Happiness Blog

The book Happiness Rules by Manuel Astruc, a board-certified psychiatrist from New York, discusses the relationship between success, burnout, and happiness. As an entrepreneur, Astruc knew about the devastating effects of burnout all too well. He uses stories about his life and struggles with burnout, addiction, and mental health to curate real but inspirational advice to the readers. 

As people, we often measure our worth based on our professional success. This constant pressure to be “better” can cause people to fall into burnout, defined by the World Health Organization as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” Some symptoms of burnout are exhaustion (physical and mental), being detached from work, growing cynical, and losing effectiveness. While burnout from work can seem only directly to affect your professional life, the catastrophic effects from continuous burnout seep their way into every aspect of your life. It affects your friends, family, mood, and outlook. The widespread effects of burnout can cause many people’s worlds to flip upside down. Does not work lead to success, which leads to happiness? Well, according to Astruc, no. He believes we must reverse this mindset, thinking that happiness leads to success. Astruc defines happiness as “the feeling of joy as you strive to achieve your potential.” If we change our goal to happiness rather than success, we will focus on things that truly matter to us. We will essentially be using happiness to fuel us and, therefore, our success. 

But how do we truly embrace happiness? Thankfully, Astruc gives us some guidelines: 

• Embrace the suck: Happiness is not always happy. You are not going to be perfectly content all the time. Along with life being generally difficult, changing how you function in the world is hard, even if it is for your benefit. Shifting your mindset is hard. It might be challenging to focus more on yourself and your needs. Breaking bad practices and maintaining a work-life balance is hard work. You must consciously tell yourself to focus on your well-being and break the cycle. But while this might be stressful, focusing on yourself and your happiness will ultimately improve your life. 
• Make your future bigger than the past: Complacency and stagnancy mixed is not a beneficial recipe. While you may feel comfortable in your ways, that does not make them good for you. Change is tough, especially when you feel like there is so much to do and you do not even know where to start. The best thing you can do is stop looking at the past. Do not wonder what you could have or should have done earlier. That will not do any good. Embrace where you are now. And think about what you have control of right now. Make your future bigger than the past. Make goals for yourself (see January 2023’s Something to Ponder for tips on SMART goals!). Goals create hope for the future and let you know that you are in control in the now. You have the power to make changes for the better. 
• Connection with others: Maintaining and improving your relationships with those around you is essential. Being so focused on work can often make us lose sight of those around us. Evaluate your relationships: Are they healthy or unhealthy? Why? What can I do to maintain my connection with this person? As humans, we need connections with others to thrive. 
• Blaze your own trail: Evaluate what makes you you. What makes you unique? What are your strongest abilities? What is your purpose? What are you curious about? What do you want to pursue? We can often get caught up in what people say is valuable without actually evaluating it for ourselves. That is why it is so important to explore different things. And with the rise of the internet, online courses and resources are more available now than ever! Truly explore what makes you happy and fulfilled. If you focus on that, success will come. 
• Commit to enjoying the ride no matter what: Improving yourself is not linear. It is hard work to change anything in your routine, let alone how you view success and, more broadly, life. Do not expect to stay on course the whole time. Being off course is part of the ride of improvement. Do not get discouraged if you mess up. If anything, be excited! You are doing the work! As long as you understand what went wrong and how to fix it moving forward, that is great! Be proud of yourself for trying, failing, and then getting back up. That is the hardest part. 

I know that is a lot of information to think about, but if you want to hear more directly from Manuel Astruc, I strongly encourage you to read his book Happiness Rules. There are even a few videos of him on Youtube if you are a more visual person!

Phones have become an intricate part of our lives. Now that we can access seemingly everything we want to with just a couple taps and swipes, it can almost feel impossible to not want to scroll on social media apps, text, call, take photos, browse google or do anything else virtually we want when we want to. This, however, can be emotionally draining and exhausting, as well as impact our mental health in a variety of ways. For one, constant messaging and emailing through our phones throughout the day can cause more stress in our lives, making it seem that we are not the ones in control. In other words, with notifications popping up, it can feel like we are living in a continuous to-do list that keeps adding things to our agenda. Furthermore, it can taint our sense of gratification. Our phones are an electronic dopamine loop, meaning we can scroll online to gain instant gratification and fulfillment. With this constantly occurring, we can become too engulfed in our phones to realize the happiness that surrounds all of us in our lives. Now, I am not saying phones are always bad. Sometimes we do receive important text messages or phone calls that we need to respond to immediately, however, because constant usage of our phones does have implications on lowering our mental wellness, try this little mindfulness experiment to see how much your phone may be impacting your mood:

First, pick a day to monitor your phone usage. Carry on throughout the day like any normal day, and use your phone the same amount. What I will ask you to do though is to be mindful about how scrolling, answering texts, answering phone calls, going online, etc. makes you feel before and after you do so. Jot down some notes about what emotions you have and have what you are engaging with on your phone, as well as how your overall mood is throughout the day. Now, pick a day to set your phone down. Try going throughout your day without checking your phone. If you feel you need to, ask yourself why you need to, what will that benefit, and what would happen if you did not. Jot down notes on how you feel without your phone. Do you feel like you are missing something or uncomfortable? Do you feel more in the moment and present? How have you been feeling throughout the day? Next, compare the notes over the course of the two days and reflect on the way your phone usage is interacting with your mental wellness and behaviors. You may just find something out about yourself and your phone usage that you may want to change!