5 minute read
What Does It Mean To Be Happy?
Happiness - we all want it, and we all believe that it’s the ultimate measure of success. Our life choices and circumstances are often selected by how much they lead us to the happiness we crave. We regret paths we’ve taken that didn’t lead us to it and we make changes in order to have a better chance of getting us there. Our faith in the possibility of reaching happiness is never undeterred.
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So, can we ever really reach our goal of happiness? Or, is our constant pursuit of happiness leading many of us to experience more sadness?
Let’s look at that idea. Imagine your goal and it is to become smarter, so you enrol in a medical degree, you spend hours playing Sudoku and any other brain power apps you can download. You are becoming smarter. You are winning Trivial Pursuit and scrabble and you now understand the complex workings of our nervous systems. Unfortunately, you still want to be smarter and are not yet as smart as you thought you might be. So, you learn more and try harder in an effort to reach your goal.
Now, change that goal to be wanting to be happy. You buy the latest books, repeat positive mantras and journal every evening, yet you are not as happy as you thought you would be. The disappointment tends to make you feel less happy. Less successful in your pursuit. Right?
From advertising on billboards and television screens, the promise of happiness is promoted everywhere and on the flipside, melancholy and even everyday malaise is therapised or treated with drugs designed to return people to feeling good. It makes sense that we try to find that elusive emotion, happiness and hang onto it with all we’ve got.
Many studies have been done to understand what happiness means to different people, whether it even exists and if happiness is good, then does that make pain bad?
In his search for a new perspective on what makes for a good life, Brock Bastian has studied why we need negative or painful experiences in life to build meaning, purpose, resilience, and ultimately greater fulfilment in life.
Professor, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at University of Melbourne and author of The Other Side of Happiness, Brock makes the surprising case that pain, difficulty, and risk are necessary to achieve happiness.
Is happiness something we can ever really BE?
“Yes, of course! We can be happy, but we cannot expect to ALWAYS be happy. It is simply not how we work as humans. In fact, if we were always happy we would not have survived this far in our own lives or throughout evolutionary history as a species. It is our unpleasant and negative emotions which tend to keep us safe. They are incredibly important from a survival perspective, and more so than happiness. Unpleasant and painful experiences are a part of life, but it is our failure to accept and sit comfortably with these experiences which makes them worse - this is why the pursuit of happiness can often lead to ironic effects. The more we strive for happiness and think we need to avoid pain, sometimes the more pain we end up experiencing.”
But, pain is good for us, right?
“Yes! But, within limits of course. In the sports and training fields people have spoken about good pain vs. bad pain for some time, but outside of this context pain is often viewed as simply bad. What I have tried to show is that pain is in fact very important for our happiness, for a great many reasons. I think the benefits of pain or its link to our happiness has not received the attention that it should. I have tried to show the various pathways through which painful experiences are likely to lead to greater happiness, so hopefully there is something new in there for everyone.”
What do people typically do as soon as they feel unhappy or in emotional pain?
“Typically they pay attention to the feeling and then try to work out why it is there - that is what the function of these feelings is supposed to achieve. Physical pain is an alarm signal that something could be wrong, so we should pay attention and work out what might be happening. What people also do, however, is to add secondary emotion to these responses. So they may feel anxious about being anxious, or depressed about feeling depressed, because somewhere along the way they have decided (or been told) that these are emotional states that should be avoided, that are undesirable, and which may signal a lack of success in their life.”
We asked Brock what he thought about children being programmed to strive for happiness with the many “happily ever after” stories. Here’s what her shared -
“It is not helpful and it is not real. Should they aim to build happiness into their lives? Yes! Should they expect they will always be happy, or should they see their negative emotions as a sign they are failing in their goal of being happy? No! It is this second step which trips people up.”
We have become masters at hiding and fixing our negative emotions as they arise. We tell each other “you’ll be OK, lighten up, don’t stress, it’ll pass.” We tell others “I’ll be fine, I’ll get over it, don’t worry about me.” All of these typical reactions reaffirm that our negative emotions must be shaken off or moved quickly through to get back to being “good.” They reaffirm that being happy or “good” is the only desirable emotion, which is so damaging to our mental health and our self acceptance.
Step towards your negative emotions and try and understand why they are there. Trying to escape from them or pretending they don;t exist may seem to make them easier to deal with, however, we are not honouring the reason we are having them or honouring ourselves in that process. Negative emotions are just as much a part of us as positive ones, so why turn your back on that aspect of yourself? That is a large part of you to cast aside as “unacceptable.”
Leaning into the icky feelings, allows us to learn from them and to understanding the information that they contain. So, happiness is not the only emotion that brings our life meaning and fulfillment. Pain, suffering, and struggle should not be seen as weakness or failure as they can help us to recognise the good things, make us kinder, focus our thoughts, give our life depth and offer us a deep understanding to ourselves and who we really are.
brockbastian.com
