The Philosophy of Happiness

Happiness is a very complex philosophy to examine. Each person has a unique view of what happiness is and what makes them happy. There are also several things that can affect your happiness, so the process of becoming happy means addressing different parts of your life – often at the same time. And to complicate it even further, happiness is both an individually derived emotion and one that is affected by other people in your life.

Whatever your view of happiness is, most people would agree that being happy is a big part of your holistic health (emotional, spiritual and physical). Being happy positively affects your health and being healthy positively affects your happiness. If you are interested in health and happiness, you can visit Authority Health for more exciting topics.

Emotional happiness is the most basic form of happiness where you are perceiving the positive things in your life and drawing connections between them and your state of existence. It may come from achieving goals that you have set out or simply from doing an activity that you enjoy. However, emotional happiness is quite complex because it links with other emotions like surprise and gratitude. 

Emotional happiness is mostly the manifestation of other forms of happiness and it is governed mainly by your psychological health. Your psychological health is also based on your perception of your reality and that may be relative to someone else’s reality or your own past.  For example, going on a camping trip might make you happy because you have fond memories of it, while a camping holiday may be downright miserable for someone else who is used to hotels. 

The key to emotional happiness is, therefore, to recognize your perception and either modify your perception or situation accordingly. 

There are so many different religions and people who don’t necessarily believe in spirituality, which makes spiritual happiness very personal. But, what is common amongst the various spiritual beliefs is that there should be a sense of purpose and possibly a life after death. Even in the absence of a spiritual belief, such as in someone who is an atheist, if they have made peace with their perception of what they believe will happen after they die, they have positively contributed to their spiritual happiness. 

If spiritual happiness is an important part of your life, then make sure to take the time to journey through your questions and form some solid beliefs to reduce spiritual confusion, which is a strong antagonist to spiritual happiness. Spiritual guilt also negatively affects spiritual happiness and must be addressed in order to obtain spiritual happiness.

Physical happiness is derived from being physically healthy. It’s hard to imagine someone being completely happy with chronic and recurrent pain. Physical happiness is also relative because truthfully, not many people are one hundred percent healthy. Again, it boils down to perception. A person who suffers from asthma, for example, has a condition that affects their physical abilities, but they may have a solution in the form of an inhaler, and can go on to live happy and meaningful lives. Physical happiness is then about finding an agreeable solution to being able to live life to the best of your physical ability, possibly drawing on the assistance of medicine or other health remedy options.

Financial happiness is probably the clearest cut, in the sense that being financially happy is easily defined by having enough finances to service your needs and many of your wants. It is interesting in the sense that fostering your financial happiness can negatively impact your other spheres of happiness – chasing down money can lead to emotional, spiritual, physical and social neglect. 

On the other hand, you may need to compromise slightly on other forms of happiness to have the time to address your financial wellbeing. So financial happiness probably best illustrates the need for balance between the different spheres that you need to achieve overall joy. 

And that really is one of the most open ways to view happiness – as a balance between all of the different things that affect it and finding the combination that makes you feel the happiest. This is definitely not an easy task, and for most people, it is a lifelong journey, but in the end, if you have really enjoyed the positives in your life, you have experienced happiness.