There are plenty of instructional materials that aim to teach people how to be happy, and many of them are useful. This article takes a different approach. It begins with the acknowledgment that sometimes happiness is not forthcoming, no matter how hard a person tries. I propose one simple trick to take advantage of this situation.
To be clear, this is definitely not a tutorial on how to achieve unhappiness. Unhappiness is certainly not the goal, but it need not be the enemy. This article is meant to help you navigate through those minutes and hours and days and maybe even months of unhappiness — should they arrive — in a way that is constructive and, possibly, transformative.
Trauma is unavoidable in life and biochemistry is prone to fluctuations. For these and other reasons, unhappiness is a state of being that everyone experiences from time to time. Some people experience it more than others, but nobody escapes it. For better and for worse, unhappiness is part of the human condition. The question is, what to do about it?
When unhappiness arrives — which is often how it feels, like a shift in the weather — the natural tendency is to fight this unwanted sensation, or flee from it, or forcibly change it. We each have our own private arsenal of techniques that we employ in these situations. Drugs and alcohol offer one approach, but this usually fails. Physical…
