Is Happiness a skill?

By Jorge A Cevallos MD

February 17 2022

Are you happy? We all are at one point, and not so much at others. It is human to face problems in life, and it is common to end up in a crisis at times. We all struggle, and we all constantly strive for meaning, connection, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is not an easy feat to always be in a happy place. Is the answer positive thinking? Yes and no; in other words, It might just be more than positive thinking. The answer lies in the synergy of positive thinking and positive action.

Positive action? Yes, happiness can be thought of as a muscle and as a skill that we can all train and work out. It is definitely not the average concept of happiness, but let us explore this concept further.

Have you ever been in a situation where you kept on worrying all day every day, even though rationally, you knew it would not help the situation in any way to do this? You are not alone. This is very common to all of us as human beings, just as it is a pervasive thought nowadays that we tend to think of ourselves as objective machines. That is, entirely rational machines that can just turn on happy thoughts whenever we wish. Although controlling our thoughts is a key skill, and can be strengthened by practices such as meditation, it is by no means an easy practice or a skill that can by itself bring about happiness.

In fact, our brains are hardwired to put more emphasis on negative consequences, rather than focus on positive ones. Think about how you remember more strongly the most recent negative setback than your latest success. Similarly, it has been shown that losing money is more painful than gaining a larger amount of money. In essence, as humans, we are more afraid of loss than we are excited about gain.

This makes sense considering our brains evolved to be more concerned about how they will get us to survive the day, rather than put an emphasis on making us happy survivors.

Therefore, if happiness is a skill, happiness takes hard work, effort and dedication to develop. In this paradigm, let us think of happiness a a skill and work and improve on; as a muscle we can and must work out. We are all constantly bombarded with information about how to stay physically fit and eat nutritiously. But, where are all the emotional skill commercials? What is the emotional equivalent of a six pack? The psychological equivalent of repetitions? Of drinking that protein shake?

How do we work out our happiness? Well, there are many exercises we could do. For example, meditation has been proven to physically and physiologically help us strengthen focus, attention, and can be used to focus on virtues such as gratitude.

Yet, the most powerful "exercise or protein shake" we can work out when it comes to happiness is: the cultivation and maintenance of healthy social relationships.

For this, let us normalize having healthy, nurturing, non-toxic relationships! Let us normalize and place happiness as another common factor that requires promotion in regards to what being healthy means.

Let us place the skill of happiness, together with eating healthy and exercising. Let us normalize happiness as a skill when we say to our children eat well, exercise, and work out your happiness.

It has been shown that happiness does not come from wealth or from working hard. At least not the lasting kind. True lasting happiness comes from our relationships and strong social networks.

Interestingly, not only is happiness positively correlated with a strong social network, but rather health and wellness are as well are correlated with robust social support. People with strong and nurturing social networks, which we could now equate to happiness -therefore happy people- live longer.

It turns out it is not so much about being in a committed relationship, which is important, but rather the focus lies on the quality of our relationships. That is: listening to our people, being able to be vulnerable with them, and sharing what is close to our hearts.

We have now learned that happiness is a skill that needs positive thought but also positive action; with some actions being more powerful than others - cultivating strong, nurturing social networks.

I invite you to investing your time, heart, and effort in strengthening relationships around you. This might just be the most powerful thing we can do to work out our happiness.

Remember, itt takes dedication and commitment, just like the development of any other skill does. Let's go and work out our happiness muscle today!