***I want to preface this blog by saying that it may be more relevant for people who are not what we might call clinically depressed and are generally capable of experiencing joyful moments. If you are deeply depressed and any joy or warmth is presently eluding you, I would like to hold hope for you that you will soon find help and I still think that some parts of this blog could be useful. However, I want to recognize that in this present moment happiness might mean a different thing for you and that this conversation about skills may ring hollow.***

When people think of the variety of things that require some skill or learning, there is usually no dearth of things that come to mind. Some of you want to become conversational in a new language for example, or learn to play a particular sport. In the realm of life skills there is also no shortage of things that people know would require skill-building: Planning, time management, anger management, relationship-building, having a healthy relationship with food are all examples of things that you probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear require some skill – after all, this fact is incorporated into our daily discourse.

What is not incorporated into our daily discourse at all is the notion that being happy also requires skill. Being happy is certainly a state of mind (and chasing the feeling of happiness can be counterproductive, as I’ll soon show), but it often starts with specific actions. You might be thinking of someone you know whom you believe to have been born “happy.” Some people have genes that give them a leg up, it’s true, but if we examine them closely, we often find that their success can be explained by some behavioral choices and some specific ways of relating to the things that happen to them.
It is important to note that when I say “being happy” I am not referring to “calming down from a state of anxiety” or otherwise learning to overcome a challenge and feeling relieved. Neither do I mean some ephemeral state of unmitigated joy or pure bliss. What I mean here are things such as:

• Being able to say “this was a good day.”
• Knowing what to do with a day off.
• Knowing how to enjoy a trip.
• Knowing how to enjoy your food.

My clients often believe that if they could just learn to manage their time and schedule a day off, enjoyment of this day off would come naturally. When they finally do manage to take a day off and then spend the whole day being unmoored and miserable they find themselves puzzled and often even more upset than before. “What kind of person am I that I cannot even enjoy a free day? I must be more ill than I assumed!” To that I tell them that they should belay worrying about their desperate character for just a moment. Have they practiced having a good day? Has anyone ever talked to them about it? Have they spent time trying to figure out how they personally process good and bad and what amounts to a good day for them? In short – how much time have they spent developing the skill of having a good day?

Some of the ideas below deserve their own blog, but for now, here are some ways of relating to life that people who know how to practice the skill of having a good day seem to have developed, either consciously or unconsciously, for example by observing a parent. The list, of course, is not exhaustive.

1. Continuous happiness is impossible. If you are waiting for a “perfect day” – stop it. That is a very tall order for a day to fill and having that expectation sets you up for disappointment. In reality, in the course of a good day people experience multiple moments of negative emotions, multiple small things go wrong, they might experience some negative bodily sensations, untoward things are said to them, etc. In essence, what you are doing when you walk around telling yourself that you are meant to be enjoying every moment of something is you are telling your brain to focus on the question of whether you are happy moment by moment and your brain starts paying special attention to all the things that are “out of place” or “not good.” Ever noticed that some of your best days are days you never planned for? Days when you never expected to be happy? This is why.

2. We are not entitled to happiness. We are entitled to basic respect, to basic fair treatment, and to safety from physical harm. That’s it. Happiness is a privilege. People who tend to be better at having “good days” tend to view moments of happiness as gifts and not as something that was due to them. In other words, they say “even if nothing particularly joyful happens to me again today, I am grateful that this joyful moment came to me” as opposed to “I worked so hard to clear my schedule this day and managed to have a nice cup of coffee in the morning, but then this annoying call came my way. Why couldn’t it wait?”

3. It works better to define a good day behaviorally, instead of emotionally. We can control our behavior but not really our emotions. Therefore, if we say we want to have a day where we wake up later, have a nice breakfast, watch a particular movie and at night try a new restaurant , it is not unlikely that we will succeed in whole or at least in part and the day will go down in the record as a “good day.” If, however, we chase the subjective feeling of happiness we find ourselves in murky waters and are likely to come to the conclusion that we have failed.

4. You have to structure some, if not most of your “unstructured time”. If on your day off you are still in bed at 11:30am, haven’t showered, haven’t eaten breakfast and haven’t made a move on anything that you might have wanted to do that day then the noon hour is very likely to find you dehydrated, with low blood sugar, sluggish and sleepy and with a distinct feeling that you are running out of time to enjoy your day. There is definitely a time in everyone’s life when to stay in bed all day IS the plan, and then it can work great. Everything else requires a plan. The plan can, and probably should be less rigid than a work plan. It can, and should allow for flexibility and should be held lightly, such that if a better idea pops into your head you can pivot on a dime and do the better thing. However, a plan nonetheless you will need, especially if you know that you might struggle with getting out of bed but you don’t want to spend the day in bed.

5. Sitting with pleasure can be as challenging as sitting with pain. When we sit with pain we are consumed (usually) with the desire for it to go away, and when we sit with happiness many of us are quickly become consumed by the fear that it will go away, which of course makes the happiness go away. It takes active practice and skill-building to allow yourself the happiness that comes your way.

There is a lot more to say about this topic and some of the ideas above can be greatly expanded (so perhaps part II to this blog is warranted), but the basic takeaway if that it takes practice to be happy and if you struggle with being happy but upon reflection you realize that you never worked on it and no one has ever endeavored to teach you anything about it (because it “should come naturally”), then you might want to find a way to start learning and practicing before you decide that you are just not capable.

Copyright © 2024 Anna Braverman