Happiness isn’t necessarily comfortable

QUICK PSA: Comfort is essential for your well-being and shouldn’t be underestimated in your day-to-day activities.

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If there is one thing I have come to realise these past few summer months, it is that happiness has come to me way more naturally when I was struggling to get up on my surfboard, being slapped in the face by multiple waves than when I was sat on the sofa for the 5th night in a row looking for something to watch on Netflix.

Society tends to try and have us associate happiness with comfort: comfort of means, comfort in security and comfort of needs. Whilst it is undeniable that a certain level of comfort in all those areas is necessary to feel relaxed and therefore leave space for happiness, we tend to forget that our brains are fully designed for one sole purpose, which is to keep us safe; to keep us comfortable.

But comfort can be a trap, it can also be fake.

 
I don’t deny the necessity for our physiological and security needs to be met – refer to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – but I believe the trap is when we start to indulge too much in them in order to seek comfort, whether it be conscious or unconscious.

For example, Maslow identifies our physiological needs to be: air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing and reproduction. Ok, I’ll give you that it’s hard to strive for too much air but when it comes to food or even sleep, for example, we easily let ourselves overindulge in those. In order to seek happiness, someone will sleep around or simply sleep too much, getting trapped in “comforting activities”; or someone will seek comfort by overeating, therefore creating fake happiness as only satisfied for some time.

Now, in no way am I telling you to stop having lie-ins on Sundays, order takeaway for a Netflix evening or even spend the night with a gorgeous stranger. After all, happiness is the holy grail in life, isn’t it?  But for those moments when you don’t even seem to be making your decisions and are doing things out of habit, I would just like to invite you to ask yourself these questions:

Your answers can easily differ from one day to the next depending on your mental state and your general life schedule.

·       Is this … something that I need today or am I trying to stay safe?     

·       By doing… am I trying to stay too comfortable right now?

·       Is any of this fake comfort?

·       What is my definition of happiness?

Sometimes, trying out things outside of our usual programming is where true happiness lies. Trust me, comfort isn’t so comfortable when you have been sitting on it for too long, just like sitting in a car for 8 hours straight… At some point, you need to move!

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭'𝐬 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐝𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐤𝐞𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐚 𝐛𝐢𝐭 𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞? 𝐋𝐞𝐭 𝐦𝐞 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬!

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