Contents
Goodbye to self-help: being happy is not as easy as they make you believe
Psychology
«The construction of an enduring happiness», is the phrase subtitled in the last book by the psychiatrist and writer Ricardo Capponi, “Solid happiness”. As if it were a diet, one that you cannot do without previous pillars of healthy eating, the professional considers that the search for (true) happiness is not a matter of a day, if not a lot of effort, knowledge and previous work .
Capponi – recently deceased – focused his career on the search for well-being. With the aim of helping others, he published several books, in which he addressed the achievement of healthy and fulfilling romantic relationships and mental health. In his last post, the writer focused on the global happiness concept, the complications to achieve it and the importance of knowing its pillars in order to achieve it.
The solidity of this happiness of which the Chilean author speaks is based on a fixed basis: the essential pleasures. These are three, the sensorial, the comfort and the permanence.
The importance of the basics
In the case of sensory pleasures, they are the most basic. Thus, it is what we feel when we are hungry and we are satisfied by eating; when we are cold and we put on a sweater; or what we feel with the most basic well-being, when we have all our needs covered. Although it is true that these are fundamental, Ricardo Capponi explains that the happiness they produce varies depending on how they adapt to our life. The author gives the example of our ancestors, who felt security and comfort inside a cave. In our case, we would not find any pleasure in it, but we need a house adapted to the moment in which we live.
On the other hand, there is the pleasure of permanence, which is what makes us feel integrated into a specific group. This can be achieved with material goods – wearing the same clothes or wearing the same hairstyle – or with the simple feeling of permanence: having things and values in common with others. “This pleasure has so much weight in happiness that the relative matters more than the absolute,” explains the author in the book and gives an example: there are times when a person prefers to earn less money if the rest are going to earn less, in Instead of earning more, but that others earn even more than him.
The second part of the book is dedicated solely to material resources, those that we often think of as essential to our happiness and almost always restrict us rather than help us.
The thesis that Capponi defends during the book is that, since happiness is a derivative of pleasure, essential pleasures make us think that material goods will bring us happiness. But this is not so. “The positive emotions that money offers, for example, do not last long, and the negative ones, which come from the difficulties and costs of achieving it, are prolonged over time,” says the psychologist in the publication, who also emphasizes the fact that «a monetary loss generates more unhappiness than an equivalent profit. ‘ He sums it up simply: material resources cause unhappiness in the two most harmful ways for mental functioning: addiction and stress.
Psychic pleasures
Ricardo Capponi also develops the idea that, although they are important, happiness is not only obtained from essential pleasures; it also comes from obtaining psychic pleasures. And these depend on our ability to meet life’s challenges with sufficient “mental resources.” Therefore, he speaks of the importance of accepting negative feelings that we have, understand them and, in this way, be able to enjoy the good ones.
“The more prepared we are to face these challenges, the more capacity we will have to obtain psychic pleasures and, therefore, happiness”, asserts the author. He thus speaks of the danger of “Suppression mechanism”, that resource by which we try not to have to feel negative emotions, which deprives us of the negative consequences of life. This results in the fact that “we do not have a guide capable of helping us to face the challenges that humanize us.”
This is where resilience comes into play, the ability to recover from bad situations and face them with integrity. «Contradictorily, having everything under control induces greater vulnerability. Volatility and disorder benefit resilience, because they activate the resources that everyone has to recover from attacks and non-excessive imbalances ”, explains the author.
All the ideas in the book lead to one place: “Happiness can’t be built from scratch.” This is why the author cautions against self-help books, which sell the idea that it is easily obtainable. But not only this, he also believes that this type of thinking often urges us to follow the advice of others to establish our own well-being. «We cannot appropriate the experience of third parties, in happiness there are no scavengers. Sooner or later, like everything built dishonestly, it will collapse ”, he comments and ends:“ Just as in material life, obtaining goods is not improvised or stolen, neither in mental health ”.