Happiness Strategies | How to be Happy

This is the seventh of 10 tips for unwavering woe.

Why pursue happiness? If happiness wanted to have its way with you, it would find you. Why make the effort of doing things that bring you joy and promote your well-being when it could be that happiness is just not that into you?

Remember the old joke about the guy who’s caught in a flood? He sends away a boat, a helicopter and a plane, saying he doesn’t need them because God will save him. When he inevitably carks it, he asks God why he was allowed to drown. That ole heavenly humorist replies ‘I sent you a boat, a chopper and a plane – what more did you want?’

You need to be just that resistant to happiness. Don’t let measly trinkets like pleasant activities, good work, people you like, beauty or chocolate make you happy. Hold out for the big stuff. Keep waiting. Godot is coming.

A useful approach here is to personify happiness as a lecher and see yourself as a demure and innocent maiden determined to maintain your virtue in the face of happiness’s raunchy reach. Whatever you do, don’t put out. Be a bliss teaser.

At the same time, think of people who easily let themselves feel contentment as happiness hos. Belittle their joys. Scoff at their pleasures. Refuse to laugh at their jokes.

The declaration of independence speaks of a person’s right to pursue happiness. It’s this pursuit that you must relinquish. Instead, sacrifice your prospects for happiness to:

1. Chance
2. Other people’s desires.

Such temperance  calls for a judicious blend of laziness (I can’t be bothered choosing to be happy) and low self-regard (I don’t deserve to be happy). At times all of us feel both of these tendencies; the trick to playing hard to get with happiness is to make them a staunch habit. Your reward? It will be almost impossible for happiness to find you, you wanton tease, you.

It also helps to tune out any inkling of your own preferences and avoid actions that might brighten your life. Step away from the work that gives you a sense of satisfaction, the people who leave you feeling good, the things you like to do, the places you enjoy visiting or the ways you like to spend your time – or you’ll be on a slippery slope to happiness ho-dom. Don’t think it can’t happen to you. Before you know it, you’ll be laughing at only moderately funny jokes, telling people you like your job, wearing a shirt in a colour you love (lordy woady!) and channeling Louis Armstrong with a stirring rendition of Hello Jolly. 

You’ll be helped in your happiness abstinence by the fact that nature abhors a vacuum. By simply not choosing what you do want, you’ll virtually guarantee that you get a lot of what you don’t want. You’ll end up, by default, with  people you have nothing in common with inviting themselves over, music to gas yourself by on the radio, and movies that make you want to gnaw your own arm off on the TV.

It’s true – you can duck happiness’s advances just by doing nada. Passiveness pays, little glumsters. Which is just as well, since you probably wouldn’t make the effort to send a follow-up account.

For those seeking a little more help, here are some Dos and Don’ts for playing hard to get with happiness.

Don’t initiate social contacts. Invite no-one to the movies. Host no dinners. Organise nothing. Make no calls.
Do sit by the phone. Preferably in a darkened room. With maudlin music playing. And your shoulders slouched.

Don’t add fun to anything. Avoid music when doing chores. Dress for pure utility and look down on fashion.
Do bemoan the fact that chores are so unpleasant and your wardrobe is dull.

Don’t spend time doing things you enjoy. Have no hobbies that give you pleasure. Got a vague sense that you might love jigsaw puzzles? Never, ever get one. 
Do lament forlornly, preferably during a sitcom at which no live human has ever laughed, and your third for the night, that you wish you had the time for such bagatelles.

That’ll show those happiness hos.

Other tips in this series of 10 tips for unwavering woe:

• Tip 1: Take offense
• Tip 2: Never take responsibility
• Tip 3: Pity yourself
• Tip 4: Be needy
• Tip 5: Be ungrateful
• Tip 6: Avoid reality
• Tip 8: Be neurotic
• Tip 9: Always be right
• Tip 10: Be perfect

I’m rather loose when it comes to compliments. I sprinkle those babies like chocolate on my triple-shot cappuccino. It’s almost embarrassing how often I catch myself telling a complete stranger she looks hot in her boots or mentioning to a service person that his knowledge is a huge help. I love how a sincere compliment can tip my day from puce to golden, so I’ve made a habit of sharing it when I appreciate something. (Within reason – I wouldn’t write a compliment on a well-constructed exam question paper, for instance. OK I did once. But only because all the option (E)s were witty.)

The cool thing is, although I do it to put a little happy into someone else’s day, I usually get back a whole lot of happy for me. Often it’s a big smile and a thank you. Sometimes it’s more interesting.

Take today. There’s a woman at the gym who has no idea how gorgeous she is. She’s nearly fifty but has a nice figure, a beautiful face and a lovely, warm manner. She was wearing a deep blue jumper that made her face ‘sing’, and I told her so. Suddenly the shields went up. Alarmed, she explained that she hadn’t had a shower that morning, hadn’t combed her hair and sometimes didn’t even wash her hair before coming to the gym (I never do any of these things before the gym because, you know, IT’S THE GYM! You go there to sweat! Oh, but I do wear Juicy Tubes. In Groseille. )

She must have thought I had mistaken these egregious grooming oversights for an attractive appearance, and was determined to save me from the misapprehension that she looked nice, what with her brazenly uncombed hair and all. Her tirade continued, presumably in the hope I would spot my error (Oh. It was your uncombed hair. And here I was thinking that blue suited you. What a dolt!) and retract my observation before it could penetrate. I had to interrupt and say ‘Just take the compliment!’ at which she stopped, inhaled the fact that someone thought she looked great in blue, and said ‘Thank you’. She had to make an effort, but she allowed the nice feeling in. She left smiling. And you know what? So did I.

There’ve been times when I’ve complimented a stranger on something they were wearing, or having a nice voice, or handling something smartly, and seen them absolutely glow in response. Seeing that is a lovely buzz.

Other times a compliment can get right under a person’s skin.

I was once toward the back of a long queue for the women’s restroom at a conference. I noticed a girl walk up and stand outside a separate, wheelchair-accessible restroom. When it became vacant she called up the long line so the next person on the queue could use the available cubicle. I commented to her that it was a cool thing to do, especially as no-one would have known if she’d popped in there herself. Her eyes filled with tears and she turned bright red. She whispered ‘Thanks for noticing’ and gave me the sweetest smile. I bet she’s someone who often does nice things that no one notices. This time, someone noticed and said so, and she felt pretty damn good.

As I waited on that queue, with scores of women tensing their pelvic floor muscles like it was an impromptu Pilates class, I felt pretty damn good too.

This is the sixth of 10 tips for unwavering woe.

All our tips so far have involved the way you relate to others. We now turn to reality avoidance, a skill you can use all on your ownsome. It’s a trick of the mind that keeps you locked onto a Mobius strip of misery, and stops you spinning off into constructive action that can wreak havoc on your hopelessness and leave you with a disturbing sense of inner peace.

Note: This tip is not about avoiding reality TV. Reality TV is an excellent choice for miseratis. If woe is the go, then there are few better ways to spend your time. You can listen to conversations that make Cletus the slack-jawed yokel sound like Stephen Hawking. You can watch as the hopes of naïve wannabes are tauntingly raised and cruelly dashed to distract viewers from the disappointments of their own lives. You can revel in the knowledge that exhibitionistic and bellicose personalities are chosen in a set-up that would never be allowed by university ethics committees, even to gain knowledge about human behaviour. And you can thrill to the harmonious matching of national networks so keen to exploit with ordinary people so keen to be humiliated.

Rather, here I’m referring to a form of reality that exists outside of TV.

Now most of you will be familiar with the two great allies of anguish: guilt and worry. These twin torments are best deployed in endless circles of re-hashing and rumination that mire you in melancholy and keep you from taking action.

On no account should you let remorse over something you’ve said or done drive you to apologise or try to heal the relationship. Ineffectual guilt keeps you safely stuck, miserable and isolated, but constructive remorse can engender reconciliation and all manner of heinous relationship growth as well as a frightening sense of relief and inner peace.

Nor should anxiety ever precipitate your taking steps to address the troubling situation. Ruminative worry can afford you insomnia, ulcers and a slew of other gloom-inducing ailments, but purposeful thinking can lead you to do something – which can help to relieve your anxiety and, in extreme cases, potentially solve the problem.

The key to harnessing guilt and worry is debilitation and the secret to debilitation is avoiding reality. Once you see things the way they are, action starts to seem like a good idea. Before you know it, you’re off on an upward spiral of feeling better and happiness is snapping at your heels. Can open, worms everywhere. To safeguard yourself you must remain in a fog of vague, unproductive guilt and worry.

For help in avoiding reality and keeping guilt and worry in their place, we turn to a master of misery, Freud. His ambitious goal was to move clients from neurotic suffering to everyday misery, making him quite the woe-hero.

Here are some of his defense mechanisms and suggestions for how to use them.

Repression: Repress any and all thoughts that make you uncomfortable.
How to use it: Have no recollection of your nightly Snickers and Kettle Chip binges and wonder pensively how you can have gained so much weight when you ‘eat like a bird’.

Projection: Project your thoughts, feelings or motives onto an innocent and unsuspecting third party.
How to use it: After loudly asking the Salvation Army lady whether a fifty is OK, comment that Mary only make donations so everyone will think she’s generous.

Displacement: Displace feelings such as anger from their true target onto an alternative (and ideally smaller and weaker) substitute.
How to use it: Instead of standing up to your overbearing spouse, pick fights with random people at grocery counters, church pews and nursing homes.

Regression: Regress to childishness.
How to use it: When your boss presents a fair and comprehensive review of your unsatisfactory performance and failure to meet even the most basic requirements of your job, retort with a belligerent ‘You are’.

Rationalisation: Rationalise crappy behaviour with legitimate-sounding but totally bogus explanations.
How to use it: Decline to contribute to a colleague’s get-well gift because you ‘refuse to support hospital politics’.

Identification: Identify yourself with a person or group to shore up your own shaky self-esteem.
How to use it: Join Celebrities Online on Facebook and go about poking famous people you don’t know. Or if you’re old-school, become a groupie.

Overcompensation: Overcompensate for a felt inadequacy in one area by exaggerating another.
How to use it: Can you say big red sports car?

Socrates said the unexamined life was not worth living. If you want a life not worth living then you simply cannot afford the indulgence of constructive thought and its dangerous tendency toward productive action. Heed the warning: don’t think and thrive.

Other tips in this series of 10 tips for unwavering woe:

• Tip 1: Take offense
• Tip 2: Never take responsibility
• Tip 3: Pity yourself
• Tip 4: Be needy
• Tip 5: Be ungrateful
• Tip 7: Make happiness chase you
• Tip 8: Be neurotic
• Tip 9: Always be right
• Tip 10: Be perfect

An article in yesterday’s SMH reported a new study showing that “people with clinical depression may be unable to ’snap out of it’ because of faulty wiring in the brain”.

Here’s what the study did.

• Depressed and non-depressed people were shown unpleasant images such as car accidents in order to induce negative feelings.
• They were then asked to consciously ‘re-frame’ the situations – to imagine a more positive outcome than the one implied in the image, or to imagine it was acted rather than real. The idea was to use cognitive skills to reduce the negative feelings. 

Here’s what the study found.

• Everyone showed increased brain activity relating to emotional regulation.
• In the non-depressed people this was accompanied by low activity in the amygdala, which is the centre of fear and anxiety.
• But in the depressed people, amygdala activity remained strong, suggesting their attempts at emotional regulation didn’t work so well.

Although both depressed and non-depressed people made the cognitive effort to re-interpret upsetting situations, the researchers concluded that clinically depressed people may have had dysfunctional brain circuits that undermined their efforts.

Now before you dismiss the power of thinking on your happiness, consider how those ’dysfunctional brain circuits’ might have dysfunced to begin with. Here’s one scenario:  you start to feel down, you think sad thoughts, you feel even worse. It’s a classic downward spiral. Once you’re down there, snapping out of it does seem impossible.

I hear alarm bells (there goes my amygdala) whenever someone suggests your level of happiness reflects how your brain is wired. Brain wiring isn’t set in stone; how you think can change your brain.

For instance, in London taxi drivers the hippocampus – the part of the brain associated with navigation in birds and animals – is larger than in the rest of us. And the more they drive around, the bigger it grows. Think a certain way long enough, and you create new wiring.

Maybe consciously focussing your thoughts isn’t effective once you’re deep in clinical depression. But it might just stop you getting there in the first place.

This program is to be broadcast in Australia on Sunday night. I understand it will include highlights of a panel discussion during the conference I attended in Sydney in June.

The Dalai Lama’s characteristic wisdom, humour and humility shone trough (how many people are so willing to say ‘I don’t know’?). In terms of the other panelists, I thought the star was Madga Szubanski — she was warm, intelligent and insightful.

**Compass Program on Happiness & Its Causes 2007 – Sunday 19 August, ABC TV, 10.05pm**

“Everyone wants to be happy, but why is it a state of being that is so hard to obtain? There is little understanding of what actually leads to happiness, and in tonight’s special episode of Compass, we explore the latest thinking on how it can be achieved. Compass host Geraldine Doogue heads a panel discussion during His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s recent visit to Australia for the 2nd Annual Happiness And Its Causes Conference at Sydney’s Darling Harbour. As one of the world’s most notable and sought-after religious leaders, and winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize, the Dalai Lama has spent years preaching the path to peace and happiness, attracting thousands of people from different denominations all over the world.

“Joining His Holiness are guest panellists: actor/comedian Magda Szubanski; Author and Executive Director of The Australia Institute Clive Hamilton; Canterbury MP and first Indigenous women elected to NSW Parliament Linda Burney; and Executive Director of the Black Dog Institute Professor Gordon Parker.Just how much can material possessions and wealth make you happy? Can ambition and success be the solution to a fulfilling life? How can parents raise happy children? Can pain and tragedy actually put you on the path to happiness? An episode that no-one should miss, this intriguing discussion is interwoven with thought-provoking insight and potentially life-changing ideals to live by that may leave you inspired and motivated to put yourself on the path to greater peace and contentment for years to come.”