What is happiness?
Over The next couple of blogs we will explore happiness. Statistics show one in 10 people will attempt suicide and one in five will suffer with depression. This isn’t great news and not good reading. There are so many factors that are not psychiatric disorders.
loneliness
divorce
moving house
death of a loved one
midlife crisis
relationship issues
social isolation
lack of purpose
These are just a few of the external factors that can create unhappiness. Sometimes people who have mental health issues trying to hide from it and hide it from others. We live in a feelgood society that is obsessed with finding a true happiness, we are told to eliminate negative feelings and replace with positive thoughts and feelings.
we are told that you should be able to control what you think and feel. This is difficult as we sometimes cannot control how we feel but we can control their actions. We are encouraged to think positive thoughts, turn negative into positive, if only it was that simple!
we are good at working out what works for us and if it’s not working for us what we can do to change that to make us happier, this only works when it’s externally. It is a good idea to change things that are outside of our heads and that we can control, however it’s internal thoughts and feelings, our memories, our emotions, urges and sensations, these are harder to deal with.
When we were young sometimes we were taught how to control our feelings for example “ stop feeling sorry for yourself” or “ don’t cry”.
Sending messages that we should be able to control our thoughts and feelings.
Think about this for a moment if you suffer from anxiety what would you say about it to yourself, something like, “ anxiety is bad“ Think about changing this to “ anxiety is neither good or bad it’s merely an uncomfortable feeling”. Maybe if we thought more like this we can except our imperfections and manage it better this giving us a happier feeling.
In the next blog we will be looking at vicious cycles that prevent happiness.