Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. As we journey through life, it can be pleasant, it can be enjoyable, but at times it can be hard. But why is it so hard sometimes? And is there anything that we can do to soften it when it is hard?

And that's what we're going to look at today, making life easier when it's hard.

Well, the first thing we have to do is understand human behavior, because in life, once we have understanding understanding it's a lot easier to create change.

Well the biggest thing that happens in our lives is that we create expectations.

We watch people that are older than us. is that we create expectations.

We watch people that are older than us.

We see other people's lives and we think,

I want that.

That would be good.

Maybe it's our parents.

And we say, yeah, I like what they did. I want to do that too.

Or maybe we had a tough childhood.

We say, I don't want that, but I know these other people that they see on television that have met through friends and I like their lives.

I want that.

For example, here in the United States, about 50% of us have parents that stay together throughout our lives.

And we may say, when I get married, I want that too.

But another 50% have parents that didn't stay together.

And because of that, we may say, I don't want that, that was hard.

I'm going to make sure I stay married. Or perhaps our parents financially struggled when we

grew up and weren't able to give us everything that we wanted or at least

keep up with what our friends were getting. So we say we're going to work really hard so

that we can have a lot of things that make sure our kids don't suffer like we did.

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