Actually, the studies show the opposite to be true.
When you’re not happy or when you’re not happily achieving your goals, you tend to experience more stress, frustration, and anger along the way. These negative emotions in your body actually contribute to disease. You’ll notice it in the weakest part of your body first. So how can having a weakened immune system and poor health add to your motivation to achieve your goals? It can’t.
When you’re happy or when you happily achieve, you experience positive emotions such as compassion, gratitude, and joy. These positive emotions release powerful chemicals that support great health in your body. This has now been scientifically proven.
So, given the choice—and you do have a choice—which decision do you think will diminish your motivation to succeed more: happily achieving your goals in good health or unhappily struggling to achieve your goals in a body that is steadily declining in health?
When you’re happy, you experience less stress. When you experience less stress, you’re able to do more productive work, better quality work, and with less errors. When you happily achieve, it’s the negative spiral in reverse. I call it the positive spiral to health, wealth, happiness, and the abundance of all good things. Success begets more success. Happiness begets more happiness.
If you want more “stuff” because you think it will make you happy, it won’t. Study after study shows that more “stuff” or more money does not make you significantly happier in the long run. The only exception to this is if you are below the poverty level. Then, once you rise above poverty, more money or success doesn’t make you significantly happier in the long run.
When you achieve a goal, you may experience a spurt of short-term happiness, and that’s okay. But it doesn’t last long. You need to get another “fix” in order to feel happy or successful.
That’s the trap a lot of people fall into: the philosophy of “more.” “When I get this new house, then I will be happy. When I get this new car, then I will be happy. When I get out of debt, then I will be happy.” Then you get the new house and new car and out of debt and you say, “When I get this bigger house or another house, then I will be happy” and so on. It never ends. You can never be satisfied or happy unless you change your definition of success to “living a happy life,” rather than the philosophy of “more, more, more.”
I don’t have a problem with having goals or being ambitious. You should have a direction in your life. A personal purpose statement and goals give you that. But if you want to be happy now and in the future, regardless of what happens, don’t condition your happiness on the achievement of your goals. Choose to be happy now and then happily achieve.
People like to be around happy people and don’t like to be around unhappy people. Interestingly, when you’re happy you attract more happiness and success.
