Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. The choice of happiness. What do I mean by that?

Aren't some people just born happy and others aren't? There might be a choice whether I'm going to be happy or not.

That's what we're going to explore in this podcast today. How do I choose to be happy?

Because it is a choice. But I have to warn you, happiness is a really difficult choice because unfortunately

if we truly want to be happy on a regular basis, on a consistent basis, it means we have to let go of lots of other things,

lots of things that we don't want to let go of, and so we're not happy.

So what am I talking about? If we compared happiness to a lover, it would be like

this. Happiness, if it was our lover, would say, if you want me, if you really want me, then you can't have anyone else.

You can't look at other people, you can't think about other people, you can't desire other people,

and you better never cheat on me because if you do, I'm out of here. The great news is we're all capable of

being happy, of finding peacefulness on a regular consistent basis. It's not something

we have to learn, it's really something we have to unlearn.

Because our natural state is actually one of peacefulness, of happiness.

So what happened? What went wrong? And if my natural state is one of happiness, why am I not happy?

It all begins when we were very young.

What happened was, as a young child, we could be fascinated by anything, a pile of dirt, a dirty shirt, a puppy, it wouldn't matter.

Anything could make us really curious at first.

I remember one Christmas I was with my niece and she was visiting from out of town and she had

never had oysters before, but one of my relatives made oysters for Christmas, and I thought

I'd give her a try.

And she was very excited.

She put them right in her mouth, started chewing them, and immediately spit them out, because

...