Stop Chasing Happy
Sunday evening is here. Saturday was great, you felt happy, at peace, but the feeling is creeping away as the hours slide by. You’re sitting on the couch running through the to-do list that you felt like you really made a dent in,but you just added several more items. You're thinking about how you’re going to fit the items into the week and complete your work responsibilities (your calendar is packed), and that pilates class you swore you weren’t going to reschedule this time; oh and text your friend back that you meant to reach out to at the beginning of last week… You look at your calendar and feel the creeping sense of dread. You’re exhausted. You must be doing something wrong, you’re not feeling happy right now. It can feel easy to slide a spiral in which we end up researching buying some land and living commune style as a homesteader. When will you get a break, when you can slow down. And the answer is, never. Not unless you make the choice. In a world whose pace is never slowing and it seems like the list of expectations is ever growing, how do we balance trying to find the “feeling happy” moments with all of the expectations and demands we experience?
Doing the work that I do with emotions and helping clients feel less fearful of them, I realized that I’ve been doing a disservice in recommending they pursue what makes them happy and it clicked. There was something missing there. We talk about feelings as moments, something that will fade and be replaced by another, temporary. We recommend embracing emotions as they come, embracing the natural ebb and flow into another. How is trying to be happy, when happiness can be so temporary, a sustainable goal that doesn’t end in seeking disconnection and escape. In chasing happiness, are we doing ourselves a disservice? Are we creating a never ending cycle of trying to find and trying to hold on to a feeling? We become fearful of other emotions, of losing “happy”.
My hypothesis is two fold. First, that we’ve conflated happiness with fulfillment, with being in alignment to our values and it's hurting us.Second, the daily expectations and responsibilities we experience, whether from objective circumstances or those that have been self imposed has created a pressure cooker environment, in which we often are experiencing a kind of chronic burnout, a loss of direction, and therefore have begun to associate, checking out, disconnecting, and leisure as pleasurable, seeing everything else as a burden, task, or “something to check off the list”. Do we know what our values are and how to create action in alignment with them? Have you thought about how even the mundane tasks of the every day can bring us closer to a life lived in alignment with our values? This is how we create contentment and fulfillment and we’ll talk more about this shortly.
First, let's define happiness. Per the Oxford Languages Dictionary, happiness is a feeling of pleasure or having a sense of confidence or satisfaction. Now, when we think about the things in life that make us happy, what comes to mind? Brunch with friends, puppies, a sweet treat, binging the latest season of that show you’ve been meaning to watch? What do all those things have in common? They are external. Happiness is often influenced by external factors, whereas contentment is influenced by both external and internal factors.
When we live life focused on finding contentment our moments of happiness may be more frequent and consistent and, when the happiness fades, it doesn’t have to be such a distressing experience where we are fearful of what follows. When we are content we can experience other emotions in a way that feels less threatening, where we can focus less on finding the next external experience and focus on creating a richer inner life where, we might feel, sad, frustrated, stressed, but these emotions aren’t the threat, they don’t need to be eradicated.We can even begin to approach these feelings with curiosity, in the way they were intended, as a compass to guiding us and informing how we experience the world, in a way that helps us. Happiness isn’t the goal, it’s a byproduct.
Steps to utilizing values to find contentment:
Identify your values. What's really important to you? You might have serval primary values as well as secondary values. Thats ok! At this stage we’re just reflecting.
Identify where those values came from. Why are they important to you? Are they really yours and are they in alignment with the version of you you want to be?
Consider what elements of your life are already in alignment with your values.
Reflect on what might not be, how did it get there? What values is it currently serving?
