Stephanie Gray

Inquiry Paper
Dr. Rand
03/21/15
Happiness can be many different things, it can be the joy of receiving a gift, it can
be the pleasure of being in someones presence or seeing someone else happy, and it can
be having a moment to live through an experience. Every person has something different
that makes him or her happy and has a different idea of what happiness is. Why do people
try and strive to be happy, to work hard, and see results and outcomes.
What affects being happy has on someones life, how it affects their health, their friends
and family, and their everyday lives. Exploring the science behind being happy and the
motivation of gaining happiness .
Many different things can determine happiness and for each person it is different.
A lot of people go to college to have fun, meet new friends that will last a lifetime, and
get an education, as well as other things like joining clubs and getting involved and
setting up your future life in a certain career. What ever it is that you come to college for,
I would say that almost all the students want to be happy. You can go up to a group of
college students on any campus and ask them how they are doing. The majority of these
students will say, Im alright or Im good. But there are always a few students who
say that there is something going on, or that theyre stressed about something. As college
students, sometimes we can find ourselves unhappy, it can be for a moment because you
overslept by ten minutes and dont have time to eat breakfast, it could be that you didnt
do well on an exam, or more serious where you did not get accepted from your prerequisite program to your major and you are stuck. Whatever the reason may be, coming
out of that unhappiness can be difficult.
Realizing what I wanted and what made me happy was the key step for me when I
found myself unhappy here at UNCC my first semester. Coming here to school, twelve
hours away from home, was not as easy as I thought. I never would have predicted that I
would miss home so much and that I would be unhappy here at school. I thought that I
would come here, meet new friends, go out every once in a while, enjoy the nice weather,
and gain an education about nursing. I didnt realize I was unhappy until about two
months into school. I found myself not going out and meeting new people, but just
nagging out with one of my roommates. I live in a four person/four bedroom suite, and
every room is like that in my building. I discovered that there is not much social activity
going around when everyone can just hang out in their own common room instead of
going out and meeting people. So I kind of just accepted that and didnt try, but boy was I
wrong.
I was lazy, I expected to come to college and meet new people and friends, but
that those people would come and find me. Looking back I realize that no one was going
to come and knock on my door and be like hey lets be best friends. Of coarse that
would never happen. Now I see that if I wanted to meet new people I had to go out and
meet them in the middle. I had to put on some nice clothes and show some effort and go
socialize. I had to go out into the world and get what I want.

Happiness comes from within and is determined in the frontal lobe of your brain,
specifically in the pre-frontal cortex (Gilbert). Dan Gilbert explains in his video, The
surprising science of happiness, that happiness is synthesized and that happiness can be,
in a sense, pre-determined. He goes on to explain that our minds have an experience
stimulator where we can experience things in our head before we experience them in real
life. This allows humans to test things out before actually doing them. Everyone does
this without realizing it, but two billion years ago this was not possible (Gilbert). Now we
can think about what makes us happy and go out and achieve it.
The mind is used for exploration and experiment and the relationship between the
function of the brain and body (Chittister 46). Technology has allowed us to explore the
brain and go deep inside to figure out what triggers happiness, and what responses it has.
Happiness has to deal with the relationship between mind and matter (Chittister 46). Both
Chittister and Gilbert talk about the happiness of paraplegics. Gilbert compares a
paraplegic to a person who just won the lottery, initially both have complete opposite
reactions, feelings, and emotions, but one year later, they are at the same level on
happiness. Chittister says that happiness has at least as much to do with whats in us as it
does with whats around us, and uses that to explain that a paraplegic can achieve the
same amount of happiness as he or she did before they became paraplegic. If this is true,
it shows that outside factors, in the long run, do nodet have much of an affect as people
think they do.
Of coarse, outside factors still have an affect on your life. After a year, the two
men find themselves on the same page, being just as happy as they were before. But
during that year, each man experienced many different things. A year is a very long time,
even a day is a long time, and for those periods of time, the lottery winner most likely had
more fun, and was happier and got to experience more life and have more enjoyable time.
While the paraplegic had a rough time, he or she had to figure out a new way of life and
figure out how to gain the happiness and the joy back. During the year, each day was
different and it was hard for the paraplegic to keep going, he had to fight, while the
lottery winner enjoyed himself and his money and whatever it is that his money brought
him. In the long run, you dont see to many of the ups and downs in life and you can find
content and happiness, but on a day-by-day, moment-by-moment status, it can be very
difficult to do so.
The negative side of life helps in the search for happiness (Harter). Having a bad
day makes you realizes how great and precious the good days are. No one can be happy
twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. Things happen in life that we have no control
over. Failing an exam, loosing one hundred dollars, getting lost, losing a friend or family
member, a tree falls on your car. Everyone goes through things in life that just happen, we
get stressed out, but these times allow for people to grow and learn new things about
themselves and what they want. Every experience someone goes through has a message
or a lesson that can be learned. In a year or two you are not going to remember failing
that exam, you are going to remember the exam that you passed because you studied so
much and worked hard for. Its the little things in life that we have to realize and put into

perspective. Dwelling on every little thing that goes wrong will never allow you to be
happy, you have to pick and choice your battles.
If we could be happy forever, how long can we live for? Happiness and life
correspond greatly, more then just saying, A happy life is a long life. Happiness may
not cause a long life, but it has affects on health. As we grow older, we hear the fearing
word more and more, stress. Nobody likes this word and no body likes what it does to us.
I see stress as the opposite of happiness, but like happiness, it can be out of our control.
Being stress can do many different things to your body; it can cause you to lose your hair,
to eat more food, to get angry and agitated easily, may cause acne, headaches, hard time
falling asleep (), depression, high blood pressure and many other things.
Stress is never an easy thing to deal with because if you think about it more, you
just become more stressed. Planning out what you have to do and get done can make it
easier and asking for help from others can make the biggest change. It is hard to be
stressed and sometimes it may causes depression. Depression is also like the opposite of
happiness; sometimes you can never see yourself being happy. The downsides of stress
and depression can go on and on and getting out of those states will be a challenge, but it
also shows that they can be overcome. They have a valuable toll on your life and health
and the side effects are bad, which allows for one to see that you may not live a long life
from being happy and it wont necessarily cause a healthy life, but you will be healthier
and live longer then you would if you chose not to be happy.
Choosing to be happy can be easy or difficult depending on where you are in life
and what you are going through. As college students we want to be happy, we get through
the week in order to get to the weekend, some people go out and have fun, while other
people stay in and watch Netflix. Whatever you decide to do, its your decision. I know
what its like to not be happy, for some time here at school, I wasnt. I was spending most
of my time during of the week doing work for my classes and studying and when the
weekend came along for that break, I didnt find myself having fun or spending time with
others. I love my roommates and we got along great, but two of them would go home on
the weekends, and the other one and I would just hang out the two of us. It was fun for a
couple of weekends, being able to relax and jus chill, but I wanted to meet more people.
I started to get very homesick, after spending most nights in my dorm and
whenever we would try and go out something bad would happen or something would go
wrong. I kept asking myself, why does this keep happening? Why cant I go out and have
fun? I would see all my close friends on social media and they would be going out, they
would text me there crazy stories of whats been going on and I would always feel left
out. I was beginning to think about transferring and I decided to give the second semester
a try, and I am so happy I did. I have found that I cant just expect things to happen, I
have to go out and make them happen. I have to go out and find a party, go out and find
new friends, talk to new people, join clubs, discover new things. I kept on wanting things
to just happen to me, maybe that works for other people, but I am not a lucky person.
My dad has always told me that if I want to be happy, I have to make myself
happy. Yes, you can depend on other people, but you have to depend on yourself first.
You have to wake up and chose to be happy, not wake up and want something to happen
to make you happy because odds are thats not going to happen. Luck has a lot to do with
happiness, but it also can have no effect at all. Sometimes people get lucky and win the
lottery, find ten dollars on the ground, get the perfect schedule for next semester, get a

great deal on a new coat, etc. While other people are not as lucky, they lose ten dollars,
they get a bad schedule, they fall and hurt themselves, etc.
Fate and luck are tricky things, and nothing is for sure. Things happen and it is
how we over come them and finds happiness that defines who we are as people and how
we live our lives. It is easier to go through life being happy, and there are little things in
life we can do to become happy, like mediate, find a religion to follow, do yoga, workout,
do sports and activities (Srivastava). When you figure out and determine what makes you
happy as a person, you can change your day. Its as simple as finding out they have grilled
chicken in the dining hall for dinner, you get happy over something so small as grilled
chicken but because you like and they have it, it makes you happy.
Being happy can lead to others being happy as well, just like being sad or in a bad
mood can lead others to be in ones too. Dr. Anjuli Srivastava for ABC News says that
happiness is contagious: Having a happy friend or family member who lives within a
mile of you appears to increase the probability, up to 15 percent in one study, that you
will be happy, too. So just being around others when you are down or sad can help. Its
like spreading joy at Christmas time, when you glad and content, others around will pick
that up.
Finding out what makes us happy, doing the little things, and spending time with
people we like and love makes all the difference. Martha Washington said it best, I am
determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have
learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our
circumstance but by our disposition. Just like my dad said as well, You have to want to
be happy and make yourself happy. Being happy can change in an instant and nothing in
life is definite, but how you live your life and the decisions you can be controlled.
Choosing to be happy has affects on you and others around you in ways you would never
think about and ways you cant always understand, but ultimate happiness does come
from within.

-unhappiness
-easier to conplain then to go out and fix it
-find quote more relevant to college students about happiness-why should we be thinking about happiness, connect the sources
-competing ideas and putting them together and make them connect
-science is not relelevent
gilbert is saying in our how scenarios happen our head, look at the summary and what
they are trying to say
-Talk about Deja and consequences and how we cant pick at the little things we have no
control over.
-Paraplegic cant say how bad his life is because he will never move on and find
happiness
-Think about the role of happiness in our lives and how it dictates what we do and chose
and decide.

-What is my message, what do my peers need to now about happiness, this is what I leave
them with
-Write the introduction last
-fix connections and how the subjects relate to eachother