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Whenever you attach conditions to your happiness you wont experience it. The same mental process that attaches your happiness to a specific outcome will only repeat that pattern once that outcome is obtained. A person who believes that having children will make her happy will then create new conditions to be met once the children arrive. She may then believe that she will be happy when the infant stage is over, or the terrible twos, or when she has enough money to meet her growing familys needs. Your commitment to happiness itself allows you to let go of all your preconditions. Instead of having conditions, you say to yourself: No matter how difficult it seems, Im going to practise the mental processes that will lead me to happiness.
Being happy isnt always easy. In fact, it can be one of the great challenges in life. True maturity means taking responsibility for our own happiness right now. It means choosing to concentrate on what we have instead of what we lack.
Commitment is the first step in allowing you to regain the positive feelings that you are looking for. Most of us believe that by solving our problems, or improving our relationships, we will find contentment, but this means that our happiness must be postponed until some future date when those conditions are met. Commitment is a step towards bringing that future to the present.
Happiness is the result of a decision to be happy. You may believe that you will one day arrive at a place called happiness, that one day everything will fall into place and you will be able to say: Great, here I am. Ive made it to happiness land. Obviously, this isnt going to happen. Regardless of how good your life gets and how many of your dreams come true, you will still have to make the decision to be happy. You will still have to make the commitment. There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way!
The information in this book will act as a navigational tool that will guide you towards happiness. Remember that your goal is to be happy. Make the commitment and use the tools in this book to take you there. So lets get started!
Two / Your Thoughts and the Way You Feel
We are all constantly thinking and its a good thing that we do! Without the ability to think, our lives would seem to have little significance. Its important to realize that you are constantly thinking. Dont be fooled into believing that you are already aware of this fact, because you probably are not. Think, for a moment, about your breathing. Until the moment I brought it to your attention, you had most certainly lost sight of the fact that you were doing it. Breathing is so natural and automatic that unless you are out of breath you simply forget that youre doing it.
Thinking works the same way. Because youre always doing it, its easy to forget that its happening, and it becomes invisible to you. Unlike breathing, however, forgetting that you are thinking, even for a moment, can cause some serious problems in your life, including unhappiness, even depression. The reason is that your thinking will always come back to you as a feeling. Let me explain: the way you feel right now is the result of your thoughts at this very moment. In a broader sense, the way you feel is always determined by the thoughts you are thinking. Suppose you have the thought as you are reading this material. This is far too simplistic my problems are far more serious than Dr Carlson could possibly imagine. The result of this thought would be that you would be feeling sceptical and pessimistic right now. This is not a coincidence. Before you had these thoughts, you werent feeling pessimistic. Your thoughts created your sceptical feeling, the words I have written did not. If the words themselves created feelings, then everyone who read them would feel the same way, which of course they dont. The relationship between your thinking and how you are feeling is formed so fast (in a tiny fraction of a second) that almost no one realizes its occurring. Yet this cause-and-effect relationship between thoughts and feelings is one of the most powerful phenomena you will ever experience as a human being.
Now suppose that as you were reading the morning paper, you came across an article about a little girl who was rescued from a burning building. As you read the story you had the thought, What a relief. As soon as you had this inspiring thought you felt an uplifting of your spirits. Again, your emotion was created by your thoughts about the event not the event itself. If you had thought differently, you would have felt differently. For example, if you had the thought, Its about time they included a happy story. The papers are always filled with bad news, you wouldnt have felt uplifted but pessimistic. The feelings that accompany the thoughts you are having happen in an instant. This psychological dynamic is true all the time there are no exceptions. Whenever you have a thought, and believe that thought to be true, you will feel a corresponding emotional response to that thought. Your thoughts always create your emotions. Understanding the significance of this fact is the first step in escaping from unhappiness and depression.
Negative and pessimistic thoughts, regardless of their specific content, are the root cause of all of your negative and self-defeating emotions. In fact, its neurologically impossible for you to feel anything without first having a thought you simply wouldnt have a reference point. Try feeling guilty without first thinking guilty thoughts. Try feeling angry without thinking about something that makes you angry. You cant do it. In order to experience an event, you must process that event in your mind thereby interpreting it and giving it meaning and significance. This understanding has enormous implications. It suggests that if you feel unhappy, its not your life, your circumstances, your genes, or your true nature that is creating your unhappiness its your thinking. Unhappiness doesnt, and cant, exist on its own. Unhappiness is the feeling that accompanies your negative thinking about your life. In the absence of that thinking, the unhappiness cant exist. There is nothing to hold your negative feelings in place other than your thinking.
I am not saying that there are never physiological components that compound an unhappy or depressed state, or that make a person predisposed to unhappiness or depression. I am saying, however, that without thought there is no fuel to throw on the fire, there is nothing to foster the predisposition or physiological components into a reality.
Its interesting to note that there have always been people who would seem to have every reason to be depressed circumstances that depress some of us just hearing about them: helpless poverty, unbelievable hardships, cruel treatment by others. But some people simply dont experience unhappiness regardless of how serious their circumstances appear to be. They make the best out of the situation they are in. There are other people who apparently have every reason to feel happiness and contentment, people who are often tormented by depression. Rather than appreciating what they have, they focus on what they would rather have.
Thinking Turns Events into Problems
Lets suppose that two of your friends are getting divorced. You had always assumed that if anyone could make it, this couple could. On Wednesday, the couple started divorce proceedings, and a week later your friend called you to tell you the news. Oh no, you say and instantly begin to feel bad. Interesting, isnt it? The event has already taken place, its long over. But now, as you think about the event, you start to feel bad. Clearly the event itself didnt make you feel bad. It happened seven days ago and you didnt even know about it. Your thoughts about the event are the guilty party, responsible for the way you feel. The event was certainly real but it meant nothing to you it was neutral until you were able to bring it to life through your thinking. Interestingly enough, had your thinking interpreted the divorce differently, you would have felt differently. You may just as easily have thought to yourself, Oh well, I suppose only they can know what is best for them. This thought may have left you with a feeling of compassion and understanding.