What Is the Number One Cause to Unhappiness and Misery?

While I know this is somewhat painful, I invite you anyway to take a few moments to look at the world and the unhappiness and misery that overwhelm it, that overwhelm us all.

What do you know notice? Where do all this unhappiness and misery come from? Do you know the number one cause?

Many of us blame loneliness, or oppression, or war, or hatred, or violence, and so on. We are mistaken. There is only one cause to unhappiness and misery: The irrational thoughts and false beliefs that inhabit our minds – self-defeating thoughts and beliefs that are so widespread and common that it never crosses our minds to even question or challenge them. It is because of these irrational thoughts and false beliefs that we have a distorted vision of the world, that we hold a prejudiced image of ourselves.

Our conditioning is so strong and the pressure society puts on us so intense that we are somehow trapped in our own perception of the world. And as long as we will ignore that our perception is distorted, that our thoughts are irrational, and that our beliefs are false – at least, some of them! – it will remain impossible for us to escape this overwhelming unhappiness and misery.

What complicates matters further is that we have somehow been programmed not to suspect, not to doubt, but to blindly focus and trust the lessons taught by our traditions, our culture, our society, our religion, and so on. And when we feel unhappy and miserable, more often than not we feel guilty and unworthy as well because we have also learned to blame and devalue ourselves – and not the conditioning, the cultural background, the irrational ideas and false beliefs that inhabit our minds.

Good news is the irrational thoughts and false beliefs we have learned and believed for so many years, we most definitely have the capacity to challenge and replace them with self-helping thoughts and beliefs that will create true and sustainable happiness in our lives.

Difficult – and sometimes very, very difficult – you bet! Impossible, absolutely not! As Louise L. Hay so beautifully says, "A thought is is just a thought and a thought can be changed."

"What are these irrational thoughts and false beliefs that keep us from being truly happy?" do you ask. Not only are there many of them, but I promise to explore the most popular ones with you as part of my next posts. Until then, let me leave you with this valuable advice from Dr. Wayne W. Dyer: "Don’t believe everything you think."