High school is a series of milestones and achievements. If we’re not focusing on studying for the next test, we’re looking towards the end of the quarter, the semester, the year or even graduation. As students, we start to put ourselves into a mindset focused solely on achieving goals, and we stop embracing what is more immediately in front of us.

We deprive ourselves of what makes us truly happy, because we have this misconceived idea that if we study hard enough and get the A we need, we’ll be happy. But then there’s the test after that, and the test after that. The list of things to complete never ends.

As a senior, I’ve heard and personally said things along the lines of, “I’ll finally be happy when I finish my college apps.” Then, once applications are finished, it becomes, “I’ll finally be happy once I get into college.” Where does that kind of qualification stop? Retirement? Death?

We keep depending on external success for our happiness, but our definition of success keeps changing. With that formula, we can never truly be happy.

According to positive psychologist Shawn Achor, the majority of our happiness is determined by how we process the world, not by the external world itself. So, the way many students, myself included, have been living is the opposite from the way our brain actually works.

Goals are important to push and motivate you, but making them your sole focus puts you on an impossible pursuit of happiness. If happiness primarily comes from within, raising our happiness level only requires a shift in thinking. This shift can even cause an optimal mindset for achieving our goals, Achor said.

“If you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, [essentially], your brain [with a positive outlook] performs significantly better than it does at negative, neutral or stressed,” Achor said in his TED Talk.

So why wait any longer? Just be happy right now! It would be awesome if it were that easy, but for a long time we’ve set ourselves up to think that happiness comes after success. It will take some time to break that habit.

Start out with living in the present. Focus on what you’re doing when you’re doing it. Seems simple, right? Think about the last time you ate a meal or brushed your teeth without thinking about your to-do list, or even accomplishing a different task at the same time.

I started this process by focusing on brushing my teeth, every single stroke. Not only did I clean my teeth better, but it was incredible to truly just focus on one task. For those few minutes, there weren’t major tests or regrets from the past; none of that mattered, because it wasn’t happening. It had previously only occurred in my head.

The second thing that I tried was finding three things in my day that I was grateful for every day. According to Achor, this trains our brain to start looking for the positive in the world before anything else.

After about three weeks, I really started to notice a change in myself. Throughout this process, I became less and less consumed with success and back from college admissions offices.

I’m now focusing more on the tasks at hand, because that is truly all we can do. There is no point in worrying about things we can’t change, so we should try to shift that energy into working on what we can change in the moment.

I know that I sure don’t want to look back on my senior year as crossing days off of my calendar until letters from colleges show up in my mail box.