Note to self

Here's a thing. Posting it here is partly minding the gaps and partly because this blog is where my non-fiction comes to die. Also it's partly because, sometimes, I need to remind myself I wrote this, and that it's mostly true, I think, even if it reminds me of that time on Family Guy when Brian wrote a self-help book...

How to be happier

Are you happy? Yes? No? Somewhere in between? With apologies for opening this piece with question after question, how did you go about answering the opener? Instinctively, as in “yes, of course I’m happy”? Or did you take some time to apply some form of quantitative assessment? For example, how often are you asked about your day? And when your friend/family member/significant other asks that question, what proportion of the time are you able to give a positive response? If greater than 50%, does that make you a happy person?

It’s not so cut and dried, is it? Happiness isn’t a binary value, it’s not simply on or off. To pretend otherwise is to over-simplify. However, to apply some critical thought to how happy you are is nevertheless a worthwhile exercise, not least because you inevitably start to notionally place yourself somewhere on that sliding analogue scale of happiness. And once you’ve done that, perhaps you start to think about how you could move up the scale, to a happier place.

Before I go any further, I should probably add that if you are a relentlessly upbeat person, always happy, remorselessly optimistic and positive, well, that’s great! But you probably don’t need to read any further – thanks for stopping by, sincerely, but I needn’t take up any more of your time… …still here? So maybe you’re a bit more like me? Maybe you too are seduced by the negative. It’s tempting, isn’t it, to focus on the problems we face rather than celebrate our successes. It’s easy, and quite natural, I think, to remember the criticism we receive rather than the praise. To dwell on the adversities we face. And if the weight of those problems, that criticism, those adversities, if it’s too great then even the most upbeat optimist can be unhappy.

I’m not writing this from the perspective of an upbeat optimist. I have problems; don’t get me wrong, no-one’s dying but my problems are more than enough to make me unhappy. Like a depressingly large proportion of people in my demographic, I’ve been unhappy enough to entertain some pretty drastic and ultimately destructive courses of action. But, and it’s a big but, I’ve been able to move to a happier place. Many of those problems, those dissatisfiers, those causes of depression are still there, sure. But there are ways of lessening their impact, in my experience at least. I’m writing this to share those ways.

The first and by far the most important, is recognising that, to a degree, mood is an elective state. A few years back, there was a slightly annoying and briefly fashionable management text called FISH that had the tag line “choose your attitude – it’s the one thing you have complete control over”. Now I’m not going to pretend it’s that simple – I don’t believe that anyone has complete control over how they feel, nor do I believe that happiness is simply a matter of choosing to be happy. But I do believe anyone can choose to improve their chance of happiness, by focusing on the good things, however small. Okay, so that girl you have a huge crush on barely knows you’re alive, but work is going well, right? And your ageing parents are healthy, aren’t they? And how about your personal best at Parkrun last weekend? Of course I understand the tendency, in this example, to focus on the girl – misery can be seductive, I know. It’s just easier, somehow, to focus on the negative, perhaps because of a tendency to take the positive for granted – good stuff is just supposed to happen, right? Well, maybe, but so does the bad. And focusing on the things that make you unhappy is a gateway into a destructive feedback loop – the more you dwell on how unhappy you are, the unhappier you become. Far better, wherever possible, to accept that there is bad stuff in your life (yours and everyone else’s, however outwardly successful/happy/beautiful/confident they may be) and choose to concentrate on all the good stuff. You might think they’re small, trivial even, but they’re really not – think how you’d feel if they weren’t present. And I’m not suggesting ignoring your problems – it’s important to distinguish between pouring thought into an issue productively (i.e. trying to solve or improve it) and counter-productively (the vicious circle of feeling unhappy about being unhappy). You can’t simply choose your attitude, but you can choose to remember, concentrate on and celebrate the positive things in your life rather than be seduced by the negative.

Secondly, I have found it is easier to feel happy with your life if you are happy with yourself as a person. It is important and beneficial, then, to do whatever you can to try to be a better person – after all if you can’t like yourself, how can you like anything else? Now a lifestyle magazine approach to being happier with yourself might be to buy a new outfit or have a new haircut – feel better literally by looking better. Now I’m not going to discount that kind of thinking – if it works for you, great – but I will suggest it’s temporary, short-term thinking. Far better and longer lasting, in my view, is to make choices that make you happier with who you are as a person. This might be straightforward when making simple decisions – an unemotional choice between options – but far more difficult when faced with behavioural choices. A useful approach to the latter is to imagine trying to explain your choice to your mother, or describing the consequences of your actions to your child. These, I have found, are good ways of making ethically and morally sound choices, of being the sort of person you’d like to be rather than the person you are. Over time, this is a self-fulfilling approach – you start to become the idealised you, a version of yourself that you can be happier with. And, as I have already suggested, a first step towards being happier with your life is to learn how to be happier with yourself.

And finally, it’s important to remember that happiness is not a continuous state – no-one feels happy all the time. The good news is that this means unhappiness is not a continuous state either. In my view, life is generally somewhere in the middle, with flashes of happiness and blots of unhappiness, high points and low troughs, after which things generally return, at a greater or lesser rate, to the average. So if you’re aspiring to be happy all the time, stop it! Give yourself a break! You’re aspiring to an unnatural and unsustainable state. Far better to concentrate on making those high points higher and the lows less deep (which I suggest you can do by actively choosing what you focus on, as per my first point) and on moving the median line up (which I believe you can achieve by striving to be the version of yourself you’d be most proud of, as per my second point).

This has turned into quite a ramble, a glut of opinions. And that’s really all it is, a personal viewpoint, with the odd truism thrown in, from someone who has been profoundly depressed and has learnt, through experience, analysis and applied determination, to be happier. This way of thinking has worked for me – it might for you too. To summarise, then, here are the three things to remember if you consider yourself unhappy on a regular basis:

1. You can choose to improve your chance of happiness, by recognising the good things in life. Make sure the energy you expend on dissatisfiers is productive (try to solve or improve them) rather than counter-productive (resist the seduction of misery).
2. Strive to be your best, the version of yourself you’d be most proud to show your loved ones. Only when you are happy with yourself can you be happy with your life.
3. Don’t try to be happy all the time – it’s unrealistic. Concentrate instead on appreciating the highs whilst recognising that there will always be some lows, and so aim to move your median happiness line up.

And that’s it. The thought that this little essay might help others, even if only one person, has made me feel happier for having written it. How are you feeling?

Footnote: this essay originally appeared as a guest post on philosophy blog The Thought Train, in January 2017.