“Happiness for any reason is just another form of misery.”—The Upanishads
Deep inside, you know that true happiness doesn’t come from merely collecting an assortment of happy experiences, situations, or things. While there isn’t anything wrong with that kind of happiness –it just isn’t the whole picture. It’s what I call being “happy for good reason.”
At your core, you know there’s something more than this. And you’re right. It’s what I call being “happy for no reason”– a neurophysiological state of peace and well-being that isn’t dependent on external circumstances.
Happy for no reason isn’t elation, euphoria, mood spikes, or peak experiences that don’t last. It doesn’t mean grinning like a fool 24/7 or experiencing a superficial high. It isn’t an emotion. In fact, when you are happy for no reason, you can have any emotion—including sadness, fear, anger or hurt—but you still experience that underlying state of peace and well-being.
When you’re happy for no reason, you bring happiness to your outer experiences rather than trying to extract happiness from them. You don’t need to manipulate the world around you to try to make yourself happy. You live from happiness, rather than for happiness.
This is a revolutionary concept. Most of us focus on collecting reasons to be happy, stringing together as many happy experiences as we can, like beads in a necklace, to create a happy life. We have to spend a lot of time and energy trying to find just the right beads so we can have a “happy necklace.”
Being happy for no reason, in our necklace analogy, is like having a happy string. No matter what beads we put on our necklace—good, bad or indifferent—our inner experience, which is the string that runs through them all, is happy, creating a happy life.
When you’re happy for no reason, it’s not that your life always looks perfect—it’s just that however it looks, you’ll still be happy.
Excerpt from Happy for No Reason: 7 Steps to Being Happy from the Inside Out by Marci Shimoff.
