Happy All The Time

Experiencing a Whole Spectrum of Emotion

A youngster once commented, “Happiness is truly a choice. I choose to be happy all the time even when I’m dying in the inside. You can drown in sadness, but you can’t drown in happiness! You swim!” Words are just words. We can draw limited conclusions without comprehending the complex intertwining of feeling and context. But these words, whatever the intended meaning, struck me, representative of a prevailing mode of thought—positivity. The deep conflicting message of being happy, while dying inside, conveys the modern message of forced smiles while experiencing intense suffering.

The myth that we must continually experience glee exacts a costly toll on well-being. We charge ourselves with forcing happiness. There is confusion between experiencing pleasurable emotions and living a rich and meaningful life.

Certain segments of the happiness movement popularize the myth that we must experience pleasurable emotions—all of the time; if we aren’t happy, we are defective. Happiness is a choice, they proclaim. Instead of empathy for those grieving, hurt, or downtrodden, their advice simply is: “why are you choosing to be sad?” I’m concerned with this direction of thought that has even infiltrated trained therapists.

Forcing Happiness All The Time

Many awash in despair, possibly as this young poster describes, “even when you’re dying inside,” feel an uncanny drive to force a smile and ignore underlying affects bubbling beneath the surface.

Emotional expression, such as a smile, isn’t a singular event, that is disconnected to the complex stream of felt experience. Forcing one emotion over another, without exploring other complex causes for the primary emotion leads down a path to detaching from the felt experience, often crashing in severe anxiety or depression.

Underlying feelings of despair is a complex construction of environments, evaluations and memories, not to be ignored and replaced with a smile. Some studies, however, have discovered a smile does positively impact mood; but impacting the mood doesn’t suggest a permanent cure for despair, or that constantly forcing a smile is healthy.

Sometimes, on a gloomy day, a smile might be all we need. Other times, however, more sinister elements are at work, requiring more than a deceitful grin that leave demons unchallenged. We should seek a more sophisticated cure. Instead of hedonic pleasure, we can build eudaimonic joy.

Faulty expectations of happiness create internal conflict. When life—at the moment—is unhappy; we slip into a battle that can never be won. Attempts for continual pleasure clash with reality, the body seeks homeostasis, not an extremity—monopoly of any one emotion. Extreme emotions motivate action; we avoid challenges, engage in pursuit, or aggressively defend. We need motivation from both the pleasant and unpleasant affect.

Feeling Like A Fraud

We are increasingly surrounded by smiling people, chanting life is wonderful, but dying inside. How are we to empathize with those falsely expressing emotions? Perhaps, the growing masses suppressing emotional expression, pinning on a happy face, will create an epidemic of a loss of connection. Is our push for unrestrained happiness partially at fault for the sweeping darkness of loneliness that is plaguing our young people?

Henry David Thoreau said, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

If the mythical land of continual happiness is what we seek, we may never sing the song of the rich, fulfilling life that includes an array of emotions, open to feeling experience of living. To connect with experience and effect positive change, we must face some difficulties that evoke discomfort.

All Emotions Have a Purpose

“Emotions exist for a reason and are trying to communicate something to us. One important aspect of emotional intelligence is to know that all emotions are valid; even when the information that caused the emotion is not” (2019).

Susan David, a psychologist and faculty member at Harvard Medical School, describes emotions as “a neurochemical system that evolved to help us navigate life’s complex currents” (2016, location 65). T. Franklin Murphy wrote, “emotions are a biological reaction to experience. Incoming data from our senses interact with our biological being. Our system leaps, pulls back, or freezes in response” (2021).

Relationships and Emotion

Intimate relationships require sorrows from loss and even the occasional pain of disloyalty. But these deep pangs of feeling create meaning, connection, and purpose. The feelings create wholeness. Building connections on superficial pleasant emotions authors a thin personal narrative, constructed from a disjointed patchwork of misunderstood feelings.

A Few Remarks by Psychology Fanatic

To flourish, we must face the heartache of personal and societal suffering. Reality consists of happiness and sadness; both contributing to fullness, and imparting wisdom. Sadness is not a sign of defectiveness but of passion and connection. We can swim or drown in the flow of emotion. However, our survival depends less on the nature of the feeling than our relationship with the feeling. We flourish when we accept feelings. And then, and only then can we bask in the energy and richness and life. Richness and wellness will never amount to being happy all the time.