Five Ways To Feel Great

There are many thoughts about happiness, and many techniques that attempt to achieve it.  From my perspective, these boil down to about five high-level strategies for feeling great, outlined below.  Of course, I’m not necessarily advocating any of these.

1. Have a set of beliefs in which the “big picture” of life is great. If you believe that the world and life as a whole are great or will be great in the end, this can lead to feeling great, right now.  For example, if you believe that you will go to heaven when you die, or that everything that happens is part of a larger plan to teach you important lessons about life, or that there is perfection in every circumstance no matter how bad it may seem on the surface — these beliefs can lead to happiness, even if the immediate circumstances are less than ideal in a traditional sense.
2. Become skillful at focusing your attention, and focus it mostly on things other than past regrets or future problems. The idea is that if you can focus your attention away from things that cause distress, you won’t feel the distress associated with those things.  For example, you might focus on the present moment, or on your own breath.  The idea of “meditation” is closely related to this.  Some proponents would carry this a step further and say that a great feeling of happiness may arises when negative emotions are reduced in this way.
3. Stop wanting things to be different than they are. This is a classic Buddhist technique.  The idea is that wanting things to be different than they are causes lots of negative feelings, so the solution is to stop wanting things to be different.
4. Have what you want. This is in some ways the opposite of #3 — instead of being okay with whatever your circumstances are, you change your circumstances to be what you want.  This is probably the most traditional (and most popular) way of trying to feel great.
5. Directly altering brain functioning (usually with drugs). This method goes right to the source of our feelings (our brains), and attempts to take a shortcut to feeling great by directly altering the brain circuits responsible for how we feel.  With current technology the only real option currently is by taking drugs, but this may change in the future.  Many people engage in this, if only moderately, through the use of alcohol and tobacco products.