Happiness and Satisfaction

I was recently talking about the difference between happiness and satisfaction.

In the movie “500 Days of Summer” the main character freaks out about how the girl he’s been seeing can’t commit to him, and the girl replies that she can’t promise that she’ll wake up every morning and feel the same way for him. That’s how I see happiness, as a moment-to-moment mood thing. Sometimes it has highs, but other times it fades away for no real reason, and it probably has mostly to do with rapidly turning over brain chemicals.

On the other hand, being able to take a step out of your environment, and looking at your life apart from the hectic mess is a good way to assess satisfaction. Life is going to be busy, sometimes crazy, and other times a hassle. But if you can say despite the pain, you still love your life, that’s something like real satisfaction.

To me, satisfaction is the more important of the two, especially since you have so much more control over it. Essentially, I think about it as putting yourself on a road you like and taking the detours and potholes as they come.

But there are definitely days when I randomly feel down for no real reason. Well, maybe there is a reason for it, but I think it’s probably just something superficial like not getting enough sleep, having worked out too hard, caffeine crash, etc.

So even though I think satisfaction is more important, dealing with your day to day happiness is important too. I used to not be a fan of these bandaid type solutions, but sometimes you just need short-term solutions to survive and help gap you to the long-term solutions. And knowing that it’s just a superficial thing makes it a lot easier to deal with, because you can fight back with superficial solutions.

Here are some that actually improve my mood:

1- Force myself to go to sleep early.
2- Get moving and go for a light workout.
3- Change something in my environment, like adding flowers to my apartment or slightly moving the angle of my couch.
4- Shower.

It’s nice to have little tricks like these to help take care of myself, and keep myself sane enough to focus on developing satisfaction with my life.

from ken

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