How I Wake Up Really Happy And Excited About Life Every Morning

Reverse Engineering The Key To Sustainable, Long-Term Happiness

(Author’s Note: Portions of this piece were originally published as a Facebook post. I decided to expand upon my thoughts in a longer format here.)

Several weeks ago I found myself driving through the mountains of Northern Thailand on one of my frequent meditative motorbike rides. The dirt roads can sometimes be rough to drive on, but the breathtaking scenery more than makes up for it. As I was appreciating all of mother nature’s glory, I began thinking about the fact that for the past several months I’ve been waking up really happy and excited about life every single day.

What makes it even more peculiar is that it holds true even if I didn’t get enough sleep the night before or if I had a particularly bad day. I always wake up the next day with a smile on my face and a radiating sense of happiness.

It didn’t escape me that being high-on-life the way I have been is more of an anomaly than a common occurrence — especially when I compare it to what I see on social media, particularly Facebook.

Granted, I’ll be the first to admit that the inherent flaw with using Facebook as a barometer of happiness is that people who are generally well-adjusted and live a decent life aren’t posting about their ‘normal life’. You usually get the extremes. It’s either exciting stuff people are doing or a venting session about anything and everything. So while I acknowledge that using people’s Facebook posts isn’t necessarily an accurate representation of their overall emotional state, I will argue that it can at least provide a window unto it.

There are enough people venting about their jobs, where they live, or any other number of subjects, to make me realize that collectively, we could all use some more happiness in our lives.

To that end, I decided to reverse-engineer how and why I reached this state of almost constant happiness because it wasn’t always this way.

The conclusion that I came to is as follows:

Me pondering on the secret to being happy all the time.

Generally speaking, people’s fear of change is greater than their tolerance for dissatisfaction or unhappiness.

This is especially true for big change.

If you give someone a terrible — or even mediocre — dinner and they don’t like it, but they’re hungry, they will probably finish it. Let’s say you continue to give them that same option every single day.

Over and over.

The same bland meal.

At what point will most people look for something else to eat?

I’d say the threshold is probably fairly low. Perhaps a week at the most.

This is because the effort required to make the change from lackluster dinner to tasty dinner isn’t that high.

Most people won’t tolerate eating mediocre food for very long. The threshold for making a decision to change is low.

Now let’s say we offer someone a job. Let’s say that the job isn’t particularly exciting but the person needs to pay their bills. They take the job. Over time they hate the job more and more. They dread Mondays and live for the weekend.

They complain about the job to their friends and family constantly.

How long will they complain for?

A few months? A year? A few years? Their whole life?

Finding a new job requires more effort than finding a new dinner so the threshold for tolerance will be higher. Many people will tolerate doing a soul sucking job for a long time. Some will even spend the majority of their life doing it because it is familiar. It sucks, but it’s a sucky-ness they know and there is a level of comfort in that.

Now let’s take a third example.

Someone is born in a place or is brought there at a young age by their parents. They grow up there and don’t know what it’s like to live anywhere else. Through their life experiences they realize that where they live has a lot of problems and they find themselves complaining about it constantly. Their social media posts are always highlighting these various issues and it seems to be taking a toll on their psyche.

So, how long will someone tolerate living in a place that they are constantly complaining about?

Shouldn’t you like where you live? You spend a lot of time there. In fact, you live there.

What’s the threshold?

This question has many answers but ultimately they can be diluted into one of two positions:

a) I’m unhappy, but there are other aspects of living here that outweigh the bad.

b) I’m unhappy, but it’s familiar. I’m either too scared to make a change or too overwhelmed by the research and subsequent steps I’d have to follow to make the change (or both).

You can slightly reword the above to make it apply to other aspects of life satisfaction, not only where you live. The point is to understand the framing so that you can use it to change whatever is having the greatest impact on your own personal happiness.

If the answer to your issue is genuinely choice (a) then you’re all set, but I suspect that for many people, if they are being honest with themselves, the answer is probably (b).

Admitting that it is (b) can be frightening though, because if you do realize and admit to yourself that you’d be happier by making a change, then you have to take ownership over that change.

This is why the threshold of tolerating unhappiness is so high.

Few people are willing to take ownership over the changes they need to make to be happier.

While it can be incredibly overwhelming, it’s also downright illogical not to take action.

Think about it.

How can it be so easy for most people to choose a better dinner than to choose a better job, a better place to live, or to change whatever aspect of their life that is causing them such mental anguish? I’m not discounting the importance of a satisfying dinner. I love food.

However, isn’t it just as, if not more important, to be satisfied with the aspects of your life that make up a comparatively larger portion of it (or have a larger impact on it)?

Most people spend an incredibly large majority of their time at their jobs and they spend almost 100% of their time in the location that they live. The exceptions being an occasional vacation or out-of-town trip for work, etc.

Logically speaking, it should follow that for things that make up such a significant percentage of someone’s life, that a person should be highly motivated to want to optimize those things for maximum happiness.

But personal tolerance is not logical.

It is a beast unto its own.

If you understand this beast and how to tame it, you can control it. You can set its upper limit and when that upper limit is reached, you can decide to pursue happiness.

That’s exactly what I did a few years ago and although I am not happy with every single aspect of my life, I made the one necessary big change that was having the greatest impact on my day-to-day mood. For me, that change was location. For someone else it might be something smaller. It might in fact be their mediocre dinner.

The point here is that if you’re not waking up happy on most days, then you should do some self-reflection to answer why. Write down the answer or answers, and then figure out a process to change whatever those factors are.

Life is too short to wake up every morning only to be dissatisfied with your dinner, your job, where you live, or whatever else. Don’t let familiarity and fear stop you from living your best life.

You are in the driver’s seat. Make sure you’re enjoying the ride.

If you absorb information better by listening, you can check out my YouTube episode where I discuss this same exact topic and cover the same points. You will also be treated to some incredible, cinematic footage of the beautiful Doi Suthep Temple in Chiang Mai.

All photographs in this article are the property of the author and should not be used without consent.