I just want to be sad, okay?

{Image Credit :: Natalie Dee}

Between self-help books, anti-depressants, luxury cars, and feel-good movies, we spend billions of dollars per year in the quest for a single elusive thing. It’s something that poets and philosophers, and certainly us psychologists, have spent entire careers trying to capture and understand. It’s one of the tenants of our constitution and the way that end the tales we tell our children.

It’s happiness.

F***ing happiness.

Would fairy tales be so heartwarming if they weren’t concluded with a “…happily ever after” send off? What if the story of Cinderella ended up something along the lines of… “and eventually the golden-haired beauty developed shingles from the stress of infertility treatments while Prince Charming was shacking up with the her ditzy step-sister while the their magnificent palace went into foreclosure?”

Perhaps we’d make children cry – or look at us in bewilderment – and that’s why we end these tales of fancy with a dismissive reference to eternal bliss.

But perhaps we do a disservice to ourselves by focusing so much on happiness. We fall into what Dr. Russ Harris and other Acceptance and Commitment Therapy advocates call “the happiness trap” – the place where we experience depression, isolation, and stress not because of a lack of happiness, but because of our constant pursuit of it.

The hunt for happiness is often predicated on a couple of really distorted assumptions.

False: You can control everything we think and feel.

As comforting as perhaps it would be to be able to turn on and off our emotions like we do our cell phones (yes, they do have an OFF button, addicts…), we just don’t operate that way. We experience thousands of thoughts and feelings each day and to attempt to regulate each one would be exhausting – and extremely inefficient.

We sure do a lot of things to try, however, falling victim to the illusion of control. We spend countless hours and dollars trying to change or numb or change the way that we feel, instead of learning to accept whatever comes our way. If someone were to tell you that the time and money you are putting into working toward retirement today would all be for naught – you’re dying at 50 or winning the lottery – would you still keep up the struggle? If so, that’s a whole other issue. But most of us wouldn’t spend so much of our valuable resources in pursuit of something we often cannot control. It’s no different with our thoughts and feelings.

and…

False: You should be happy all of the time.

Give me a break, people. I’m not sure where this little rumor got started, but it’s about time it was laid to rest. More than 20% of us will suffer from depression during our lives, and not a single one of us will avoid be affected by depression. While this doesn’t mean that we have to accept depression as the status quo, it points to the fact that being happy all the time isn’t in our biological or cultural reality.

And would we really want to be happy all of the time? Even if you can’t say that a good cry watching The Notebook feels amazing (which, um, it does), you have to acknowledge that we were given a range of emotions for a reason. To miss out on experiencing disgust, anger, embarrassment, guilt, and fear, as difficult as these feelings might be, would be to be miss out on part of our humanity. Everything amazing in life requires a range of emotions – like true love and profound loss.

Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist who studies happiness, found that those with positive emotions tend to be more flexible, creative, and able to cope with stress. But interestingly she also found that it was not the happiest of the bunch who had higher incomes, more job satisfaction, and greater academic achievement – but rather those who were slightly less happy. It was proposed that this is because we need a little bit of discontent to feel spurred to make changes and fuel success.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that you shouldn’t incorporate pleasurable activities into your life and discover the things that bring you pleasure. But if the pursuit of happiness is making you miserable, it may be time to take a step back and learn to love, or at least appreciate, gray days and the feeling of frustration. Happiness shouldn’t be an end goal, but a byproduct of living an authentic and vulnerable life.

Do you feel like it’s okay to feel things other than happiness? What does make you happy?