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Positive Outcomes Drive Happiness

Picture of Hugh Massie Hugh Massie : February 04, 2023

Money Energy View All

Money Energy Law #4:

Find happiness in your life. Positive outcomes will provide tranquility, joy, and a longer life.

Who doesn’t want to live a happy and fulfilling life? It’s fundamental to who we are and often there is a deep interconnection between your level of happiness, your health, and your wealth. The balancing act from incorporating all three into your life is what makes it so challenging to attain positive outcomes. However, striving for higher Money Energy has the potential to fuel all your life energies— giving both your vitality and your feelings of fulfillment a boost.

Does money buy happiness?

How many times have we heard that it does not? But that may not be entirely true. Based on our own extensive research and unpacked further in our Mastering Your Money Energy White Paper, our findings validate that money cannot buy long-term happiness. However, we have found those sentiments may differ when it comes to having enough money to experience happiness in the short-term. It also can potentially contribute to achieving lifelong satisfaction in terms of its impact of generating Money Energy.

Sometimes, however, we are unable to achieve happiness because of negativity bias. This refers to our tendency to pay more attention to and give more weight to negative experiences, emotions, and information compared to positive ones. I’d like to point out that behavioral biases aren’t always a bad thing. Negativity bias has evolutionary roots and served a vital purpose to our ancestors’ survival—and that required being more attuned to potential threats, dangers, and the negative consequences of our actions. It’s okay to be cautious, just not overly cautious.

The opposite is equally an influencer on happiness—and that’s overconfidence. Becoming overly focused on uplifting news, stories, or events, while ignoring negative information or warning signals can lead to feelings of disappointment when expectations are not met.

The Impact of Stress

According to a survey conducted by CNBC, 70% of Americans are feeling financially stressed, roughly 58% are living paycheck-to-paycheck, more than half say they don’t have an emergency fund, and more women than men are feeling that stress.¹ Those are some alarming statistics.

One barrier to achieving happiness is the stress associated with money—not just for those with less of it, but also for high net-worth individuals who are concerned with protecting, maintaining, and passing on their wealth. Some triggers to stress can be attributable to:

Having an unhealthy money relationship
How we choose to define success
The comparisons we make with others in terms of wealth

These feelings shape our personal experiences with money. And if you’re someone who is responsible for corporate purses trying to manage revenues and budgets (especially through an economic downturn), you are not immune to these same behavioral risks.

Your well-being is interconnected.

Regardless of the catalyst that creates anxiety and stress toward money, it invades our ability to experience happiness. In fact, Money Energy and your overall wellness are intertwined, perhaps in ways you may not have considered. Did you know your financial well-being is connected to your nutritional, physical, and mental well-being? Let’s look at a real-life example to illustrate this.

Meet Peter Madden.

Peter is age 67 and recently retired from his chief executive role. He feels in control of his world; he is a strategist and tends to be very skeptical of others and their ability to give him advice. He is a do-it-yourself investor, and his success has made him a very wealthy man. He still enjoys watching and playing the financial markets from his home study and, until recently, was happy, healthy, and full of travel plans with his wife and family.

However, Peter has become concerned about the economic downturn in recent years. He finds himself less able to time the market or read the signals to buy and sell investments as he once did. He has never allowed himself to rely on or get too close to an advisor, believing he can control his financial world.

As a result, he is feeling less satisfied with his life and isolated despite what many would be more than glad to have accumulated with his level of wealth and connections. So, what is driving this unhappiness?

A few issues come to mind:

Peter sets ambitious goals but expects bottom-line results, which isn’t happening as before.
He follows budgets and is now concerned that he won’t have enough money for his life and that of his family. He hadn’t considered longevity risk previously (the risk of outliving your money).
He is a loner who does not know how to enjoy himself and build relationships with others.
He is experiencing less meaning and purpose in his life during retirement because he has not found an activity that he is passionate about.
He is letting his fear about money constrict his spending of money on meaningful life experiences.

Money Energy feeds more than wealth.

Peter needs to be made aware of his Money Energy and how to manage it. Failing to discover opportunities to generate more of it impacts mental health, relationships, diet, and even work performance. And, by the way, the lower the Money Energy potential, the more likely you will experience financial stress. If he learns how to harness Money Energy, and build more momentum and alignment to it, Peter might find that his life will improve on all levels.

Have you ever felt like Peter? Or what about your friends, family, colleagues, and clients? Without understanding how your life energies are interconnected, it makes it harder to achieve and maintain feelings of health, wealth, wisdom, and happiness.

Stay tuned every week as we continue to reveal all 40 Laws of Money Energy.