When Do You Feel Happy? 6 Signs of Happiness

Share With Your Friends!

Shares

Have you ever asked yourself, “when do you feel happy”? What will bring you joy has nothing to do with status, money, or any external things that will make you happy. The number one way that you feel happiness is when you master what you feel like you’re lacking.

There are other times when you do feel happy, which I cover below. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t the happiest of people 5 – 7 years ago. It was when I was just starting to become who I actually am. I was unsure of who I was or who I was going to be. Everything was uncertain.

This kind of feeling just comes when you’re very young. Sure, I was good at school and getting A’s but being good at what I don’t lack didn’t bring me happiness. It was a time of uncertainty when I wasn’t even really sure what I wanted out of life. I was going through the motions and following what others were telling me to do.

Go to school, get a good job, and get married. I never asked myself the question “when do you feel happy?” because I didn’t want to look weak to my friends and family. I mean, I’m supposed to have figured everything out, wasn’t I? It took a long time to figure out that that wasn’t the right way to think.

I know better now. If you are down and going through life, please understand that you’re not alone. It took a long time to have enough self belief and genuinely say that I love and enjoy waking up in the morning. I’m still not at 100%, I would say I’m at 85%. However, it’s big progress from the 40% I was at years ago.

When Do You Feel Happy? 6 Signs of Happiness

When do you feel happy? Well one way that you can feel happiness is to SMASH that social share button and post to your favorite media for your friends to know! They may need to know the signs of happiness because this isn’t something people are willing to talk openly about.

I sure wasn’t. Only Google really knew that data as a result of me searching for the answer on Google. Share with your friends so that they can lead happier lives as well.

Moving on, when you ask “when do you feel happy?” it’s not any external material things that will bring you permanent happiness. Those things only bring temporary joy for a day or maybe even a week. Afterwards, we get used to having those things.

We end up wanting more and more things and practice excessive consumerism by the end of it all. That’s not the right way to live. The minimalist lifestyle will bring you more joy than having a bunch of stuff lying around in your house.

So with that, let’s dive into the 6 signs of happiness that will bring you permanent joy.

1) You Feel Happy When You Master What You’re Lacking

As stated above, this is THE number one way to bring happiness into your life. Self actualization is a powerful psychological concept people unconsciously chase every day. Self actualization is our number one goal in life. Deep down, we feel happy when we achieve what we want to achieve in life.

Your goals, dreams, and aspirations are an important aspect of your life. Your goals can range from being the CEO of a company to being a better parent for your kids. When we feel like we are lacking in our personal lives, we feel frustrated. Maybe work is breathing down your neck so you couldn’t tend to that area you are lacking.

Or it could be any other reason.

Whatever the definition of self actualization is to you, when you lack it, then you feel unfulfilled. Like there’s some missing hole that you want to fill but it’s not being filled. When you ignore it, one day it will hit you like a train wreck. Evaluate your happiness scale to see if you are generally on the right track to achieving success.

When you don’t, that’s when you might realize you feel unhappy.

2) You Feel Happy When the Ones You Love Love you Back

When do you feel happy? When the ones you love love you back.
Pure happiness.

The second most important way that you feel happy is when your loved ones love you back. There’s nothing more demoralizing when a significant other, parent, child, or sibling doesn’t reciprocate what you give them. When a random stranger says snarky comments to you, you don’t feel that bad.

You don’t have anything invested in that stranger, they’re just saying words to you. However, when the people who you want to be close with says those words to you, it hits you the most. Don’t be the richest person in the grave with no one to show up to attend the funeral.

It’s one thing for people to not care about you but it’s another for the people you care about to not care about you. The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. If your loved ones don’t feel anything for you, it will be a bigger deal than you know.

Take steps to nurture these relationships. When they love you back, you will feel joy. We are social creatures, we biologically crave the human interaction and relationships, especially deep and meaningful ones.

3) You Feel Happy When There is Progress

It doesn’t matter if you are moving forward or backward. Both count as positive or negative progress. it’s when you feel stuck in life when you feel frustrated, unhappy, and angry at the world. We might not like falling down, but we don’t get frustrated at it. Something is moving and happening.

When something forces us to stand still, that’s when we get frustrated. There are Dutch protestors who got angry at the new government lockdown restrictions back in January 2021. People do NOT like the feeling of doing nothing. They don’t want to feel like they are cooped up with no ability to move forward or backward.

When you have zero progress, that’s what you feel unhappy. Take the time to figure out what progress means to you. Is it building up a good net worth stack? Is it moving up the corporate ladder? Whatever it is, find out what will make you feel like you are moving forward and upward. Then work towards it.

4) You Feel Happy When You Help Others

My current job doesn’t bring me much joy. I am not helping others or myself, I’m helping the company get richer. I’m passionate about it because I’m good at my job but that doesn’t mean that I’m happy about the job. When I write personal finance articles helping my readers with their financial situation, I’m happy.

When a friend asks for advice on a work problem and I provide the correct advice that works, I’m happy. You will feel happiness when you feel like you are helping others succeed. This doesn’t mean help others at your own expense. When you help others while losing something, you will feel not so good.

It means that you are generous with what you have and are sharing with the world.

If want to feel happiness, consider figuring out what causes matter to you. Then volunteer your time to help out. Now, obviously, don’t help out when you haven’t fully helped yourself out first. Once you have your life figured out, lend your support to others.

5) You Feel Happy When You Love Yourself

When I was in my teens, it was difficult to love myself. I was good at everything business wise. However, it still didn’t make me feel happy. I didn’t hate myself but I felt neutrality towards me. I felt that I was just existing, doing things that others were telling me to do, and doing a good job at the end of it.

It was doing what everyone else was doing that made me feel average. However, once I started immersing myself with the online personal finance community, a whole world was open to me. So many people openly and comfortably talking about money was what I wanted to do as well.

Finally, a community out there understood that money is not an evil thing and talking about it isn’t a bad thing. Once I found the clique I wanted to associate with, I started to feel like what I wanted to do wasn’t a bad thing. It’s not a bad thing to want more money in my life.

Then that’s when I started to feel happy. That what I wanted to do wasn’t “evil” by any means.

6) You Feel Happy When the Little Things in Life Help You

It’s not the big things that will help you feel happy. It’s the little things. Life isn’t about those once in a while big moments but the accumulation of the little things that adds up to a greater whole. It works just like with compound interest. The small things compounds into a much larger thing by the end of it all.

Do you savor the little things like freshly baked bread? The way the birds chirp in the morning? Or fresh bed sheets that you just got out of the dryer? If you feel genuine appreciation and not appreciation because it’s a good thing, then you will feel happiness.

Sense the world around you, it’s a much more pleasurable environment than you know. Don’t let time pass you. You don’t want to think “where did all that time go?” without knowing how to appreciate the little things.

When do you feel happy? When little things make you feel good.
Delicious!

My Story with Unhappiness

When I graduated college, I made between $20 – $25,000 per year after tax advantaged contributions and taxes. I was living paycheck to paycheck. It was a lowly start for someone who poured his heart out during college. Not just with schoolwork but with multiple real life internships.

I felt angry. Did I really do all that work just to be paid near the poverty line? I was struggling. Once I started to feel some upward mobility is when that anger went away. Once I started to feel that I had more of what I was lacking, money, I felt better. That’s when my life felt like mine and I started to feel happiness.

Once my net worth hit $300,000, that’s when I started to feel security. That the work I meticulously put in was actually paying off and showing results. It took me about 5 years to reach that level. It takes a very long time to get there but anyone can get to where I am.

Unhappiness doesn’t feel good. You start doing illogical things like blaming others for your inability to achieve upward mobility. I had random bouts of anger at times, angry at the world at how slowly I’m progressing through in life. Anything else besides myself that I could blame, I blamed.

It’s a good thing I blamed in silence. If I couldn’t find others to blame, I found a mountain to climb and when I reached the top, yelled and shouted as loud as I could to get everything off my chest. The feeling of frustration that my progress is slower than a snail’s progress. It’s not a good feeling at all by any means.

I hope that my story helped in understanding what unhappiness feels like and what it can take to be happy.

Now it’s Your Turn. When Do You Feel Happy?

Now that I laid out the six signs that you are happy and outlined my own story of unhappiness, it’s now your turn. Answer the question “when do you feel happy?” You don’t have to answer right away. You can absorb and think about it for a couple of days afterwards.

Then you can truly sit down, evaluate, and look at what the next steps you should take are. Happiness is an emotional concept, not a logical concept. Therefore, if you feel unhappy, please feel free to shout at the top of your lungs when you climb a mountain or any other area without people around.

Sometimes, you just need to let go of the burden and anger that you’ve been holding in. Don’t live life with heavy shoulders weighing down at you. The world is already difficult enough, don’t make it even more difficult for yourself. Wherever you are in life, you have the absolute sole power to change it to your liking.

Even if you think or feel that you don’t, you do. Happiness is a learned emotion, not an innate one. When we are born, we don’t even know what happiness is, let alone what it feels like. It takes time, effort, and the right circumstances to actually become happy.

Then after putting in the work, one day you will feel intrinsic happiness. When you feel no need for anything else but yourself. It’s not a magical place where fairies and unicorn exist. You can get there as well. It was quite difficult road to get there, but I’m so happy I finally ended up there.

Your happy life is just around the corner. Seize it because you have the final power to do so!

Share With Your Friends!

Shares

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *