These days I know that our own thoughts can make us happy or miserable. It wasn’t always so. I imagine that, like many of you, I used to think all this sounded like self-motivation techniques and cheap philosophy, even though, without realising it, I have never liked dwelling on the negative side of things, or suffering and worrying over things only to discover, in time, that all that suffering could have been avoided.
Over time I have noticed a very common pattern in people who live in constant bitterness. And that bitterness is often rooted in the way they think. After all, we are our own thoughts. As the saying goes: “Life is a gift you unwrap. Whether you like the gift or not depends on your attitude towards it.”
The way we think can affect how we feel. Our own thoughts can help us come out of a bad situation stronger, or weigh us down even when we are not going through any bad situation at all.
We talked about this in our article “Neuroscience explains 5 rituals to reverse depression and raise your levels of happiness“.
Nobody just wakes up one morning and, out of nowhere, gets diagnosed with depression. It is a process, often predictable to anyone watching and listening. That is why certain thoughts have to be nipped in the bud. Not because we are necessarily going to fall into depression, but to raise our level of happiness in life, even if only a little.
James Clear, a writer and researcher on the psychology of behaviour, explains how changing a simple remark that practically all of us make can improve the way we see our lives. It might sound silly, but you have to start somewhere.
As adults, we spend most of our time talking about everything we have to do: we have to get up early to go to work. We have to visit a client at the end of the day. I have to write a good article this week. You have to cook for your family. You have to cross the city to take your child to class.
Clear suggests replacing that “I have to” (which sounds like an obligation) with “I get to”.
You get to get up early to go to work, when millions of people are desperately looking for a job. You get the chance to do productive things in that job.
You get to visit a client, even if it’s at the end of the day. Some salespeople would envy you, because it has been a long time since they managed to get a meeting with a potential client.
I get to write a good article for this blog, for a readership that keeps growing, which pushes me to keep improving the quality of the articles.
You get to cross the city with your child to take them to class, because it is time you can spend chatting with your child in the car, something that, sadly, few parents do these days.
You get to cook lunch or dinner for your family. How many people feel lonely and would love to have a family, or to be able to get their family together even once a week?
If we manage to remove the feeling of obligation from our minds, we will be freeing ourselves of a burden. These are things we are going to do anyway, so if we are grateful for them, they will comfort us instead of weighing us down.
See also: Richard Branson: my 8 favourite quotes about change
And best of all, you get the chance to change anything you don’t like about your life, even though things often weigh on us because we fail to appreciate that the real burden would be to lose them one day, or how miserable we would be if we had never had them.
In other words, the things we often see as hard work are really our greatest reward. But the person who knows this best is the one who lacks those rewards.
Our brain listens to our thoughts, and our thoughts condition our brain and how we perceive our surroundings.
If we had petrol for breakfast and screws for lunch, it wouldn’t be long before we collapsed, because the body needs certain foods. The same goes for our brain: whatever ingredients we feed it will produce one result or another. It isn’t a spiritual or cosmic matter: how we frame things can affect our mood and motivation.
Even taking positive thinking to the extreme, when faced with a run of difficulties in life, I can vouch for the difference between seeing them as “a series of problems that have landed on me” and seeing them as “a series of challenges that will make me stronger once I overcome them”. Nobody likes problems, but some of us love challenges. Tony Robbins devoted an entire chapter of his book Awaken the Giant Within to the subject of controlling our emotions.
But let’s be sensible. We are not going to tell someone who has been diagnosed with cancer: “Don’t think that you have to go for a chemotherapy session; think that you get the amazing opportunity to have a chemotherapy session.” The truth is, it’s a rotten thing to happen. But it is a rotten thing that person will have to get through, and the attitude with which they face it may help them cope with the challenge life has thrown at them.
Generally speaking, though, there are no real reasons to be as miserable as some people set out to be. It is their own thoughts that keep them from being happy in circumstances other people would kill for.
Is pain good or bad? The truth is that in any context it is bad. Nobody enjoys being in pain, and yet if we ask soldiers who have found themselves in a conflict with little chance of getting out alive, their greatest ally was pain, because pain told them they were still alive. As long as they felt pain, they still had the possibility and the chance of getting out of there alive. And this isn’t something out of the movies: it is one of the lessons instructors give Navy SEALs to help them condition their brains for something the vast majority of them will suffer on a mission.
In short: try not to see the things you have to do as an obligation and a burden, and start seeing them as an opportunity and a reward. Because the real reward is having the opportunity to do those things. That is why people who look for a reward after doing them end up frustrated. Those rewards, like happiness itself, are not destinations but paths.
Further reading
- 14 things to avoid so you don’t wear yourself out mentally and sabotage yourself
- 3 things you overthink that keep you from moving forward in life
Featured image: Yoichi Okamoto, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
