An opportunity to reframe our idea of happiness, for good, in joyful June 🌼
Welcome, June 1st, the promise of Summer.
(Did your mind just start commenting on this sentence? I would expect it, in 2020).
This promise sounds kind of tricky today and is very likely to trigger many additional thoughts and emotions.
What is our Summer going to be like? Is it even ok to think about it?
Our self-criticism might be sneaky enough to tell us that we shouldn't be thinking of Summer, considering all the suffering that has been going on, and still is. Well, we actually need to allow ourselves to wish for the best possible days of rest and wander ahead of us.
We need it for our own mental health, and for that of people around us.
Again, we might be in the position of having to adjust to a particular kind of Summer, different from what we wished for before March, or from what we're used to.
It is useful to be aware of some traps our minds might display, for example our IDEA of happiness and how things will or won't MAKE US HAPPY.
But, what is #happiness anyway?
I chose to share with you the words of Russ Harris to help you explore how he describes different myths that often do not allow us to actually experience happiness, and create more struggle.
There is a link between our IDEA of Summer and our IDEA of happiness: if we hold rigidly our beliefs and expectations about how things should be, than we expose ourselves to disappointment and miss the opportunity to truly appreciate what Summer 2020 (or life, more in general) will bring to us, in the little moments that have the chance to create wonder, if we just allow them to.
As the June calendar puts it, it's a lot about cultivating our #willingness to #appreciate and feel #grateful for the things we have, while committing #intentionally to do small things that nourish a mindful approach to our days.
The happiness myths by Russ Harris
Happiness is the natural state for human beings
If we give people food, water, shelter, and loving relationships, then they’ll naturally be happy. Unfortunately, many people walk around with the belief that everyone else is happy except for them. And — you guessed it — this belief creates even more unhappiness. The natural state is an ever changing flow of emotions. Sometimes we’re happy, sometimes sad, sometimes angry. Each state brings a different dimension to our lives and broadens our overall experience.
Happiness means feeling good
If this is our understanding of happiness, then there’s no chance of lasting happiness. Think of how long pleasurable feelings last before we experience some frustration, anxiety or fear.
Happiness is defined as living a rich, full, and meaningful life. Meaning comes from stretching ourselves across the full range of our emotions, without running away from the less pleasant ones, in the service of what maters most to us.
If we’re not happy, we’re defective: If we’re not happy, then there’s something wrong with us. Following logically from myth 1, western society assumes that mental suffering is abnormal. It is seen as a weakness or illness, a product of a mind that is somehow faulty or defective. This means that when we do inevitably experience painful thoughts and feelings, we often criticise ourselves for being weak or stupid.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is based on a dramatically different assumption. ACT proposes that the normal thinking processes of a healthy human mind will naturally lead to psychological suffering. There are ways to adapt to this, starting from reframing our myths.
To create a better life, we must get rid of negative feelings
We live in a feel-good society, a culture thoroughly obsessed with finding happiness. And what does that society tell us to do? To eliminate ‘negative’ feelings and accumulate ‘positive’ ones in their place. It’s a nice theory and on the surface it seems to make sense.
After all, who wants to have unpleasant feelings? But here’s the catch: the things we generally value most in life bring with them a whole range of feelings, both pleasant and unpleasant.
For example, in an intimate long-term relationship, although you will experience wonderful feelings such as love and joy, you will also inevitably experience disappointment and frustration. There is no such thing as the perfect partner and sooner or later conflicts of interest will happen.
The same holds true for just about every meaningful project we embark on. Although they often bring feelings of excitement and enthusiasm, they also generally bring stress, fear and anxiety. So if you believe this myth, you’re in big trouble, because it’s pretty well impossible to create a better life if you’re not prepared to have some uncomfortable feelings.
You should be able to control what you think and feel
The fact is, we have much less control over our thoughts and feelings than we would like. However, we do have a huge amount of control over our actions. And it’s through taking action that we create a rich, full and meaningful life.
The overwhelming majority of self-help programs subscribe to this last myth: for example, many approaches teach you to identify negative thoughts and replace them with more positive ones. Other approaches encourage the repetition of positive affirmations such as, ‘Everything that happens is for my highest good and greatest joy’, or ‘I am strong, able and capable at all times’. Still other approaches encourage you to visualise what you want, to vividly imagine yourself the way you want to be, living the life you dream of.
The basic theme of all these approaches is this: if you challenge your negative thoughts or images and, instead, repeatedly fill your head with positive thoughts and images, you will find happiness. If only life were that simple!
Our minds have evolved over a hundred thousand years to think the way they do, so it’s not likely that a few positive thoughts or affirmations will change them all that much! It’s not that these techniques have no effect; they can often make you feel better temporarily. But they will not get rid of negative thoughts over the long term. The likelihood is, if you’re like most other humans on the planet, you’ve already spent a lot of time and effort trying to have ‘good’ feelings instead of ‘bad’ ones — and you’ve probably found that as long as you’re not too distressed, you can, to some degree, pull it off. But you’ve probably also discovered that as your level of distress increases, your ability to control your feelings progressively lessens. Sadly, this myth is so widely believed that we tend to feel inadequate when our attempts to control our thoughts and feelings fail.
These powerful myths provide the basic blueprint for the happiness trap. They set us up for a struggle we can never win: the #struggle against our own human nature. It is this struggle that builds the trap.
Developing the willingness to experience unpleasant feelings and thoughts in the service of what matters most to us will widen our chances to notice happiness when it comes, without being carried away by the urge to keep that moment beyond its duration, an attitude that will probably make happiness even shorter.
Are these myths part of your beliefs about happiness?
If so, I encourage you to try and cultivate this new perspective, and get out of the Happiness trap!
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