Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. When we think about happiness and having a good life,

I believe there's a very strong tendency to say this will happen

when everything is going well. I go to the restaurant, I get right in, the table is nice,

the atmosphere is pleasant, the waiter is very attentive, my partner who I'm with, I enjoy, the food was exquisite,

and the bill was reasonable. So I leave that evening and say,

I'm happy. I had a good night because everything went well.

But another day I wake up. I have an important event to get to at work. When I go to get in the car, I can't find my keys. I look everywhere and finally I find them hidden in a pocket.

So I'm already 15 minutes behind.

I get on the road and sure enough there's traffic, a lot of traffic

and I'm delayed. I'm not going to make my meaning, and I have to call in

and apologize, and I just start screaming, why does this happen?

Why? And life is not at that moment a happy life. And I think for most people, both of these situations make sense. Things go well, we're happy. Things don't go well, we're not

happy. That seems reasonable. That makes sense. But unfortunately, though most people live this way, there's a definite threat, a definite

danger to our happiness if we embrace this philosophy of life.

But what is this philosophy, Dr. Puff? It's basically the fact that

we're happy based upon what's going on in our lives. If we are on a beautiful vacation, we're having lots of free time, and our health is good, our

families, well, we're not going in debt to be in this vacation, and there's a good job to go home too and we like the people

around us that we work with and dot dot dot the list can be quite long so

those happy experiences are fading and they change. And because of that, there's

always a threat to our happiness when we look for it externally. And mostly it's because we just can't control so many things of life.

I mean from the weather, from the traffic to who we interact with, to our parents,

there's just so many different factors that we can't control the world economy,

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