Is Having Mental Wellness The Equivalent Of Being Happy?

Happiness depends upon ourselves.
Aristotle

If you want happiness for an hour—take a nap. If you want happiness for a day—go fishing. If you want happiness for a year—inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime—help someone else.
Chinese Proverb

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
Abraham Lincoln

I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.
Groucho Marx

I’m a mental wellness coach, executive coach and performance psychology coach. I frequently have clients come to me asking to help them become happier. They’re not necessarily depressed or down in the dumps. They just want to be happier more often. When I ask them how much of the time they would like to be happy, they often reply, well, as much as possible. Some even say, all the time!

How about you? Do you have a desire to be happy constantly? If you’re a bit unhappy, do you take immediate furtive steps to get back to being happy? Do you view any periods of unhappiness as negative? Do you view your unhappiness as a problem? Do you feel that when you’re unhappy there’s something wrong with you? Do you look around and believe that other people are happier than you? Do you believe they are happy more often than you?

When you’re unhappy, how do you spend that time? Is this time unproductive for you? Do you see being unhappy as a waste of time? Do you simply mark time until you can get back to being happy? Does being unhappy derail you from your normal activities? Do you put life on hold until you can get back to being happy?

You already know that no human being can be happy 100% of the time. It’s just not possible. Life doesn’t work that way. So when people hope to be happy constantly that’s just not realistic, and they’re setting themselves up, paradoxically, to be unhappy. People are unhappy for a wide range of reasons. Sometimes external circumstances trigger unhappiness. Sometimes people are unhappy for internal reasons. We may have health or medical or psychological reasons for our unhappiness. And sometimes we become unhappy for reasons we don’t really know. We can’t put our finger on why we’re unhappy. All we know is that we are unhappy.

What I’m going to say here may surprise you.

I strongly recommend you use your unhappy bouts as growth experiences.

Yes, I’m suggesting you turn lemons into lemonade. I want you to view downtimes as potential uptimes. If you ask yourself, what does my unhappiness have to teach me, that can elicit some self-reflection and introspection that could lead you to a brand new place of self-understanding. Instead of being unhappy about being unhappy, and wishing you could get out of that space as rapidly as possible, dwell in that space a bit and engage in self-exploration of why you believe you might be unhappy.

Clearly, with folks who have been diagnosed with issues such as clinical depression, anxiety or other issues, I’m not suggesting that suddenly becoming happy is a simple or a guaranteed thing. But I have suggested these mental wellness strategies for clients of mine who have had all sorts of diagnosed maladies, and these have been quite helpful for them.

Here’s a very common example. My clients come to me with dreams and goals of high achievement. I love to help them devise strategies and pathways for achieving these objectives. Sometimes they’ll be quite frustrated because they have very high goals, but they’re not reaching them at the moment. This achievement gap causes frustration. That frustration turns into unhappiness. The unhappiness turns into brooding or feeling stuck and then my client no longer takes action on their goals. They allow the frustration to block them.

Does some of this sound familiar? It doesn’t need to be this way. Here are my mental wellness strategies to help you gain benefits from your bouts of unhappiness.

1. Don’t Seek To Be Happy 100% Of The Time: Recognize that all human beings have a percentage of time when they’re unhappy. Don’t view this downtime as a negative. View it as a growth opportunity. Take steps to learn about yourself when you’re unhappy. Take the unhappy periods in stride and see what you can discover about your inner world.
   
   
2. Write About Unhappiness In Your Journal: This helps you process your thoughts and prevents them from simply endlessly spinning in your head. When you put your thoughts on paper or on a computer screen, they go over there permanently. It’s as if your mind asks you, “Are you going to save those words that you wrote down over there?” And you would say yes, I’m going to save them. Then your mind will immediately relax and let go of the worries. You have now separated your thoughts you just wrote down from your mind and emotions. You just gave yourself a sense of relief. As a result, you can also examine your thoughts much more objectively and clearly when you see them in black-and-white. You can also come back to these thoughts after taking a break, and when you do so, you will often gain a brand new perspective about them.
   
   
3. Speak With Someone You Trust: When we spend time with someone who we know supports us, understands us and who will not judge or criticize us, that allows us to speak our truth and to open up about how we think and feel. Even if the person says very little, and mainly listens, you will often gain a new level of understanding about how you think and feel as you speak. You also will be downloading your thoughts and feelings onto the other person. We’ve probably all heard the old saying, “A burden shared is a burden halved.” Don’t hold your thoughts and emotions in when you’re unhappy. They will only expand and increase your frustration and sense of feeling stuck. You need to give them a place to go.
   
   
4. Ask Yourself, What Can I Learn From Unhappiness? I’m a firm believer in lifelong learning, across every sphere of life. If I can learn from everything I encounter, I gain many benefits. The major benefit is that I continue to grow as a person. You may know someone who is good at storytelling. Maybe they particularly tell stories about their bad luck or odd and quirky things that have happened to them. They may tell the story in an interesting, lively and funny way, and you may notice as they tell the story, that they seem to be no longer negatively affected by that unfortunate circumstance. On the contrary, they actually seem to relish telling the story, and they seem to have learned a great deal from that experience. This is turning lemons into lemonade. This is achieving victory over a formally negative circumstance.

I encourage you to turn your own lemons into lemonade. I encourage you to view your unhappy periods of time as growth experiences.