“Comparison is a thief of joy”.
One of my friends recited this to me the other day in our conversation on the phone. It's someone that I trust and respect massively (they're not a dentist), but someone I work with closely.
It was that type of sentence, you know the one strong verbs and short sentences that has an impact, that makes you stop and think, ‘what am I doing wrong here, what am I getting wrong in relation to the words that I hear?’.
Research has shown time and time again that all of us have a baseline level of happiness and so if you are a ‘0-3’ you can't get higher than a three, but you can get higher than a zero.
If you're 7 to 10, you appear to be happy all the time, but it is possible to be happier than a seven.
And so, if we agree that we have a baseline level of joy, we can try to increase our joy or try to decrease the thing that takes our joy away.
It's up to you to choose your weapon and on a day-by-day basis and which one you choose to improve your level of well-being and satisfaction.
It seems more and more that decreasing the amount of time we compare ourselves to other people is the easiest and quickest way to increase our happiness and improve our lives (it's a little bit like dieting, you can run as much as you want, but you really have to stop eating chocolate to make a difference).
Blog Post Number - 3295