Happiness is a choice: How to be happy everyday

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 If you control your thoughts, as your feelings come from your thoughts, then you are capable of controlling your own feelings. 

You control your feelings by working on the thoughts that preceded them. Simply put, you believe that things or people make you unhappy, but this is not accurate. You make yourself unhappy because of the thoughts that you have about the people or things in your life. 

Becoming a free and healthy person involves learning to think differently. Once you can change your thoughts, your new feelings will begin to emerge, and you will have taken the first step on the road to your personal freedom.

To look at the syllogism in a more personal light, let’s consider the case of Cal, a young executive who spends most of his time agonizing over the fact that his boss thinks he is stupid. Cal is very unhappy because his boss has a low opinion of him. But if Cal didn’t know that his boss thought he was stupid, would he still be unhappy? Of course not. How could he be unhappy about something he didn’t know.  Therefore, what his boss thinks or doesn’t think doesn’t make him unhappy. What Cal thinks makes him unhappy. Moreover, Cal makes himself unhappy by convincing himself that what someone else thinks is more important than what he thinks.
 

This same logic applies to all events, things and persons’ points of view. Someone’s death does not make you unhappy; you cannot be unhappy until you learn of the death, so it’s not the death but what you tell yourself about the event. 

Hurricanes aren’t depressing by themselves; depression is uniquely human. If you are depressed about a hurricane, you are telling yourself some things that depress you. This is not to say that you should delude yourself into enjoying a hurricane, but ask yourself, “Why should I choose depression? Will it help me to be more effective in dealing with it?” 

You have grown up in a culture which has taught you that you are not responsible for your feelings even though the syllogistic truth is that you always were. You’ve learned a host of sayings to defend yourself against the fact that you do control your feelings. Here is a brief list of such utterances that you have used over and over. Examine the message they send.

“You hurt my feelings.”
“You make me feel bad.”
“I can’t help the way I feel.”
“I just feel angry, don’t ask me to explain it.”
“He makes me sick.”
“Heights scare me.”
“You’re embarrassing me.”
“She really turns me on.”
“You made a fool of me in public.”

The list is potentially endless. Each saying has a built-in message that you are not responsible for how you feel. Now rewrite the list so it is accurate, so it reflects the fact that you are in charge of how you feel and that your feelings come from the thoughts you have about anything.

• “I hurt my feelings because of the things I told myself about your reaction
to me.”
• “I made myself feel bad.”
• “I can help the way I feel, but I’ve chosen to be upset.”
• “I’ve decided to be angry, because I can usually manipulate others with my
anger, since they think I control them.”
• “I make myself sick.”
• “I scare myself at high places.”
• “I’m embarrassing myself.”
• “I turn myself on whenever I’m near her.”
• “I made myself feel foolish by taking your opinions of me more seriously than my own, and believing that others would do the same.”

Perhaps you think that the items in List 1 are just figures of speech, and that they really don’t mean very much, but are simply figures of speech that have become clichés in our culture. 

If this is your rationale, then ask yourself why the statements in List 2 did not evolve into clichés. The answer lies in our culture, which teaches the thinking of List 1, and discourages the logic of List 2.

The message is crystal clear. You are the person responsible for how you feel. You feel what you think, and you can learn to think differently about anything—if you decide to do so.

 Ask yourself if there is a sufficient payoff in being unhappy, down, or hurt. Then begin to examine, in depth, the kind of thoughts that are leading you to these debilitating feelings.

Learn more at the Ransford School of Philosophy online