Could Chasing Happiness Actually Be Bringing You Down?

Spend any amount of time in the personal growth world and you’ll hear lots of talk about choosing happiness, living with positive vibes, and even that cliche love and light. And honestly, the pursuit of happiness is pretty much everywhere you look today, not just within personal development.

I won’t lie, I’ve used many of the above words and phrases myself at the beginning of my own growth journey. But I’ve come to realize the toxicity that comes with the constant pursuit of positivity and happiness.

I find that placing happiness on a pedestal, which happens all too often, can actually affect you in the opposite way of your intention.

The Humanness of Emotions

In the constant seeking, searching, and yearning for happiness, you’re likely to feel even more sad, hopeless and helpless when you find that the feeling doesn’t always stick around. No matter how tightly you grasp it.

As human beings, we are wired, made to feel emotions. And a wide range of emotions too, everything from despair to ecstasy, from sadness to joy, from nervousness to peace. All of these emotions serve a purpose.

They are a flashlight pointing you in the direction of what you want, what you don’t want, what you like and what you dislike. Where you’re hurting and what you may need to let go of.

We cannot mute these emotions no matter how hard we try.

And if you are smothering your emotions, I hate to break it to you, but they will surface at some point and it likely won’t be enjoyable when they do.

When emotions have been covered up, shoved aside and ignored for any length of time, they build up. They explode. This can look very different to different people.

Some may experience burnout or fatigue, panic attacks, severe anxiety. Others may succumb to feelings of anger or depression. Big emotions that haven’t been felt and released can manifest within your body, wreaking havoc in ways you’d never expect.

With such a wide range of emotions visiting us throughout our lives, what happens when we choose one emotion as the end all be all, the ultimate goal of life? What happens when all of your energy is spent trying to reach that epic peak known as happiness?

All other emotions get labeled as bad, wrong or unwanted.

They aren’t the sparkly and shiny happiness after all, what good are they?

And when an emotion becomes, in your mind, a bad one to feel, you’ll do your best to avoid it. To stamp it out. You may even add guilt on top for feeling that “bad” emotion at all.

But in truth, no emotion is bad. No emotion is wrong. Emotions arise to show you something. To teach you something. To bring something into your awareness. Sometimes emotions simply need to be felt. And then released. Both the uplifting emotions and the heavy ones.

It can be easy to fall into the trap of feeling an amazing, uplifting happy emotion, and wanting to grasp hold of it and never let it go.

This isn’t how emotions work.

They come and go. Ebb and flow.

The tighter you hold onto an emotion, the more likely it is to fade away. The feeling of wanting something you don’t have is all you’re left with.

Let go what goes. Let come what comes.

So learn to flow. Flow with the waves of emotions with acceptance, even grace. Let the emotions in when you feel them rise. There is no need to do anything except find a safe space for yourself if they are heavy. Let them move through your body, cry if you need to, move if you feel called to, laugh if it rises within you.

Listen to the message the emotion may have for you. Whether it is letting you know a relationship is no longer good for you, whether it’s time to explore a new hobby, whether it’s time to decrease your stress levels.

And accept that sometimes there may be no message. You may just feel heavy and not know why. Trust that this is okay too.

And then release your grip. No need to attach to what you’re feeling.

If you think of yourself as the sky, emotions are only passing clouds. Some stay longer than others, but they soon meander on their way.

Is the Pursuit of Happiness Bringing you Down?

Life is not always positive. You will not always feel happy. Even if you have everything you’ve dreamed of, you will still have moments of sadness. Of anger. And forcing yourself to be positive when you aren’t feeling that way, can actually be more detrimental than helpful.

I am all for habits to help you shift your mindset, but often, you just need to feel that shitty feeling for a little while before you’re ready to release it and move on.

If the feeling of happiness is what you’re constantly striving for, you may feel like you have failed in life, or done something wrong when an hour, a day, or a week of sadness settles in.

Let go of these unrealistic expectations of how happy you feel you’re supposed to be.

“If only we’d stop trying to be happy we’d have a pretty good time.”

Edith Wharton

A far more human goal is a general feeling of contentment or peace with fluctuations of emotions amidst pockets of joy.

To be human is to have emotions. To be human is to feel.

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Every day we are bombarded with the pursuit of happiness. Every day we are told that we can’t possibly be happy as we are.

Buy this, you’ll be happy. Go on this trip, you’ll be happy. Get rich and successful, you’ll be happy.

Happiness is one of those emotions that is kind of hard to understand, it’s difficult to know exactly what happiness is and would feel like. It’s elusive and like any other feeling, the harder you try to “get” it, the further you seem to be from it.

I’ll let you in on something that I’ve learned. Happiness tends to arise within you more often when you stop thinking about it so much.

It’s like this, do you ever realize that when you really want something, all you can seem to focus on is the fact that you don’t have it? So when you stop focusing on how unhappy you are, you might start to see the things in your life that do actually bring you happiness.

Be Here Now

Living in the present moment is one of the quickest ways to feel happier and more at peace with your life.

Yes, of course, you have dreams and visions for the future. Maybe you have traumatic experiences still weighing you down from the past. But both the past and future pull you away from the present.

Trips into daydream land can be useful and provide great motivation to create what you want in life. And forays into your past may be necessary to heal and let things go.

But don’t unpack and stay in either of these. The present moment is all there truly is, it’s all that truly matters. And when you live in the here and now, with what’s right in front of you, it’s much easier to feel contentment.

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I’m sure many of us have fallen into the trap of chasing happiness. But chasing something only highlights the fact that we’re feeling the lack of it. Personally, as I release the need to feel happy all the time, I feel happy a lot more of the time. Funny how that works.

So do the things that bring you joy, let go of the things that don’t. And remember, happiness is an emotion and emotions come and go.

Let yourself be human, and feel what needs to be felt.