If you are to find happiness, it is important to be open to the idea of “change”. That is, be open to changing your way of thinking. Without change, you would simply repeat the same negative ways of thinking and not find happiness.
In some sense, there is a “perfect recipe” for happiness which will work for you. However, to discover that recipe, you will need to experiment with various ingredients. This is not too different to how you cook. Suppose you decide to bake a cake and your recipe calls for eight spoons of sugar.
You follow the recipe precisely, and the cake comes out of the oven looking lovely. But when you take a bite, you immediately realise that the cake is too sweet for your liking.
If you decide to bake the same cake again, how much sugar should you use this time? Should you use the same amount of sugar you used last time, or should you reduce the amount of sugar? Of course, since the cake was too sweet last time, reducing the amount of sugar used this time would be sensible. In other words, the cake recipe needs to be adjusted to improve the cake’s taste.
The same concept applies to how you think. Suppose you think in a certain negative way that brings unhappiness; if you keep thinking that same negative way, the unhappiness will continue. For happiness, you must work on changing your current mental recipe.
You might wonder if it’s possible to change how you think. The answer is, “Yes”. In neuroscience, it’s generally accepted that your nervous system can undergo “neuroplasticity.” Neuroplasticity is the brain’s remarkable ability to reorganise itself to form new connections and pathways, resulting in your thinking in different ways. So each time you change how you think, your brain undergoes neuroplasticity.
While it’s true that change requires effort and may even be unpleasant in the short term, it is also associated with huge potential rewards. Changes don’t always have to be big. You can also make small changes that eventually add up to big changes.
A key ingredient needed for finding happiness is the concept of “experiments”. I am, of course, not talking about using test tubes and chemicals to cause explosions in your kitchen! Instead, it’s about doing mental experiments to see which changes work and which do not.
This website offers many simple psychological tools to help you change your thinking. You can experiment with these to see if they are helpful. After some experimentation, I am sure you will find a suitable recipe for happiness.