Society has so many misconceptions about happiness. How to be happy is the supreme goal: be happy at work, be happy on your own, be happy even when you hate your job or your life situation or your relationships. “Put a smile on your face and change your perspective”, they say. “Quit everything and go for that dream life,” they say.
You are either supposed to ignore your very really and tangible problem and suck it up or your supposed to ignore your very real and tangible problem and search for something that doesn’t exist. (Spoiler: nothing, nowhere is perfect).
So, I think it’s safe to say, the problem with trying to be happy is the black and white, all or nothing advice.
Which is why I wrote this post about happiness from the good enough perspective aka the one that is real and wayy less toxic. This post is hear to help you actually be happy in away that honors your organic and messy and human-ness.
Read on my dears and enter into the world of your wnn multiplicity.
If you like this topic and want more on the subject grab a Journey to Joy.
3 Reasons trying to be Happy is Making you Miserable
#1: You think negative emotions are “bad”
We do not exist in singularity nor in a binary. We exist as this undulating spectrum of forces and ideas and complexity. To that end, our journey to happiness (because I’m assuming your on this journey with me) is not about necessarily just being happy, feeling happy, doing “happy” things. That idea would stand in the face of our own well being.
There are many times that choosing objective happiness, which is to say seeking out happiness for happiness’ sake aka smiling when you really need to cry, dismissing your anger when you really need to put up a boundary, or saying your “okay” when your not to uphold happiness is harmful.
Emotions are the brain’s predictive mechanism. They anticipate actions we might need to take to get back into alliostasis. While your brain can make contextual predictions incorrectly because of things like trauma, emotions still provide valid information about yourself and your relationship to your environment as well as to other people.
To deny all of these emotions for one singular supreme emotion is…supremacist…or at least follows the ideology of supremacy: classify, compartmentalize, put something nuanced and complex like well being into a box, define it narrowly and in black and white and then add a level of subjective value to it so that we can place ourselves on pedestals for arbitrary reasons and call ourselves emotional healthy.
#2: You are trying to be Happy ALL. THE. TIME
When you ignore or deny some emotions for superficial expression of others it is called emotional bypassing. When you deny some emotions for superficial expressions of others for the sake of your supposed “well being” it is called spiritual bypassing. You are effectively bypassing your lived experience, the inevitable, incessant, sea within you that contains multitudes.
In this same way, you bypass the spontaneity that comes with being connected to life around you, the ecosystem you are a part of, for some rigid ideal of what life is supposed to be. You bypass the necessity of conflict to be able to form deeper more fulfilling and understanding connections. You bypass the ability to cry and release what you have been carrying that has weighed heavy. You bypass and bypass and bypass…for what? A toxic, or should I just say, superficial version of positivity?
The way happiness is often portrayed on social media exemplifies toxic positivity. As someone who is neurodivergent and sometimes struggles pretty heavily with anxiety and chronic low grade depression which are NOT enjoyable, people telling me that all I have to do to feel better is to think my way better and that if I can’t do that in the moment, which when you are in the throws of an anxiety attack is hard, I have somehow failed at living my life the way I want to which is with more well being not less.
Furthermore, things that say if your having a hard time just remember that it will get better is a pretty toxic way to say, “Hey, your experience of grief or anxiety or frustration or stress doesn’t really matter…you know what matters that happiness you need to get back to feeling.” Or, “Hey the systems that are at play in your life that are making things really difficult for you, you can think your way out of the struggle…just try harder.” Again, your emotions and again your complexity and the complexity of something like actual tangible happiness is boiled down to a feeling in a moment and a superficial dichotomy of what defines wellness.
#3: You conflate happiness as a feeling and happiness as an attitude
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of feeling like I’m failing at well being because I inevitably buy in to this version of happiness that leaves me wanting and gaslights my lived, intricate, experience on this planet. I much prefer to accept that happiness is a feeling that I like and want to experience more often, but also wanting this feeling to be more frequent doesn’t come from denying all that is within me.
On the contrary, happiness as more than a feeling but as an attitude to approach life leaves room for the mess of that life. Happiness as an attitude, an attitude of joy, allows for and embraces all emotional experiences because it isn’t necessarily about the feelings as much as it is about the perspective.
This perspective isn’t one seen through rose colored glasses, as toxic positivity would have you believe, it’s one seen through the lens of things like forgiveness and compassion and humility. It’s a perspective that says, “Hey, you are feeling sad or afraid or stressed out, the joy I can give you in this moment is to acknowledge how hard it is to feel that way. Let me hold you and offer you my support”
Happiness as an attitude is about resource. How can we resource ourselves in ways that are nurturing and validating and open hearted, even, and especially when our objective feelings are uncomfortable or even painful–even, and especially when we are suffering?
Today my mental illness is harder to manage. Today, its the primary lens I am seeing the world through. Toxic positivity would have me bypass my anxiety and dysthymic state and go straight to a premature version of happiness. My anxiety and mild depression would have me fall into the dark hole of rumination that takes days to come out of. It’s important to remember that neither option has to be true. We do not live in binary. I do not have to put blinders on to my suffering nor to the happiness that surrounds me. I can exist in the complex space of both/and.
Cultivating happiness as an attitude means we can hold both the truth of how we are feeling AND the truth that this is only one perspective. We can honor both our suffering and our capacity for joy and then, in doing so, resource yourself accordingly.
For me this means feeling sad today but also actively noticing all the other emotions that exist in a moment. For example, RIGHT NOW I am immensely grateful I’m in the middle of Vermont finally in respite from van troubles. The sound of rain is pleasant and takes me out of my head. My body feels a little chilly which is a reminder that I am in a body (I am not just my brain). All of this to me is happiness.