Be wary of the happiness bump.

You land the promotion. Your crush finally texts back. Some amazing news hits your inbox.

The happiness bump—that temporary high from good news—rarely lasts more than a day, a week, maybe a month. That exciting news, that super fun experience, that big win—it all fades back into the normalcy of everyday life.

Even lottery wins fade—unless the joy is reinvested in something lasting. Hinging your happiness on an external event, even a string of external events, leaves you fragile. When your happiness is outside the locus of your control, it can be taken away at any moment.

I'm not here to say you can be happy no matter what. Life can get pretty tough, and I'm all for grieving through the rough parts. Feeling the full range of human emotion is healthy. Toxic positivity is not welcome here.

But here's what I'd like to invite us to think about: slow happiness.

It's not the kind that you get from winning the lottery. Not from selling your company or marrying your dream person.

It's the kind of happiness that builds up over time. It's the equity that you build from overcoming difficulties and being proud of yourself. It's the joy in being able to appreciate things we take for granted—a roof over our head, the smell of a rose. It’s the skill of training our awareness to focus on what we do have.

This idea has been brewing in me for some time. About seven years ago, I hit the hardest part of my life. I fell to my own rock bottom and had to climb back up—emotionally, vocationally, socially, financially.

That story is for another time. Skipping ahead to now, what got me out was not being saved.

No one came in and gave me a billion dollars. The woman of my dreams didn't sweep me off my feet and solve all my problems.

What got me out was the long, difficult process of becoming skillful at navigating my own mind. It was learning a tremendous amount about psychology and going through various healing modalities.

It was a long road to getting to a place where I feel great about my life. It's not the result of some high. It's a quiet hum of happiness that stays with me.

And it's also the patience to know that tough times and difficult emotions will pass. Slow happiness is not about feeling elated all the time. It's the general sense that life is good.

We all go through hard times, and the challenges of modern-day living sometimes feel so hard that we want someone to just come in and fix our problems. But even if that happens, if we haven't built up the skills to nurture our own happiness, we will still be stuck in cycles of frustration.

The key is to build a happiness that runs within us no matter our circumstances.

Life will always have problems—but slow happiness doesn’t depend on their absence.