Happiness can kill you! Being happy is good for humanity but should it be used 100% of the time? While most people believe happiness is a very positive emotion, it has some negative effects. There is a such thing as being too happy. Emotions such as anger and sadness are actually beneficial.
Positive emotions are great but not always. Being happy is an amazing feeling. Everyone has their own opinion about the definition of happiness. I believe happiness is the overall feeling of love, stability, and peace. This emotion contains many different positive effects. “More “positive” emotion is linked to a lower risk of various psychological illness, including depression, anxiety, and borderline personality disorder” (Don’t Worry...page 2). It is true that happiness is good for us. However, too much happiness can create carelessness and can become dangerous.
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Susan David author of Don’t Worry Be Gloomy stated, “When we’re overly cheerful, we tend to neglect important threats and dangers”. People who are happy tend to live carefree. When this becomes a habit, they lose all cautiousness and don’t think about the what ifs. “You might engage in riskier behaviors like drinking too much, binge eating, skipping birth control, and using drugs.” (Don’t Worry....page 2). The end results of these actions can definitely knock a person out of that happy space. Having a mixture of emotions is good. Sharon Begley from Happiness: Enough Already, believes that “once a moderate level of happiness is achieved, further increases can sometimes be detrimental” (Happiness... page 2). Negative emotions keeps a person well
Happiness is the positive emotion and contentment one feels naturally. Many Psychology studies have been concluded to display what pure happiness is. In the article, “In Pursuit of Unhappiness” by Darrin M. McMahon, he indicates that happiness cannot be forced. In the article, McMahon mentions a philosopher, John Stuart Mill, who acknowledges as well, that happiness can not be forced. He says that if one focuses on something other than their own happiness, happiness will come to them naturally. By what Mill says, people should be encouraged that happiness will come to them and can not force happiness to them. Another example is Jeffrey Kluger’s article, “The Happiness of Pursuit”, he talks about how people focus on never being happy. He says,
People push being happy on society as a total must in life; sadness is not an option. However, the research that has conducted to the study of happiness speaks otherwise. In this essay Sharon Begley's article "Happiness: Enough Already" critiques and analyzes societies need to be happy and the motivational affects it has on life. Begley believes that individuals do not always have to be happy, and being sad is okay and even good for us. She brings in the research of other professionals to build her claim that extreme constant happiness is not good for people. I strongly agree that we need to experience sadness to build motivation in life and character all around.
Thomas Szasz states in his writing, “happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly often attributed to the living to the dead, now attributed by adults to children and children to adults.” I do not agree that happiness is an imaginary state of mind. Happiness is scientifically proven to in fact be a real and natural feeling produced by the body, but it is up to your brain to make you feel it. When you are in a pleasing situation, your brain responds to the pleasing stimuli and releases endorphins that spread through your body, making you feel good. We just call this feeling happiness.
This is seemingly the case in the time period prior to the collapse of society. For example, when a character named “[Jeevan] reached Allan Gardens Park… he found himself blindsided by an unexpected joy. Arthur died… there’s nothing to be happy about. But there was… now he was certain, absolutely certain that he wanted to be a paramedic” (11). When Jeevan finally realized what he wanted to be, his true calling, he was overwhelmed with joy. Even though somebody had just died, all he could feel was happiness because he found something within himself. When Arthur was beginning to reflect upon his life, “He stared at his crown and ran through a secret list of everything that was good… Dancing with Clark when he was eighteen… Tanya sipping wine, her smile… Riding in his father’s snowplow when he was nine, the time [he] told a joke and his father and his little brother couldn’t stop laughing, the sheer joy he’d felt at that moment” (327). All of these different things brought Arthur happiness and eventually sadness at some point in his life, showing that nothing can keep you happy forever. The meaning of happiness is ever-changing. Since happiness was based off of how much you had, people had the ability to manipulate it by obtaining more
Happiness and sadness have a very interesting relationship. Many philosophers have taken this view point and gone deep into the idea to find out what is really true about it. Some say that if you have never felt sad, then you would never know whether or not you are truly happy, because of this some see that teaching and think of it in a fairly depressing light. Though it is not to say that they can’t exist separately, without sadness there would not be true happiness. This idea is a very interesting topic because there are very few people who can go through their lives and not be unhappy for at least a brief period of time. There are countless ways that somebody could become unhappy. To name a few, one could lose a family member, end
You may or may not have noticed this before, but when one observes the fact that they are happy, the feeling is instantly gone. "Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so," (Brink) Mill says. This self questioning of our own happiness often only gives us a sense of despair, and this is because simply asking this question is a type of insecurity. It is a norm in society to be as happy as everyone else, so although the people around us may seek to help us out, they are laying on more pressure. If we were all to ignore the subject of happiness, us as a whole society could become a much happier society.
David says, “An excess of freewheeling giddiness and a relative absence of more sober emotions can even be a marker for mania, a dangerous symptom of psychological illness” (124). Negative emotions have copious amounts of bad feelings but can also give people a more balanced life.
However, happiness also takes into account a wide range of other aspects of our lives, including our thoughts and actions, and even genetics. Therefore, happiness should be defined as the amalgamation of how we think and act, and how we interpret our experiences as positive or negative. What this means is that in order to become happier, we must simply force ourselves to become more optimistic. This is easier said than done, however. In order to have a noticeable increase in happiness, people must be willing to make lifestyle changes in addition to changing their mindset. However, the difference between optimism and delusion is a fine line, so people must be cautious to not exaggerate the positive parts of an experience or become overly optimistic. If we practice seeking out the positive views of our circumstances, with time we will find ourselves happier than
Ultimately being happy is not as great as it is talked up to be. Having too much happiness is not good. Being too happiness can cause us to miss the true value of happiness, only focus on ourselves, and it can cause us to be less alert to threats and dangerous situations around us. Being happy is a good thing but like all good things there are also some
Before we look into specifics, we’ll examine the history and development of “happiness” as a philosophy. Of course, the emotion of happiness has always existed, but it began to be seriously contemplated around 2,500 years ago by philosophers like Confucius, Buddha, Socrates and Aristotle. Shortly after Buddha taught his followers his Noble Eight Fold Path (which we will talk about later), Aristotle was teaching that happiness is “dependent on the individual” (Aristotle).
According to the Webster dictionary, the word happiness is defined as enjoying, showing, or marked by pleasure, satisfaction, or joy. When people think of happiness, they think about having a good feeling inside. There are many types of happiness, which are expressed in many ways. Happiness is something that you can't just get; it comes from your soul. Happiness can be changed through many things that happen in our everyday lives.
In addition to anyone being happy, genuine happiness is vulnerable. “If happiness is similarly available to people of any age, sex, or race, and to those of most income levels, who is happiest?” (Myers and Diener 14), the capacity of peoples’ joy is undiminished. Self-esteem, personal control, optimism, and extraversion are four inner traits that classify happy people. People who are happy admire themselves and feel personal control, empowered rather than helpless about their lifestyle. They are also optimistic and tend to be more healthy, successful, and happier than pessimistic people. Also, people that are happy are extraverted and they are happy when they are surrounded by a lot of people and even when they are alone. They are not happy because of their status of wealth.
When we are young children, we are introduced to the concept of "living happily ever after". This is a fairy-tale emotional state of absolute happiness, where nothing really happens, and nothing even seems to matter. It is a state of feeling good all the time. In fairy tales, this feeling is usually found in fulfilling marriages, royal castles, singing birds and laughing children. In real life, an even-keeled mood is more psychologically healthy than a mood in which you frequently achieve great heights of happiness. Furthermore, when you ask people what makes their lives worth living, they rarely mention their mood. They are more likely to talk about what they find meaningful, such as their work or relationships. Research suggests that if you focus too much on trying to feel good all the time, you’ll actually undermine your ability to ever feel good because no amount of feeling good will be satisfying to you. If feeling good all the time were the only requirement for happiness, then a person who uses cocaine every day would be extremely happy. In our endless struggle for more money, more love and more security, we have forgotten the most fundamental fact: happiness is not caused by possessions or social positions, and can in fact be experienced in any daily activity. We have made happiness a utopia: expensive, complicated, and unreachable.
In the modern day, most people have heard that being happy is good for health. We all hear this, but no one really tells us why it is so. When striving to be truly healthy, a person must keep in mind that a happy attitude is directly correlated to a healthy physique. Happy people feel healthier because they are more comfortable with themselves, more likely to help others through things like volunteering, and are usually better educated. Once individuals sustain a generally constant feeling of happiness, they start to feel healthier. It is also said by some that happiness helps prevent serious diseases but this is not a known fact, (Healthy Happiness). To be happy and get the benefits requires effort, but it is far from impossible, even so overdoing it can have harmful effects.
Happiness is a feeling that cannot be broken if strong enough, no matter how much sadness or hate is around you. Happiness can come from the smallest thing, for instance, music makes me happy and can easily change my mood, or when I am doing something I love my mood is easily changed. For others it could be whenever you do something well, or right and get recognition for it. It is the easiest feeling to be spread and given out but often neglected and forgotten about which is something we should all be more aware