FAQ


What is exactly a “happy place”?

Finding your own happy place doesn't mean that you have to be necessarily happy all the time. You can't be happy all the time and it's absolutely normal to feel down sometimes. It's also normal to completely lose it sometimes. Finding your own happy place is more about boosting your resilience and making choices. From my personal experience my happy place comes from being the best version possible of myself. How do I improve my resilience and deal with a difficult situation? I'm going to write down a plan and follow it. 

Also, a happy place doesn't have to be a physical place, but it could be. Is there any particular place where you feel you can relax or work productively without pressure? A place with the right temperature, lights, sounds, smells, amount of people, etc.? If you struggle to find a physical place where you feel happy and safe, you will have to work a little bit more and use some strategies. Some people find mindfulness and yoga useful, other people prefer high quality headphones and rock music (I'm one of them), others find easier to practice sports or go out for a run (definitely not me, I couldn't run for my life!). 

It's easier to find your own way if you keep your mind open and try different things. I didn't know I enjoyed doing pilates until I have been literally forced by my physiotherapist to do it. I tried yoga and it didn't work. We are wired differently and have different backgrounds, so different things could work. Just try.


Why a “happiest place” then?

Happiness it's not about having no difficulties in our lives, it's about being psychologically and emotionally well equipped to deal with them in a healthy way. That's why it's important to identify the things that make us happy and the things that increase our resilience. 

Once you know yourself well enough to know what could work for you, push yourself. Find your weaknesses and turn them into your superpower. It sounds like an overly positive and almost dull advertisement, I know. But if you look at the lives of some people who struggle enormously or dealt with traumas and then found the way to grow and be successful, you will see that what I say makes sense (Alex Zanardi and Niki Lauda will give you an idea of what I mean, but there are hundreds if not thousands of examples. I mention them only because I know their stories quite well). 

How do we build our resilience? There are many things we can do, and I will explore some strategies that worked for me in this blog. For example, I find writing both relaxing and rewarding, so you will probably find articles and short stories as well. This blog will be a pink box full of information, strategies, ideas and probably silly things (they're good for the mood).


One example...

Most people struggle to find a way to relax. I've spent some time asking people what they do to relax and I've noticed that they usually do the same things all over again, complaining about those things not working, though! And you know what else I've found out? That if you ask kids what do they do to relax or have a break the most common answer is: “I play videogames”. Now, this is not a quantitative research, but clearly there is trend. And clearly those thing are not working. 

How about moving the focus from “how to relax” to “how to feel happy”? A very clever person once said that stress doesn't actually exist. When I first heard this I was quite skeptical. But then, thinking about it more deeply, it kind of made sense. If you think about stress not in terms of “something that does something to you” but in terms of “how I react to that something”, it makes perfectly sense. In some way, we create the stress by reacting to a stressor in a unhealthy way. Boom. The stressor is not the problem, our reaction is the problem. We can't change the stressor or avoid it, right? Our boss will be nasty, the telephone will ring at the wrong time, the bus will be late, the supermarket will run out of toilet paper and your dog will eat your very important paperwork, and there is nothing you can do about it. But can you change how you react to the unexpected or to challenges? 

According to Stoicism you should accept whatever happens and don't worry too much. The term “Stoic” could be used in a negative way as “emotionless”, but we don't want that. Even Spock fell in love and felt upset sometimes. Stoicism is an ancient Greco-Roman philosophy. The ideal for the Stoic is to show psychological stability (equanimity) in the face of adversity. It doesn't mean being careless, it means being calm and stable, psychologically balanced and able to deal with adversity in a healthy way. Sounds like the key to happiness, huh? There are lots of thing we can do to build our resilience and feel happier.


Copyright stuff

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