Striving Towards Happiness: What I've Learned So Far

December 2013, I suffered from the worst depressive episode I had ever had.  It was so bad, I couldn't even feel any enthusiasm for the upcoming holidays.  I was so depressed, I didn't even want to try and help myself.  That was when I realized I had reached a new low.  I've been depressed before, but I always had an interest in trying to alleviate it.

I figured it was due to my approaching the big 4-0.  Actually, I still have another year to go, but I've always been precocious.  I thought I was starting my mid-life crisis a few years early.  However, I realized that I needed to do something.  I would try one last time to conquer my negative thinking by willpower, but if that failed, I would go to a psychiatrist.

By chance, I happened to find a link to a place called Happify.com on Facebook.  I checked it out.  The website claimed it had scientifically proven ways to boost your happiness.  I was intrigued, but also a little skeptical.  I tried a few of the exercises and noticed an immediate benefit.  The skepticism disappeared.  I was sold.  Was I sold enough to buy a subscription so I could have full access to the website?  I had to sleep on it.  It wasn't that the cost was unreasonable.  A year's subscription was cheaper than one visit to a psychiatrist.  However, I have a bad habit that once I subscribe to something, I lose interest in it.  A year's subscription was $35.70.  Was I sure I would keep with this to make it worth it?  The next morning, I bought a year's subscription.

It was a great decision. I've forgiven Facebook for all the misery it has given me because it lead me to this place. Two months later, I still visit the site.  However, even if I did stop using it, I have made so much progress already to believe it was full worth the expense I paid.  While I don't always do the exercises on a daily basis, I have stuck with it.  Even if I lost interest in the exercises, I've met many wonderful friends on the site who are not only struggling with the same problems, but also tend to have similar interests.  That is worth it in itself. What I really like about Happify is that unlike many other places that help people fight depression, people on there are determined to try and do something about it.  Many places I've visited in the past, the people just seem to want to complain...which tended to make you feel worse rather than better.

The exercises seem simple, sometimes even stupid.  One exercise has you clicking on hot air balloons that only have positive words.  You wonder, "How does this exactly help?"  Yet, I started thinking more about words and the power they have after playing this game.  Words can alter our thinking.  They can prejudiced us.  They can unwittingly trigger a response in our brain that can reduce our happiness.  What is funny is that I do feel better after playing the game.

Doing these exercises has really helped me, and the change has been remarked upon by my mother.  However, I don't really need her to tell me, because I can tell for myself.  It isn't that I'm always joyful.  I still have my bad days.  However, I'm starting to have more good days than bad, and my response to bad days is different...and because of that, they are not as bad as they were before.

Would I recommend Happify?  Certainly.  However, I'm not sure if it is for everyone.  I think the person I was years ago would have scoffed at the exercises and would not have taken them seriously, and thus would have received little benefit.  One qualification I think that is necessary is that you have to be willing to give it a chance and believe that it is possible it will help you.

So what have I learned?

1)  Forgive the part of your brain that gives you the negative thoughts.  This was actually an incredible breakthrough for me.  It had never occurred to me to forgive that part.  I always viewed it as an enemy to be destroyed or shouted over.  When I actually forgave it, I felt liberated.  Oh, that isn't to say I never had a negative thought again.  I still have negative thoughts, but how I now view that part is different.  When I stopped fighting it and viewing it as an enemy, I started analyzing the thoughts and discovering the root of them.  I discovered what triggered them in the first place, and that has been responsible for my progress.  I now consider this part a friend...admittedly, sometimes still an annoying friend.  However, when I truly listen, I figure out what this part is trying to tell me is wrong.

2)  I learned that I sabotage myself because somewhere I got the message that a happy person is a weak person.  I was shocked when I realized this.  I don't know where or who gave me this message, but I learned that...and that is one of the biggest obstacles to my personal happiness.  When I write a list about things I'm grateful for, that part sneers, "OH, LOOK AT JESSICA! SHE IS GRATEFUL FOR PRETTY FLOWERS AND RAINBOWS! WIMP! YOU DON'T HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO SURVIVE IN THIS WORLD! YOU HAVE TO BE TOUGH! YOU CAN'T DWELL ON THIS MAMSY-PANSY STUFF! IT WILL MAKE YOU SOFT! AND THEN PEOPLE ARE GOING TO ATTACK YOU AND TAKE YOUR STUFF, BECAUSE THEY WILL KNOW YOU ARE WEAK!"  I don't believe this consciously, but it is such a deeply ingrained message that it has interfered with my happiness.

3) Know and accept your limits.  Many of my friends have a hard time with the social exercises.  There are many exercises that encourage you to interact with people because it has been proven that connecting with others increases our happiness.  However, many people are introverts, and socializing causes quite a bit of anxiety.  I like people, but I am also very sensitive to my environment and to other people.  I need to limit how much time I spend on my social life, and I need to rest in between interactions.  Admittedly, this can sometimes cause problems with people.  There are some people who just always want to be in the company of their friends, and inevitably those types are drawn to people like me.  However, your friends need to respect your limits...and you need to know them and accept them too.  Your limits will also vary.  Some days will be more limited than others.  Trying to do more than you can handle is a recipe for disaster and may do more harm than good.

4) Being happy can sometimes cause you to overdo, which will lead to stress and fatigue.  When I am having a good day, it is hard to sometimes avoid not overdoing it.  I try to keep in mind my limitations, but when I feel so good...it is just tempting to do as much as possible.  What is even more difficult is that sometimes it doesn't seem that much, and yet the next day I feel like I'm dying.  I haven't learned how to balance my emotions yet.  This is one reason why my happy days are inevitably followed by bad days.  I've learned that exhaustion is the number one trigger of bad days.

5)  A support group can help you, but sometimes it can bring up your demons.  My friends on Happify are great, and I really enjoy talking to them.  Since many of them are struggling with the same problems, they can sometimes give truly helpful advice.  However, being around people who are struggling with the same problems can also bring up your own demons.  This happened to me a little awhile ago.  A friend of mine had been talking about how her daughter is in an advanced program, and that she has been stressed out because of the tough academic regiment.  This brought up memories of my own experiences in an honors program.  I hadn't realized how profoundly it had affected me until it suddenly surfaced.  I had a really bad couple of days.  It turned out to be enlightening.  I realized that my bad experience with the honors program was what caused me to develop an underachieving personality.  I had failed due to unrealistic expectations, and I got into the habit of not trying after that because I couldn't accept that I might fail.  I had worried that I said something offensive to my friend, because the bad memories had caused me to react negatively, but fortunately she didn't take it that way.

6) If enlightenment is your goal, that is not a good time to pursue other goals.  I sometimes think the Hindus had the right idea that spiritual enlightenment is best done when you are elderly.  The fact is, pursuing enlightenment takes a tremendous amount of effort and time...and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish other major goals.  I've made progress, but the progress has had some side effects.  It sometimes has caused tremendous stress.  I'm tired a lot.  I've had to reduce my activity and work load.  I don't mean to sound discouraging.  Maybe there is someone who is more talented than me who can do it all. However, I just find that when you are battling your inner demons, it can wreck havoc on your home and work life.

7) Relapses are to be expected and are not a sign of failure.  This is probably true of anything--whether your problem is negative thinking, overeating, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, etc.  How many people succeed the first time?  My guess is very few.  If you succeed the first time, it was probably never really a problem to begin with.  You may take several steps in the right direction, but inevitably you will probably take a step or two back at some point.  Bad habits cannot be broken overnight.  They are usually deeply rooted in psychological trauma that probably occurred in childhood.  The memories are probably deeply buried and more than likely you will not even remember what triggered this behavior.  To break a bad habit requires digging, and that takes time.  You'll probably have to take breaks.  You are not a failure when this happens.  It doesn't mean it is impossible, though it may feel that way.  It just simply means you are not there yet.  Every time I have a relapse, I take a deep breath and say, "I will try again tomorrow."  And I do.  It is like learning how to walk or roller skate or ride a bike.  Probably when you first learned to do any of these things, you fell down quite a bit before you finally perfected the skill.

8)  Anger is often a sign of anxiety.  In fact, with me, I think it is always rooted in fear.  When I look at other angry people, I believe many of them are driven by fear as well.  In fact, wasn't this the moral of Star Wars?  Anakin Skywalker feared losing people he loved.  When he encountered something he could not control, he became angry.  This inevitably lead to him falling to the dark side, and caused him to bring about the very thing he feared.  What I always find frustrating is how addictive anger is.  It makes me feel powerful.  Probably being angry is more preferable to feeling scared.  However, anger doesn't make you powerful, and it tends to lead to destructive behavior and bad decisions.  What is unfortunate is that the media sometimes promotes that anger makes a person powerful.  I've started realizing that our culture often promotes values that are guaranteed to lead to our misery.

9) I used to scoff at Happify's values because I did not want to take responsibility for my own happiness.  I said earlier that the person I was years ago would have not benefited from Happify because I would not have given it a chance.  I admit it--though I'm not proud of it--I used to mock people who wrote gratitude lists and did many of the exercises I now rave are helping me so much. Why did I mock them?  I think it is because I didn't want to take the responsibility for my own happiness.  I believed then that it was outside of my control.  I preferred to believe that.  Some people were lucky and were born into lives that guaranteed happiness.  It was determined by an outside force.  They were born wealthy or to loving families or had some advantage that an unhappy person didn't have.  I resented people who had been blessed back then.  I sneered at the exercises on Happify because when I did them back then, I didn't receive any benefit.  The main reason was that the person I was at that point was not at the right place to realize any benefit.  It is a terrible thing to try to be happy and fail miserably.  You don't want to accept that you are a failure, so you blame it on an external force.  I sometimes fear I will encounter people who were the way I was then.  I hope that I respond to them with compassion even if they jeer at me.  It is worse to be someone like them than to be laughed at by them.  We need to have patience with other people, because sometimes they just aren't at a point in development where they can understand things.

10) Daydreaming is a buffer when I am starting to feel stress.  I don't know if this is true of everyone.  One of the exercises on Happify was to concentrate on what another person was saying.  This is a difficult skill for me.  I often half-listen to people and sometimes start day dreaming when someone is talking to me.  While I can usually follow a conversation enough, the fact is I often lose about a quarter of what is said to me because I stop paying attention.  The day I concentrated, I started realizing why I daydream.  As I am already sensitive to my surroundings and other people, daydreaming is a way of buffering myself from stimuli.  If I am daydreaming about being a Jedi on a planet in a galaxy far away, I may fail to notice that the cashier who is talking to me has bruises on her that look like they were caused by domestic violence.  That reduces my stress.  However, I have to admit that this really does annoy me...and I hope to develop a better defense mechanism than daydreaming.

11) I should live my life now and not wait until I am enlightened.  I realized that I was making this mistake.  I kept saying, "I will learn to drive when I conquer my mind."  The fact is, enlightenment takes time to achieve.  You shouldn't not do things because you haven't achieved your enlightenment goal.  In fact, you never know if doing those things will lead to progress in your enlightenment goals.

It is amazing what I've uncovered after just two months.  These are things that have eluded me for the past 39 years.  Sometimes I am a mess after making progress.  I accept it.  It is part of the growing process.

I sometimes feel like Alice in Wonderland when she is very tall and she is looking through the tiny door into a beautiful garden.  I feel very encouraged, even if I am not there yet.  I get glimpses of what my life could be when I free myself of negativity and fear.  What I see is well worth the effort.