When I think of happiness, I can’t help but think of children as they express joy so easily and without hesitation. Unfortunately, as we become older we forget just how easy it is to create happiness. Too often we put limitations on our high spirits instead of just enjoying the simple pleasures of life and find all sorts of ways to talk ourselves out of feeling light-hearted. It’s great to focus on a set of goals but to have a list of conditions which we need to fulfil before we can feel good, complicates life and makes it difficult to simply experience happiness. Instead of feeling joyful and exuberant, we start to worry and feel restless.

We falsely believe that happiness can’t be experienced until we get rid of all of those problems but in reality, the absence of challenges from our lives doesn’t automatically make us happy. We can create pleasure whenever we choose to and it isn’t an end point that is reached through the clearing of all the obstacles on the road leading to it simply because the barriers are all in our heads.

To be happy, we must learn to tame our minds so that they don’t continually generate thoughts that lead to negative emotions, and it takes practise to bring about satifaction in all that we do. So many people have internalised the false belief that life requires suffering – that no matter how well their lives are going, all they can think about is what is wrong and how to fix it. They don’t recognise the value in acknowledging their problems and working on them while remaining happy, regardless of how bad things seem to be. They would actually find their experiences completely different if they only focused on creating more of what makes them feel good.

We’re especially likely to focus on concerns that we have in long-term relationships because over time, we just naturally notice our partner’s flaws. Yet in order to create happiness, we must look at our relationships and ask, ‘What can I appreciate in this person and feel grateful for?’ If we decided to focus on those little things that annoy us about them, our excitement to be with them will fizzle out.

Every day we are bombarded by advertisements that tell us that our lives won’t be complete unless we own this or that. The media is filled with stories of people who seem to be happy because they are rich celebrities, implying that money and fame are the keys to lasting joy. Our parents, teachers and societies have their own ideas about what leads to happiness which we later discover that their formula for joy doesn’t work for us. So when we finally achieve what we believe makes us happy, it could very well turn out that we are just as depressed as before. Yet when we are true to our deepest values and desires, we avoid focusing on what we don’t value and instead concentrate on what we do, thus fostering our own happiness.

Happiness is simple as long as we keep things simple and not hesitate to enjoy it when it comes knocking.