“Happiness does not depend on what you have or what you are. It solely relies on what you think”. Attributed to Buddha, this phrase reminds us why our never-ending search for happiness is flawed. Whilst an increasing number of people now realise that happiness doesn’t depend on having more stuff, they still want to avoid emotional pain at all costs. If you have a human brain then that’s simply not possible. Instead, you change your relationship to pain.
Pleasure versus Happiness
Do you even know how you would describe happiness? In fact, it’s very often confused with pleasure. Have you noticed though that whilst pleasure gives you momentary blissful emotions, it can sometimes feel superficial or shallow? Compare that with the feeling of giving someone you love something that makes them overjoyed. The different feel-good emotions you experience come from different chemicals. So, pleasure is linked to the reward chemical dopamine but happiness is about connectivity and belonging, more closely linked to serotonin. You can actually trick your brain to get a boost of some of those chemicals but that’s only momentary.
Eastern philosophies take this one step further and teach us that happiness and pleasure are both concerned with the ego and how ‘I’ is doing. In most of our cultures, we also learn the habit to want things. I want a new car or I want to be more patient. It’s all founded on what the ego desires which is a source of suffering, according to Buddha. The craving for pleasure, immortality or other things can never fully be satiated and so we enter endless suffering. In other words, the more we want pleasure and happiness, the more miserable we become because we can never reach those illusions.
What is it to Avoid Emotional Pain?
At the opposite end of the search for happiness is the quest to avoid emotional pain. Needless to say, feeling betrayed, depressed, angry or even humiliated is not enjoyable. No one wants to sit in depression and feel all its darkness and pain. And yet, by trying to avoid it, that’s exactly what we’re doing.
It’s an odd paradox that takes a while to sink in cognitively but the more we fight unpleasant emotions, the stronger and more complex they become. In case you’re not convinced, studies now show that emotional suppression directly impacts your health and wellbeing in a negative way.
What does this mean in terms of our quest to avoid emotional pain? It means, perhaps counterintuitively, that we need to go into the pain. We need to feel all those emotions and really get to know them. We need to be curious about what betrayal and anger feel like. Where do you feel them in your body? What do they look like if you imagined them in shape format or even as a persona? Most importantly, create some distance with them by naming those emotions. Otherwise known as affect labelling, it can be a powerful way to regulate your emotions.
Another way to look at it is to think to yourself that by naming your emotions, you’re not avoiding them or clinging to an unrealistic experience. Being aversive to pain will always cause suffering because pain is unavoidable. On the flip side, suffering is a choice. It might be a tough choice but we still choose to give emotions importance. We entangle them into stories about how the world should be so further distancing ourselves from accepting that pain is part of life.
If Pain is Part of Life, How to Avoid Unnecessary Suffering?
Rather than search for happiness, the practice is to embrace pain. The more we accept, the easier it is to see that everything eventually changes. Emotions are just as transient as the clouds in the sky. It’s our minds that create stories so that the emotions fester and take hold of us. Of course this is easier said than done but sitting in the pain with curiosity helps us accept it as part of human existence. Journaling is a great tool to do that and to help us process our pain. Often these experiences get ‘stuck’ in our subconscious and our consciousness needs time and space to make sense of them.
As Pema Chodron says in her article on meditating with emotions “the reason emotions are discomforting, painful, frustrating is that our relationship to the emotions is not quite clear.” Then, once you’ve truly experienced your emotions, you feel liberated and free from the distraction of thoughts and stories.
1- Treat emotions as just messengers
A useful tip to keep reminding yourself is that emotions are actually there to help us. We get angry because someone hurts our child or our dog so we respond by changing what we can control. Sometimes we get depressed and we need to change something in our lives. Whatever it is, emotions are usually signals that something needs to change, usually within ourselves which is where the challenge is.
2- Practice the wheel of awareness
Neuropsychiatrist Dan Siegel who wrote the book Mindsight tells us that we’re so disconnected from our emotions and the mind that we struggle to relate to others wisely. We suffer and so do our relationships because we don’t understand our inner worlds, let alone anyone else’s. A great way to start practising is through one of his meditations around the wheel of awareness.
3- Chunk your expectations
Many of us have unrealistic expectations of how we should be and how others should. This also creates huge suffering and instead, the road to wisdom is acceptance. That means chunking your goals into manageable pieces that incorporate potential roadblocks in a realistic manner. It also means looking at people with the mindset that they too are suffering and that it’s very rarely about you.
Change Your Search for Happiness into A Quest for Experience
Eastern philosophies have known for a while that clinging to desire only causes us suffering. Neuroscientists and psychologists are now changing their stance to guide people to acceptance rather than avoiding or blocking all our so-called bad emotions and traits. The journey is tough and no one suggests it’s easy but you can shift your stance to be more welcoming of pain rather than to blindly search for happiness. Paradoxically, you’ll find that contentment starts seeping through naturally as you discover greater inner peace.
