Relationships
Here’s a small post about relationships and happiness.
And me discovering what is honesty.
relationships… are a key to happiness
These days, I’m integrating more and more the concept that relationships are one of the big keys to happiness.
(I talk a lot about the long-running Harvard study of happiness; here is a video that sums it up very wel)
The two main keys are:
- physical health
- quality relationships
relationships… need honesty
I was feeling really down for a few months for something silly. I was just in love with this person, but it didn’t really get reprocicated in the same way. I thought she was semi-rejecting me, which is really weird.
So… I was feeling down, and I started expressing my feelings a bit more with this person. And I noticed that I felt better. “I feel really extremely bad… I have feelings… I should do something about this… one small step… I feel better? one bigger step… I feel really better? wow!”
This is the day that I figured out that I’m not really an honest person.
When I feel jealous, I act like I’m not. When I feel sad, I act like I’m just tired.
That kind of stuff.
I sometimes get complaints from friends that tell me that they don’t know what I’m thinking. I brushed it off.
But now, I realize that
a) I hide what I think extremely well from my peers and
b) this is a really, really, bad habit for my relationships and my mental health
So… being really honest is not really a nice-to-have… It’s more like it’s the most important thing ever.
so, why no honest?
I have the impression that this is a “strategy” that I picked up somewhere when stuff got wrong in my life, and then, I kept repeating. And I never really adapted. Of course, the best would’ve been to never pick it up, but it’s not possible to control what happens to you.
So rather: how can I find these other behaviors that are working against me without me realizing?
If I missed something as essential as “be 100% honest about your feelings with your loved ones”, I really wonder what other subtilities I am missing…
If I had to guess: “live a healthy lifestyle” and “enjoy what you have now”. Which are both stuff that I do in moderation. When will I get the peak of illumination and really integrate them into my life?
Beeminder helps, but it cannot fix this kind of stuff. Forcing me to do sports: I did it, but I stopped it.
Beeminder is only a corrective lens. If I cannot see in the first place, deeply into me, the problems; then, even a 90$ is not going to force me into acting.
So… yes, relationships are a skill. Lesson number 1: be honest and explicit
And also: how can I increase the rate of these discoveries?