So often, we focus our energy on trying to do things that we believe will make us happy while, unfortunately, completely ignoring all the aspects of our life and the toxic habits that actually keep us from experiencing genuine happiness.
Today, we are going to be talking all about the top 10 secret causes of unhappiness and what we can do about them.
It really doesn’t matter how much effort we put into trying to become happy if, unknowingly, we are working behind the scenes to do the complete opposite.
Some of the things that keep us from true happiness have to do with our habits, mindset, or even our belief system.
The good news, however, is that all of these things can be transformed—which is exactly what we’ll be talking about today.
So let’s go ahead and jump right into the top 10 reasons we are not as happy as we could be.
1. Living by The Standard of others
The first problem is that we are living by the standards of other people instead of our own.
I think a lot of the time, we feel that, in order to be a caring person, we need to put the expectations and priorities of other people in front of our own.
I did this subconsciously throughout my life. I always felt that in order to love and honor people that is what we should do, and I thought there was some kind of nobility in that self-sacrifice.
But I learned the hard way that our needs really do matter, and we’re never going to truly feel happy when we aren’t doing what we know, deep down, is best for our own lives.
The truth is that we don’t need permission to make authentic choices and to live in a way that brings us joy and fulfillment, and only we can define what our lives should or should not be.
An important component to happiness is living our life in our own ways, and oftentimes, we can better serve others when we attend to our own needs first.
It’s so important that we not only learn to speak our truth but also to live our truth and not to be confined by the opinions of others, no matter how much we love and respect them.
And it’s also so important that we learn not to feel guilty about making these authentic choices for ourselves.
2. Believing Others Needs to Live By Our Rules
The second cause of unhappiness is having the belief that other people need to live their lives by our rules.
This is kind of the reverse of the first cause of unhappiness.
Just like we don’t want to live our lives trying to please other people, we also cannot expect other people to live their lives in a way that pleases us.
It is a huge source of frustration when we try to direct other people’s lives because other people simply do not play our rulebook and it is a huge energy waster trying to get other people on board with our ideals, beliefs, and standards.
And to clarify, I’m not talking about standing up for the rights of other people or educating other people about important topics.
I’m simply talking about the belief that people need to conform to our personal viewpoints and to live life the way we do.
The fact of the matter is that everyone is different. People have had unique life experiences, suffered different hurts, and see the world in completely different ways.
If we can learn to appreciate that we all think and behave differently and understand that we can’t always be right, we can learn to appreciate these differences instead of having them keep us from happiness.
3. Focusing On The Negative Aspects Of Situations
The third thing keeping us from being happy is constantly focusing on the negative aspects of situations.
Now, I know it’s a hard habit to break, and it is human nature to notice the negative aspects of situations, and that is perfectly healthy and good.
What I’m saying here is that we shouldn’t give them excessive focus and attention.
It’s simply not healthy to constantly exaggerate them or give them more attention than they deserve.
It’s also possible to reframe these situations and start to see the hidden good in them, to find that silver lining, and to learn from these situations.
We actually can control the amount of suffering we experience by controlling how we choose to view these situations.
If we can learn to be more optimistic and to look for hidden positives, we will definitely begin to become happier.
4. Social Comparison
And yes, I perfectly understand that this is also human nature, but it is something that we can definitely learn to fight against.
I’m sure you have heard the expression “compare despair,” which really just showcases our tendency to distress ourselves by comparing ourselves to people that we feel are more successful than we are.
Nowhere is this more prevalent than in social media, where we are constantly bombarded with images of people that we believe to be better off than us in some way or another—which is oftentimes not even the case.
We never know what is really happening in the lives of other people. We just know how they are choosing to portray themselves.
We certainly can’t let the successes or failures of other people help us determine how we feel about our own selves.
We all have completely different lives, and believe me, just because someone looks happy doesn’t mean that they actually are.
So the comparison is never really valid.
We need to learn to focus on our own lives and just try to be a better person or a better version of our own self from day to day.
5. Constantly Clouded by Worry
Now, worrying is normal and natural in some situations and certainly appropriate in some situations.
However, I can safely say that most of us crossed that line a long time ago and spent a disproportionate amount of time in inner turmoil.
The problem with worry is that it is not productive. It wastes time, it causes intense suffering, and it gets us nowhere. In fact, experiencing this much fear often makes us unable to think clearly or realistically.
So much of worry comes from not trusting life and from trying to control everything, which is self-defeating and completely impossible.
As Mark Twain once said, “I’ve suffered a great many catastrophes in my life, most of which never happened.”
If we can learn to break the habit of constant worrying, happiness would come about a lot easier.
6. Feeling Like it Doesn’t Have a Purpose
I think this one actually causes a lot of confusion because what we mean here is that our life needs to have meaning—not that it needs to have one specific focus that never changes for eternity.
One of my favorite quotes is, “There are two great days in a person’s life: the day we are born and the day we discover why.”
I think we have to realize, however, that it doesn’t have to be one thing that is constant or even something that is monumental in the eyes of other people.
Your purpose can change as you grow, and it just means that you are doing things that you feel are bigger than yourself. And it doesn’t have to define your external world, just your internal world.
It’s the reason we have for getting up in the morning. It can give us a sense of meaning and direction. And so, yes, that does mean that our purpose can change throughout our life, and oftentimes it does.
But it’s really important that we find that “why” behind what we do, because without that “why,” it’s very unlikely that we’re going to experience much true happiness.
7. Waiting For Specific Events to Occur Before We Allow Ourselves to Feel Happy
So this is when we tell ourselves that we will be happy when we have this job, or when we lose weight, or when we have this relationship, or when we have a baby, or whatever it is.
And the problem is not that we are setting goals. Goals are oftentimes very important to happiness.
The problem is that we are making our happiness contingent on reaching these goals, which isn’t always possible.
Secondly, we have to learn to enjoy the journey, which is oftentimes much more fulfilling than these actual events.
Research has also shown us that most of the time when we reach these goals, we’re only experiencing additional happiness for a short period of time, before we go back down to our happiness set point.
We have to understand that happiness is always found in the NOW.
It’s never found in these external events or these points of time in the future that may or may not come into existence.
We have to learn to live in the present moment and enjoy the present moment because this is the only time that we actually have.
8. Prioritizing Things With No Value
So we have to think about it this way: Usually, we have about four hours of discretionary time in our life, which means we have four hours that we are not eating, sleeping, or working to get done—and everything else in our life, which includes our free time and time to do things that are actually enjoyable for us.
But so many of us either waste that time doing obligations that we need to do that really aren’t that important that we have agreed to, or do things that don’t add a lot of value to our life—like watching television that we don’t care about or scrolling through social media.
So we need to realize that that time is actually extremely precious and to use every moment of that time to really truly enrich our lives.
9. Being Stuck in The Past
And this is something else that I can completely relate to.
And it’s very understandable when we feel this way because there are parts of our life that were so amazing that we want to repeat them and kind of relive them in our mind all the time.
And there are also other aspects of our life that are so terrible or tragic that we tend to ruminate over them again and again.
So either way, we are staying stuck in the past.
The first thing that we have to remember is that we don’t have to cling onto the good memories. They are with us forever. They’re not going to be lost.
Secondly, the bad things are in the past, and rumination does not help or change anything. We’ve got to keep in the present moment, where that happiness can actually be found.
Remember, there are endless beautiful possibilities for the future, and we can’t get caught up in the mindset that our past is going to be superior to what lies ahead.
10. Failure To Continuously Grow as a Person
So maybe we have unrealized dreams, maybe we are stuck in the comfort zone, or maybe our life is just kind of on repeat.
Or maybe we are confusing comfort and happiness—and these are two entirely different things.
In fact, a lot of times, comfort actually is a barrier to happiness.
So we’ve got to understand that personal growth is so important to becoming happy.
The seconds we stop growing, the seconds our happiness starts shrinking.
We have to learn to make the commitment to invest in our greatest resource, which is ourselves.
When we continue to grow and learn, we stay inspired, and our self-esteem starts to flourish. We see the wonders of the world and all the possibilities that lie there.
It helps us become more self-aware to find strengths and talents that we never knew we had.
It keeps life from becoming boring and it helps us to constantly become a better version of our own selves.
When we feel that we are making progress in our life the journey becomes much more enjoyable, interesting and fulfilling.
Personal growth is directly related to both life satisfaction and happiness.
So remember, it does not matter if we are guilty of doing all of these things or having these negative mindsets or these habits or these thought patterns, because they are 100% changeable and transformable.
And we have to remember that we are always in control of our own happiness.
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