Success and Happiness: Can We Have Them Both? – PART 2

February 4th, 2022

The first part of this article concluded by demonstrating the need to disrupt our deep-seated illusion that success is what brings us happiness, by successfully silencing the inner agitation of the reasoning process – the so-called mind. Which apparently brings us back to the same old paradigm, that success comes before happiness, which proved already to be an error. How do we unlock this?

The key to this dilemma is to simultaneously enter a state of deep relaxation, whilst holding a perfectly controlled attention. This, by default, dispels inner agitation and allows our inherent happiness to freely flood into every experience of our life.

What does that mean practically?

If you carefully look inside, you will discover something very peculiar: when you try to focus your attention intensely to solve a problem or complete a task, you become more and more tensed, eventually getting exhausted by the effort. While when you want to relax, in fact you end up choosing to drift into a semi-conscious, or even totally unconscious state – such as watching tv, drinking alcohol etc. – as a way of trying to run from the tension that otherwise appears. This is the reason why we cannot stay focused for a long time and yet, we relax very ineffectively, unable to regenerate or fully enjoy.

These two faces of the coin are valid for most people today: we get tense when we pay attention, and we associate relaxation with a state of unconsciousness.

The vicious circle

I’ve heard people saying: “I’m so stressed I cannot even enjoy my holidays or my weekends”, “I come back from holiday more tired than when I left.” It is a vicious circle that perpetually amplifies today, and referred to as burnout syndrome. A syndrome that is nothing but the expression of a wrong correlation between relaxation and unconsciousness, and between attentiveness and tension.

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Relaxation in action

We are, in fact, designed to be very similar to cats in this respect. Experiments confirm that the more attentive a cat is, the more relaxed it becomes. But a relaxed attention is almost opposite to what we’re cultivating today. The higher the stakes in an action, the more relaxed we should be. Most of the time, however, the higher the stakes, the more tensed we become, which also keeps us further away from the success we aspire for in that action. On top of this, you may have noticed that this tension means we cannot even enjoy the experience of that action, or in other words, we also remove the happiness from it.

Relaxation is associated with unconsciousness because we have not yet trained the capacity to stop our attention jumping to and from all kinds of stimuli. Very few people can go to a park and just spend 30 minutes contemplating nature. For the rest, attention constantly jumps from one spot to another, agitating their consciousness in the process. We keep ourselves busy with the phone, daily concerns, judging others, creating to-do lists, and many other things, rather than being present in the park, connecting with the environment directly.

Every time our attention makes a micro-jump, there is also a twitch in the nervous system or muscular system; a small spasm inside our being. It is interesting to know that we make hundreds, or even thousands, of small jumps per minute that together create a constant buzz that both tires us and consumes 60-80% more energy than is needed for the respective action, which could even be enjoyable and leave us with energy afterwards. By learning relaxed attention, we can enjoy and be happy in the middle of the action itself.

Postponing happiness as a habit

Very often people expect, “to be happy” after they finish the “hard work” of becoming successful. In other words, on the way to success (which implies hard work) we don’t have room for happiness, but we will save it and enjoy it later, at the weekend. But here we can make a very interesting observation: if we work hard now, at the weekend we will not enjoy.

Some people get used to this vicious circle and crash from so-called burnout syndrome. Others stop working hard, give up discipline and end up just hanging around, hanging onto life, while a third category learn to juggle between these two extremes, extracting the few drops of enjoyment and happiness that filter through their very stressful life.

If we learn to train our attention, to control its orientation at will, we become able to train an attitude of relaxed awareness and, therefore, we also become happy on the way to success. The new paradigm emerging from this perspective is that happiness is an integral part of the journey to success.

The wrong path towards success

If you are not arriving to your success already happy, then you chose the wrong path to get there. Examples here are enormously many, as you probably noticed: people achieve success and they die of some disease they got on the way; they achieve success but they have no one to enjoy it with because they sacrificed practically everything that was profound and worthwhile in their life in order to build what they thought was necessary. These kind of absurd situations appear because we postpone our happiness until the end of the journey.

With relaxed awareness, we will discover that the path to rightful success actually contains the rightful happiness. In other words, when we achieve the success we aspire for, we are already happy. The universe built us in such a wise way that we can’t be disappointed. Happiness is on route, we are supposed to pick it up. If one arrives to success with a bag empty of happiness, it means he didn’t pay attention to the road. These elements are naturally solved when we are able to control the orientation of our attention at will, when we are able to relax and be attentive simultaneously.

Read here the last article in this series …