🏃‍♂️ Why chasing happiness might be making you miserable

Efforts to relieve unhappiness are often fruitless, and in fact, can make things worse.

We all experience unhappiness at some point in our lives.

Perhaps we have an anxious, uncertain moment that passes once a threat is over. Or maybe we feel stress and insecurity leading up to a public speaking event or a job interview.

While these moments do no long-term harm, many of us carry unhappiness around as if it’s a keepsake weighing us down as we move throughout or days.

If we’re not careful, this long-term unhappiness and worry can become part of who we are, leading us to search for a cure.

One such “treatment” is to change our mindset, to think more positive.

But too often, attempts to calm unhappiness, insecurity, and anxiety can get in the way of eliminating our negative emotions. Efforts to relieve unhappiness are often fruitless, and in fact, can make things worse.

Author Oliver Burkeman writes in The Antidote “that the effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative — insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness — that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.”

Some believe that what you focus on, you create more of. Indeed, if we focus our efforts intently on how to become happy, we’re admitting to ourselves that we are in fact unhappy, and so we create more unhappiness.

Only by letting go of unhappiness and removing the importance we place on being happy will we able to break free from this routine.