This is Part 2 of a 6-part series in which we take a closer look at the basic emotions: Anger, Happiness, Sadness, Love, Fear, and Guilt/Shame. Simply click on each link to view the associated article.
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What is happiness?
Enjoying a sunny day. Connecting with a friend. Remembering a good time. These, and many other situations have the power to inspire happiness in our lives. When we’re happy, we smile, our eyes widen, we get a warm and expansive feeling in our chest, and a sense of lightness or buoyancy. Our energy levels increase and we feel enthusiastic and ready to engage.
Of all the basic emotions, happiness is the most pleasurable. It ranges from feeling contentment, satisfaction and amusement to enjoyment, delight, joy, elation, and euphoria. These emotions not only make us feel better, they enhance our intuition and creativity. They open up our hearts and minds, enabling us to feel more connected and see a wider range of possibilities.
And yet happiness can be one of the most difficult human emotions to achieve and to enjoy.
Wanting and fearing happiness
Many of us wish we felt happier in our lives. We have plenty going on and much to be grateful about, but we still feel that something’s missing. Others among us struggle to enjoy ourselves or to feel a sense of satisfaction in our achievements. We actually feel uncomfortable about being happy. This discomfort can manifest itself in various ways, including being unable to feel a real sense of pleasure or joy for very long, or having an inability to share a sense of pride or happiness with others and feeling awkward and uncomfortable about accepting praise or compliments. Some of us actually feel guilty about experiencing feelings of joy and exuberance. But why?
The root cause lies in our past
When we were very young, we learned all about how to be in the world (and how not to be) from our caregivers. We were totally reliant on them for our survival. So, when it came to learning about happiness, if our caregivers pulled away from us when we were excited and happy, that likely caused us to associate those happy times with danger, because we needed our caregivers. We didn’t want them to pull away.
If our being too exuberant made our caregiver nervous, in our effort to maintain a safe connection with them, we may have started to suppress our feelings. Some of us learned to suppress our natural vitality because we sensed and saw that feelings like joy and delight caused conflict between us and our caregivers.
When emotional experiences are suppressed, when they’re not processed through to completion as they need to be, they stay stuck inside of us and don’t go away. That’s why old patterns of responding get triggered. Early lessons around emotion with our caregivers are still alive in our memories along with all of the emotional charge of the past. And all of the fears, beliefs, perceptions, and expectations associated with them get activated when we’re triggered.
Our old software is telling us happiness is dangerous, don’t go there. Even decades after such events with our caregivers, our adult brains still operate on that old wiring. And we’re still responding to those feelings as though they’re harmful. We learned that if we have too much fun something bad will likely happen, or something unpleasant could be lurking around the corner and so we act accordingly.
Why can’t we enjoy being happy?
It’s understandable that we’d feel reticent to experience unpleasant emotions such as anger and sadness. But what makes less sense is this discomfort some of us have with feelings that are meant to be pleasurable. Like excitement, love and joy. They make us feel scared and anxious.
What’s keeping us in this state is fear. We’re afraid of our own feelings. This “feelings phobia”, which is actually pretty common, is keeping us from experiencing joy.
We’re afraid to open up and feel what’s inside us. Afraid that we’ll lose control. Afraid to let people see us as who we really are. Oftentimes, we’re too busy to notice that we’re pushing our feelings aside. That we’re distracting ourselves, doing anything and everything we can to stop feeling the discomfort associated with happiness.
We’re racing through our days, missing the chance to feel good about the here and now. Putting off feeling good until later, which sometimes never comes. And if it does, we act as if we don’t have time or the awareness to stop and be present for it.
In short, we don’t make enough room in our lives for joy. We don’t give happiness time to register inside us and make us feel great. We end up cutting ourselves off from our joy and feeling disconnected and confused, like somethings’ missing.
What to do to experience more happiness and joy in your life
Many of us search for happiness outside of ourselves – buying the latest gadgets, a bigger TV, a new car, a bigger home. These things might bring temporary happiness, but we soon learn that it’s not enough to just do things that make us happy. We need to feel happiness. We need to stay present with it and fully experience it when it arises.
The key to achieving this is to have new experiences with our emotions in which we move through our discomfort and are fully present with our feelings. New experiences in which we lean into our core emotions have the power to change the way our brain is wired, overriding the old fears from our past that are outdated and no longer serving us.
If we are able to shift our focus to the present moment, we discover that more often than not there is a reason to be happy – even when times are tough. Then, we need to learn to tolerate the uncomfortable feelings that arise with our happiness. When we lean into them, they dissipate, and have less of a hold on us. Whereas avoiding our anxiety or fear gives us less opportunity to see that, ultimately, we don’t have to feel anxious or afraid.
The more we can lean into our happiness, the more we can break the old ties to anxiety, worry and guilt. We can change our relationship with the emotional experience inside of us and make it possible to experience happiness more fully. It’s a process that, over time and the more we practice it, will establish new neural networks in our brains that will expand our range of emotional options.
I detail a four-step process in my book Living Like You Mean It that can help you navigate your emotions and cultivate your capacity for emotional mindfulness – purposefully paying attention to our physically felt emotional experience as it happens. The steps are:
Step 1: Recognize and Name
Step 2: Stop Drop and Stay
Step 3: Pause & Reflect
Step 4: Mindfully Relate
You can discover more about these steps in the book and in my Make Room For Joy audio download. But, for now, let’s try a simple exercise to help raise your awareness of your emotional experience.
A Happiness Exercise
Try to recall a moment in your life that filled you with delight. Maybe you won a prize, completed a tough assignment successfully, traveled to a beautiful part of the world for a vacation. Or imagine great times you’ve spent with friends or family.
How does your body respond when you think of these things? What do you notice about yourself? Be as specific as possible with your recollection of the experience. It can be about anything that made you feel happy or had the potential to. How did you respond to the moment? Did you stop and make room for it? Did you enjoy it? Did you stay with and savor your happiness? Or did you feel anxious, uncomfortable, afraid?
If you made room for the experience and enjoyed it, that’s great. That’s what all of us are looking to achieve. Because we all deserve to be able to make the most of every moment of joy and happiness we experience in our lives. If you noticed feeling uncomfortable, that’s great, too. You’re growing your awareness of how old lessons show up in your body and impact your emotional experience. With greater awareness, you can do something about it. You can move in a different direction. Take a moment to breathe into your discomfort. Just give it a little room. And then try leaning into your happiness a little more. Alternate back and forth between breathing into your discomfort and making more room for joy. Notice what happens inside you. Keep coming back to this practice whenever you notice feeling uncomfortable and, little by little, you’ll grow your capacity for joy.
