So Much Happier Blog
"Stuff" That's Not Yours
“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.”
Unless you’re a hermit on a mountaintop, you have to deal with the ups and downs of the other people in your life, and surrounding you on this planet. Doing so is one of the biggest long-term challenges we face. I mean, imagine if everyone else in the world was completely at peace, and all you had to worry about was your own thoughts, emotions, and projects! Life would surely be a lot simpler! Come to think of it, that’s a pretty nice fantasy that might rank up there with an endless beach vacation. But it sure isn’t the life we live.
In reality, all the people around us are striving and often struggling with plenty of their own challenges. They’ve built up a lifetime of experiences that influence them in the present. They are working through confusion and old, unprocessed emotions just as we are. Even if they’re all doing their utter best, being around them won’t always be easy. You know how sometimes you can walk into a room and just feel immediately that there’s a dangerous charge in the air? Or take one look at someone’s face and realize that you’ve landed in the middle of a whole situation not of your making? Uh oh. Now what do you do?
There are, of course, many ways to react to someone else’s outpouring of emotion. Many of them are not terribly helpful, and you’ve probably tried and failed enough in this arena to know exactly what I mean. Sometimes it seems like you just can’t win around others’ big emotions! The good news is that, the more you do your own work on how you feel about your own old stuff, the easier it is not to be inappropriately drawn into other people’s emotions about theirs. It’s not that you’ll lose your ability to be compassionate, and offer that person empathy regarding their situation, but you won’t be automatically dragged down by what they’re experiencing. This is much better for everyone. You won’t be exhausted by reflexively getting upset whenever someone around you is; you’ll also stay more resourceful when someone else is in need. They can go through their own experiences while having someone more stable in the room, who can better support them for not having metaphorically jumped into the hole with them. Everything becomes a bit easier when you can be calmer. When you don’t immediately get upset around someone emotional, you have a lot more leeway to find better options for responding.
The best way I’ve ever found to de-fang our knee-jerk responses to others’ emotional overwhelm is to use Tapping to work on past events from our lives that still rankle and form the stuff of our greatest regrets and resentments. We all make mistakes, and so do the people who have come into contact with us at every point in our lives. Even someone who has lived the tamest possible life will have collected some unfortunate, hurtful experiences. Some people will have many more. Tapping doesn’t erase bad memories, but it does make them a lot less painful, and it also helps us to put them into healthier context. This, in turn, makes it easier to understand and forgive the others involved so that we can feel free of limitations that came into being as a direct result of those experiences.
You’re always going to be aware of other people’s emotional stuff, but you can build your ability not to be too distressed by someone else’s emotional state when it has little or nothing to do with you. People who are addicted to drama might not like your new, calmer demeanor, but only you get to decide what level of emotional involvement is right and balanced for you in any situation. As long as you’re still able to offer sympathy and caring, most people will appreciate your ability to remain grounded and open rather than reactive around their emotions. This frees them to feel as they do without worrying that you are very negatively impacted, and outbursts become easier for everyone to deal with and recover from. When we fear emotions less, they can become the useful signposts they are meant to be, and we can all live more balanced lives together.
Keeping Hold of Your Heart
“The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness.”
Despite the fact that this world gives us access to greater technological advances and opportunities for cooperation and success than ever before in known history, it's also true that it can be an incredibly hard place to live. We all have to keep so many plates spinning at all times, and we're often stretched very thin; so is everyone else. This plus an exploding world population, increased levels of pollution, lower-quality food than what was generally available a few generations ago, etc. etc., can make for a pressure cooker of an experience. Without a steady, committed daily practice of some sort of calming modality such as meditation, mindful breathing, prayer, gratitude journaling, or Tapping, you're likely to be building layers upon layers of stress into your mind and body that will add up to lots of unhappy, unhealthy days.
I'll just take this opportunity to remind you that physical exercise is also a key element in the construction of a life that works. It helps you naturally bust stress and feel happier, it helps your body's overall health in so many ways that you probably already know about, and it keeps you strong and limber so you can enjoy using your body all throughout your days. Sleep is also incredibly important. You know I'm going to keep reminding you about all these things! If you're not minding your body, mind, and spirit each day, you're not living your best life, and I want the absolute best for you. But more than all these, and less possible by far without them, we long for creativity—the creation of new ideas, solutions, and artistic expressions. We might want to create them or just observe and appreciate them, but either way they bring a great deal of zest to life that creates enthusiasm and energy. Therefore, whether you consider yourself a creative person or not, I urge you to find ways to bring more creativity into your routines.
If you're not currently in creation mode, get out there (or stay in!) and consume some creativity that others are offering for your enjoyment. Keep in mind, though, that when you do this, you go on a ride of sorts that someone else has designed. You have a great deal of choice in the kinds of experiences you can elect in this realm, so you should think and choose wisely. Decide what kind of ride would be most helpful to you at this moment. Do you want something thrilling and death-defying to wake you up and add some excitement to your day? Something sweet that will restore your faith in humanity? Something about people who have risen to challenge to become the best in themselves? Something that just makes you laugh until your belly hurts? I personally don't go after experiences based on horror, as I find these to be the opposite of energizing for me, but we're all different. Experiment to find the kinds of experiences you really enjoy riding along for, and then allow yourself to enjoy them regularly. These journeys can be musical, they can involve films or stand-up comedy, visual art, culinary adventures, documentaries, Ted talks or other educational lectures, books, whatever you'd like to try this week. But keeping new experiences rolling in helps keep you from becoming stale or retreating into a smaller life experience than you could be having. Why not avail yourself of everything you have access to?
I came across this list of films that might foster empathy, according to the author, which I found interesting. If there's a quality you're trying to build into a strength, consuming supportive creative products can be a part of your practice toward that end. You can also poll people around you with different tastes to find a list of potential ideas. Even just a few minutes per day spent appreciating the product of someone's creativity can give you a tremendous life and remind you of what's good when there's a whole lot of chaos and madness around you. Find something to sample this week, and feel free to comment with some of your favorites below!
Teaching Happiness
“Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.”
Many of us struggle with creating happiness, motivation, and fulfillment, in large part because we weren't given the tools to successfully foster these things on a daily basis as part of our schooling. It's never too late to learn, though, and that's what this blog and my work are all about. It was refreshing, then, to read this week about how various governments are beginning to experiment with adding the development of important happiness-related skills to their school methodologies in order to help kids to be healthier mentally and emotionally, and perform better in school. Predictably (I think) it works really well.
Here's a link to the article I read, and I thought I'd just go ahead and pass it along this week. I hope it serves as a reminder that increasing focus on learning things like giving ourselves credit for what we do well, feeling grateful, and empathizing with those around us has real and measurable positive results. What can you do to model these results this week?