Lately, I have been reading You can be happy, No matter what by Richard Carlson. The book argues(rightly so) that happiness can’t be an outcome of some external factors. It can’t be achieved as a result of some material success or after achieving something in life. Happiness is the outcome of proper mindset and is the default state of a calm and composed mind.
Richard proposes 5 principles to keep life in perspective, namely the principles of thoughts, mood, separate realities, feelings and present moment.
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The Principle of thoughts: I have been wondering the concept of reality and perceived reality for a long time. Reality can be perceived in a different way for different people. A color blind person sees the world in a different shade. The reality is same for everyone, but the perceived reality is different for everyone. The Author argues that we create our own psychological realities and the kind of experience we are having in life can be altered greatly by recognizing the fact that we can alter or better our life experience by acknowledging the fact that most of our thought are just perceived reality and are just thoughts and doesn’t correlate to actual reality. Also, we can make our lives much better than being little more positive in our thoughts.
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The Principle of mood: Our thought fluctuates a lot and it create mood. The quality of our decisions are greatly influenced by mood. The reason being that our Intelligence is hijacked when we are in “low mood”. We look world in a very different way when we are in bad mood as compared to when we are in Good Mood. Nothing has changed, the world is same as it was previously — What has changed is our mood. The Author argues one shouldn’t be making critical decisions in bad mood. The
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The Principle of Separate realities: “Because we all think in a unique way, each of us lives in a separate psychological reality.” This is true everywhere. We need to understand this and have to be receptive about other’s opinion. Remember this as basic tenet of human psychology. Beyond the concepts of right and wrong, we need to understand that differences of opinion comes from different thought pattern and we should be receptive to different opinions!