How to be happy

Today I’m in Aberdeen, ready for tomorrow’s training on ‘Dual Diagnosis’. It’s been a long drive but that’s what happens when your patch consists of the entire UK. Fortunately the roads were clear enough in spite of the snow and I had all day to get here from Stirling so it wasn’t too stressful. I had time to think as I drove. Even when driving the scenery along the Scottish East coast road can be incredibly inspiring.

I arrived in the city at around 2pm with a couple of hours to kill before I could check in at my hotel. This gave me an opportunity to walk around and see a little of the city. That’s a rare treat for a trainer. Usually I get to a place after dark, prepare future courses, deliver training the next day and then leave again to arrive at the next venue sometime that evening. The chance to stop and look around is an unusual luxury and so I grabbed it with both hands.

I meandered aimlessly around this beautiful, stone built metropolis, still continuing with the same train of thought as I watched the local inhabitants passing by. I’ve always been interested in my fellow man and so ‘people watching’ has long been an engrossing pastime of mine.

As I looked at the many faces before me I realised just how many people in our society seem to have forgotten how to be happy. It’s as though this basic, fundamental and vital skill has all but disappeared under a mountain of worries, expenses and appointments.

I’m sure that, had I asked one of the many miserable looking people I saw this afternoon they’d have been able to cite lots of reasons for their unhappiness. There is a recession on, after all. But explanations conerning the global economy, domestic deficits, illness, relationship stresses, unreasonable employers and the like all miss the real point. It’s not what happens to us that makes us happy or sad, it’s what we think about what happens that makes the difference. In the play ‘Hamlet’, Shakespeare’s Polonious puts it this way:

“Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so”

Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not advocating a return to the bizzare ‘positive mental attitude’ training of the 1970s. That sort of perpetual, perfectionist thinking is not only unrealistic, it’s dangerous. Blind optimism leads to repeated disappointment, despair and even suicide when the world consistently fails to live up to expectations and let’s face it if your expectation is that everything will always be wonderful then you’re going to be disappointed an awful lot. The world is not perfect and pretending that it is creates far more problems than it solves.

Rather I’m suggesting a simple awareness:

You can control your own mood!

Many years ago when I was a student nurse I noticed something really obvious. I noticed that people suffering from depression wake up depressed and then spend the day doing depressing things. They sigh a lot, they look down or stare blankly into space. They speak little and move less. It’s no surprise that they stay depressed, or even that their depression deepens over time. With nothing else to occupy their minds they dwell upon how bad they feel and come up with endless justifications for why they couldn’t possibly feel any better:

“Anyone would feel like this if they’d been through what I have.”

I wrote an article about this process of justification which was subsequently circulated around several depressed people’s chat rooms and received very mixed reactions. Some people Emailed me to say that they had used the article as the basis of a self-recovery programme which, of course, was very nice to hear. Others simply dismissed the article and ridiculed me for daring to write it. That’s life, I suppose. You can judge for yourself by clicking below to read it on the AMJ website:

http://www.amjcaretraining.site50.net/1_12_Earned-Depression.html

My reason for writing that earlier article and also the background to this blog post is that I realised all those years ago as a student that people actually can create and maintain their own emotional states by controlling their thoughts, their expectations and their behaviours. So I began to wonder what would happen if a person just decided to be happy and began to behave in happy ways. I decided to try it.

Albert Ellis, founder of  ‘rational emotive therapy’ used to insist that people are happiest when they are engaged in some project or activity that they define as more important than themselves. This was my starting place.

I have made a point since then of always having something worthwhile to be involved in but also, I’ve come to realise that the extra ingredient, the ‘X’ factor is simply choice. I choose to be happy.

This has nothing to do with unrealistic expectations of the world. Bad things still happen and, like everyone else, I still have my problems to face. However, I now know that the power to choose my mood lies within me. I can choose to be happy, sad, calm, exzcited, even angry regardless of what is happening around me. So here’s another principle from the great Albert Ellis:

People have enormous control over their emotions if they will only realise it and take charge of their feelings.

I wish that the people walking around Aberdeen this afternoon would understand this. I wish the people walking around every other city in UK would realise it too. I sincerely hope that readers of this blog will ‘get it’ and start working on their own emotional control (assuming that they haven’t already done so).

I still intend to do more work around challenging behaviour first but maybe the next project after that’s finished should be around the cognitive (hinking) and behavioural elements of happiness irrespective of events in the world around us.

As I often say…….. watch this space.

Update 5/2/2010:

Since I posted this two days ago a number of people have commented, understandably enough, that I’m being far too simplistic in my outlook. I must say that I do understand what these commenters mean and if there was nothing behind the comments I made then it would simply look like yet another ‘pull yourself together’ rant. Clearly if people could simply snap out of mental disorders then they would do so.

However I’m not really limiting my comments to clinical depression – more about people without diagnosable disorders such as climnical depression. Anyway – I think the response below sums up my position on this. Hopefully it’ll make sense.

“If the stuff I’d written above was all I meant then you’d be absolutely right. I would be far too simplistic in my thinking and probably shouldn’t be in practice. But, as I alluded to in the original post on this topic there’s much more to come.

But to respond directly to your comments let me say this (actually you’ll find we agree more than you might think).

For people who do not have diagnosable (clinical) depression then it is absolutely possible to learn to control mood. There’s more to it than simply saying ‘pull yourself together’ – and in fact I made that point in the article too.

There’s activity – there’s involvement in worthy activities (however you define worthy) and there are a lot of cognitive techniques too. That’s why I refer to happiness as a ’skill’ – more than a choice alone, although choice is part of it.

In the case of people with clinical/biological depression then there’s more to do but please remember that the original post was talking about the general population of a UK city. I do not believe that all the people I saw in Aberdeen last Wednesday afternoon were clinically depressed.

There’s a problem in Western society generally that we think there should be a pill for every ill (which of course there isn’t) and people often confuse depression with ‘a bad day’.

I suspect that the majority of the people I saw had no biological/diagnosable disorder – they were just miserable.

However – even for people who are clinically depressed there has to be more to treatment than simply medication. That’s part of it but then there are also other issues that regularly contribute to emotional and psychological disorders. These can be social, cultural, developmental, behavioural and psychological.

That’s why cognitive behavioural therapy is so effective not only in reactive depressive states but also in those depressions assumed to be organic as well as the heavier disorders such as schizophrenia and biopolar disorder.

Please don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. The fact that psychological technique is not the complete picture in every type of mood disorder doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a place at all.

Also please bear in mind the cultural difference here. I think you’re in America and I know from talking with American nursing colleagues via the internet that American culture is still very dominated by the bio-medical model of depression. Therefore it may well be that everyone you deal with believes that medication is the only intervention needed.

Here in UK we’ve moved away from relying just on medication and so culturally we’re different. We’ll use a number of other techniques for mental disorders alongside medications.

This is not to suggest that medication has no place – clearly it can and does help when used appropriately. But it’s not the complete picture – in fact most of us would argue that it’s only a relatively small part of the picture in the vast majority of cases.

For more information on the thinking behind these ideas follow the links on ‘emotional management’. They begin here:

http://stuartsorensen.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/emotional-management-1-introduction/

Cheers,

Stuart”