No B.S Friday: Happiness, like everything, is use it or lose it.
“I dunno Jon. I think I’ve forgotten how to be happy.”
She said it like it was meant to be a joke, but she wasn’t laughing. And it wasn’t really funny. It kind of gave me chills.
I kinda got the joke she was trying to make. “I’m so tough and hardened that I’ve forgotten how to be happy, even though happiness isn’t something you do, like driving a car, and is therefore not something that you can ‘forget’.”
Boom tish.
Only thing was, it kinda was like she had forgotten how to be happy. She had one of those mouths that seemed to have hardened into a frown. Like how some models have what they call “resting bitch face”. She had ‘resting general disaffection with life face.’
And look, I don’t want to be mean. I know where her outlook came from. She hadn’t had the easiest life, and she’d never had a lot of self-confidence. So I can understand. I can empathise.
But it just struck me because I really think she had forgotten how to be happy. Happiness had become such an alien state of being to her, that she had lost the map to get back there.
And again, I think there’s this misperception about where emotions come from. We tend to think that our emotions are naturally set to neutral, and then we swing from happiness to sadness depending on what happens to us.
Like, you’re in a room having a rest. Your emotions are at neutral. Then someone comes in and gives you a foot rub for 5 minutes. You emotion-metre swings over to happiness. After they leave, and after a while, your emotions return to their neutral setting.
This really isn’t the right way to think about it when it comes to happiness, and this framework gives away a lot of our power.
There is no neutral emotional state. Sure, there is something that is neither happy nor sad, but you don’t revert to it. It just happens to lie in the middle.
Your natural tendency is just where you happen to spend the most time. We are creatures of habit. If you’re happy a lot, you tend to be happy. If you’re sad a lot you tend to be sad.
And what the whole theory of neuro-plasticity tells us is, that if you’re not using certain parts of your brain, those parts will be co-opted to serve other functions. It’s an efficiency thing.
So if you’re not using the part of the brain that is happiness, that part will be asked to chip in elsewhere – probably towards feeling more nuanced sadness if that’s where you spend all your time.
After a while, after your happiness cortex is subsumed by your sadness cortex (not actually things), it is actually very difficult to feel happiness at all.
You can, literally, forget how to be happy.
But if it is possible to forget, then it is also possible to remember.
And so at the risk of making every blog about radical self-reliance, there’s a lesson here.
Happiness is not a reaction to the outside world. Don’t think of it like that. Rather, think of it like a skill. It is something you do, like driving a car, and it is something you get better at with practice.
And if you’re serious about being happy, then put the time into it. Make space in your life and in your mind to feel happiness. Work on getting better at feeling happy.
Happiness is like riding a bike
JG.
Malcolm DICKSON says
I read all of that . Mark me down as a permanently possessed perishable please