A Personal Review Of The Happiness Project By Gretchen Rubin

What happiness is to me I have never really thought about happiness at all unless I thought about it in small spurts throughout my life. I used to think that I needed something to make me happy or that I would be happy after I got back from an 8-month deployment, and I was but it was very short-lived. I slowly came to realize after reading and doing some of the assignments in class that to be happy you either have it or you don’t. I found that there is more than one way to be happy, and at the end of the day, you are responsible for your own happiness, although other people and situations will arise that will for a short time be your flow of happiness. Now that I look back on my life so far I can see all the times that I was unhappy and …show more content…
Gretchen Rubin was playing the fake it till you make it happiness and it seemed to be working to an extent. The reason you cannot always fake it till you make it is because one could be in such a horrible arrangement or their whole world is crumbling beneath their feet and they try and act happy but they are only lying to themselves. Fake it till you make it is a good start to try and act the way you want to feel, but this method doesn’t work for everyone so you just have to find a way that works for …show more content…
In the book If we are so rich, why aren’t we happy? Written by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi speaks about the science and percentages about the human body and what makes some people tick and act the way they do. This man Mihaly does a great job in breaking down the way our brain works and the different kind of people who find happiness in different ways. Mihaly talks about this thing that is called flow which is when you’re doing something that you don’t necessarily want to do, but when you do it you get lost in time and you can potentially accomplish the task at and because you were so engaged the whole time that you flowed through it. What I love about Mihaly is that he came up with a chart in his many years of studying happiness which tells us the root of what determines one’s happiness. Mihaly’s chart states that fifty percent of our happiness is at a set point, that no matter what happens after being very happy we will always safely return to this set point of fifty percent. What was crazy to me is that only ten percent of our happiness is determined by our circumstances, being rich or poor had little effect had a very small role in our happiness scale. Maybe that ten percent is true because in