Can You Let Yourself Be Happy?
How We Can Sabotage Our Good Moods
In spite of my recent experiences with low mood, today I woke up happy. I seemed lighter than normal, with a dose of optimism for the day ahead that I hadn’t felt for some time.
It was a great reminder that low moods don’t last forever.
It was strange to me, then, that I soon found myself feeling anxiety arise.
What was I anxious about? I was feeling good.
Well, exactly that.
It wasn’t until I sat down to meditate that I realized my persistent low mood had become a familiar feeling and my good mood a stranger. Was it possible I was sabotaging my good moods with the overriding expectation that I’d feel the familiar feeling of emptiness again?
As much as we can dislike our low moods, sometimes it’s better for the devil we know. I wanted to talk about happiness today and how to embrace it so as to not sabotage ourselves back into states of sadness.
Where Attachment To Identity Keeps Us Stuck
We all go through hard times, but it’s this attachment to the hard times that can often prevent us from escaping them.
And this isn’t a malicious thing we try to do, humans naturally seek familiarity. It offers us safety, even if that familiar isn’t necessarily the best place to be. As I said, the better the devil, you know.
This statement rang true for me this morning in light of the anxiety I felt about being happy. I was almost anticipating my mood to drop and, in the process, was disassociating from the happiness I felt at that moment.
Allowing ourselves to be happy is a risk as our mood is sure to turn again. Rather than feel into both sides of the coin, the happy side, and the sad, we can push ourselves back into sadness prematurely so as not to feel the disappointment of losing our happiness.
It’s a trait I’ve seen not only in myself but in others, too.
Allowing Yourself To Be Happy
Despite this aversion to feeling happy, I wanted to note that the anxiety we can feel in the unfamiliar isn’t a bad thing. It’s good.
As I said above, anxiety appears in the unfamiliar and in any place we feel uncertain. But just because we’ve been accustomed to a period of low mood does not mean that it can last forever. You may feel bad 90% of the time, but in those moments of 10% joy, it’s imperative you lean into it and not away.
The very fact you may be feeling anxious is a sign in itself that you are not feeling sad. In those moments, something has changed, and the more we can recognize it, the less attachment we can have toward sadness.
We have to be wary of the identities we unconsciously attach ourselves to. Otherwise, we’re destined to sabotage ourselves back to familiar states of being.
Getting Real With Our Aversion To Happiness
When we accept our own aversion, we can begin to move through it and towards happiness.
I urge you to think about what may also be contributing to your inability to hold happiness. Is it a series of limiting beliefs that tell you you’re bound to mess up, sabotage yourself, or be dealt a bad hand at whatever it is you try to do? It’s easy for us to create our own self-fulfilling prophecies in these scenarios.
Is it a generational pattern whereby struggle and pain were a common thread throughout your childhood? In these scenarios, feeling happiness can challenge us as we never saw it modeled growing up. We may have been told we needed to branch out, change the family system and achieve the success our parents couldn’t, able to fight for something but unable to reap its benefits.
Is it the fact that opening ourselves up to feel good ultimately means accepting that that happiness won’t last? Because it won’t — no mood is constant. You could say it’s better to remain comfortable in your sadness than it is to open yourself up to happiness with the acknowledgment that it won’t last. In this case, it’s our ability to withstand vulnerability that needs work.
And finally, when we allow ourselves to truly feel the happiness, we paradoxically open ourselves up to feeling sadness. We’re reminded of the times that we did lose it and the pain that brought.
Whatever the reason, or a mixture of all, it’s time you let happiness in again.
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