Cultivating Happiness

Since I was a little child, I had been fascinated by the way how our emotions came about. I loved to analyze people’s feelings, study their patterns and gauge their personalities accordingly. This “hobby” mostly served me well as it strengthened my perspective and social intelligence, which are some of my top VIA character strengths (according to the survey https://www.viacharacter.org/character-strengths). I have also been very disciplined in applying psychoanalysis on myself to help me identify and manage my emotions so I had been proud of having a good level of emotional intelligence as well, until it is no longer true.

My experience of suffering from emotional turmoil is humbling yet as Buddhism wisely points out: suffering and pain is the only path to happiness and well-being. Consider, if you have never felt sad, why would you know what true happiness is and how to cultivate it when time isn’t good?

So, suffering and pain it came, at times, when my anxiety attack emerged, I felt I was drowning in an emotional tsunami, helpless, hopeless. By now, I had learnt to cope with deep breathing, guided meditation, and walking outdoors, and definitely benefited from these amazing tactics. However, the effects wore off after a little while and the next cycle would begin.

Then one day I finally saw the light and breakthrough ensued. I was in the middle of a recovery from a very bad cold which had me coughing up a storm in the middle of the night for an entire week. So sure enough, I slept poorly and was feeling very tired during the day. At 3:30pm, I decided to take a cat nap (which is an amazing technique, 10 minutes is all you need) which involved breathing through the nostrils (more on that later) to relax my muscles. And indeed, 10 minutes later, I woke up and started to gain some energy to resume my work. At this time, my LinkedIn app pushed a feed to me (which it rarely did) and it was a podcast where the guest was Shawn Achor (a Harvard trained best-selling author and public speaker whose passion is to advocate for Positive Psychology).

I always have a strong love of learning and motivated to help myself. So by now, I had devoured many self-help books like my life depended on them. Yet reading is a lonely exercise, sure, I maintained my own independence, it also lacked the human touch. At this particular moment, on this particular day, I suddenly perceived this push on my phone to be a sign from the universe, so I decided to take a listen. It was 30 minutes or so long in which Shawn had shared three things that I took to heart: 1) When he was studying at Harvard, he suffered from clinical depression and realized that 80% of the freshmen in this world’s prestigious university were impacted by some degree of depression; 2) He not only recovered from it but thrived thanks to the courses he took and later practices on Positive Psychology; 3) He shared a list of five simple tactics to try to enhance well-being.

I was immediately drawn to his experience and insights and had two observations: 1) common humanity: while I felt that somehow I was alone in this struggle, many others have been or are still going through them; 2) hope: if someone with clinical depression could benefit greatly from this field called positive psychology and some easy to follow tactics, they sure will help me with my cyclical mood swing and periodic anxiety attacks!

The five steps to happiness he listed involved showing gratitude in three different ways, meditation and high intensity workout for 15 minutes (more on Shawn’s method here: https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/want-to-be-happier-science-says-do-these-5-simple-things-every-day.html)

I had already been practicing meditation of some sort and I was too lazy to pursue high intensity workout, so I immediately decided to give the three gratitude expression strategies a try, and guess what? I felt a sense of calm and grounded-ness that I hadn’t felt for a long while. A week later, when another sleepless night deprived me of a calm mind, I incorporated a quick cardio on top of the other tactics (thanks to Shawn, I learnt that 15 minutes of high-intensity workout is just as effective as taking anti-depressant for half a year and effects are more lasting, I am a data-driven scientist by training, you show me the real data, I follow) and literally felt that my anxiety just melted away with my sweats. (This is my favorite, only 12 minutes but it works well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKXw8XEQiA)

You now should have guessed the next step I took after using myself as the guinea pig and benefiting from the experiment: yes, I started exploring Positive Psychology myself and what ensued had changed my life for the better and I hope that it will transform you as well!