How Smart People Can Find Happiness

I am surrounded by smart people and some of us live in a state of semi-contentment and semi-sadness. It is like we are blessed and cursed at the same time.

And if you have ever wondered (or Googled), if smart people can be happy then this post is for you. And by the way, when I refer to intelligent people, am not only talking about high IQ but emotional intelligence, talented musicians or any other sphere where a person has special gifts. But one would think, that being bestowed with higher cognitive abilities should lead to a more enriched life and hence more happiness.

And that is logical. But in life, all privileges come with their share of woes, the reverse side of the medal if you will. With intelligence comes the overachiever mindset. If I am not constantly excelling, I am not good enough. This is especially true for people like myself who have been praised for being smart ever since we were kids.

What happens on days when you are tired or months were things are not going your way? You go to a very dark place, where irrationality reigns. You lose sense of reality and your inner critic takes over.

The spiral

Before we dive into my hard-earned strategies on how to create happiness, let us understand how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Like I told my friend during a conversation, I am happy 99% of the time but that 1% is so dark and frightening that I work hard just to never go there. It sends a chill down my spine just thinking about it. Unfortunately, I can’t hide against this monster as it is also part of me.

And I also used to brush it off, thinking that statistically speaking it should be manageable as it happens on very rare occasions. But my friend who is very wise and concerned, told me that it is not about the frequency but the intensity.

Because of our tendency to overthink, it is easier for minor negative thoughts to spiral into bigger ones. Because we just don’t know how deep our potential runs, we feel guilty for not putting our gift(s) to be used efficiently all the time.

The constant need for achievement somehow becomes a familiar routine, almost like every achievement is a permission to keep going in life, to confirm that our life matters. We blame ourselves for not being perfect, for not maximising our potential or for judging ourselves for not going at full speed all the time.

The little things

Because we have been conditioned to focus on accomplishments, it is almost the grandiosity of things that validates our existence for living. So as much as intelligent people are independent thinkers, our whole being is dependent on us achieving milestones in life.

During the darkest times, I have learnt to slowly detach my identity from my smart brand and also dissociate my happiness from my achievements in life.

I exist, I am enough and I deserve to be happy, no strings attached.

With time, I learned to focus on joy and the kind that is derived from the simplest of things. I learnt how to journal my complex emotions and to enjoy the process of channelling my thoughts to paper and leaving them there. I have learnt to seek out beauty in the little things I see on the way home without having to memorise them or know their names, their histories or their usefulness. I am learning to co-exist with nature.

So can smart people be happy?

The short answer is yes, and there is a but. We have to work on it. We have to remember that intelligence is no more than a tool in our arsenal and not the representation of our whole existence. We are here to make memories and undergo a process of discovery not only to produce beneficial things for society and ourselves.

When I think back on my 38 years on this plane, I no longer assess where I am in life based on my degrees, job experiences, how many countries I have travelled to or even how well I write. I look at the trails I have left, with my friends, on my friends, on strangers I have met, on places I have travelled to and then marvelled openly at them. I cherish everything from a light breeze during summer caressing my face to a hot chocolate after a cold winter day.

I think about these moments:

When my male friends would pronounce words in a silly manner intentionally to make the girls laugh. I once remembered how they just said hawt dawgs (hot dogs) repeatedly after watching a Russel Peters show and it made me chuckle out loud in a crisis meeting at work.
When my uncle took me to the market on Sundays when I was a child I would watch him negotiate the best cut of meats. How excited I was picturing the delicious meals we will be having for lunch and skipping back home holding his hands.
When we got drunk before going to watch a movie at college and I was walking down an escalator going up. And how it became a regular joke with my friends.
When a female acquaintance broke down in tears while giving me a hug because her long-term boyfriend broke up with her I felt hot tears trickling on my shoulders.
When my friend jumped into a freezing cold pool after dinner during winter and after looking at each other and thinking what a bad idea, we all followed him. I remember the shivers we felt getting out of the pool and instantly regretting the decision once we got out and had to run inside with trembling feet. Then we sat down drinking hot tea after a hot shower and laughing at the deed.

The moments are endless and none of them required my cognitive prowess. In fact, they were just moments of connection, with myself and with my loved ones, when I chose to let go and embrace the present and when I relied on my heart and not on my head to make sense of things.

Because not everything needs to be understood, some things need to be experienced and felt.

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Final thoughts

Because we are naturally inclined to rely on our brains to navigate life situations, we become miserable when our brains don’t operate at optimum levels. Smart people can be happy too, if only they appreciate themselves in their total humanity.

And I wish somebody told me everything I wrote here when I was younger and struggling. But that is also part of life, learning as you go and expressing it, and not perfectly as my inner critic would have liked to but in so many words that others can relate to.

We have been given this advantage to help ourselves and others around us but we should not feel guilty for not maximising every minute of every day or every ounce of our capacities. On some days, we can be limitless and on some days we can be perfectly flawed. We don’t need to have solutions for everything and we also don’t have to understand everything.

It is in the knowledge of that surrender that I found happiness.

If we have been given the capacity to overanalyse everything, then that can also be used consciously to tell our brains that we are taking a break today and we will come back tomorrow. That we are allowed to be very silly because it is good for our mental health and that is a smart thing to do.

We have to learn to seek beauty in ourselves, in the fact that we are a work-in-progress, that on somedays our gifts can be used to help society but on somedays, we can be a couch potato, eat bad ice cream and watch cartoons.

All our guilt and discomfort from assessing past behaviours are part of our mechanism and while we can appreciate that side of us, we can be aware of the fact that they form lessons of our past and not stains on the canvas of our life.

If our brains are a complex maze of loops, twists and turns, then how can we expect our lives to be a straight line and feel sad when that straight line repeatedly turns crooked?

That we are complex beings in a complex world but we can choose to focus on the simple things for our happiness and contentment.

What makes me happy? I look forward to the next moment when I can turn my brain off and say ‘hawt dawg’ again. And laugh out loud. And people will look weirdly at me. And I will respond back with a smile that almost says: it is ok if you dont get it, I don’t get it either but am enjoying myself.

Thank you for the inspiration Adrienne Gibbs , these words have been waiting to get out for a long time 🙂

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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