How to Be Happy in Spite of Yourself

You might be seeing by now that the effectiveness of instinctive behaviour comes at a high price. It prioritises survival over quality of life. If you want a bit more satisfaction and happiness in your life, you are going to have to have to regulate your instinct’s interference. You will need to interpret emotions, yours and others, a little differently. Emotions are both your fire alarm and your sprinkler system. Your survival instinct has been honed over thousands of years. If it is starving of recognition, approval or relative importance (RAi), your instinct uses anxiety and avoidant behaviour to attract more. If you are anxious, you are excessively frustrated because you aren't getting enough recognition, approval or relative importance. Instinct steps in with anger when anxiety hasn't been enough to get the recognition, approval or relative importance it needs. Depression occurs when neither anxiety nor anger has been enough to attract the RAi you need. Your depressed feelings and behaviour are a last ditch attempt to increase RAi and deaden your frustration in the meantime. Emotions are designed to manipulate your behaviour and the behaviour of those around in search of recognition, approval and relative importance. They have to be intense to do so. They can be pretty hard to tolerate at times. If you drug them too much to make them more tolerable, your sprinkler system won't work very well. Sooner or later, your house is going to burn down. How much is too much? When you begin to see smoke and fire; when dissatisfaction and subsequent frustration exceed the relief your drugging achieves. Although instinctive behaviour produced by emotions may efficiently attract RAi in the short run, emotions can be toxic to others. Reality confronts us with circumstances where it is necessary and normal to feel anxious. But it is not OK to avoid doing things that are important to others. We do find ourselves in situations where it is necessary and healthy to feel angry. But it is not OK to threaten or behave aggressively towards others to satisfy your own need for RAi unless you are fighting for your life. Reality also confronts us with situations where it is necessary and normal to feel depressed. But it is important to get out of the ‘ultimate safety and nothingness' of depression when other people might be depending on us. To be happy in spite of yourself, you have to increase your tolerance of emotions, your own and others. If you remain intolerant of bad feelings, your instinct will continue to dominate your life. Stop assuming that since you are anxious, angry or depressed that the sky must be falling. You probably don't rush to the doctor every time you sweat with a fear of leaking to death. You probably don't want your sweat glands removed. You probably realise that sweating is necessary for managing body temperature and your health. You also probably don't like to sweat. Take the ‘sweat' approach to emotions. See them as normal reactions to life situations and the way they impact on you as necessary for your survival. Emotions are not indicative of something wrong with life, with you, with past choices and your future potential. If you can ‘normalize' the way you feel you can stop catastrophizing about it. If you can do that you are ready to calm down, reality test your situation and then talk sense to your instinct. Your instinct operates at an unconscious level, you can't hear it, but it can hear you. An understanding of instinct, emotion and the frustration/satisfaction tanks provides a framework to manage the variables that influence your experience of happiness. In the example chapters that follow you will see many examples of how to use this framework in different life contexts – stewing, socialising, parenting, relationships, working, ageing, bureaucracy, retiring, breaking up, competing and chronic pain. The first one on stewing is not to be missed. We have the potential to stew about everything so make sure you look at the management templates given in this chapter.