Behind Every Happy Person There Is Someone Who Fights

Behind every happy woman, there is a woman who fights against everything to stay that way. Behind every man who smiles at life, there is a man who fights against all odds to overcome difficulties, challenges and fears … Because happiness is not a key that we find: it is on the contrary, an attitude of combat, perseverance, vitality and, above all, resilience.

We know it sounds stoic, but  saying out loud that “life is not easy” holds the obvious that many will agree with. This is perhaps why one of the most classic representatives of this school, the Greek philosopher Epictetus, left us a teaching around the year 130 which does not leave us indifferent and which adapts to us. perfectly to the social and psychological reality in which we currently live.

“Happiness is internal, not external; therefore, it does not depend on what we have but on what we are. ”

If you’ve ever heard the classic saying that in order to be happy in life you don’t need a lot of things, you should know that’s wrong. Because we need a lot, yes, a lot of this so-called “inner work”. Such a psychological, motivational and emotional architecture cannot be acquired overnight.

If, throughout our lives, we have been educated through this pattern of associating happiness with the accumulation of things, goods and social relationships, it is likely that as soon as we fail to achieve this goal and can only live with the bare minimum, we felt desolation, vulnerability and dissatisfaction.

Oliver Bukerman is one of today’s best-known authors who help us be happy. His point of view is undoubtedly one of the most innovative in the publishing market. With his book  The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Cannot Endure Positive Thinking,  he invites us to set aside Martin Seligman’s classic point of view. This is justified by an idea with which we will mostly agree.

Much of the personal help books remind us of the need to cultivate our positive side,  to always strive to seek the good side of life to attract it to us, to always think of the best so that this path with yellow tiles appears under our feet.

Oliver Bukerman explains that these ideas end up exhausting and can even be counterproductive. The current economic climate, combined with political and environmental insecurity, means that often it is not enough to have hope, it is not enough to cultivate positive thinking.

In the book  The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Cannot Endure Positive Thinking,  we highlight the need to assume, at first, that life is difficult,  that bad things also happen. to the right people and sometimes it just doesn’t take a lot of effort to make something work. Adversity is there, like a stray animal which, almost without us knowing how, pounces on us when we least expect it.

Being positive is good, but being able to deal with all the negative times is imperative. We need to be able to accept failure –  and come out of it -,  take the losses  – and face them – and understand that life is a constant change.

Happy people and their daily strategies

We already know that to achieve this adequate well-being we need “a lot”:  we must be responsible for negative emotions, architects of realistic goals in a complex world,  foremen of overcoming when adversity knocks on our doors and surviving. -the daily lives of all the challenges that fate places on our path …

“Human happiness is usually not achieved through big luck, which can happen very rarely, but through small things that can happen every day.”

-Benjamin Franklin-

It is obvious that we have not been trained for this and that  these methods of “surpassing oneself” cannot be learned overnight. So, before we fall into the desperation of not knowing what to do to act the same as happy people, let’s think about this a bit. Here are some simple strategies and points of view that we can make our own:

• The world is as it is, changeable, capricious and difficult. We must accept this complexity and not hide behind it,  not take refuge in the simplest things, in the “I stay here and I do not try anything” or in the “it is useless since it is not there is no hope ” .
• Don’t imagine yourself as a strong, brave, and do-it-all hero / heroine with his shining armor. Build a picture that shows someone flexible, light and indestructible at the same time, like a bamboo which, day after day, overcomes the impact of the wind  and withstands the most violent of thunderstorms.

• Rather than stubbornly worshiping the positive things, create a new ideology that will allow you to embrace the negative so that you can learn and survive those times.

Finally, and this is a curious fact, there is one thing that can help you when problems assail you and when you cannot find a cognitive solution to get out of this maze: go out for a walk. Exercise is very useful when we only see walls on the horizon: it is ultimately another simple, inexpensive, and accessible way to learn to be happy.