Are You Sabotaging Your Own Happiness?

Want to be happier?  Stop trying.

Stop focussing so much on whether you are happy or not, and just be.

Organizing Our Emotions

People always try to finish the sentence ‘I am ….’  I am happy, I am sad, I am hungry, whatever…  But the sentence is complete on its own: I am.

Too many times we try to put ourselves and the world around us into neat little boxes.  We like definitions.  But labels can be destructive (Read: The Risk of Labels).

We have this false belief that if we organize things into boxes (including identities, emotions, thoughts, feelings, etc.) life will become simpler.  Safer.  More in control.  If we can sort things, we become the masters of our own destiny.

But it’s very limiting.  For example, what happens when a thing fits into more than one box.  Maybe you have a thought; is the thought a good one or a bad one?

Maybe you feel angry.  We tend to judge anger as a negative emotion, but anger can actually be very positive (it is one of the few emotions that can inspire us to take action).  So if we are angry about something that we feel is unfair, we may find the experience of anger to be ‘negative’ but that anger can also drive us to make changes which are ‘positive.’

Most people I know would have no problem putting anger into the ‘negative emotion’ box, but they would have a lot of trouble pulling it out to put it into the ‘positive motivator’ box.

We Like to Judge Our Happiness

Happiness too tends to get defined into boxes.  Either, “I am happy” or “I am not happy.”

Experiences in particular get dropped into “Happy” or “Not Happy,” “Everything worked out” or “Everything did not work out,” “Life is wonderful” or “Life is a black abyss.”

We then measure the number of experiences in each category, and make our conclusions.

The problem with this system is that there is always good within bad within good within bad.

Brené Brown gives a perfect example in her book, The Gifts of Imperfection.  In it, she talks about watching her daughter sleep, being so filled with joy and love and gratitude, and then something sinister creeps in: the fear of loss.  The fear that everything is so good it could go away.

Even at the height of joy, there is this seed of loss that comes in.

There is a little bit of both bad and good in every single situation.  The more we have to lvoe, the more we fear we could lose.

But we, as a species, like our boxes.  So we will sort the situation into the good box or the bad box.

The Dichotomy of Happiness

When it comes to happiness (or any other ‘positive’ emotion), we tend to have the boxes ‘Happy,’ and ‘Not Happy.’  They are polar opposites (ie, a dichotomy) — you can be one thing or the other, but not both.

(Sorting into ‘Happy and ‘Sad’ is more complicated because some things aren’t happy or sad, maybe they make us angry, confused, or uncertain.)

We also tend to deal in 100%.  Meaning, that for something to fit into the ‘Happy” box, it must make us 100% happy.  But we know that’s not possible, because of the good within bad within good thing…. So, if something doesn’t make us 100% happy, it must go into the ‘Not Happy’ box, meaning it makes us 100% not happy.

Think this is crazy logic?  Yep, it is, but pay attention to how often you sort your thoughts like this.

Life is a Spectrum

(Read: The Power of Perspective)

There aren’t good and bad things.  There are just things.  Emotions, thoughts, feelings… they aren’t good or bad, they just are.

People aren’t happy or unhappy, they just are.

Every label we have given ourselves (whether happy or unhappy, depressed, anxious, sad) is just that, a label.

What if we stopped worrying about trying to figure everything out?  What if we stopped organizing ourselves into boxes?  What if we just existed.

Each of us is an individual, the result of countless thoughts, experiences, and emotions.  I don’t believe that it’s possible to define an individual, or to try to lump it into a box with other similar individuals for ease of organization.

There isn’t some metric or measurable marker for happiness, or success, or worth.  It’s not like if you experience A, B, C, and D, you are now a happy person.  So don’t stress about it.

No More Analyzing

Let’s make a commitment right now to ourselves and each other: no more analyzing.  No more boxes.  No more nitpicking the good and the bad and the good and the bad in every situation.

If we feel happy, let’s go with it.

If we feel sad or mad or overwhelmed, let’s go with it.

Instead of trying to be happy, let’s be human.

2-3 Love you all!

Photo by Nicholas Githiri from Pexels