TROUBLING HABITS OF DEVOUTLY UNHAPPY PEOPLE

Happiness comes in so many different forms that it can be hard to define. Unhappiness, on the other hand, is easy to identify; you know it when you're in its presence, and you definitely know when it’s taken a hold of you.

Unhappiness is lethal to everyone around you, just like second-hand smoke. The famous Terman Study from Stanford followed subjects for eight decades and found that being around unhappy people is linked to poorer health and a shorter life span.

Happiness has much less to do with life circumstances than you might think. A University of Illinois study found that people who earn the most (more than $10 million annually) are only a smidgen happier than the average Joes and Janes who work for them.

While you may blame your past for your unhappiness, that doesn't make it responsible for how you feel. Shit happens, and often there's bugger-all you can do about that. But how you choose to feel about that shit happening is ultimately up to you.

Life circumstances have little to do with happiness because happiness – like sunlight -- is available to you – unconditionally. Reaching for Happiness is as futile as trying to reach the horizon –it will always remain out of your reach. Happiness is not a destination; it's your environment. You're standing it it, arms folded, protesting “This ain't it.” Have you ever seen a fish swimming to reach water? Me either, which leads me to suspect that the dumbest fish is more “with it” than most supposedly intelligent humans.

The problem, at least in part, is that in line with your conditioning, your habits, your growth in Awareness and your outlook on life, you pre-conceive what happiness will look and feel like, and you make your acceptance of Happiness conditional – “When I get such and such, or when xyz happens – then I'll be happy.” It's our ideas about happiness that prevent us from ever be-ing happy. And we use our Un-happiness as a weapon. We deliberately, purposefully and habitually withhold our well-being for the purposes of manipulation, domination, or control of someone or something else. We abuse our natural happiness to get – happy.

Here's a theory to test for yourself – “We are all happy – until we think about it.” We are happy, until we ask ourselves, “Am I happy?” Then Mind comes into it. Mind is never happy. Happiness is not something you can mind. Even memories of happiness are sense-memories, not re-minders. The Happiness/Unhappiness continuum contextualises Mind and all of its machinations.

There are psychologists from the University of California who get paid to study happiness. (There's no evidence, by the way, that their peculiar pursuit makes them any more or less happy than their campus counterparts, but I digress). These academics found that genetics and life circumstances only account for about 50% of a person’s happiness. The rest, they say, is up to you. Wow! It has only taken several millennia for them to catch up with the ancient mystics. Well, it's my contention that genetics and life circumstances may be affective for a while, but after age 30, the responsibility for both your level of happiness and the ”face” you put on it, is 100% yours.

“The American Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.” – Benjamin Franklin

Jefferson in the US Constitution spoke of happiness as some kind of “thing” that is capable of being chased or prised out of a hiding place, surrounded and captured. Happiness is no more concrete than any concept about it. I found happiness to be just as fluid and elusive as water in a stream. When I open my hand, it flows in. When I close my hand to grasp it, I lose it. J.S.Mill concluded that making happiness a goal for your life is a bit like luring a cat to sit on your knee; you get better results from ignoring it, rather than by wheedling “Here, puss, puss,puss.” Mill saw happiness as “a shy sort of sensation, sneaking up on you when you least expect it” and sometimes even when you don't want it. Not want happiness? Sure! When you're trying to bawl someone out for one of their sins, “happiness” is the last thing you want to come flooding over you! Without unhappiness, where would your motivation for righteous anger be?

I get better results returning to happiness by offering my unhappinesses to my best version of myself, and inhaling happiness with the air into the resulting space and allowing it to infuse me. Most importantly, I suggest that when you catch yourself in a burst of happiness, leave it be. Don't meddle with it. Don't try to lasso it. Don't try to replicate an old version, nor scare this moment off by courting it. Happiness can be like a flower – pluck it, try to dissect and analyse it, you'll kill it. Let it be. And simply enjoy the beauty and the fragrance.

A certain recipe for dissatisfaction and anxiety is to buy into any ideas that Happiness looks a certain way, is obligatory, or that we are entitled to it, or that we've failed if we can't be happy on demand.

Unhappy Habits. When people are unhappy, it’s much more difficult to be around them, let alone work or play with them. Unhappiness sucks big-time. It drives people away, creating a vicious cycle that holds you back from achieving everything that you’re capable of.

Unhappiness can catch you by surprise. So much of your happiness is put off by your habits (in thought and deed) that you might do well to monitor them and their consequences closely, firstly to get to know more realistically this wonderful “self” you have created and, secondly, to make certain that they don’t drag you down into an abyss that you'll not crawl out of this side of death.

Some habits lead to unhappiness more than others do. You should be especially wary of the habits that follow as they are the worst offenders. Watch yourself carefully to make certain that these habits are not your own. If they are, find a more effective replacement and practice it until it becomes your new habit.

• Waiting for the future. Telling yourself, “I’ll be happy when …” is one of the easiest unhappy habits to fall into. How you end the statement doesn’t really matter (it might be a promotion, more pay, or a particular relationship) because it puts too much emphasis on expectations and circumstances. There's a double trap here; expectations are the seed pods for disappointment and circumstances are often the hand that is dealt to you before you start playing. The other side of the whammy is one of life's greatest pratfalls -- neither improved circumstances nor met expectations produce happiness. Guess what? Those who offer you a better life and/or satisfaction if you buy what they're selling are either appallingly naïve or downright crooks. If this is the road you're exploring, you're setting yourself up for one of life's greatest troublemakers – Disappointment, the parent of Sadness and Bewilderment. Don’t spend your time waiting for something that’s more than likely to have little or no effect on your mood.
  Instead focus on being happy right now, in the present moment, because there’s no guarantee of the future. There's a Law of Reality that goes something like this – Where you're headed is where you come from. If you live in Life's Waiting Room, you're headed for............a Waiting Room of one sort or another.

• Spending too much time and effort acquiring “things.” There is not a single “thing” on this earth that has happiness built into its DNA. I was reminded of this one day when I was driving a taxi cab. A woman got in and asked me to take her to the Retirement Home. Making conversation, I asked, “What's on your agenda this afternoon?” Sourly she replied “Lunch. It'll be roast beef and vegies today!!” At the time I was grabbing a burger whenever I could between jobs; I'd have sold one of my offspring for the same baked dinner!
  People living in extreme poverty experience a significant increase in happiness when their financial circumstances improve, but it drops off quickly above $20,000 in annual income. There’s an ocean of research that shows that material things don’t make you happy. When you make a habit of chasing things, you are likely to become unhappy because, beyond the disappointing lack of bliss you experience once you get them, you discover that even if you’ve gained them, they don't deliver the qualities that they were a code for -- the real things that can make you happy, such as friendship, intimacy, and renewal.

• Staying home. When you feel unhappy, it’s very tempting to avoid other people. This is a huge mistake as socialising, like exercising, even when you're not enjoying it in the moment, is great for your mood. We all have those days when we just want to pull the covers over our heads and refuse to talk to anybody, but understand that the moment this becomes a tendency, it destroys your mood. Recognise when unhappiness is making you antisocial, do whatever it takes to coax yourself to get out there, mingle, and become interesting by being curiously interested. You’ll notice the difference right away.

• Seeing yourself as a victim. Unhappy people tend to operate from the default position that life is both oppressive and out of their control. Well, you're right. Life is hard in places, and it is not under your control; these are facts are on purpose. So what do you do about this?
  The problem with a philosophy that “Life is out to get me, and there’s nothing I can do about it,” is that it fosters a attitude (an angle of perceiving) of Help-lessness. People who feel helpless are less than likely to take creative action to make things better. While everyone is certainly entitled to feel down every once in a while, it’s important to recognise when you’re letting this affect your outlook on life. You’re not the only person that bad things happen to, so you can give up that line of thinking you are in this way “special”; this is a very twisted form of Self-Importance – (“I'm far too important to be made to feel this way”). And you have no more control over life than a surfer has control over the wave but, by the way you surf the present creates influence over your future as long as you’re willing to take action and be a little inventive, daring and playful.

• Pessimism. Nothing fuels unhappiness quite like a pall of pessimism – that habit of taking the gloomiest possible view, and that for instances of evil and pain there are no balancing instances of good and happiness. Pessimism, just like its half-sibling, Optimism, is a loopy, one-eyed way of being in the world that ignores the duality of all things.

One big problem with a pessimistic attitude, beyond it being hard on your mood and everyone else's nerves, is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you expect bad things, you’re more likely to get bad things. Pessimistic thoughts are hard to shake off until you firstly recognise how illogical they are. That recognition on its own, however, is not going to dissolve most pessimism. In my experience, only a very small percentage of people can be reasoned out of any condition that was not reasoned into in the first place. In the face of logic and reason, pessimism says “So f----ing what?” Feelings of pessimism were not logically reasoned into in the first place; they were driven home emotionally, and emotionally is usually how you're going to have to extract yourself. By all means explore how illogical, false and damaging your pessimism is, but be prepared for something more than an intellectual discussion to permanently transmute pessimism into a voice of sensible, stabilising Caution.

• Complaining. Complaining itself is troubling as well as the “victim” attitude that precedes it. Complaining includes Anger – Anger is actually nothing more or less than Complaint with the volume turned up. Complaining is a self-reinforcing behaviour. By constantly voicing persistent thoughts about how bad things are, you reaffirm your negative beliefs, opinions and assumptions - (“This is so wrong. See how right I am?”) While talking about what bothers you can help you feel better, there’s a fine line between complaining being therapeutic (exploring and realising) and it fuelling unhappiness (dumping). Beyond making you unhappy, complaining drives other people away.

• Blowing things out of proportion. Bad things happen to everybody. The difference is that happy people see them for what they are—a temporary bummer—whereas unhappy people see anything negative as further evidence that life is out to “get” them. A happy person is upset if they have a fender bender on the way to work, but they keep things in perspective: “What a hassle, but at least it wasn’t more serious.” An unhappy person, on the other hand, uses it as proof that the day, the week, the month, maybe even their whole life, is doomed to be permanently bent out of shape.

• Sweeping problems under the rug. Happy people are accountable for their actions. When they make a mistake, they cop to it, make amends where possible, and prepare to deal with the fallouts and consequences. Unhappy people, on the other hand, find problems and mistakes to be threatening, so they try to hide them, deny them, project them onto someone else, ignore them, or minimise them. Problems tend to get bigger when they’re not dealt with. The more you don’t do anything about a problem, the more it starts to feel as though you can’t do anything about it, and then you’re right back to feeling like a victim.

• Not improving. Because unhappy people are pessimists and feel a lack of control over their lives, they tend to sit back and wait for life to happen to them – “What next?” - to which God usually replies, “Well I was about to ask you the same question.” Instead of setting goals, risking, digging, questing, learning, and improving themselves, they just keep plodding along. They resist change and then they wonder why things never change.

• Trying to keep up with the Joneses. Jealousy and envy are incompatible with happiness, so if you’re constantly comparing yourself with others, it’s time to stop. In one study, most subjects said that they’d be okay with making less money, but only if everybody else did too. Be wary of this kind of thinking as it won’t make you happy and, more often than not, has the opposite effect. As an old friend of mine used to say – “If someone else has to change for you to be happy, you're fucked.”

Bringing It All Together. In order for anything in your life to change, you have to change something. Changing your habits in the name of greater happiness and well-being is one of the best things that you can do for yourself. But it’s also important for another reason—taking control of your happiness makes everyone around you happier too.

What do you do to make yourself happy?

For my own wellbeing I've quit the pursuit of Happiness. Somehow the idea of a Flourishing Life appeals to me more. Flourishment challenges me to welcome difficult situations where I can practice Courage, become aware of others in such a way that Celebration and Compassion lead me to empathise (feel with, not for others), and defer gratification (which takes me to a birth thing of frustration and panic at having to wait). Every possibility that comes up now goes into a “Maybe” file, just to see what pops up next. Hey, a flourishing life isn't all lollipops and roses. In that respect, nothing changes. But flourishing is way more satisfying than anything else I've tried so far.

And here's the rub.......... even when I'm “unhappy” nowadays, I'm happy and grateful about it. As long as I'm happy about it, being Unhappy beats the hell out of being dead. And “unhappy” passes. Death is a wee bit more permanent.

This is when I discovered that Happiness was no longer a state of being for me; it returned to the status of an Emotion. What a relief! Happiness is at last allowed to be what it was when I was a child – a transient feeling that may be present, and sometimes not. After all, Happiness is not always appropriate or desirable. At my daughter's funeral, for example, I found a helluva lot to celebrate and be grateful about, but I didn't feel like acting up like Ronald McDonald. Expressing 'happiness' is also a cultural thing – when in Rome........

Once I reclaim Happiness as a feeling, I am enriched by surprise, complexity, shades and contradictions. Happiness now ceases to be a bland state of featureless bliss, and becomes, sometimes a contented groan of relief, sometimes a flutter of excitement and fear, sometimes an eerie sense of everything being just-so, and sometimes something that feels like a daring, audacious, scary bridge over troubled crocodiles.

Ah! That's better!