Thursday, September 17, 2015

Why Less Than 1/3 of Your Life is Happy

Most Psychologists agree that we have 9 basic feelings:
  1. Joy
  2. Fear
  3. Anger
  4. Shock
  5. Love
  6. Disgust
  7. Sadness
  8. Guilt
  9. Curiosity
Go back through the list and count how many of those are "good" feelings.

Most people pick 2 or 3: Joy and Love, and sometimes Curiosity.

Most people consider Fear, Anger, Shock, Disgust, Sadness and Guilt to be negative or "bad" feelings.

Well, let's assume you're a normal person and in an average day you feel most of these emotions, and in about equal amounts.  If 6/9 or 7/9 of them are BAD then you can only spend 1/3 of your life feeling GOOD.  

If you live 75 years like most Americans, then you are going to spend every moment of an entire 50 years feeling BAD.

That leaves what, 25 good years?  Most people think of their childhood as pretty good, and sometimes up to their mid-twenties, so that means most of the good times are behind you.   So I guess most of you can look forward to the next 50 years of constantly feeling BAD, and then you'll die.

(I really should end this blog post here, just leave everything BAD)

What if there were no "good emotions" and no "bad emotions."  What if emotions were just, well, emotions?  They were something to be felt.  That's it.  

What if none of them were bad, what if they were all just meant to serve a purpose and move us forward, all in their own time.

The writers of the Disney movie "Inside Out" understood this. They chose 5 emotions for the movie, Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust.  

Joy was the only "good" emotion. She tried to control the mind all the time.  She thought that if JOY could be the only emotion ever felt, then life would be perfect.  She worked really really REALLY hard to make sure sadness never took control.  Sadness couldn't touch the mind, or the memories.

In fact, in the movie, Joy eventually made Sadness promise never to do anything or affect anything by staying inside a circle she drew on the ground.

Joy was caught in the happiness trap. She thought that sadness was BAD, and anger was BAD.

She didn't realize until the end of the film, that sadness is necessary.  Sadness helps us apologize and fix relationships. Anger helps us protect what's important in our lives when it is threatened.

Emotions aren't good or bad.  The only way we should measure good v. bad is "Are we doing what matters to us?  Are we living according to our beliefs, our values?"  If we value family, are we doing what matters to make our family succeed?  If anger and sadness and love and joy and guilt and fear all help us live our values, then they are all worth it.  

We don't WANT to feel them all.  We are instead, willing to feel them all because we WANT to make our family succeed.  

If you keep labeling emotions as "good and bad" or "acceptable and unacceptable" then you are guaranteed to have a BAD and UNACCEPTABLE life at least 2/3rds of the time.

Let yourself out of the box.  Don't be chained to a life of misery by thinking you have to feel joy all the time for life to be "good."  Statistically, almost 90% of your life will not be "joy"ful.  

When you accept all 9 emotions, and make them all useful, then 100% of your life can be worthwhile, and push you further down the path you want to go, living the life you want to live.

That is TRUE Happiness.