This is the 2nd part in my series, The Secret to Never Ending Happiness. If you are here for the first time, please make sure to check out the part 1 and then come back here. At the end of part 1, we discussed about one kind of happiness, the happiness of bouncing back from all odds and we compared it to the placebo effect. We took the analogy of a depression patient in case of placebo effect and a cricketer in case of the happiness of bouncing back. Where the cricketer corresponds to the patient, the depression corresponds to lack of form. Medication given in placebo effect corresponds to the mental therapy that the cricketer took. And we concluded that overall as a process, this was quite similar to placebo effect. Overall it was the same thing, it is all about conditioning your mind to believe that the situation you are in is curable. Once you are able to successfully condition your mind, irrespective of the method you take to condition your mind, which in case of placebo was a fake medicine, and in case of cricket was therapy and time away, happiness is guaranteed.

We ended the last part with a question, a question that was less about placebo effect and more about conditioning your mind. If an unemployed person convinces himself to stay happy irrespective of whether he has a job or not, is it a good thing? Obviously it is not a good thing. But is this the kind of mind conditioning I am talking about? Is the unemployed person actually happy? Even if the person is happy, how long will he stay that way? Is his family happy? This kind of happiness is generally very short term and ’taking comfort from blaming the situation’ kind of happiness. You might’ve seen a lot of people who do that. You yourself might have done that in your life in some part or the other. I will give you my own example. 5 years ago, I appeared for the JEE Mains examination. I was nervous, when I sat in the exam hall, I saw that there was no wall clock available in the classroom, I was not allowed to carry a wrist watch. For those who don’t know, JEE is one of the toughest exams in India and it is huge for students who want to pursue engineering after class 12. The exam has 90 questions to solve in 3 hours, i.e., 2 minutes per question, that is how I used to time all my mock exams and I absolutely needed a watch at that time.

Since I had a habit of looking at the watch every minute in the exam, I was very tensed, I was borderline devastated. I thought it was over, I am not going to be able to finish my paper in time. And it happened as expected, it did not go well for me. I cleared the exam but not with good marks. I obviously had the option to ask time to the supervisor, but how many times? I had a habit of checking it every minute and timing every question. I came out and cursed the center a lot for not keeping a wall clock in the classroom. I told every single person who asked me that it was not my fault that the exam did not go well. It was because I did not get a stupid watch. But what was it actually? Deep down, I knew that it was my own lack of preparation that led to the situation. If not wall clock, I would have had some other excuse for the bad performance. I was comforting my own mind by blaming the situation and conditioning my own mind into thinking that it was not my fault. Yes it was not my fault that I did not get a watch, but it was my fault that I did not prepare good enough for the exam.

Here’s one more example from my own life, one of my biggest fears, swimming. Since childhood, I have always hated swimming, because I cannot figure out how to do it. A few years back, one of my friends told me that he is joining swimming coaching classes and he invited me as well. It was the month of December and my college vacations were going on. I thought let’s give it one more try. I tried, and I failed. I tried for 3-4 days continuously and I failed again and again. On the fifth day when my friend called me, I thought of the best thing that could comfort my mind, ‘it is really cold outside’. For context, I live in Mumbai, India, where even the lowest temperatures don’t go below 20°C. But since I wanted some or the other reason to avoid swimming (i.e. my fear), I found it in the form of Mumbai winters. It was not even on purpose. I literally comforted my own mind by blaming a situation that is not even a blocker. It might seem a bit silly, but everyone of us do this in some or the other form or some or the other situation. The unemployed person is doing the same thing.

Most of the people who say they are happy of the adverse situation are happy because they have convinced their mind to stay in the comfort zone of blaming the situation and not taking up the charge themselves. Even after knowing all of this, it is very difficult for us to come out of the trap of blaming the situation. Actual happiness is not in comforting yourself by blaming the situation, actual happiness is in accepting your own flaws, working on them and beating them.

The above discussion was a rather short one and might seem like a tangent from the main discussion that was going on about the different kinds of happiness, state of mind and the placebo effect but I thought that it is important to highlight it when talking about the winning kind of happiness. It was especially important to highlight what kind of mind comforting or mind conditioning I am not talking about. In the next blog, we will move on to a totally different kind of happiness, a really small kind of happiness, let’s say you ate your favourite chocolate and you are happy. Do check out part 3 where I discuss about the same.