Today I think of that time as somewhat idyllic, although I also recall that these were the years when I first encountered serious symptoms of depression. I was sure that money was not a real source of happiness, so I wasn't going to get involved in business, or banking, or anything like that, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what would make me happy. What always seemed to me to be a brutal irony was that while I honestly believed that there were many routes to a happy life, and that this should be a more important goal than status based accomplishments, or straight up profiteering, and I tried to align my values appropriately, happiness seemed to me to be elusive, and a thing I couldn't quite get a hold of.
My pursuit of happiness as a goal, although driven by what I thought were positive ideals, was really a failed enterprise. At 29 I was a big mess, I was angry, depressed to the point where I couldn't get out of bed, terrified of the future, and eventually hospitalized. Where was happiness? What had I done wrong?
One of the first Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) books I read was called The Happiness Trap, by Dr. Russ Harris. I got this book from the Hamilton Public Library, they still carry it and I recommend it. This book describes a variation of CBT called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Dr. Russ Harris has a website where you can read sample chapters from his books and look at videos where he describes ACT:
https://www.actmindfully.com.au/
An important focus for all varieties of Cognitive Behavioural Therapies is identifying unrealistic thoughts. ACT methods are no exception to this but also emphasize mindfulness and explicit techniques to diffuse negative emotions allowing space for them. In The Happiness Trap, Dr. Harris discusses unrealistic thoughts that people have about how to achieve happiness. When I was in my 20s I was using simple rules of thumb like money and status will not bring you happiness, look elsewhere. Dr. Harris agrees with this in principal, but his ideas go beyond this and he asks tough questions: Why do you think pursuing happiness even works? Do you believe that if you are happy you won't have negative feelings? When you have bad feelings (and you will) why can't you just do the things that make you happy to get rid of them?
In the opening chapter to his book Dr. Harris lists several myths related to happiness.
Myth 1: Happiness Is the Natural Status for All Human Beings
Our culture insists that humans are naturally happy. But the statistics quoted in the introduction clearly disprove this. Remember, one in ten adults will attempt suicide, and one in five will suffer from depression. What's more, the statistical probability that you will suffer from a psychiatric disorder at some stage in your life is almost 30 percent!
And when you add in all the misery caused by problems that are not classified as psychiatric disorders- loneliness, divorces, work stress, midlife crisis, relationship issues, social isolation, prejudice, and lack of meaning or purpose - you start to get some idea of just how rare true happiness really is. Unfortunately, many people walk around with the belief that everyone else is happy except them. And - you guessed it - this belief creates even more unhappiness.
Myth 2: If You're Not Happy, You're Defective
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 criticize ourselves for being weak or stupid.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is based on a dramatically different assumption: the normal thinking processes of a healthy human mind will naturally lead to psychological suffering. You're not defective; your mind's just doing what it evolved to do.
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Myth 3: 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 arise.
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 Myth 3, 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.
Myth 4: 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. It's not that we have no control; it's just that we have much less than the "experts" would have us believe. However, we do have a huge amount of control over our actions. And it's through taking action that we create a right, full, and meaningful life.
The overwhelming majority of self-help programs subscribe to Myth 4. The basic claim is: 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!
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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, Myth 4 is so widely believed that we tend to feel inadequate when our attempts to control our thoughts and feelings fail.
When I first read this book I found the ideas in it compelling, but also strange. I had the same experience when attending Recovery meetings for the first time, the approach seemed interesting but also not what I expected. For many years I thought that the true focus of understanding my unhappiness had something to do with understanding my past, and dealing with it in some fashion. While I still believe that a person's history has a lot to do with how they got into their current predicaments, your history is something that you can't change. Whether you fully understand it or not may help to some degree, but this is only a small part of the answer.
I now believe that happiness isn't something that you can pursue in a meaningful way. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it isn't, and these days I'm more willing to be surprised by what will make me happy and what won't make me happy. Social engagements, new electronics, cookies and sometimes beer have been reliable at bringing small bursts of happiness over the years, but these things are arguably as base as money or status, they don't provide fulfillment. I've tried eating boxes of cookies, and occasionally spent money I didn't have going to parties, or to buy new gizmos, and these activities all have limits in providing positive feelings. These small pleasures sometimes bring their own negative consequences without providing anything but a brief break from feelings I was trying to hide from.
Dr. Harris gives an answer to these questions that is very much like Dr. Low's answer. This always sounds overly stoic, but I have come to believe it is the truth; that you will have negative feelings, and they will come of their own accord. You can make them more intense by neglecting parts of your life (your bills, work, or important relationships), and while new electronics, good food, and parties may mask these feelings briefly, these activities are only temporary control strategies, and no variation or amount will provide any sort of long term solution.
So what can you do? In Recovery we say "You can't control what you feel, you can control what you think say and do." We also say "Feelings will come and go if you let them" and "Feelings can be distressing, that does not mean they are dangerous." It requires effort to act in spite of your feelings, but this is a large part of the recipe for managing negative emotions like fear and anger. That never means that we ignore our feelings, its important to express them in a reasonable and civilized way, and while we can't dictate what our feelings will be, we shouldn't respond impulsively to drive away negative sensations. Telling yourself to not feel bad about a situation is about as effective as telling yourself to not feel any pain at the dentist. The pain and upset are there and they are real, you cannot wish them away. However, you can face tolerate and endure the discomfort. Many people are frightened of going to the dentist but they go, because the long term consequences of ignoring cavities can be far worse. We encourage the same attitude with other feelings, be aware of them, but don't be controlled by them.
At Recovery meetings we talk about being "Self led, and not symptom led." This means that we rationally chose our long range goals based on positive values and work towards them. We emphasize endorsing for our efforts, and not necessarily the outcome. For example if our goal is to do some housework on the weekend for our family, we make an effort to do it, and minimize behaviors that would distract us - like watching television with a bag of pretzels to avoid feeling guilty about not doing what we said we would do. Some TV is okay, because we acknowledge that we aren't perfect. And, if at the end of the day we didn't do everything we had planned to, that is also okay, achieving the goal is not nearly as important as respecting the effort that we put in. Feeling happy is something that may come eventually if we resist our impulses, it also may not come. We know for sure that if we engage in short term relief strategies - like eating junky snack foods while watching Netflix, we are attempting to make bad feelings go away, and often we end up feeling worse than if we had just done the unpleasant chore.
In the chapter "SABOTAGE METHOD NO. 9: Failure to Practice Muscle Control" from MHTWT Abraham Low describes how sensations come and go, he writes:
Sensations are notorious for their transient and ephemeral existence. They come and go. All you have to do is to observe yourself for a few minutes time and you will have no difficulty spotting numerous mild sensations rising to consciousness and instantly falling back into unawareness. You can then notice in quick succession a warm feeling in the lobe of the ear, some tenseness in the neck, a tickle in the throat, a momentary heartburn in the region of the sternum, a pulling in the shoulder, an itch somewhere and a pressure somewhere else. Some sensations, if mild, are pleasing, like the warmth, the tickle and the itch; others are displeasing, like the heart-burn, the pulling and the pressure. In this manner, stimulation and irritation alternate. The one set of sensations are relaxing; the others are tensing. This continuous ebbing and flowing, appearing and disappearing has been likened to the systolic and diastolic phases of the action of the heart and has been called the "sensation pulse."
How is it, one may ask, that the sensations felt by nervous patients come but do not go? What causes them to lose their transient character and to acquire the quality of sustained duration? To express it differently, why do the sensations experienced by nervous patients tend to lose their pulse? The same consideration may be applied to the obsessions which plague nervous patients. An obsession is a thought, usually a suspicion. The suspicion may be directed at others as in jealousy, or at one's self as in the case of the obsessive thought that one's body is changing or that people stare at you. Of thoughts it is just as axiomatic as of sensations (and feelings) that they are of transient durations flitting through the brain, coming and going, unless they are concentrated on. Just give yourself over to a few moments of revery or day-dreaming and you will realize how your thoughts wander across the field of experience, now reaching out into the future, then roaming through the past with a motley assortment of ideas, opinions, plans and dreams crowding in on one another, the ones just entering your brain, the others leaving. This ceaseless hustle and bustle of an up and down flowing mentation has been called the "stream of thought." The question is again permitted: How is it that with nervous patients the ordinarily fading and floating thought elements harden and crystallize into perennial and unending suspicions and obsessions? Why does their stream of thought cease streaming? Obviously, some factor operating in nervous patients upsets the pulse of their sensations and interrupts the stream of their thoughts. That factor is an abiding sense of insecurity producing, through concentrated preoccupation, sustained tenseness and preventing the nervous system from relaxing.
Chasing happiness, and never finding it, can create this sense of insecurity, this idea that it no longer matters what we do, that we are doomed to a life of anxiety and depression. These thoughts are however not entirely realistic. As Abraham Low points out, our mind is filled with thoughts and sensations that are ceaseless in their coming and going. While we don't have much choice in which thoughts arise spontaneously, we are almost guaranteed that new thoughts will come. If we punish ourselves with ideas like "...why isn't this party making me happy now!" or "...all my friends have an iPhone-X11, they are happy, why doesn't my iPhone-X11 make me happy?" we are wandering into the zone of insecure thinking where we fixate on unrealistic ideas and become frustrated. Paradoxically, focusing on feelings of not being happy and working to erase them or cover them up usually just creates more unhappiness. Russ Harris talks about making choices based on positive values (creativity, curiosity, courage, persistence, freedom and gratitude) despite having difficult feelings in this short youtube video:
Our minds function in a peculiar fashion, and are not entirely under our control. We can control what we think, say and do, despite not feeling well and despite having contradictory impulses. If we make rational and good choices based on positive values, and try to not respond to all of our insecure thoughts, or get wrapped up in achieving particular goals without endorsing for our efforts, our feelings will have the opportunity to change. Happiness isn't something that we are going to easily find or manufacture, we aren't broken if we aren't happy, and we can still function without happiness.
Many people argue that the pursuit of happiness is an unrealistic goal because true happiness, like all feelings, is so ephemeral. More realistic pursuits involve identifying positive values and working towards related goals without being too concerned about how they make us feel in the short term. We need to remember to focus on the journey, and while choosing a good destination is important, if we don't get there it will be okay so long as we put positive effort in to our trip and celebrate our efforts. This can be difficult, we often pursue that which is pleasurable and avoid that which is painful. With some effort however, we can pursue that which is meaningful despite feeling afraid or uncomfortable. While pursuing worthwhile endeavors almost always includes pain and frustration, with luck we may experience some happiness and fulfillment along the way.
More Information
The Imposter Syndrome, Competency, Self-Esteem and Rejection
Mental Health Myths, Inkblot Tests and Electro-Shock Therapy
Feelings are Not Facts
