Cultivating Happiness

This title sounds like an oxymoron. Isn’t happiness one of the best things that can happen in life, one of the most precious positive emotions one can experience? Isn’t the Pursuit of Happiness, along with Life and Liberty, according to the Declaration of Independence, every man’s unalienable rights?

If that is the case, why will wanting more happiness be a bad thing? I’m not trying to state any hyperbole but I have sincerely felt that I may be having an addiction problem to happiness. And perhaps I am not really alone in this.

It feels good to be happy and who doesn’t want to feel good. But life ebbs and flows, emotions come and go, it is simply impractical to expect happiness all the time. For people who have known me for years, they always see me as a super positive person who carries a big smile. I started to get attached to my identity as the Poster Child of Happiness. It is when I lost that “super-power”, did I start to spend more time introspect my more inner layers of thoughts and emotions and I surprisingly realized that it was not really that I was a super-human in the past who never felt sadness, yet in my upbringing, sadness was never an emotion that was openly expressed and my bubbly personality was always touted by my parents as a positive trait.

Okay, enough of Freud like psychoanalysis, the bottom line is: our past does influence our behavior and thought process. Fast forward to the present time, when I have a bad day due to stress, illness, or poor sleep, then I do not feel cheerful, and in fact, at times feel anxious and sad. Perhaps some will just shrug this off as being a real human experiencing a bad day. I, on the other hand, had high expectation on my positive energy and emotion, felt more anxious because of them. There is actually a scientific reason why lack of sleep may lead to anxiety or other negative emotions as the part of the brain that is impacted by sleep deprivation is also responsible for regulating emotions. Talking about double whammies!

Having read “The Upside of Your Dark Side”, I know that I am in good company. Below paragraph that I quote offers more detail of the mindset and an antidote to it:

“Happy thoughts and feelings should be viewed as a thermostat, a metric that offers insight into how things are going. When moving the thermostat becomes the objectives of life, activities lose their intrinsic appeal and performance is compromised. If you want to be happy, get out of your head and into your life. Trying desperately to seek the positive and avoid the negative is not only a wasteful errand, it will also lead you to fail at what you desire most. To claim the benefits of unhappy states, you must face, tolerate and appreciate them.”

Emotions, good or bad, are just information, no more, no less. They are not our identity, not our personality, not our soul; they are not even guaranteed to accurately reflect how you are doing (a sometimes flawed thermostat perhaps?). Reading too much into the emotions and using that to organize our lives are a fool’s errand. And for that reason, my friends, I have been a fool for decades 🙂 No worries, something for me to work on in my 4th decade.

Be well, people, live your lives and enjoy the full spectrum of the human experience!