“The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.” ~Fyodor Dostoevsky
Have you ever felt frustrated that you weren’t as happy as you thought you should be, that you were stuck on some evil treadmill of unhappiness or that every time you thought you were right on the verge of feeling happy, something pulled the rug out from under your feet?
Perhaps you feel like every time you start climbing the mountain of life, you get yourself trapped in a ravine, or fall off a cliff or realize after what seemed miles and miles of uphill hiking, you’re still at the base of the mountain, at the very beginning of the trail, having made no real progress at all.
Sometimes we’re our worst enemies to our own happiness
We think we know what we’re doing and where we’re going and how to get there only to realize down the road that we’re lost and are using an outdated map to navigate a new reality.
This is my attempt at redrawing an old map and marking a new trail, one with fewer ravines and unexpected cliffs.
Learning what to do to be happy is unquestionably important. But learning what to stop doing on our way to greater depths of happiness is too.
12 Ways to Stop being Unhappy
1. Stop complaining
Many unhappy people are chronic complainers. They see all the clouds and none of the sky. And they make sure everyone around them knows what’s coming.
The problem with this well-worn profession is that it keeps the mind focused on all that is wrong and complain-worthy, even when there are other things going on in your life that are wonderful.
It’s like going to a museum and never looking at anything but the graffiti in the bathroom stall.
The habit of complaint is a self-inflicted wound. It darkens horizons and amplifies the ugly. Never ignore warning signs or hide from reality, of course. Just don’t dwell so exclusively on it that you forget to look beyond the stall.
2. Stop dwelling on past wrongs
Unhappy people spend way too much of their precious time rehashing old offenses and picking at old wounds. But that distracts us from experiencing the present moment in all its beauty and wonder.
If we’re too focused on what was, we may miss the way things have become. You have to let the past go to be free enough to enjoy the flow of life directly below your feet.
3. Stop blaming others
Blame traps us in the mud of a bad experience. We get stuck there, unable to move on when we’re focusing on who did what, when and why instead of focusing on what we can learn from the lessons embedded in the experience.
4. Stop blaming yourself
Too often, we turn our judgment inward and shoulder the burden of guilt. If you did something regrettable, fix it. Then let God juggle the numbers on life’s ledger and move on!
Repair what can be repaired and lift your vision from the trash bin of the past and look for ways of creating meaning today and into the future.
5. Stop thinking life owes you
Those who sit around expecting life to provide for them will spend a lot of frustrated moments waiting for what will seldom, if ever, arrive. Life owes you nothing. It provides everything.
But it is up to us to use what is made available to fashion a life of passion and happiness.
Once you can let go of the expectation that life owes you anything, everything becomes an opportunity to learn and love and forgive and overcome and develop and create and become.
We truly become masters of our own fate, no longer kites held afloat or pulled down by luck, fate, government, history, circumstance or the whim of others.
6. Stop judging
This doesn’t mean to hang your insight, discernment and wisdom on a door and go through life without ever again forming another opinion. But those who are hyper-judgmental or who leap to quick and unfounded judgments are robbing themselves of a level of happiness that can easily be made available.
Stop judging so many books by their covers and start allowing others’ true essence to blossom. Only then will you see others as something more than their responses to you, but as their potential, as spiritual siblings, hungering to be affirmed in their basic humanity.
7. Stop comparing
Unhappy people compare their own spouses to friends’ spouses, their children to neighbors’ children, themselves to society’s standard of beauty or their own standard of perfection and their lives to the rich and famous. Silly, isn’t it?
Our lives are unique and unlike anyone else’s. Why spin your wheels in the sands of dissatisfaction and disappointment comparing who you (or others) are to people you (or they) can never be?
You were born into a unique set of circumstances with a unique set of life experiences and obstacles, advantages, trials, traumas, abilities and disabilities that have shaped and formed you in different ways, forging vastly different personalities, values, character traits, strengths, weaknesses, reference points, insecurities, sensitivities, mind-sets, likes, dislikes, habits, perspectives, ideologies, opinions and attitudes.
No wonder we’re all so different. Accept that fact. Embrace it. Love it.
8. Stop worrying so much.
Some people are so plagued with fear, doubt and anxiety that life affords few true unadulterated joys. Most of their happiness is attenuated by the nagging tug of fear.
What-if-this and what-if-that thinking beats anxiety into every part of the body with every pump of a nervous heart. Life is thereby robbed of the peace that accompanies the highest, most steady forms of happiness.
Instead, learn to let life be. Trust that things will be okay. Let go of the need to control. Take reasonable precautions, of course, but not out of fear that something terrible will otherwise happen, but out of respect for your health and well-being.
9. Stop making mountains out of molehills
Do you make a big hairy deal out of every little misspoken word or gesture or forgotten deed? Does a little disagreement escalate quickly into a blowout fight? Stop making everything a national offense and see how your happiness sinks down into a deeper, more secure place.
10. Stop being so easily offended
Similarly, those who make mountains out of molehills are often the same who are easily offended. Stop seeing offense in everything you don’t like and learn to accept people as they are.
When you are able to see that not everything is a reflection of how the world loves and accepts you—or fails to—but is just the way different people think and behave and deal with life, a world of happiness that has been too long hidden will finally open to you.
(for 10 steps on how to do this, click here).
11. Cease and desist your pessimistic ways
The belief that things just won’t work out, that you have no control over circumstances in your life, that nothing you do will change much of anything virtually guarantees unhappiness.
Stop seeing the negative in the positive and train your eyes to see the glow of life emanating from the ashes of life’s trials and challenges.
You will then be free to experience a revolution in happiness that will add an amazing amount of life satisfaction to the daily experience of living.
(Here’s 10 ways optimism can help)
12. Stop perfectionism
Perfectionism is the daily act of proving you don’t fit the bill. It is a way of sabotaging all positive feelings. It’s how we undermine happiness by always setting a standard for acceptability beyond what is humanly possible. It is the habit of forever moving the standard of self-criticism 10 steps beyond your current capacity.
Strive for improvement without measuring your growth by the distance you are from the perceived ideal. Instead, measure it from the place you started before the goal was set and celebrate the incremental growth you experience as you grow.
Bonus #13: Stop ingratitude
An ingrate is someone who takes life, others and all those basic gestures of kindness for granted. Life becomes common, expected, owed, deserved. An entitlement mentality replaces appreciation, wonder and awe. And so happiness fades.
To change that, start allowing gratitude to seep back into your awareness. Make it a habit to count your blessings, naming them one by one and life will become much more beautiful, positive and happy.
(add these unlikely items to your gratitude list)
Final Thoughts
The surest way to guarantee that none of these obstacles to happiness are ever replaced or overcome is to try conquering all of them at the same time. When we feel overwhelmed by the enormity of a job, most people tend to stall, stagnate, and procrastinate getting started.
Instead, choose one (two at the most) and start there. When you feel you have made enough headway as to consider that trait something you now possess, even if imperfectly, you can take on the next most relevant obstacle and begin tackling that one.
In time, you will feel the natural flow of happiness make its way back into your life as the obstacles to it begin to be replaced by the principles of a truly happy, soul-satisfying life.
In the Comments
Questions to consider: What step did I leave out? What would you have added? What solutions would you have suggested? Which of the steps have you struggled with or have you successfully overcome? What resonated with you? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Hi stop standing still, just take one small step forwards every day. In a week when you look over your shoulder you will see how far you have come and what it used to be like.
Take care
Glen
Great point, Glen. Incremental growth is the only kind of growth. One step at a time. The tragedy is getting a year older without ever taking a single step toward self-improvement.
Great article with very sound advice. I would add ‘Forgive Yourself’ to the list as well. Most of us hold so much inner guilt and resentment towards our own past actions, it makes it very hard to let go and move forward, even if we’ve forgiven others. There’s an enormous amount of peace that comes to you when you truly forgive yourself as well.
Great addition! Forgiving ourselves of past wrongs and of current shortcomings is essential to living life at its happiest. There is just too much self-disgust, chronic guilt and a lack of self-respect in the world today. Thanks for reminding us of the need to forgive ourselves too.
The 12 steps are quite practical though not east. But practice always makes perfect.
Thanks for sharing, Isaac. Life is certainly an adventure with twists and turns along the way and the more we practice living it well, the happier we’ll be despite the challenges that come our way.
Hi Thanks so much for sharing a very positive approach on how to stop the cycle of unhappiness. I totally agree with you. This is very helpful and very informative. Great Read
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Yeah. You are just like the other people who give advice. Pretending to be a good adviser but you also suck in life.
Hmmm. And based on what are you making this judgment? In what part of my life do you have special insight and can identify my suckiness? Do you feel like by saying my life sucks that you therefore don’t have to confront your own challenges to your own happiness? I understand how suggesting that your happiness is in your control can be threatening if you have spent your life complaining about others (parents, neighbors, spouses, governments, circumstances) holding you back and holding you down. But as you delve deeply into the literature on happiness, and start to work on the principles I’ve talked about in the article, you’ll find the journey quite liberating. Try it!
This is all terrible advice. I don’t think you have any insight into the human condition at all. I sincerely hope you are not a therapist of any kind although I very much doubt that you are. This is simplistic and superficial nonsense. I don’t think you have any understanding of depression at all whatsoever. The worst part of offering people advice who are going through the kind of suffering you have clearly never experienced is that it’s dangerous. It’s not only unhelpful but misleading and therefore damaging. You want to feel as if you’re helping people because that makes you feel special, good about yourself. You’re not and you shouldn’t. You speak in absolutes as if it’s truth when it’s your opinion but anyone with any training could tell you you’re trivialising suffering whilst completely misunderstanding what depression or ‘unhappiness’ is. I hope you stop offering advice because whilst you are clearly not helping anyone with such nonsense the truth is you could be dealing some pretty serious harm to people along the way whilst ingratiating yourself. I do not believe you are the kind of individual who has the insight, empathy or reflective capacity to actually take on board what I have said but I sincerely hope, for the sake of others, that you pause to contemplate the implications of the offensive nonsense you have spouted here. Not only do you have no answers, you are telling people that you do. Worse, you blame them for their own unhappiness as if it’s their fault because they decided to have the wrong attitude. You seemingly have no idea how inept or lacking in compassion you are, or how unethical it is to be doing this. Please stop.
Well Dan, let me start by thanking you for sharing your thoughts and feelings here. It shows how passionate you are about wanting the quality of help those in desperate circumstances are groping for to improve. I thank you for that.
If the reason for your passion is that you or someone you love has personally suffered or currently is suffering under the terrible and terrifying weight of depression, I am deeply sorry. My heart and prayers go out to you and to them. Life can feel dark and empty, dried up and pointless to those struggling to find their way in the dark. If you have suffered or do suffer from depression, I pray you keep hope alive, no matter how futile hope may seem right now. Lights do eventually shine in the darkness, no matter how dimly at first. Hang on and get whatever help you need from those trained to provide it.
But let me now address the specifics of your complaint. If you read carefully, what you may notice is that you attacked me for writing about something I didn’t actually write about. I wrote about unhappiness, not depression. While people struggling with depression are, by definition, also struggling with unhappiness, not all unhappiness is attributable to clinical depression. In fact, most unhappiness is not diagnosable depression. I never used the word depression in the article exactly because depression was not part of the message. But let’s explore your claim anyway. You claimed that what I wrote was all terrible advice.
If my advice is wrong, then presumably staying in the state I said is harmful to happiness would be better than taking my advice and stepping away from those mental, attitudinal and behavioral states.
So, are you saying someone could be happier by complaining and dwelling on all that’s wrong in their lives and the world? Or can they find happiness by blaming others and themselves for past mistakes, by walking around feeling entitled, or unfairly and harshly judging others and themselves? Are you claiming that people who chronically compare themselves to others, or worry incessantly, or make big hairy deals out of everything, and are easily offended are better off than pursuing their opposites? Can seeing life through the lens of pessimism, and living a life of ingratitude produce better results than I what I presented?
If not, then how is my advice misdirected when those are the qualities I wrote about. Telling someone what they can do to protect themselves in the future is not blaming them for being raped in the past. Similarly, telling people what they can change to find greater and longer-lasting stores of happiness now is not the same thing as blaming them for their lack of happiness.
It seems to me that your complaint about my post might be something like complaining about a list of vegetables a nutritionist gives you for a longer life. The list is hardly a recipe book that details just exactly how to use each of the vegetables. Nor is what I wrote a detailed recipe book on how to develop each of the mindsets I referenced either. And, of course, there are other ways of addressing a long life just as there are other ways of addressing unhappiness. But to say the foods you eat don’t contribute to health is simply wrong. Likewise, to say your attitude and the way you deal with the negatives in life has no effect on your happiness is at least equally wrong.
In fact, based on research conducted by the author of The How of Happiness, Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, about 40% of our happiness is in our own hands (the rest seems to be genetic and life circumstances). You can also look up the research conducted and evaluated by Dr. Martin Seligman and others. The research shows that what I have suggested actually works. What I wrote about happiness cannot hurt those with depression (you won’t likely become more depressed by focusing on the positive or curtailing chronic complaining), but it was not meant for those so struggling with a clinically diagnosed psychobiological issue. Where brain and body chemistry has failed to produce the proper balance of chemicals, namely dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and/or endorphins, a chemical solution should likely be part of the treatment plan. But the bottom line of what I wrote was meant for the millions and millions of other people who are not unhappy by virtue of their brain chemistry or other deep-rooted challenges that would be best served under the care of a psychologist or psychiatrist.
You are correct that I have never experienced depression (though I have had my fair share of life challenges and difficulties). But a surgeon shouldn’t need to have had cancer to remove it from a patient. The idea that I have to have direct experience with the thing I talk about would mean very few people would talk about very many things. Would you want people to shut up about politics unless they’ve been a politician? Probably not.
I have been a student of the subject of happiness for over 30 years. I know a little bit about the subject. The research and the science of happiness has become quite sophisticated in the last couple decades or so. We know what we know now, even if it seems difficult or hard. It’s always easier to look outside for something or someone to blame for our challenges. Turns out, though, that our inner lives depend more on our inner qualities than the outward circumstances we experience. My article was an attempt at pointing at some of those inner qualities.
You called what I shared simplistic and superficial. This complaint may have had more merit had the article been solely about clinical depression. But even then, I would still refute your claim to some degree. Good health depends on some pretty simple life changes: Eat better and move more. Is that simplistic and superficial? Perhaps, if your unhealthiness is due to cancer or Alzheimer’s. But the fact that some people’s challenges are more severe than most people’s challenges does not in the slightest negate the good advice that eating better and moving more is.
Perhaps it would have been more helpful to get into some detail about what eating better is and what kinds of movement produce the best results. Sorta like I did. The article identified what the best foods of thought and attitude are for living a happier life. Is it superficial to identify which foods are best for longevity and health without sharing how to prepare those foods in a meal? Well, depends on what you are trying to do. If your task is to write a recipe book and you fail to include recipes, then you may have a point.
If, on the other hand, your purpose is to awaken people to the necessity of eating healthier and pointing to those foods that are healthiest, then no. People can go look for ways of incorporating more broccoli into their diet without everything related to the topic being included in one article. Google is a click away. If I’ve succeeded at winning people over to the I-need-more-broccoli-in-my-diet side of the argument, then it’s a win in my opinion. Similarly here. My aim was not to write a step-by-step manual for developing any particular quality I mentioned. The proof is that I didn’t write a step-by-step manual for developing any particular quality I mentioned. But I did point a finger at what qualities if developed would enhance personal joy.
As for trivializing suffering, I’m not exactly sure how to respond to that one. I didn’t really speak about suffering. Certainly, it is implied in the unhappiness I write about, but I’m giving solutions to climbing out of the mental and attitudinal traps we can all stumble into. I’m just not sure how that trivializes people’s real experiences with suffering. If someone is in a hole and I throw a rope down to them, that doesn’t trivialize the pain they may feel trying to use a broken arm to climb back up. The rope may or may not be the best tool, but that it trivializes their pain seems an odd complaint. Feel free to elaborate on that one if you feel inclined to reply.
As for urging me to stop speaking out on such topics, well, given the almost countless emails and blog replies to the contrary of your claims, it won’t likely happen. But the good news is that the internet is filled with competing options. So there is plenty of room to find the solutions to challenges that best fit your interpretation of what would most help you in your particular set of circumstances.
As for your claim that you think I may not have the “insight, empathy or reflective capacity” to deal with your comment effectively and that what I wrote is “offensive nonsense” just may reveal a little bit as to why you responded with such hostility. Just some friendly advice for future disagreements with me or anyone else in life: Try to stick to the ideas you disagree with rather than attacking the character of the person who holds and advocates them. That is the nature of the toxins so polluting political discourse today. Nothing gets done because both sides are attacking people for holding views instead attacking the views themselves, articulating thoughtful and convincing arguments. Suggesting what I’m sharing hurts people is fair game. Calling me heartless for suggesting it is childish and counterproductive if you actually want to convince me I’m wrong.
Still, thank you for your comment. It is always helpful to get contrary opinions that help me to fine-tune my explanations and my thinking. Perhaps a disclaimer about what I’m not talking about would be appropriate at the outset of such an article in the future.
I wish you the best, Dan. Thank you.
Those are so true but hard to do. I have been holding a grudge against my mom for always letting me down when I need her the most. She never come through when it come to me. Since, I have stopped asking for her support in what i am doing. But it looks like she has no clue. i don’t know what to do.
I really like this article it really helps people see what they are doing a lot of thats hindering them from putting them in a good light. going off of the “Stop complaining” this one is really important because life happens and life is 10% we cant control but 90% is our reaction in which we can control which will give us 100% of our outcome. so complaining becomes the outcome which is never really desired.
This article was really well written !
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This advice is absolute trash. Your arrogance and insensitivity reveal what a messed up person YOU are inside. You think all this toughness and lack of sensitivity is the right path? Try f—–g with your own demons before you foist a bunch of dangerous bullshit like this on people who are looking for *good* advice, not a bunch of whining from a s——k like you. You so vastly overrate yourself and your abilities. The only thing significant about you is your insignificance. Stop giving advice until you clean your own messy self up.
Wow! You should tell us what you REALLY think. I’m not entirely convinced you did more than read the subheaders if you think what I wrote was all toughness, arrogance and insensitivity. Sorry if you did read the whole article and was literally offended or hurt by the words of advice I shared. That was not my intention.
Sorry, but I do have a little more advice to offer though:
When someone shares something you think is not helpful, it is helpful to identify what and how it falls short, providing specifics about the mistakes in their thinking rather than attacking their very significance and value as the person for having shared that thinking online (or wherever), however misguided you think they are.
The other option, of course, is to move on and find something that better floats your boat. That’s the thing about online articles; You paid nothing for them, signed nothing, committed to nothing, and so can simply walk across the virtual street and knock on someone else’s door.
As to the merits of what I wrote, I would simply ask you to identify the suggestion I shared that would not improve happiness. Do you honestly think happiness improves by complaining more, blaming more, comparing more, worrying more and being easily offended? I would love an actual challenge to the content of the article. Maybe you’re correct. Correct me and let’s see how it pans out.
In fact, there have been times when other readers shared their disagreements (usually quite a bit more politely than you did, truth be told–Haha!), and they were correct in their critique and I altered a line or two or more to make what I shared better. I welcome such magnifying glasses on my work. Editors do that to professional writers, so who am I to think I won’t make a mistake here and there?
But here’s the thing: While I think your harsh and mean-spirited response is simply wrong and a bit narcissistic (digitally spitting at people because you happened to not like something, it in no way was even remotely helpful because you just called me a bunch of names and ran off. You didn’t identify what was wrong. You didn’t pick up the intellectual responsibility to make an argument, to think through the issue and challenge me on something actually written. I would have enjoyed that and thanked you for it. Instead, the way you responded makes you sound like a troll, someone to be ignored and dismissed as a crank.
Yours was the digital equivalent of spitting at someone and hiding. It did nothing and solved nothing, convinced no one and changed nothing. What’s worse, is that your spit at me makes you sound immature and crude. That’s self-sabotaging if what you had to say was important. Hopefully you will see this (my answer to you) and give a better reply, either so your manners can be redeemed or so I can improve what I wrote.