All your desires are because you believe they will make you feel better. I mean 100% of them whether they are for food, a new car, a bigger house, better clothes, swim the channel ;), win the lottery or just a cup of coffee.
Think about it? spend a few moments any desire you have is routed in this.
These desires might well make you feel better, but only in the short term because they are external. So they will bring up your mood, but they are unfortunately not permanent, when you achieve these things you will have a new desire. This is called Hedonic wellbeing it is based on the notion that increased pleasure and decreased pain leads to happiness. The problem with this is it needs constant external achievements (things you’ve decided you like) of desires, and avoiding pain (things you’ve decided you don’t like).
Good examples of this are lottery winners or celebrities, they achieved their desires and have everything but it wears off quick and now they have everything and still aren’t happy….
But there is a much better and simper method to attain happiness, Happiness is just internal pleasantness. You can feel internally pleasant right now. Try it.
So lets use an example, think of something that makes you feel happy. Lets take a cup of coffee, a sunset or holding hands with someone special to you.
Now what are you feeling inside? (internaly) pleasant possibly even very pleasant.
Remember you just felt this with out even having that external experience.
Our whole experience of the world is based on our bodies interpretation of our senses, our minds interpretation of whats happening based on its model of the world and our beliefs of whats good and bad (its very binary like that good or bad).
So all our experience of the external world is internally interpreted. So if you decide to feel internally pleasant and decide to feel internal pleasant regardless of whats happening externally you will be happy. If you feel internally very pleasant you will feel joy.
So how do you practice this and improve on it? just that practise feeling internal pleasant several times a day. It will grow the more often you do it. its a skill, one unfortunately society has taught us comes from desires and achieving these. Desires are great they drive us, but don’t wait until you achieve them to feel pleasant, feel it right now.
it is this simple but also theres more you can do Ill write a full blog post on how to do it soon.