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hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this video I'm going to be talking about understanding happiness and I'm going to share with you my happiness spectrum happiness is a topic that we need a better and deeper understanding of as we're going through the self-actualization process and as we're doing personal development we need to know better what kinds of happiness are good for us and then what kinds are bad for us and so in this video what are we talking about is I'm making a distinction between two fundamental types of happiness this distinction will help you in your personal development journey to go through and identify which happiness is the one that's the most right for you and then also I'm going to share with you my happiness spectrum which is this large list that I created which takes you through all the fundamental categories of happiness that you can have in your life and then we kind of rank them and we're going to show you which ones are the lowest quality happiness's and which ones are the highest quality happiness's and I'm going to tell you the most high quality happiness the number one activity that you can do to attain the highest quality happiness so stick with me the basic distinction that we need to make here is between what's called pleasure on the one hand and then gratification on the other pleasure versus gratification and now if we go back 2000 years into antiquity and we take a look at what the Greeks and Romans were talking about when they were talking about happiness because that was a favorite topic of theirs Aristotle we could take a look at him and he makes this distinction as well he calls it had donek happiness versus eudaimonic happiness so what does this actually mean hedonic happiness or pleasure this is the most obvious and typical form of happiness so this is the stuff that titillates your senses or raises your emotions it's sort of pleasurable way so drugs food sex excitement of any kind so basically thrill-seeking this is what we call hedonism and then this was contrasted with the eudaimonic happiness and that's what we're calling here gratification gratification versus pleasure what is eudaimonic happiness this is a little bit more difficult to capture and it's not immediately obvious why you would want to pursue eudaimonic happiness but I'll talk about that and I'll make a case for it as we go forward so you don't want of happiness this is all about living a virtuous life the Greeks and Romans were really big into this thing called verbs you living a virtuous life and what that really meant for them is the same thing that's going to mean for us now which is embodying your greatest strengths living up to them living a life of integrity and noble purpose and living with higher consciousness and wisdom that's basically what you demonic happiness is the Greeks and the Romans they have this um term called r8a an arte basically translated as living excellently and that's the same thing as living virtuously so you see we're kind of contrasting we've got the pleasures of the body and the senses and the emotions on one hand and then this kind of wisdom virtuous noble living on the other hand this is this is the fundamental distinction were making so now I want you to already start asking yourself how much of my happiness currently if I graphed it out if I took all the stuff that I do in my life and I graphed it all out in a given week all my activities how much of them would be about hedonism and how much of them would be about eudaimonia the degree to which you've got this ratio is it 50/50 what is it for you 50/50 is it 90 percent here and only 10% here or maybe you're doing good and you've got 90 percent here and only 10% there basically in all of personal development what you're going to be doing is you're going to be increasing the ratio of eudaimonic and decreasing the ratio of hedonic that's what you should be doing with all your personal development goals and everything that you trying to achieve and I'll talk more about that as we go forward so this ratio is important to ask yourself where you lie and then also you're gonna start asking yourself how can I move the ratio more towards the UNAM they've actually done a lot of research on this now with positive psychology and they're finding more and more and more that the stuff that we think will make us happy which is all the hedonic stuff the hedonic stuff seems like it's going to make us the most happy because it's the most thrilling and exciting in the moment it's the most thrilling and exciting if you don't really think long term too much so this is stuff like you know awesome food and taking great vacations and getting a huge bonus at your job and having a cushy career and having fame and acclaim and prestige in your career ah sex and any kind of chemical drugs that you take that make you happier so all this easy stuff this stuff is easy the problem is that the you time on extorter and it's not immediately obvious that it's going to produce the same levels of satisfaction as this stuff here the hedonic stuff but actually with all the research that they've done and I'll talk a little bit about this as we talk about my spectrum is that the hedonic happiness is like a hollow shallow happiness you think that it's going to make you happy and you chase it and you chase it in your chase and you're probably going to spend a good ten to twenty years of your life if not more caught in the trap of chasing hedonic happiness but we're going to find is after all that chasing and all that hard work that is going to make you unfulfilled and unsatisfied on the inside and so when that starts happening then you start scratching your head and your start wondering hmm what's going on here why is my not my life not really improving even though I'm doing all this stuff in my life and I'm accomplishing all these big goals well that's what is going to hit you that you need to turn from the outside more on the inside and start to live this more knowable more virtuous type of life and when you start doing that that's when you're going to start to the fulfillment come into your life for real rather than this hollow happiness that you were getting over here it's an interesting point that you demonic habit is gratification it cannot be chemically induced and there's really no shortcut for it and it also takes hard work it doesn't come naturally and it doesn't come easily to most people if you just do the average thing that most people do then what happens is that you always drift towards heavy hedonism and if you want to move towards eudaimonia then you have to work a lot and that's where a personal element comes in it but it's also curious to me that you can't chemically induce you don't want of happiness because what is you know monic happiness ultimately it's this feeling of strength and inner integrity and nobility that you have well how are you going to buy that you can't buy that with money and you can't create a magic pill that will do it for you so all the shortcuts towards happiness they end up being hedonic happiness which is why you really can't buy yourself happiness because I mean you try you go out there and try to spend your money doing it but you realize after a while of trying that that you're just kind of spinning your wheels and you're not getting that more deeper fulfillment that you can get in life which can only happen through the hard inner development that you do to move yourself more towards eudaimonia and that's basically what the ancient philosophers were about the ancient philosophers weren't just disputing abstract theoretical ideas about metaphysics and stuff I mean they were doing that but mostly they were actually interested in how do you live the highest-quality life and what they ultimately discovered is that it's through excellence it's through wisdom it's through embodying a lot of these self-help principles that you see my videos and basically it is self actualization it's the process of self actualization they just had different labels for it so what I want to do now is I want to get into my spectrum and I want to tell you a lot of details about the different types of happiness that we could M that we can be engaged and how good or bad they are but before I do that there's three factors that I want you to look out for when you're thinking about an activity that provides you with happiness number one is how long does the happiness last in duration does it last for five seconds for five minutes for an hour for a day how long does it last that's an important consideration as you're strategizing the second important consideration is what does this cost to produce so how much does it cost you to create this form of happiness does it cost you a lot does it cost you a little and then the third thing is what are the consequences of engaging in this form of happiness what does it cost me long-term if I keep doing it again and again and again and again does it make my psychology weaker or does it make my psychology stronger and this turns out to be a really key consideration so let's talk about the spectrum the spectrum is going to go from this side here which is going to be pure hedonic happiness to this extreme side over here which is going to be pure eudaimonic happiness and it's going to gradually just kind of move in this direction and I'm splitting the spectrum up into three chunks the first third the second third and the last third the first third is going to be the stuff that you really want to avoid this is pure hedonic stuff the stuff in the middle is going to be moderately okay types of happiness and then the stuff on this last third is going to be the best so as I'm telling you this stuff I want you to start thinking already about how you can be moving away from these and moving towards these alright so as you can probably guess what's the most obvious hedonic happiness it's drugs right so you've got drugs after drugs you've got food partying and drinking after that you've got beauty now beauty is an interesting one beauty what what that means is trying to make yourself physically look better more attractive a lot of us get hung up on this how we look and so we try to look better and this is both for men and for women it's probably worse of a situation for women because women are judged more on their appearance but men get caught up with beauty too so this is worrying about your hair worrying about how you look worrying about how you dress trying to impress people with your beauty getting plastic surgery obsessing about makeup all this kind of stuff you might think that doing beauty and improving your your appearance is going to make you a lot happier but actually they've done Studies on this and what they find is that people who obsess about beauty are not happy they're more miserable and they've also done studies and they found that people who are more physically attractive objectively speaking are no happier than the average or even below average attractiveness levels of other people so beauty is really a trap you're not going to make yourself more fulfilled just by working on your beauty the next thing is money money is huge and money becomes a trap for many many many people many intelligent people get trapped by money many business people many entrepreneurs many CEOs fall into this money trap chasing money thinking that money is going to do it for them but it doesn't do it and in fact they've done research on this as well and they found that people who have primarily money based goals in their career and in their life that these are the most frustrated people they're not happy even if they achieve their money goals they're still not happy so hopefully you're wise enough to already see that money doesn't directly buy you happiness in any meaningful way because all money can do is it can buy you more of this hedonic happiness it can buy you drugs and it can buy you food and drinking and partying and beauty and some other kind of stuff that we're going to get into here but all that stuff is ultimately very shallow and on fulfilling by itself so money is not going to do it for you and in addition to money also shopping shopping can be basically a form of addiction but most of us are addicted to it but we tend to think that shopping or buying something whatever it is whether it's a a new TV a new house a new car or anything else for your house you know that you however you want to lavishly set up your your place that somehow this is going to do it for you or if you're shopping for for clothing and of course it's very hollow the I'm not a happiness you get is very short and it doesn't produce that kind of higher level of fulfillment that you want in your life the next thing is media and entertainment so this includes television internet social media video games all this entertainment now is so cheap a lot of it is totally free that you can get with the internet now and the the really dangerous thing about is that it can consume so much of your time it can literally consume hundreds if not thousands of hours of your time every single year and this what I find is the biggest problem here is that it creates a opportunity cost which means that if you're heavily engaged in entertainment like video games and internet and television then you're missing out on so much more that you could be doing with your life because you are wasting that time and then that time is not available for you to do the more you demonic types of happiness so here you could potentially make your biggest gains right here is by limiting some of this stuff they've done again Studies on this and basically what they find is that people who watch lots of TV in fact if you take a person watching TV for prolonged period of time and you measure his mood what they discover is that the average mood of someone watching several hours of television is mild depression not happiness so it might seem like you're getting lots of pleasure from this stuff but actually it's kind of like rotting your soul from the inside out that's the problem the next thing is gossip and also idle socialization so when you kind of mindless mindlessly hang out with your friends or if you have a social circle to gossip about stuff and talk about politics and all those kind of nonsense it can seem like that's rewarding but really it's not it's very hollow the next thing is pursuing Fame public image and success quote-unquote success so these are like external signs of accomplishment do you pursue these if you're really busy chasing Fame and status it's basically equivalent to chasing money if you've ever gotten any fame or status it's hard to believe initially before you have it that it wouldn't make your life better but once you get it you realize like well people know me now but what does that really do for me really on the inside it doesn't do much for you at all it's just exciting when you get it and then after you get acclimated to it your fame and your prestige and all this stuff and all your public image and all your public status and all your ability to impress people with your accomplishments that this really doesn't mean much for your internal levels of fulfillment so this can be a huge trap and you can waste a lot of time chasing this stuff the next thing is validation from other people how much of your time and how many of your goals are centered around getting people to like you to approve of you to give you compliments this is a huge pointless activity to be doing this the next thing is porn and sex how much time and how many goals do you have on your to-do list that are about getting more sex chasing after sex porn you don't need to chase after it's so easy to get but it can be also you know a big diversion from the things that you should be doing in your life and then the last piece on this first third of the spectrum is going to be romantic infatuation this is the first six months or so of a new relationship new intimate relationship where you are all excited and it feels great and you're like falling in love that feeling but really what this is this is a romantic chemical infatuation and it's not sustainable it always dies off and so it feels great but then the fulfillment that it brings you in the long run isn't really high so that's going to be the first third now if you're engaged in any of this stuff first of all realize that anything in this first third can become an addiction you can develop an addiction to anything here chasing money or drugs or to food or to validation or to Fame or sex or even romantic infatuation so watch out with that because all these things are very addictive also notice though that all of these things they give you a big spike in excitement in your life but then that spike quickly comes down and in fact when it goes up it always comes down lower and so you kind of get left with this feeling of emptiness after you engage in some of these behaviors and activities so you should start thinking about how you can get the goals that you have that are centered around all this over - what we're gonna be talking about next so the next thing is going to be the middle third you're going to have hobbies any kind of hobbies that you have and those are mostly alright no problem they're also pretty good to have physical exercise and physical growth as part of your routine so that's a healthy type of thing don't confuse that deal with beauty because some people they do physical exercise especially guys the gym I see them doing this they're into physical exercise and they tell him they're doing physical exercise but actually what they're doing is they're obsessing over beauty so don't think that if you're a guy you're immune to this beauty thing you're not immune to it at all the next thing is friendships and strong relationships so you can have shallow friendships and gossipy type friendships or you can have deeper stronger more intimate friendships those are the ones you want to be going after that can be a good source of fulfilment in your life if you can develop a couple of really really solid friends and we're not talking about Facebook friends but like face to face real friends so family is good relationships that you build with your family and you strengthen with your family that's going to give you higher qualities of happiness and lastly in this middle third is going to be companionate love companionate love is the love that you have in a relationship after those first six months pass and some of the chemicals and excitement wears off and then you develop this kind of deeper bond and rapport with the other person so that can be a quite good that's the middle third the middle third is quite healthy so if you can just move yourself from the bottom third to the middle third that already is going to be huge improvement in your fulfillment levels in life but I think that it's really the last third which I'm going to talk about right now that's the most exciting for me this is what actualize our org is talking about is all the stuff that you could do with your life if you move yourself to this third right here and that starts off with learning and education how much of your time are you spending on learning and educating yourself especially after you get a college are you still keeping up with your education are you not only just educating yourself but you're actually savoring it and taking pleasure and joy from it well if you're not you're missing out on some really good eudaimonic happiness right there then after that comes excellent work and flow States do you really value your work do you do your work excellently do you pride yourself on your work and does your work produce flow for you flow meaning these periods when you lose self-consciousness and you're in that zone where everything is flowing and everything is effortless and you're you're totally engaged and absorbed in the activity does your work do that for you if not you need to create that the next thing is inner development and self-acceptance so by inner development we mean any kind of personal growth activities that you do whether it's therapy or coaching or exercises or journaling or meditating or um seminars and workshops you know there's a million different ways that you can do personal development and also any work that you do to accept yourself exactly as you are not worrying about your beauty and trying to be different and not worrying about who you should be as an ideal but instead just accepting yourself exactly as you are and there's work you can do I have videos on self-esteem and how to build your confidence so anything you can do to build your self-esteem and your confidence levels and just be happy with who you are right now how you look how much money you have and what kind of friends you have the more you can accept all that stuff then the more true fulfillment you'll have in your life you can't really be fulfilled in life if you're not accepting of yourself you understand this you're always going to be frustrated inside no matter what kind of external circumstances you can create for yourself next is kindness they've done research on this and they found that in laboratory one of the greatest chemical pleasures that you can have is by doing kind things for other people they've actually done experiments on this and they found that if they give people money like five or ten dollars that they could use to spend on themselves to buy themselves something nice what they found is that the person is happier if they use that money to do something kind for somebody else rather than spending that money on themselves our brain is literally wired for doing kindness towards others the problem is though that we've never really most of us haven't figured out how to integrate this Highness into a consistent systematic way into our own lives and it's really not a part of our daily routine is doing kind things and it's also not really natural to some of our work to be doing kind things so that's an alignment that you could create for yourself though to be doing more kind action actions next is gratitude gratitude is huge they've done lots of research on this too and they found that basically if you're not grateful for what you've already got then you're not going to be satisfied because you tell yourself well I'll be grateful when I get that cool thing that I want that money me or that trophy wife or whatever but if you can't be grateful now then the fact is that when you do get that thing that you really want that you think is going to make you happy when you get that you're not going to be grateful for that either because your brain will just Ratchet it up hedonic adaptation will happen and then you're going to be after chasing the next greatest flashiest thing and so gratitude will never happen and gratitude doesn't happen then you're not going to be fulfilled and gratitude is again one of those things you can practice and you can develop as a ritual for yourself so this is something that needs active development next is integrity integrity is really huge and it goes to the core of what the Greeks and Romans were after is living a life of integrity and this is kind of an old-school value my own durable integrity this is something like maybe my parents or maybe my grandparents with value yeah and that's for a good reason because even though integrity is not flashy it's important you can't really be fulfilled in life if you're living a life that's disintegrated and by integrity what we mean is are you living up to your greatest values are you doing the things that are actually meaningful to you in life are you honoring commitments to others and to yourself and of course this means not lying not cheating not stealing and not harming others but even more subtly it means how good are you at keeping your own commitments to yourself do you tell yourself you're gonna do something then you don't do it you set a goal for yourself but then you quit if you keep doing that again and again and again and you preach at people but then you don't walk your talk then you're not in integrity and you're going to be miserable no matter who you are human beings need that integrity in order to feel fulfilled so working on integrity is really huge and that's actually something that I identified with myself just recently is that I can make some big gains in my fulfillment levels if I just buckle down and fix a couple areas in my life where a little bit out of integrity so that's something I want to be working on in the near future the next thing on this list is contribution I think contribution is one of the biggest biggest biggest things that people I see in American society are just totally missing out on contribution is what your work does for the betterment of humanity in the world what kind of impact does your work have is it contributing in a meaningful way that you believe is meaningful not other people believe is meaningful but you you have to believe it this one I think I'm pretty good on because I've spent the last few years of my life really working hard to position myself I - lies out or because this is my business right and I knew that to be really fulfilled in life I needed to have this contribution component so I worked really hard to put it into place and that means that when I release a new video I know that it's having the impact that I want in the world and to me that's a really huge source of satisfaction but I see that most people don't have this because they haven't taken the time to make the alignment and I'm actually right now starting to work on a life purpose course it's going to be a video course for you guys if you really care about contribution and you really want to have a big impact in the world and you want to have that fulfillment in your life every single day of knowing that you're doing great for Humanity or Society in some way some way that's unique to you not just leave labeling soup in a soup kitchen somewhere but actually producing great work and great art that moves people that changes the world then I'm going to have that ready pretty soon here and then we got to the last piece on this spectrum and this is the one activity that is going to produce the highest source of happiness in your entire life can you guess what it is it is being to be simply being existing that's it the best way to practice this is through meditation now the teachers meditation teaches you how to be and how to enjoy the moment of being and now this one's tricky because someone listening to this might say well being that sounds like it's kind of boring you're basically saying I should just sit there and exist and just enjoy life and be happy and be maximally happy just doing that without anything else and that's exactly what I'm telling you is yeah you should be able to do that and that should be your greatest source of satisfaction in life which means that you should not need any stimulation of any sort not even the stimulation of reading a book or the stimulation of doing personal development or the stimulation of doing something kind for somebody because all those things are still fundamentally activities and you're still doing all those things to get like a kick but if you're just able to be in the moment just in the moment right now just focused in the moment totally enjoying yourself that's what ultimate peace of mind means and all the greatest most wisest sages throughout the last three thousand years of human history have recognized this which is why meditation is such a fundamental aspect of practice for all these sages they meditate a lot because they know that that's the most important thing for them to be doing and that's the greatest source of satisfaction and if you think back into your past about some of the most satisfying moments in your life you're going to notice that they were just moments of being and not necessarily moments of doing you weren't meditating but maybe you were sitting around the Christmas tree and it wasn't even that the Christmas the day of Christmas was exciting for you or the gifts were exciting for you but let's say everybody opened all the gifts and you've already partied out and like the day is winding down you're sitting there with with a few folks around the Christmas tree and you noticed a sense of fulfillment inside you and this fulfillment is just a moment of being you're just enjoying it you're looking at the tree you're looking at the fireplace or whatever you're looking into someone's face and you're just being and you feel complete you feel like you don't need anything at that moment and it's not because there's a loved one near you and it's not because there's Christmas tree but it's simply because in that moment you were able to just be very present the problem is that most of us are not really good at making to ourselves present and fulfilled in the moment just by ourselves and so what we need is we need all this external nonsense just to put us in the right circumstance so that we can get this sense of just peace and being but then as soon as those circumstances change we drop out of this being and we're not able to be this is also why when you go and you go hiking and you watch some beautiful sunset and you're just watching that beautiful sunset and it's winding down it's just about to set and you've got this sense of peace washing over you because that sunset provided an excuse for you just to be and you tell yourself well it's the sunset that's so beautiful that's putting this me in this mood but actually you can create that mood for yourself without the sunset but the problem is that it takes work and that's the fundamental problem with everything in this top third on the spectrum is that it all takes work it's not easy and so there's a real cost to it and so when you try to position yourself and you try to move yourself from all the stuff in this hedonic zone into the eudaimonic zone you notice that there's a lot of resistance in you it doesn't feel very good and that's mostly because you're addicted to this stuff over here and also because you haven't trained your mind you haven't developed your taste for the stuff that's over here this stuff divided the this requires an acquired taste because it's not that learning and education are always easy and simple and produce immediate gratification they don't nor does work doing excellent work that can be difficult nor does doing personal development that can be strenuous nor does living with integrity that can be challenging - or contributing to the world that can be challenging - and meditation if you've ever sat down and done a full hour of meditation that can be one of the most difficult things that you can do in your entire life is just sit there and do nothing for a whole hour but since this is a personal development and since we are here to work on ourselves and develop ourselves then we kind of already have taken on the mission to work towards improving our conditions in life and so therefore as part of the mission of self-actualization what I want you to do at the end of this video which is right now I want you to identify what are your goals your top goals for the next year and I want you to ask yourself are they hedonic goals or are they eudaimonic goals are they mostly about money and fame and success or are they more about gratitude and contribution and being and learning and self-acceptance and all the goals you have that are hedonic I want you to ask yourself how can I change them into goals that are you demonic and then go ahead and re-injure your goals because this is where the real personal development appens is when you can actually say to yourself hmm how can I be more wise about the things I'm pursuing in my life and then you actually change your objectives based on the wisdom that you get from a video from a book or from anywhere else alright this is Leo I'm gonna be signing off go ahead post me a comment down below click the like button right now and share this video with a friend on Facebook and lastly come and sign up to my newsletter right here and actualize that already it's a free newsletter I release new videos for free every single week about self actualization topics all the videos and I'm excited about releasing our mostly to be focused on helping you to improve this eudaimonic component of your life so we're gonna be talking about how to do more excellent work how to get more flow state activities how to do more inner development how to gain self-acceptance how to build your integrity how to develop contribution how to be how to meditate so if you're interested in all these kinds of topics I have a lot of ideas to share with you a lot of important concepts that will transform your life if you just act on them a little bit every single week so sign up you're going to be all set you