1. looking outside for comfort and happiness.
2. thinking that happiness is a goal.
3. using unhappiness as a tool for proving a point.
Unhappy Habit 1 – looking outside for comfort and happiness (being a victim of external events)
Tragic events hit all of us in our lives, we cannot escape it. The question is, how do we choose to deal with it? Here’s a story to illustrate my point. Several years ago, a dear friend of mine died of cancer at a young age, leaving a young family behind. It was tragic, terribly sad, and I felt very upset for the family, as well as for the loss of such a vibrant friend. For a few weeks after the death, I woke up with a heavy heart and a feeling of sadness. In essence, I felt the event was making me sad.
However, I noticed that in the split second as I woke, before my brain got in gear, I felt normal (for me ‘normal’ is light, carefree, content) then I ‘remembered’ I was supposed to be sad, and instantly felt sad and heavy again. When I realized that my real self was quite happy, I immediately felt guilt – after all, you’re supposed to feel sad when a friend dies, and feeling ‘normal’ was not how it should be. I also felt bad because the external tragedy should affect me more deeply, it should make me depressed. But in honesty, it was my ‘should be feeling like this or that’ mind that was triggering my depression, and not my real self.
This is not to say I did not feel deeply about the incident, or that I lacked compassion. It just meant that I had more choice about how to feel than I had previously realized, and if I was honest with myself, feeling happy was a better way of feeling and allowed me to give more compassion to the family.
How many of us are playing this same game? Life and others tell us we ‘should’ feel bad about this or that, or we ‘should’ feel unhappy about our situation. But what happens to our energy if we choose to feel happy about it? It doesn’t mean we don’t change it, it just means we action from a place of strength (happiness) rather than a place of weakness (fear/ anger)
Unhappy Habit 2 – happiness as a goal
“I’ll be happy when I get some sleep”, “I’ll be happy when my kids are less demanding”, “I’ll be happy when I loose weight”, “I’ll be happy when my husband starts to help out more”. What you’re really saying is, “I’ll be UNHAPPY until I get such and such…”
My favorite was “I’ll be happy when I get more sleep”. I was convinced that my moodiness was due to sleep depravation, and in truth it had a lot to do with it. However, when both my girls started to sleep through the night and I was getting enough sleep to be able to easily function, I was still feeling grumpy and frustrated! My new goal was “I’ll be happy when I start working again” and so on…
The important point to get here is that happiness just IS, it is in all of us already. Goals are goals, happiness is happiness, don’t get the two things muddled up!
Goals are things we set out to achieve – they can often trigger happiness, but rarely sustain it for long. Happiness is something that exists without goals. I prefer to see happiness as the foundation – if you are already happy, your goals come from your passions and your inner purpose. If you are unhappy, your goals come from desperation. Which do you think have a higher success rate?
Unhappy Habit 3 – manipulating others and being unhappy to prove a point
Think of the last time you had a sulk with your partner, s/he triggered you in some way, said something that was mean or unfair. You responded by sulking/getting angry/ sullen silence/ tearful (you fill in the gap!) and the reason you did this was so that s/he got the message loud and clear that s/he had done something wrong. Nothing wrong with that, but is there an easier way, a more joyful way?
What if you kept your happiness and simply pointed out to your parter that what s/he had done/ said was mean/unfair and state the reason why. Do you have to sulk/ get angry in order to get the message across (and if the answer is yes, what does that say about the state of your communication and the honesty of your relationship?!).
We all play this game to some extent, the tough question to ask yourself is “is this the most effective way to get what I want?”. As Dr Phil says: “do you want to be right, or happy?”
Did you respond to one or more of these habits of unhappiness? Habits can change, but in order to change we need to replace them with better habits. What would happen if we acknowledged that all we needed to be truly happy was to PRACTICE being happy? A leap, I know, but what are your barriers to this way of thinking? What if Happiness truly was just a habit….wouldn’t you want to choose it?
