My Secret to Happiness and 6 Things You Can Do To Find Yours Again
Hello, you. I’ll cut right to it.
My secret to happiness - and what I think might be THE secret to happiness - is:
Embrace the sadness.
Be sad. Get mad. Feel melancholy and heartbroken and depressed. Let those feelings feel.
Here’s the truth: Happiness doesn’t exist without its opposite.
The good feelings don’t exist without the bad ones. And if you don’t experience the “bad ones,” how the hell will you ever know what happiness feels like?
How will you know you even experience happiness to its fullest potential?
So how do you embrace sadness? All I can tell you is what works for me and hope it works for you too.
I’m no emotional or psychology expert here, but here’s how I discovered the secret sauce to embrace the unwanted emotions.
1 - Sit in silence.
Get to know yourself here, without any distractions. Let the deepest parts of you see and bask the sunlight.
Sitting in silence has done wonders for me. It’s a chance for my overactive mind to pause and pay attention.
This is where my heart feels safe to sing. This is where my tears feel safe to fall.
Hold space for yourself, and love yourself within the safety of your own skin.
Sit anyway you want. Crisscross applesauce, on a chair, lay down on the floor if that’s what’s calling you. Just sit and hear the peace of concentrated silence.
2 - Feel Whatever Feels Come Up.
This is the hard part. If you’ve lived in a world that’s taught you to suppress your emotions for the sake of others’ reactions, I’m with you.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve pushed feelings down so as to not trigger others. To be polite. To continue to be seen as a “good person” for my reputation.
All that did was bottle the emotions up over time until they eventually overflowed. Everything burst out at once and spilled onto every aspect of my life.
After realizing this was a pattern and starting therapy, I learned the tools and gained the skills to acknowledge and feel my emotions.
I learned how to say I see you, I hear you, I feel you without bottling them up or bursting in a reactive manner. Don’t get me wrong, this is something I’m constantly working on.
It all started with letting the feelings out, one by one. If you cry, it’s a release, a physical one. One that relieves the weight you’ve carried after the tears fall.
Did you know tears contain cortisol, the stress hormone? So the physical act of crying actually releases any stress you’ve been feeling from your body.
As an avid crier (I cry from just about anything), do you know how validating that was to learn that?!
All those years of being asked why I cry so much, I finally got an answer. I was releasing stress.
Mini secret to happiness: cry more. It works.
3 - Identify Your Emotions.
Here’s the part where you really need to listen to yourself to appreciate the feels. Identify them.
Without identifying them and why you feel them, it’s possible you’ll run around repeating a pattern.
A pattern that sends you running in a circle like a headless chicken. You’ll feel lost and frustrated that this feeling is happening again.
Break the pattern. Say to yourself: I feel ___ because…
Then say it again. I feel ____ because…
And it doesn’t have to be just one feeling. We often feel multiple emotions at once for different reasons and that’s okay.
Take as long as you need to name the emotions one by one. If you can’t find the correct emotion, try describing it.
You can even take it one step further and write it out. Literally write it out. On paper. With a pen.
I feel ____ because…
4 - Listen to sad music or read sad poetry.
I’m a person who needs to process and sit with my emotions for a while. If I’m in a mood, I often like to go to music or poetry to feel understood.
To feel less alone. To hear someone else’s story that I might resonate with. To feel someone hold my hand through whatever I’m going through.
Music is powerful. We all know this. It heightens our senses. It encourages us to feel. So when I know I’m sad, I’ll put on a sad song to push the sadness out of the darkness and bask in that sunlight I mentioned earlier.
Poetry resonates with me in a different way. It’s often ambiguous at times and up for interpretation. So it acts as a catalyst to identify my whys. It takes me out of my comfort zone so I can be more present with understanding myself and my emotions.
5 - Remember the times in your life when happiness hit you.
I’m shouting this one at you. It’s important. Actually, it’s imperative to your quest for happiness.
If you don’t make it a point to remember some happy moments in your life, what could happen? This is what comes to my mind:
You could get stuck in depressed-couch-potato-I’m-a-piece-of-shit mode and then lose all hope.
Your life will seem pointless, you won’t get what you want, you may never fall in love, you might lose friends, you’ll feel like trash, and everything in your life will be negative and you’ll be angry all the fucking time.
Then what happens to happy moments you have felt? They’re tainted black or cease to exist. Your perspective trudges toward blackness and you may start to believe that you’ve never experienced happiness ever.
That sucks. Dig deep. Bring those moments of happiness back into your memory. And when you start to think of a shaded moment around that happiness, go back to the scene of smiles in your head.
Listen, nothing is perfect. Nothing. I have plenty of happy memories that are splattered with black paint. But clear nuggets of happy shine amongst the droplets and wacks of black splatter.
Remember, emotions fly from moment to moment. They aren’t finite. And if you’ve felt happiness before, you can feel it again, even if it’s for a second.
6 - Recognize that you're still alive today. That means your story isn’t over.
This one is pretty self explanatory. Your story is continuing to be written every damn day. Every sunrise is a new opportunity, so take one.
As I like to say, let it go to let it flow.
If you need a reminder to let those feelings out and start flowing in your life, I’ve got free phone wallpaper for you.
Head over to this link to get them: https://www.amandamontoni.com/let-it-go-to-let-it-flow-phone-wallpaper-form
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Remember, there are always sweet things happening in the madness.