3 experts explain how to escape the happiness paradox

There is a false understanding that a happy life means being happy all the time

No, it's not. Learning to accept and even embrace painful emotions is an important part of a happy life

There is a paradox when it comes to pursuing happiness. On the one hand, we know that happiness is a good thing

At the same time, we also know from research that people who say to themselves, happiness is important for me, I want to pursue it

Those individuals actually end up being less happy. Pursuing happiness directly can cause more harm than good

But breaking it down into its elements can lead us to enjoy the indirect pursuit of happiness and by extension to raise our overall levels of happiness

The Harvard Study of Adult Development is the longest study of adult life that's ever been done

It started in 1938, and it has followed the same people throughout their entire lives

to understand what makes people thrive as they grow and develop. Well, it turns out the people in our 85-year study who stayed the happiest and the healthiest

were the people who had the warmest connections with others Our connections with other people help us weather the hard times of life and hard times are there in every life

There is a positive and a negative wave that goes through our lives, but the baseline

is positive in and of itself. In Greek, they have two different words for happiness

One is hedonic, and that's the typical pleasure, the joyful. Oh, this is wonderful and great

And then they have a word called eudaimonia, and that is that positive baseline that does not waver

There is so much happening in our lives that we pay attention to

and quite frankly, the little devices that we carry around don't help very much

But the problem is that our attention is so much absorbed in that, that we rarely, if ever, pay attention to just being present

When the mind quiets and you actually are at home in your body

to actually get in touch with that underlying happiness that the Greeks called eudaimonia

The good life involves a practice of ongoing care for each other, for our relationships

care for ourselves, and it's a process of continual change. It's a lifelong journey

So happiness is much more than pleasure. Happiness is whole being