7 Ways to Stop Being Unhappy

A happy life is a building with three dimensions: material, interpersonal and emotional. In other words, to be a happy person, you need to be able to achieve your goals, while maintaining a reputation and good relations with people and without sacrificing inner harmony.

People have always known that finding happiness is far from easy. Aristotle taught: «The wise man does not seek pleasure, he seeks the absence of pain.» And the French writer Jules Renard wrote in his «Diary» that «happiness is when misfortune is silent.» What should be done in order not to feel unhappy?

Here are some tips or rather tips that already contain a whole program of action …

1. Decide that everything is going well for you.

Not so simple. As the famous French philosopher Alain wrote: “You need to want to be happy and make efforts for this. If you stand in the pose of an impartial observer and keep the doors open, waiting for happiness to enter them, then sadness will enter them.

It is always easier to surrender to the power of unhappiness — this requires less psychological energy from us. And in order to prolong well-being, on the contrary, efforts are needed. In general, people differ from each other in how happy they are, but some factors are common to the entire human race: it seems that evolution favors the development of negative emotions, since they increase the chances of survival of the species.

Fear motivates us to flee or fight, anger terrifies opponents or rivals, sadness evokes sympathy…

However, nature, having taken care of our survival, did not care at all about the quality of our life. Positive emotions are much less diverse, less stable, and more «expensive» in terms of psychological energy.

2. Don’t allow yourself to be sad for too long.

Since negative emotions occur only occasionally, do not last long, and do not disturb our daily lives too much, one would expect them to pass by themselves. But «flirting» with misfortune, as was customary among the romantics of the XNUMXth century, is not safe, and today psychology is beginning to better understand this risk.

By giving vent to negative emotions, we prolong them. Previously, people believed in a kind of catharsis: for example, if you complain to someone, you can alleviate your suffering. In fact, it is often the other way around: constant and unanswered complaints can make the complaining victim of life circumstances. And misfortune feeds on itself: the more we succumb to it, the longer it will last.

Moreover, if we surrender to the power of unhappiness, then a negative emotion limited in time (at the moment we feel unhappy) gradually develops into a stable negative attitude (we have an unhappy life).

And finally, in this way we doom ourselves to the subsequent return of negative emotions: it has long been well known about depression that it relapses very often, but now we know that an ordinary sad mood also tends to return.

3. Take care of yourself, especially when things aren’t going well.

In reality, thousands of people refute this idea with their behavior. Most anxiety and depression sufferers do the opposite. The worse they are, the more they let themselves go (stop seeing friends, give up their hobby), and the more they let themselves go, the worse they get. There is a vicious circle.

Doing what you love when you have problems is not at all the most obvious way out of the situation, because we lose our desire for this. However, many works show that this desire must be awakened by making an effort (as in the case of a stalled engine that must be started again).

Just don’t be misled about the ultimate goal: when we feel bad, the purpose of pleasant activities is not to make us happy, but to prevent unhappiness from growing and taking root within us.

4. Avoid perfectionism and do not strive for happiness «by all means»

Reflecting on happiness, Gustave Flaubert wrote: “Have you ever thought how many tears have been shed because of this terrible word? Without it, we would sleep more peacefully and we would have an easier life. You should not understand the writer too literally, but nevertheless … The search for happiness should not become an obsessive state for us, and the right of every person to happiness — written down, by the way, in the US Constitution — should not turn into an obligation to be happy at all costs became.

Especially since the feeling of unhappiness, an integral part of human existence, can sometimes be useful in making us think about whether we are living the right way, or even necessary when prompting us to face unpleasant truths.

We cannot avoid meeting with misfortune, but it is in our power to stop being afraid of this meeting and benefit from it.

5. Savor moments of happiness

The best (and also the most enjoyable) weapon in the fight against misfortune is to extract as much pleasure as possible from those happy moments that fate gives us. An excellent vaccine against feeling unhappy is to enjoy happiness by trying to make this feeling stronger, more powerful, brighter.

Perhaps the disease will not pass you by, but it will pass in a mild form! As always, this is easy to say, but not so easy to do. The contemporary French philosopher André Comte-Sponville talks about how incredibly «it’s hard to be happy when you’re doing well.» Let’s not wait until the vicissitudes of fate remind us that life can be beautiful, and make us regret that we did not manage it better …

And here we come to the most ancient and wisest advice of philosophers: carpe diem (“seize the moment”), rejoice in what you have today.

6. Think about your worries, but don’t obsess over them.

Studies of the psyche of anxious people show that they constantly scroll thoughts about troubles in their heads, but, paradoxically, this does not help them find a way out of the situation. The fact is that a feeling of anxiety is needed in order to sound an alarm, to draw our attention to the problem. It is not at all a way of perceiving the world or solving our problems.

That is why one of the goals of psychotherapy, especially cognitive therapy, is to teach people to see their misfortunes as problems to be solved, and not as a curse. In this case, the so-called «Socratic method» is used, which consists in asking tough questions about our anxieties: what is relevant to the facts, and what follows from my interpretation of events or my expectations? Does it help that I’m constantly worried? What is my disaster scenario? What is the probability that it will happen to me? Etc.

The method is harsh but effective.

7. Don’t Cultivate Hostile Emotions

Many of our misfortunes come from giving too much space to so-called hostile emotions. These emotions are often very strong and directed at certain people (anger, bitterness, jealousy, etc.). Most often, they develop because we prioritize the need to prove ourselves right (“They are wrong, they should be punished”), while sacrificing our desire to feel good (“I am the first to suffer because of this, so think about what I can do useful, and then switch to something else»).

In other cases, negative emotions are explained by the irritation that we experience in relation to human imperfection. These emotions make us look at the world and its inhabitants meticulously or cynically: “Well, if she considers herself a beauty…”

The lack of benevolence often indicates that a person is ill, and is always the source of a feeling of unhappiness.