If you try to hard to be happy, you just wont succeed at it! Of course, no-one wants to be unhappy or miserable, but most of us end up taking the wrong route in life, in pursuit of happiness by simply misplacing ourselves and our mindset. We limit ourselves so much that the goals we have set ourselves are too high and we condition ourselves to believe that we must obtain our goals before we can be happy.

Its an age old adage... if I do this, I will be happy, if I get that, I will be happier, if I achieve what I want to from life, I will be happy with my contribution and so on. But there are not many of us who actually sit and examine what we are doing by placing conditions on our selves in the pursuit of happiness.

From experience, I know this isnt something we do with intention. If I had known where I was going wrong when suffering with sever clinical depression, then I am sure that I would have sorted myself out a lot sooner, there is no question about it. However, I didnt know what I was doing and it most certainly meant that I couldnt fix myself straight away.

I woke every morning as an adolescent with a longing. A longing to be anyone else other than who I was. I wanted to be a happy person, carefree and contented with life with no problems both financially and emotionally. If I made a wish on a shooting star, or blew the fairies off a dandelion, saw a black cat cross the road or even made the wish with the chicken bone, then my one wish, each and every time was simply to be happy.

The thing is, in pursuit of happiness, we forget the now, we forget what we have, and we forget to stop and take stock of where we are in life and exactly what we have achieved up to this point. Blindly, we look onwards and keep grinding ourselves into the ground looking to the future for our happiness until one day, we will stop, look back and realise that we have actually lived our lives but we are still unhappy. Instead, in our quest to find the things that make us happy, we have simply let what would truly make us happy pass us by without acknowledgement.

The thing with happiness is that everyone wants it and no-one really knows the secret to why some people are happy and others not so. Theoretical studies about depression are merely only assumptions. No-one really knows why one person is depressed and another is not, why medications work for one person, yet not another and why cognitive behavioural therapy works well for one, but wouldnt necessarily be suited to the next.

Ultimately, in all of the Therapy and Counselling sessions that I have received, what the sessions have undoubtedly boiled down to is that I am accountable for me; therefore I am accountable for my happiness. I am the one who has to figure out what upsets me. I am the one who has to understand why I cry. I am the one who has to deal with frustrations and I am the one in pursuit of my happiness therefore only I know what will make me happy.

Wanting to be happy is contagious. Everyone wants to be happy. The way we feel when we are happy, the way we react when happy and the way we behave when happy is much more our preference than to feel the opposite.

When a person laughs, the laugh is contagious, when a person smiles, the smile is contagious, and when a person is happy, the desire to feel happy is contagious too. So maybe the answer is this; if we all stopped trying so hard to be happy, we would feel it more often?

Ask yourself these questions, honestly. Are you trying too hard? If the answer is yes, then maybe the contagiousness of happiness has caught up with you too? Ask yourself, is it happiness that you want or are you just in love with the idea of happiness?

The Author maintains all rights and restrictions to this work.