our Minds

Our attention and interpretation are the fundamental factors that decide our happiness

Happy people have a positivity bias in their habits of perceiving and interpreting the world.Rido/Shutterstock

Imagine a person who has “everything”: a loving family, good friends, health, wealth, power, or even fame. Yet this person lacks one thing: inner peace. Their mind is constantly occupied by negative emotions such as anger, anxiety, and sadness; they do not like themselves or trust others, and they take a grim view of everything. Is there any way we can call this person happy?

This little thought experiment reveals the central role that our minds play in our happiness. No matter how perfect everything may look from the outside, the source of happiness is within our minds. Indeed, decades of psychological research show that our happiness is primarily determined by the way our minds work. The exception is those who live a harsh life, where they struggle to meet their most basic needs. For most of us, our happiness is determined, for the most part, by our habits of thinking, feeling, and perceiving the world.

We can think of our mind like a factory: It takes what happens in the outside world as raw material, processes it, and turns it into various emotions and thoughts. This means that the exact same raw materials (say, a promotion at work or a breakup with a partner) can be processed differently by different minds. We are not always aware of our factory’s idiosyncratic production processes and the possibility of churning the same material into different products.

Some of us have “factory settings” that are quite conducive to the production of happiness; others have settings predisposed to produce unhappiness. These settings are a legacy of our genes and life experiences. The good news is that it is possible to readjust them. With dedicated time and effort, we can change the habits of our mind and become happier.

Readjusting Our Settings 

If we want to cultivate a mind that will produce more happiness out of the raw materials of life, we primarily need to work on two habits of our mind:

1. Our attention: what do we attend to.
2. Our interpretation: how we understand the things that we attend to.

Now, let’s examine why these two “settings” are so important to our happiness, and how we can adjust them for our benefit.

Happiness and Attention

Imagine that you find yourself moving slowly through a pitch-dark room, with a flashlight in your hand. There could be countless objects in this room—pretty or ugly, amusing or frightening, ordinary or unusual. As you move through this room, your thoughts and feelings will be determined by where you turn your flashlight and what is visible to you—not the complete objective reality of the room. If your flashlight misses the chocolate fountain but illuminates the skeleton, you will have a much different emotional reaction than vice versa.

As we move through life, our attention serves the same function as the flashlight: What it illuminates streams into our mind and becomes our reality; what it does not illuminate, we are blind to. Thus, where we turn our attention has a direct bearing on our happiness. When we momentarily focus on the good things in our life, such as the actions of a loved one or the nice cup of coffee we are enjoying, that immediately makes us feel better—even if nothing else has changed in our objective situation; go ahead and try it. But also be aware that the opposite happens when we turn our attention to negative things.

This idea is supported by studies that link individual differences in attention to happiness. Happy people are more naturally drawn to positive stimuli, and less happy people to negative stimuli.

Imagine that you are a participant in an eye-tracking study, and you are shown a number of faces with neutral expressions. Among all these neutral faces, there is one with a fearful expression. It turns out that the eyes of people who are more prone to anxiety are much faster at finding this negative image and slower to disengage from it.

How do you think you would perform if you were a participant in one of these studies? If your answer is disappointing to you, you should know that it is in our hands to train our attention to orient itself toward the positive. This is a mental habit and, like any other habit, it is established through practice.

The practice in this case is simple: Look at life with eyes a little more eager to find things to appreciate and like: the colors of spring flowers, your ability to move, the joy that music gives, or the smile of a loved one. The more we focus on the good things in our life, the more happiness we will derive from life. We may even turn this into a game: Every time we leave home, we may commit to not returning before noticing three pleasant things. Every time we talk to somebody, we can try to identify at least one good quality about them to appreciate. When we go to bed every night, we can make a point to think of something good and useful that we did during the day.

Noticing where we habitually turn the flashlight of our attention is crucial to increasing our happiness. For example, what kinds of books do we read, what kinds of videos do we watch, what kinds of social media accounts do we follow? These questions are important because our answers constitute the food that our mind consumes. And what malnutrition is to our physical health, malnutrition of the mind is to our mental health. If our attentional diet contains plenty of stuff that leaves a bad aftertaste in our soul and mind or generates negative thoughts about ourselves, others, and the world, then we might want to reconsider where we choose to allocate our attention.

Happiness and Interpretation

If attention is about what we look at, interpretation is about how we look at the things that we do. What is our general outlook on life? What meanings do we attach to the good or bad things that happen to us? How do we explain other people’s behaviors?

While it would not be healthy to constantly question the way we view things, it is also a mistake to assume that our point of view is the only and most valid one. Reality is often no different than that optical illusion that shows both an old, ugly woman and a young, elegant woman. It is entirely possible for two people to look at the same thing and perceive it very differently. And as psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated, our emotions are more of a response to our perception of the situation than its objective reality.

Naturally, some situations in life (say, death or divorce) induce more unhappiness than others. And certain events are very difficult, if not impossible, to look at from a positive perspective. Yet, virtually anything in life can be approached in ways that make us feel better or worse. One of the major differences between happy and unhappy people is that happy people perceive, interpret, and think about the same events in more positive ways than do unhappy ones.

In one study, university students were asked to write down one good and one bad event they had experienced in the past month. When an independent team of judges rated how good or bad each of these events objectively were, an interesting pattern emerged. According to the judges, the most and least happy students did not list objectively different events; it wasn’t the case, in other words, that the unhappy students were going through terrible things in their life and the happy students were entirely carefree. Yet, compared to happy students, unhappy students apparently perceived bad events as more negative and the good events as less positive.

The same pattern was observed when the researchers asked the participants to evaluate a set of hypothetical scenarios rather than their own experiences. Happy students evaluated good scenarios (e.g., “you were appointed to an important university committee”) as more positive than unhappy students, and negative scenarios (e.g., “you missed the application deadline for an internship you wanted”) as less negative.

Happy people clearly have a positivity bias in their habits of perceiving and interpreting the world. As if seen through rose-colored glasses, life in its various aspects appears to them in a more pleasant and desirable way. Interestingly, one way to predict a person’s happiness is to give them a list of random things (e.g., bicycles, letter-size paper, speed limits in traffic, Japan) and ask them how much they like each. People who express greater liking for these mundane aspects of life also report being happier. People who view themselves positively are more self-confident, people who view others positively have better relationships, and people who view the future more positively are more persistent and resilient. Positivity activates virtuous cycles and desirable self-fulfilling prophecies.

If we want to train our minds to be more positive, we should develop the habit of asking ourselves some questions that we normally don’t. For example, in the face of situations that bother us, we may ask, “Is there a way to approach this situation in a more positive and constructive way?” or, “How would a more optimistic person view this situation?”

The essence of positivity is finding value and meaning in our experiences, and if we remember to look for them, we should be able to find them. Sometimes it’s a lesson learned. Sometimes it’s renewed motivation. Sometimes it’s the excitement of new possibilities and beginnings. Sometimes it is the gratitude that “it could have been worse.” And sometimes it is the resolve to transform our suffering into something good and beneficial for others.

Whether we look at things from their bad or good side is, after all, a habit. Habits can be changed with effort, even if our genes and our environment are not fully cooperative. As long as we continue to practice the kind of optimism discussed here, positive thinking will make its way in our brain. These roads will evolve from narrow paths to wide boulevards over time, and our mind’s inclination towards positivity will inevitably increase.

Transforming Our Minds

Perhaps more than anything else, the habits of our mind determine our happiness or unhappiness in life. If we constantly turn our mind’s flashlight on the worst parts of our life, neglecting the good parts, or if we insist on interpreting everything that happens to us in a way that discourages us, we simply cannot be happy.

Fortunately, it is possible to change the habits of our minds, albeit not so easily. The effort we put into this is well worth it—because happiness may not be easy to find within ourselves, but it’s impossible to find it anywhere else.

This article was first published in Radiant Life Magazine.