Stop white-knuckling happiness – take a both/and approach instead

Happiness. We all want it. Who wouldn’t? It feels good when we’re happy. And there are umpteen bazillion benefits, from better health to better social interactions to greater access to your brain’s resources.

Look at any self-help book section, and you’ll see title after title on happiness. And on the surface, that all seems positive.

And yet…

When you look a little deeper, all this happy-centricity starts to feel maybe a little toxic.

Why? Because somehow we have turned into a culture that worships happiness as an either/or idea, not both/and. We’re either happy, or something’s wrong. We want life to be all happy, all the time. We want our lives to look like other people’s smiling Instagram feeds.

And that impossible aspiration sets us up to – paradoxically enough – be unhappy.

Like it or not, you’re going to have down days. Maybe it’s just a short melancholy funk. Or perhaps things are going completely sideways in your life and you’re feeling the weight of it. Or maybe you’ve just hit a stretch of the blah doldrums. It’s all part of the messy, imperfect reality of being human.

Whatever it is, the incessant drumbeat towards an ever-happier life only adds fuel to the fire, adding to the feeling that something is wrong, that maybe we’re not measuring up and we need to do something to improve.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for doing what we can to move the needle of our lived experience towards a fuller sense of happiness and contentment. Just not at the expense of making the rest of the spectrum of human experience wrong.

The idea isn’t that happiness isn’t a worthy pursuit.

It’s that the toxic fetishization of happiness and the demonization of anything else leads us in precisely the wrong direction.

Taking a both/and approach to happiness

One way I try to avoid that in my own work is by consciously making room for both acceptance of where people are and movement in a positive direction. It’s a little like this quote from Zen master Suzuki-Roshi to his students:

“You are perfect just as you are. And you could use a little improvement.”

Listen, I get it. Feeling unhappy, or stressed, or depressed is no fun. It’s painful, and we all evolved to instinctively want to move away from pain, whether physical or emotional.

But making the uncomfortable state we’re in “wrong” does nothing but add to the pain. It does nothing to move you in a more desirable direction. It just adds to the constriction you feel and inhibits whatever positive possibilities exist.

Unhappy – Flat –Neutral – Happy

The spectrum from unhappiness to happiness covers a wide range of experiences and emotions. But for a more manageable way to think about it, let’s divide it into four main categories:

• Unhappy: This encompasses not only your garden-variety unhappiness, but a variety of experiences ranging from a light feeling of melancholy to depression to feeling deeply grief-stricken.
• Flat: This is a kind of no-man’s land that has an unpleasant tinge to it. There’s no active unhappiness, but everything feels kind of blah. It’s like watching the world on black and white TV. Life is on autopilot and feels like one long shrug.
• Neutral: While not actively positive, this is also a non-negative state. It’s neither noticeably happy nor unhappy. Realistically, it’s not unusual to be spending time here even if overall we would describe our experience of life as a happy one.
• Happy: A range of experiences from peace and contentment to delight to feeling ecstatic.

Why does it help to divide them like this? Because each of those regions of the inner landscape need to be tended to in different ways. And awareness is the starting point.

Try this: Take a look at your life overall. Which of the four landscapes are you currently navigating?

If it’s unhappy, how are you treating yourself? Are you being kind to yourself, or are you adding to the unhappiness by the way you’re treating yourself? (In my next post I’m going to offer some ideas for how to navigate the “unhappy” region with a both/and approach.)

If it’s flat, try taking a “what one thing” approach. What one thing could you add – a hobby, more time with friends, learning something that fascinates you – that could add more of what energizes you to your life? (This is one way of taking a pointillist approach to shaping your life in a positive direction.)  

If it’s neutral, ponder whether that is simply a space of pause in an overall happy experience, or if it is in danger of sliding into “flat.” If it’s a space of pause, acknowledge it. Remind yourself of what’s good, but don’t pressure yourself to “get back to happy.” If it’s sliding into flat, use the “what one thing” idea to put on the brakes and shift the momentum.

If it’s happy, pause for a moment and celebrate. Let yourself savor the things that are contributing to that. Shining a spotlight on what’s good and letting yourself soak it up consciously can strengthen and amplify what’s already there. (This is an example of using “focus management” as a way to change your experience – in this case, expanding the good that is already there.)  

Wherever you find yourself, remember that life is always in a state of flux. White-knuckling happiness with an either/or approach is actually more likely to take you in the opposite direction.

The key is embracing the reality of both/and.