In one of my books, I explain to children that when we talk about happiness, we are often referring to two kinds. One is the more obvious joy we feel immediately after something pleasurable happens such as learning someone we love is about to visit, receiving an amazing surprise or achieving something we’ve been trying to do for ages. I make it clear to children that we can’t expect to feel this kind of happiness all the time – even if it looks like people on adverts and social media are managing to!
The other type of happiness is more fuzzily defined. It’s the happiness self-help books are usually talking about. I suspect some languages have one word for it but in English, I’d describe it as an overall contentment with one’s existence.
But how do we get that kind of happiness?
I have read many books promising to make me happier, out of intrigue as to what they have to say. If I was to summarise the key messages that I have taken away from these, they would be something like:
- Practice gratitude regularly. It’s something that you do have to remember to practise and a daily gratitude diary can help with this.
- Make plans – they give you something to look forward to, they give you a sense of agency and it just feels good to make plans, however ‘small’.
- Find things you love to do and make time to lose yourself in them.
- Take time to relax (and do it guilt-freely). It’s essential for our wellbeing.
- Get outdoors – especially amongst greenery. We are designed to wander in nature and it soothes us.
- Look after yourself physically as this undoubtedly benefits mental health too: eat well, drink water, get plenty of sleep, exercise, etc.
- Practise optimism. Try to find something positive in all situations- even if it only means you’ve learned how not to do something again.
- Don’t be scared to show vulnerability – it actually helps us connect with others (even though this seems counter-intuitive) and dismantles any ‘pretence’ we are always able to completely cope.
- Learn to ask for help when you need it. It’s not a weakness. Also, most people love the opportunity to help another….
- …and find ways to help and serve others as this is proven to make us happy.
- Work out what your core values are and align yourself to them. ‘Living your values’ makes life far less jarring.
- Only worry about the things that you can do something about.
- Sort out your detrimental addictions/coping strategies – including screen time, too much alcohol and polishing off a tin of biscuits!
- Stop watching the news. You might feel it’s your social responsibility to remain informed but unless you’re using that knowledge to go and take action, all it will almost definitely be doing is making you fearful, angry and/or sad.
- Set goals that you can realistically carry out. Break them down into bite-sized stages if they seem too enormous to manage initially. This is similar to making plans but is more about fulfilment than enjoyment.
- Build open and authentic relationships: those that we feel replenished by and where we can be fully and truly ourselves. We are meant to connect with others as we are social animals. Relationships need investing in but/and can reward us endlessly.
- Exercise self-compassion and forgiveness. We all make mistakes and all mistakes can be forgiven. Forgive others as we’d like to be forgiven etc.
- Learn to listen well. It’s a gift and it enhances your relationships no end. Use empathy when listening: the ability to imagine how another’s experience is making them feel (not how you would feel in the same situation).
- Keep learning and growing. Open up our minds to resist them closing down, stagnating or becoming arrogantly rigid!
- Learn to objectively challenge unhelpful thinking: negative assumptions, ruminating, catastrophising, negative self talk, thinking the worst of others etc.
- Accept, and even embrace, change (it’s inevitable after all and helps us grow).
- Learn to be assertive and maintain boundaries without feeling awkward about it.
- Take responsibility for yourself and what you do and don’t do. Be more mindful about the choices you make.
- Don’t let your mindset restrict your options – challenge your own inflexibility, reduce striving for certainty and expand your comfort zone.
- Learn to manage emotions resourcefully. For much more on this, read this blog!
- Develop self-awareness (and therefore become more authentically yourself: the journey counselling can take you on). Most people’s blind spots are to themselves.
- Develop self-acceptance – warts ‘n’ all.
- Learn to ‘let things go’.
- Be mindful/meditate/live in the present.
While I totally and utterly agree all of these things are beneficial, I will say that if being happy was as easy as picking up a book and reading it, everyone would be thriving with excellent mental health and a sense of fulfilment. I think there’s enough evidence around to demonstrate this isn’t the case. Most of us know what’s good for us, so why do we struggle so much to do these things? (In fact, knowing what is good for us and failing to do them can be another thing we can beat ourselves up with!)
Here, I think of the expression ‘you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.’ We can be told time and time again what we should be doing to benefit our overall happiness and we fully know these things but being driven enough to do them is another matter.
What are the barriers, therefore, to us doing the things so many people promise us will make our lives all shiny and wonderful – or at least less tricky? Here are just some barriers that occur to me:
A stressed mind is not an optimum one
I once worked in a job that was unbelievably stressful: the work environment was toxic (few people managed to be happy for long), the staff turnover was frantic, the bosses were more often defensive (or in the case of bullying – offensive!) than supportive, the workload was ever increasing and the goalposts were perpetually changing. Yet I stayed. I stayed far too long because the more stressed I became, the narrower my thinking became. I started to believe there were fewer and fewer options for me, such that the idea of taking, what felt like a leap of faith, started to become overwhelming!
When we’re chronically stressed, we have less ability to problem solve and find the resilience needed to make beneficial changes. The positive change that would help us, starts to look like more of a hurdle than it would be in reality and we stick with ‘what we know’ – however awful it is – in a false sense of security!
Many people are stressed. Many people have extremely pressured and monitored jobs, have too much to do and can still feel the dissatisfaction of thinking they’re not doing enough. We’re presented regularly with global news delivered in a shocking/attention grabbing tone (just 30 seconds of it agitates me!) and we’re sold gloom and doom perspective regularly. I have no doubt stress can get in the way of the realistic stock-taking a person needs to do to be able to make and embrace positive changes.
There is also the fact, we’re not ‘designed’ to live like we’re living. We evolved for a different way of living…
A quick dismissal
Another barrier at play is a mixture of our lack of humility and a closed-mindedness that can make us dismiss things very quickly. We can so often be certain that the way we are doing something is the right way when we might actually just be a bit scared of challenge and change. If we have already decided something like daily gratitude sounds like too much of a commitment or that meditation is too slow to work for us, we can apply an automatic dismissal before we give it any real consideration.
It’s also much easier to dismiss things, decide we haven’t got time for something or talk ourselves into believing things ‘aren’t that bad’ than doing something about promoting our mental health.
Often we say to ourselves, ‘I should do that’ but don’t really mean it. When we do truly want to do something, it’s almost 50% of the effort towards making a change, I reckon!
Distracted or ‘consumed’ by unhelpful things
I think we can all feel the ‘noisiness’ of the world. It can be hard to find peace enough to catch our breath sometimes.
I have also written many times of our dopamine drive being triggered so much as to have us perpetually agitated and addicted. You could argue that looking at our screens frequently, eating too many sugary treats, a few glasses of alcohol, hankering after the latest products, are not terrible things to do, but they’re not great either.
The more our dopamine is triggered, the less likely we are going to be able to resist such impulses and the less resolve we’re going to be able to muster to make changes. An over-active dopamine drive can also leave us with a disturbing feeling of ‘never having had enough’ and mean we irrationally feel that happiness will perpetually be found in the ‘next thing’ or with ‘more’. This creates the opposite of a sense of calm and satisfaction.
When we’re constantly distracted, catching up, searching and being reactive, it’s hard to find time and effort to proactively make positive plans for beneficial change. It takes resolve to stick at anything.
Negative thinking
If we unconsciously believe all our brain tells us and never learn to detach enough from our thinking to question its validity, we’re prone to rumination, catastrophising, self-criticism, unrealistic expectations, comparisons that leave us feeling inadequate, perfectionism etc – many of the things I listed in the post Thinking Burdens.
I think pessimism drains our motivation and rarely helps us find the drive to make positive changes. It can make is give up before we start, make us feel it’s not even worth trying and it’s going to fail anyway etc.
We can also quickly dismiss something because we’re not convinced it will work on us and our particularly tragic circumstance! (I often hear people say with resistance ‘but my case is much more extreme’ – you don’t understand.’) Or we might feel we haven’t got the determination within us needed for what seems like a difficult life overhaul! Or, of course, we might assume we just have to put up with our lot.
Egoic living
My parents’ generation were the generation of ‘we’re all in this together’ and put up with a lot of stuff in the name of this. Next, however, came the age of the individual. The ‘system’ might well have needed a shake up! We might have needed to stop assuming authority figures were always right and challenge some of the rules.
However, sixty plus years’ on and some might argue that our need for such a separate identity, self-focus, perpetual comparisons between ourselves and others, competition and a need to consider ourselves ‘better’, our need to be ‘right’, our need for external approval and appreciation, our arrogance and showiness etc. has gone beyond serving us well. These things and their contribution to negative mental health are rarely acknowledged. We can accept these traits as ‘normal’ despite them working against our likelihood of finding intrinsic wellbeing and leading to a perpetual sense of feeling dissatisfied and not good enough.
General lack of any suggested need to be introspective!
There have been many wise folk who have claimed our life’s journey is really about developing self-awareness to the point of self-awareness, congruence and authenticity. Those who get to the end of their lives having worked out how to be truly themselves, free from self-imposed and limiting fears, flexible in thought, emotionally intelligence and ever expansive; do stand out pleasingly with there ample wisdom! ‘Being the change we want to see in the world,’ isn’t a switch we can flick; it requires a journey of ever-curious and humble, self-discovery! This isn’t generally encouraged via education/ethos/culture.
To realise that our own personal ‘visor’ selectively filters what we receive from what’s right in front of us and, that our personal disposition affects our outlook ‘from source’ are certainly not on any mainstream curriculum. It’s exploring the effect of this visor and outlook, and working to rid ourselves of its distortions and denials that can bring about true self-awareness and congruence. Those huge tasks, according to Carl Rogers, bring about a lightness and I’d readily equate lightness with happiness!
* * *
My personal conclusion about happiness after years of pondering, I can boil down to simplicity. Most of our lives seem to have become frantic, noisy and complicated; all things that tend to which work against simplicity. In fact, we’d be forgiven for thinking we had to find time in our busy schedule to squeeze simplicity in! Ba boom cha!
But to attain simplicity, I think we need to:
- be able to free ourselves from the complications of our own negative thinking and self-limiting beliefs,
- take ourselves less seriously,
- stare at, accept and learn to endure (as a normal part of the human experience) any agitation or low-mood until it passes,
- remember all humans are just trying their best with what they have and are prone to messing up now and then so deserve our forgiveness,
- know at the end of the day that the only person we can be totally responsible for, is ourselves,
- exercise humility and assume we actually know very little,
- learn to be fully content with just going for a walk,
- learn to really ‘let go’ so negative things imprint upon us less significantly,
- try and always to have access to a bigger perspective that helps us transcend pettiness (e.g. we all die in the end!)
- to eventually truly believe and feel we are more than enough just as we are and
- to simply get on and ‘be’.
Easy peasy 😉
Happy New Year!