How often is your day wrecked by one of the following: an annoying email request; unhelpful comment from someone you know; bad piece of news whilst scrolling through your newsfeed; or all of the above? How big an effect does this have on your happiness?
Many of us feel unhappy with our current situation, be it due to our finances, current job, relationship, or practically anything else. Some people in life accept this as their lot, and feel they are destined to be a silent form of generally unhappy as that is the cards life dealt them.
Some of us though strive to change our situation. Have a job that makes us miserable? We look to change it. Unhelpful comments from your manager? We look to confront them. By doing this, we expect that by solving the things that are making us unhappy, this will stop the problem and lead us to a land of bliss.
But has this really worked for you – are you now happy?
Yes, we can get a new job which may help, but unless the old one was exceptionally bad, we will probably find things about the new job that frustrate us and not be exactly what we want. Whilst we might confront a colleague over the comments they make, this will probably not solve an underlying issue with their behaviour, and might just shift to an awkward unfriendly relationship.
Perhaps there is a different approach we can take. In all of the examples above, what we have looked to change is the situation around us, rather than changing ourselves. In other words, there are many things that can make us unhappy in life, but do we have to let them make us unhappy?
Let’s take the example of an unhelpful comment from a friend, colleague or relative. These can upset us, and we can often feel torn. We feel upset on the inside, as if we don’t confront them, we will regret it later. But equally, we also calculate whether it is really worth the emotional baggage of a full-blown argument if we do confront them.
Instead, imagine the situation where rather than getting irritated by a small comment, we are simply not be bothered by it. We avoid all of the stress going on internally, and the potential argument with the individual. The situation floats away like a plastic bag in the wind, and we just get on with our life.
Whether we like it or not, we are not in control of what other people say, think or do. We are also not in total control of the situation around us. However, what we can be in control of is how we experience our situation, and whether we allow the situation to make us upset or not.
Now I’m not saying that there is no value in shifting things that are making you unhappy such as your job or financial situation, but we are unlikely to get the fixes we want quickly, and often these might be down to things outside of our control (e.g. a global pandemic!!). It is also important to say that there are times where it is completely legitimate to be unhappy, such as at a funeral. In fact – you probably would want to be sad there.
But in most examples I’ve seen, simply being less upset by things would probably help us. Simply put, most of the things that bother us do not matter in the grand scheme of things. Don’t believe me? Write down all the things that annoyed you in the last week. Now ask yourself how many of them you are likely to recall in your deathbed. For me, the answer is zero.
So how do we get to this zen state of bullet-proof immunity? I would be lying if I said I had got there fully myself! Nonetheless, there are a few things we can do:
- Understand that we can be in control of how we feel. We are able to change how we react to a situation. Our job does not force us to be miserable. Instead, we react to the situation of our job by being miserable. We are capable of changing this feeling.
- Assess whether the source of negative emotion is genuinely important in the grand scheme of things (is that unwashed mug at the tea point going to be the end of the world?)
- Check whether the person who is making a comment actually means to make you feel bad. If they did, does their opinion even matter to you?
- Understand that people have their own perspective on things which is most probably different to our own. This will naturally bring up disagreements. It is not personal.
- Accept the people around us as flawed but good human beings. Everyone has faults, and will likely display them at some point. At times we might be on the receiving end of it. Again, this is not personal.
So now it’s over to you. How are you going to shift how you feel about the things that are making you unhappy?