Stop Chasing Happiness and Start Making Yourself Strong

Chasing happiness doesn't make sense.

Happiness is a transitory state that, in order to exist, must be counterbalanced by unhappiness. To live a good life, a much more worthwhile thing to pursue is strength—particularly mental toughness.

Trying to make yourself happy means you're not living in the moment. If you're presently unhappy, you look back to a time when you were previously happy or look forward to a time when conditions will be met that you believe will make you happy again. Or, if you are happy right now, this invites anxiety about when you will lose whatever is making you happy at the moment.

Cultivating strength frees you to some extent from this anxiety. If you are strong, you are able to bear it when things are difficult. When life is fun and easy, you can enjoy it knowing that you can handle the tough times that will inevitably return. You may be unhappy at the moment, but you do not allow anxiety to rob you of joy.

This is all based on a recognition that external factors do not have to determine your emotions. While we do not have control over a great deal of what happens in our lives, we do have control over how we react to it. Here are seven factors that contribute to cultivating mental toughness.

1) Capacity to exist in cognitive dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change. Given our practical inability to always live up to our ideals, this is an important aspect of mental strength: flexibility. Rigid things break.

Being able to hold two opposing thoughts or feelings is important socially, especially when interacting with people who hold different ideas or beliefs. When someone you like believes something you don't like, the ability to exist in cognitive dissonance allows you to agree to disagree and prevents that disagreement from ruining the good parts of your friendship. It allows people in opposition to work together for a solution that works for both sides of the issue.

2) Toleration of uncertainty

Uncertainty is very uncomfortable. It could be not knowing if something good is going to come through, like when you're waiting to find out if you got that great job you just interviewed for. Or it could relate to something difficult, like waiting for medical test results.

Either way, it's tough to exist in a state of uncertainty, and it's not just because of impatience to know the answer. There's a feeling of spinning your wheels, where your brain won't quiet down and quit sifting through all the details looking for an answer or worrying about future implications. We are biologically geared toward finding certainty in an increasingly uncertain world. The more complex life becomes, the more difficult it is to make decisions.

It is extremely difficult to make a decision when you aren't sure of the right answer. Living means making many small decisions all the time, and there are larger decisions that can be very complex, like choosing between two homes to buy, deciding whether to change jobs, knowing whether right now is the best time to have a baby, determining which candidate to vote for, and picking a romantic partner. So much is tangled up in every decision, and every one of them has myriad ripples of consequences.

No matter how you reach your answer, there will always be uncertainty. You can write pros and cons lists, you can go with your gut intuition, but you'll never really know if you made the right choice.

For some, that feeling of uncertainty is so uncomfortable that they may rush into a decision to make it go away, or they may simply pick the easier choice by default. At that moment the relief from uncertainty might feel great, but they may later regret the ill-considered choice. Learning to live with uncertainty ultimately results in better decision-making. It can also help remove the pressure to take responsibility for things out of your control.

3) Ability to be wrong

Related to being able to tolerate uncertainty is being able to be wrong.

Nobody is right all the time. Unfortunately, we put a lot of stock in being right. Whether it's an argument with your partner about whether or not you told them to take out the trash or having the correct figures for your boss or being able to accurately name the drummer from that 80s band, when we are right we feel powerful, vindicated, proud. And when we are wrong we feel a great deal of shame and embarrassment—even if the stakes are extremely low.

Separating our egos from the need to be right isn't easy. But we can take a step back and follow a great piece of advice from Hunter S. Thompson: consider the desired effect. What's your goal? What do you gain from being right? Could you actually gain more from accepting you're wrong?

4) Avoiding dependence

We all have addictions, and their consequences have varying degrees of severity in our lives. A drug addiction that is ruining your health and destroying your relationships is obvious, and if that's your addiction, you should get help to become free of it.

But there are many smaller, less obviously destructive addictions that are worth evaluating. Everything we give energy to requires giving up energy we could use elsewhere. When we become dependent on anything—a substance, a person, a feeling, a situation—it's imperative to be aware of what that sacrifice entails in order to understand if it's worth it.

That cup of coffee (or several) every morning makes you feel good, but what do you sacrifice for it? Could you use the money you spend on it in a way that would make life better for you? Could you use the time it takes to brew it at home or stop at the coffee shop to do something more worthwhile, like spending time with your kids or partner, or meditating, exercising, reading, or whatever you love to do but don't think you have enough time for?

These questions also relate to the next factor...

5) Questioning assumptions

Life is hectic, and in order to get everything done we put a lot of our processes on autopilot. We have to. There's simply too much information to take in. We'd be completely inefficient otherwise.

But it's important to step back sometimes and question your assumptions. We can often get in a rut of doing things just because we have always done them that way. But they may no longer serve us, and we can waste energy keeping them up.

Things change. Do you need to do things the same way you always have? Has a situation changed in a way that requires you to approach it differently? Are you desires or goals the same?

Realizing that you don't need to do something anymore that you assumed was an important part of your life is intensely freeing. It's like noticing that you have a program running in the background of your computer that’s draining your battery. When you shut it down, all of a sudden everything is faster and easier.

6) Taking personal responsibility

It is easy to feel victimized by circumstance, but the ability to recognize your own part in things actually conveys a great deal of power.

When I got free of my last relationship, which was extremely emotionally abusive, I felt pretty sorry for myself. What I went through was terrible. And, if I was being honest, there was a pattern of this kind of relationship—not just romantic but also professional and friendships. At first I thought, "Why me?"...and then I thought, "Yes, why you?"

I took a hard look at what I brought to these relationships: why I attracted people who were abusive, why I was attracted to people like that, and what my assumptions about relationships contributed to creating these situations for me.

This was extremely liberating. It made me understand what was happening, and it gave me the power to break the pattern. Taking responsibility for the choices I made allowed me to see that I could make better choices for myself going forward.

7) Knowing when to walk away

Loyalty is very valuable. I believe in sticking things out and working through tough situations. But there comes a point where no matter what you do, you can't make it work, and it's time to walk away.

“(1) When a situation has become too frustrating, a quandary too persistently insolvable; when dealing with the issue is generating chronic discontent, infringing on freedom, and inhibiting growth, it may be time to quit beating one’s head against the wall, reach for a big fat stick of metaphoric dynamite, light the fuse, and blast the whole unhappy business nine miles past oblivion. (2) After making an extreme effort, after pulling out all the stops, one is still unable to score Tibetan peach pie, take it as a signal to relax, grin, pick up a fork, and go for a slice of the apple.”

― Tom Robbins, Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

It could be a relationship, a job, or a project. Maybe you just walk away for a little while and come back to it when you're not as frustrated. Maybe you need to walk away for good. But walking away always has to be an option.

Figuring out the right time to do so is probably the most difficult thing on this entire list. I can't say I've mastered this one, but I do know this: if you're consistently giving a lot to a person or situation and you aren't receiving anything in return, and you cannot foresee this changing ever, then it's definitely time to walk away.

***

The common factor in all of these is the efficient use of energy. All of these skills require a self-awareness to recognize how you think, feel, and behave and then evaluate whether those thoughts, feelings, and behaviors use your energy in a way that gets you closer to what you want out of life.

When you step back and look it at that way, it also helps you see whether you're pursuing things that actually bring you fulfillment and joy, or whether you're chasing "happiness" that doesn't actually make you happy.