'I Just Want to Be Happy'

Hi there!

Welcome back to the MoodiNews. Every Thursday, we discuss a variety of matters related to mental health and self-improvement. 

I’m so glad you’re here.

This week, we will be discussing HAPPINESS! YAY!

Inevitably, when I am meeting with a client for the first time and we talk about treatment goals, one of the most common things that people tell me is, “I just want to be happy.”

Of course, this desire makes sense—as I’ve said before, People just want to feel okay on the inside.

However, therapy is not designed to help people achieve perpetual happiness.

While good feelings are often a byproduct of the tools—or, more accurately, the lifestyle—that successful therapy affords us, measuring one’s overall success based on current levels of happiness will definitely lead to disappointment.

There are two reasons why.

1) First is that happiness is an emotion, and setting goals around emotional states of being is a bad idea.

Your emotions inevitably shift according to your environment, so disruptions to your relationships or physical functioning, for example, can create major barriers to happiness at any given time.  

Happiness is fleeting—it is a fluid, impermanent state of being. Therefore, as a therapist, confirming for clients that I can make them ‘happy’ is like promising an eternal sunset—which is never possible.

Put another way, it is guaranteed that there will be times of difficulty and strife in life, so feeling only one feeling for the rest of time is an unreasonable expectation. Emotions simply do not work that way.

Furthermore, if you want to feel any emotion at all, then you have to relinquish yourself to all emotional experiences, not just certain, positive feelings.

This brings us to point number two:

2) We cannot selectively numb emotion.

It’s important to understand that having good feelings will always leave you vulnerable to negative feelings.

Emotions operate like a see-saw, in that higher peaks often accompany deeper valleys, as our neurology balances itself out through the process of homeostasis.

(For instance, we know from research that highly positive experiences often lead to a mental crash afterward, as the brain’s pleasure center works to rebalance itself in response to dopamine overload.)

True, deep, and meaningful feelings of joy, satisfaction, and delight, for example, will only ever be available to us in direct proportion to the amount of sadness, shame, and anxiety that we are also willing to tolerate.

It is therefore naïve to believe that we can ‘just be happy’ all the time without feeling anything painful—by design, the very presence of an upswing means that a downswing becomes a possibility.

That being said, living a wholehearted life and loving deeply does not mean that we have to experience pain every time we feel a positive emotion—we can do things to regulate ourselves, keep negative emotion at bay, and increase the amount of happiness that we experience overall.

Next week, we will talk more about happiness, how it works, and discuss in further detail how to feel good, more often.