Cultivating Happiness

When things are going your way, it is easy to feel optimistic, energetic and joyous. But life has ups and downs, it ebbs and flows. There will be dark moments and trying times. At this time, are you “out of luck” for feeling well? Are you in the mindset that you need to do A, B, C, achieve X, Y, Z before you can feel well again? If so, you just kicked off a negativity cycle that may easily lead you down the path of anxiety. Why? Because the premise that feeling well depends on some time other than the present, something other than what you already have, in itself, is a form of self-rejection, implying that we are not worthy of happiness and safety until some conditions are met. This causes you to feel anxious, insecure and unlovable. Negative energy attracts other negative energy and in no time, you find yourself overwhelmed by a storm of self-doubt, fear and mental paralysis.

So can we bootstrap ourselves out of this malicious cycle? I have some good news for you. The answer is a resounding YES! And it is easy to do, everyone has the resource to achieve it. Sounds too good to be true? Read on.

First Step (2 minutes): find a quiet and private place to sit down (preferably lie down) and use your own words to emphasize three facts:

• Unconditional Self-Compassion: a mantra I tell myself when self-doubt arises: “I accept myself for who I am, as I am. I deserve self-love with no strings attached.”
• Common Humanity: acknowledge that every human being goes through suffering, this is part of the human experience. People rarely discuss about their dark moments, so you may think everyone else is fine while you suffer alone. This is simply not true. Keep reminding yourself that.
• Nothing Is Permanent, Including Your Suffering: One of the three hallmarks of Buddhism is impermanence. Remind yourself that nothing in this world is permanent, including your feelings and sufferings. However uncomfortable you feel right now, it will pass and the feeling is not your identity.

Second Step (1 minute): perform deep breathing three times. What I find really help is to lie down and inhale through your nostrils to the point that you cannot take in any more air, hold it for 3 seconds, and exhale slowly through nostrils. When done properly, you will feel your tummy falls and rises as you inhale and exhale. A modified version when you cannot lie down is to sit and inhale through nostrils but exhale through your mouth. Make sure your lips are pursed so the air goes out slowly. Try that three times and you feel you are in a completely different state of mind. Science backs this up as the deep breathing process activates the vagus nerve that is responsible for “rest and digest”, which literally turns off “fight or flight” response.

Third Step (12 minutes): perform some cardio exercise. I am not an athletic person and never have been. So it took me a long time to try this strategy even though I read many articles on this and was conceptually convinced that it works. But as some sage once said, “no struggle, no progress”. One of those days when I literally tried every other tactics in my calming repertoire, I still felt a fair amount of anxiety. And I finally gave it a try. All it took was 12 minutes (you can google short cardio exercise on YouTube but here is my favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKXw8XEQiA) and I got immediate relief, and the effect lasted for hours. This practice not only provided me the calming feeling I was desperately looking for, it also validated to me that behavior matters in our journey to maintain well-being. If you are an evidence-oriented person like me, the neuroscience behind this is high intensity exercise such as cardio will trigger the brain to produce endorphin, one of the four happy hormones. When you start to feel good and give yourself a rewarding feeling, then dopamine (another happy hormone) starts to kick in and your physical activity just generated a jolt of happiness even before your mind figured everything out (trust me, try not to figure everything out and stop over-ruminating, get out of your mind, into your body). Let’s move and be happy!