When you reflect on your goals and really boil them down, you’re left with the ultimate reason of why you want to achieve that goal, what you truly value and your happiness comes from that. “So, you value family,” Ailsa tells me, “Your happiness comes from honouring your family and you don’t need a university degree to do that, there are other ways.” I respond that I’ve always valued education because my parents sacrificed everything to provide me with an amazing, high-quality education, so I feel as though I owe it to them to succeed and graduate.
She asks me why I put value on that goal.
I tell her that my upcoming goal is to graduate from university. To break it down, Ailsa asks me what one of my goals is. “It’s about asking why you’re striving for these achievements,” Ailsa says, “It’s about recognising those values, what do you value most?” Considering this then, where do we find happiness? The hedonic treadmill theory points out a common misconception – that if we achieve x, y or z, we will become happier – but as we know now, that’s not true. “It’s an opportunity to stop and check in,” she says, “What can you hear? What can you smell? What can you see? What can you taste? What can you touch? It allows you to drop it into your body and out of your mind.” “Micro-dosing mindfulness is really helpful,” Ailsa suggests, “A lot of us don’t have the opportunities to build in long moments of mindfulness so say you’re washing the dishes, or you have a moment in the sun, or you see something in nature, take those moments.”Īilsa introduces me to the five-sense technique as a way to ground myself in the present. The ultimate question though is how do you stay in the present?Īilsa asks me what I do to find myself in the present. This is problematic because it’s in the present that we find happiness. If our achievements don’t make us happy, what does? How do I become a happier person if achieving my goals doesn’t do it for me? In my search for answers, I enlisted the help of psychotherapist and author, Ailsa Robson.Īfter introducing her to my obsessive need to create goals Ailsa tells me I likely do this in an attempt to escape present day reality. This was enough to send me into an existential crisis.
Essentially, I’ve been running on a treadmill my whole life, towards this unnameable goal that will never make me happy.
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