BLUF: I’ve increased my personal happiness by first focusing on the areas of unhappiness in my current life. Subtract known unhappiness from life before searching for happiness by adding new things to your life.
Have you ever heard the phrase “I just want to be happy”? It’s a worthwhile pursuit but like most things in life happiness is not some magical end state that is eventually achieved. You don’t unlock the secret to life one day and after that you never fight with your spouse, your job never sucks, your friends never let you down, your kids don’t disappoint you, you never stress about money and your health is always awesome. Increasing and maintaining happiness is a journey that’s it’s a never ending. It’s also a spectrum and not some binary state where you’re either happy or unhappy.
Usually the focus on increasing happiness is finding new things that will add to your happiness. More recently I’ve taken opposite approach and worked on increasing my happiness by focusing on subtracting out the unhappiness in my life. This article will explore how I identified and improved areas of unhappiness in my life to make me a happier person.
Why focus on unhappiness?
A common phrase is that people are “looking for happiness” or “looking for things that will make them happy”. And boy do we love easy fixes. We want that “one thing” that will flip the script and turn everything crappy in our lives into sunshine and rainbows. A new career, a new partner, a new hobby, a new vacation or a new experience that will somehow provide lasting happiness. To me, searching for that “one thing” is like having a massive pile of keys and having no idea what lock, if any, they’ll open. You have to keep trying keys and hope that one will work and unlock happiness in your life. Good luck.
Trying new stuff (searching for that key) to try and make you happy can be a very costly, risky and time consuming process. Could switching careers make you happy? Maybe, but changing from an accountant to a nurse is a huge undertaking in both time and money. Could you be happier with a different partner? Possibly, but are you going to suffer through the financial, mental and emotional pain of a divorce in the hope that the grass is actually greener with someone else? There’s usually no going back after that decision. All you know is what you’ve done so far in your life and how it makes you feel. You have no idea how you’ll feel about any change in your life until you’ve made the change.
But there’s another way. Instead of searching for happiness in the new, reflect on the life you currently live and identify the things that are contributing to your unhappiness. This can be ANYTHING, big or small. The work commute that sucks up time in your day. That friend that sometimes makes you feel crappy about yourself by jokingly putting you down. Feeling stressed because you’re always living paycheck to paycheck but you don’t know where the money goes. What things in your life make you feel negative emotions such as fear, stress, anxiety, anger, frustration or sadness?
Attacking my unhappiness
Let me start by saying that I’m a generally positive and happy person. But, it doesn’t really matter where you fall on the happiness scale. All of us have things in our lives that are causing negative feelings and are in our power to change. Something would happen in my day to day life and after it happened I would realize “whoa, that didn’t feel good.” I started making a mental list of the major things that were making me feel negative emotions and then started making changes. Anxiety, anger and stress were the main emotions that would crop up that I wanted to reduce.
The following are some examples of changes that I’ve made in my life to remove and reduce areas of unhappiness. None of these are complicated but be careful to not conflate simple with easy. Many of these have established habits associated with them that had to be broken or changed which is not easy. Some of these actions like removing friends from Facebook had an emotional component to them that I had to come to terms with and accept. Don’t take this as me trying to dissuade you from changing sources of unhappiness as it’s absolutely worth it. I’m just giving you a little warning that sometimes the changes are hard but they’re worth it.
Reduce Reading and Watching the News
I used to pull up online news sites during my lunch break every single day and read them as I would eat. I thought “I’m an adult, I should know what’s going on in the world.” When I stepped back and thought about the content that I was consuming each day I came to a couple of conclusions:
- Most of the news was negative
The classic news phrase was “if it bleeds, it leads” but it seems like that mentality has expanded to anything negative. An event causing people to die like a natural disaster, accident or acts of violence. The latest political situation where one side is “right” and the other side is “wrong.” The economy that’s about to go through dark times. The planet that’s falling apart because of the pollution being caused by people. Yikes! It’s enough to make the happiest person anxious and depressed. Few and far between these days are any “feel good” stories about something positive happening like a hero saving the life of someone else.
- Most of the news had zero impact on my daily life
This realization might be the one that was both most embarrassing and most enlightening. None of what I was reading had any impact on my day to day life. Part of the reason for me to consume the news was to be “informed” but for what purpose? Watercooler chat at work? I realized that there was close to zero content on any national news network that told useful information for my day to day life. Even if some law or regulation was going to be passed that would impact me, was I really going to try and do something about it? Nope. If there was something really important or worth knowing then I would likely hear it via other means.
After thinking about these two pieces of information I greatly cut down on reading the news. At lunchtime I switched over to reading a book, a blog or something else more positive. When I do pull up a news site I mostly glance at the headlines and am much more selective with what articles I actually choose to read.
Removing “Friends” from Facebook
Facebook is a funny place. In the real world, if you met a stranger it would probably take a while before you gave them your phone number or invited them over to hang out in your home. In the world of social media we are very quick to “friend” people that we know very little about and may not have even met in person recently or ever. Being on Facebook for over 10 years I had quite a few FB friends that were acquaintances at best or were once friends but drifted apart. People from high school that weren’t even good friends at that time, let alone now. Friends of a friend that I met once at a party or played kickball with one summer. Even people that I used to be better friends with once but grew apart over time due to changes in interests or life circumstances.
You could make a privacy or security case to unfriend those acquaintances but in my case it was more about what was showing up from them in my newsfeed. During the Donald Trump presidential era everything seemed to become political, divisive and downright mean on the internet. Then sprinkle in the pandemic and there was a nonstop parade of personal stances on Facebook that made me angry, anxious or bewildered on a what seemed to be a daily basis. It just got to be too much. I longed for peoples cat and dog pictures, vacation pictures or even…pictures of their kids. Anything tame and happy would have been a welcome change from the parade of false information memes and “I’m right” about this issue posts.
I started with hiding peoples content from my feed for 30 days. Something far less controversial than unfriending people. I’m not sure what triggered me to change but one day I went full steam ahead and just started unfriending people. I asked myself: would I ever hang out with this “friend” again in real life? If not, what is the purpose of keeping them as a friend? Not the most sophisticated criteria but I rolled with it. I unfriended a lot of people including those still in my hometown. I’m not sure what I was expecting but I was initially nervous about doing it. What if I got nasty messages from people when they realized it? What if they refused to reconnect with me in the future if I did want to see them again?
What happened after the mass unfriending? Nothing. A whole lot of nothing. No nasty messages, no e-mails, no phone calls. My newsfeed got a lot more quiet and I didn’t mind to check Facebook to see the things that were happening with my family and closer friends. Less politics, less memes, less arguing. It made me not mind checking social media now and then again.
Stop Arguing on the Internet
Social media, text message, e-mail and online forums have one universal thing in common. They are all REALLY horrible mediums for trying to discuss complicated topics, expressing personal points of view and especially bad for trying to convince someone else to change their point of view. In the best of circumstances you can have a very adult exchange of ideas but it takes forever to ping pong back in forth. In the worst of circumstances people are incredibly mean to each other saying things with internet anonymity that they would never say if face to face with the same person. It’s that dehumanizing aspect of the internet that seems to bring out the worst in people. Even if I wasn’t trying to be mean, I found that posting something controversial or negative directed at someone would leave me feeling anxious. I wrote something expecting a response but then I would get anxiety at the thought that I offended them
There is one conclusion that I arrived at after years of internet exchanges: it’s highly unlikely that I’m going to change anyone’s mind with what I say over the internet so stop arguing with people about complex topics. It can take up a tremendous amount of your time. It was also adding to my anxiety when I would respond and things were getting contentious. I found myself not opening up post notifications for a while when I said something contentious and I saw that the person had responded back. What an awful experience having that tension and anxiety building inside of me. And for what? In the hope of trying to convince a strange to change their point of view on something that probably doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things?
So I stopped or at least have cut it down very significantly. When I do comment I try not to attack another person’s point of view but instead try to offer up my opinion on the topic and why I have that opinion. Or, I’ll ask an open ended question to see if they’ve considered some other point of view. If someone is trying to pick a fight I’ll stop posting, the online equivalent of walking away. I have tried to focus my energy on helping others which is why I now mostly blog and hang around FI groups. Less fighting, less anxiety, more people genuinely thankful for the input that I provide.
Turning off Notifications on my Phone
I have to credit the documentary “The Social Dilemma” for this one. I found myself more and more being a slave to my phone. Not only just using it constantly, but finding it to be a source of constant distraction during my day. Whenever an e-mail, text or some other message would come in it would vibrate in my pocket or on the desk making me pull it out or pick it up. It would create instant anxiety if I DIDN’T look at it to see what just happened. I also would start to feel “phantom” vibrations from my phone in my pocket. I would think that I felt my phone vibrate when it actually didn’t and then would need to check it.
As if the distraction notification wasn’t enough, any notification had the potential to turn a 15 second distractions into many minutes. An email notification could lead you to read something unimportant. A FB notification could lead you into mindless scrolling through of your newsfeed. And once I was actively engaged in using my phone from a notification I’d feel more inclined to check other apps that I might check unprompted anyway. Talk about a massive time suck!
“The Social Dilemma” had a piece in it about how notifications are used by the developers to actively pull you back into using the social media web. They seem like a nice harmless feature on the surface that lets you know when there’s something of interest happening that you might want to know about. But they aren’t harmless as they train you to pick up that phone whenever it notifies you. I immediately thought about how those notifications were in fact becoming a source of distraction and anxiety in my life. Before the documentary had even finished I turned off just about all notifications and saw an immediately improvement in my ability to not be drawn to my phone. Maybe some people have the will power to keep those notifications on and not have it derail their day to day life but I don’t. I find it easier to just remove the distraction altogether.
Action Steps:
- Think through all the areas of your life and make a list of the things that make you unhappy. What adds fear, stress, anxiety, anger, frustration or sadness to your life? You need to be brutally honest with yourself here even if the areas are very sensitive like something with your spouse, family or friends. Here are a few areas to think about first:
- Family
- Spouse / partner
- Job
- Friends
- Personal time – hobbies / volunteering.
- Health
- Make sure you break the item down to a simple area to focus on. For example, if you aren’t happy with your job make a list of the specific areas of the job causing you unhappiness. For example, your long commute into work.
- Select one item to fix – start with something easy!
- Make a list of options to fix the area of unhappiness. Focus on things that are 100% or very largely in your control. Start with easiest and go to the hardest. For the example of a long commute to work that might be:
- Listen to audiobooks / podcasts to make the trip more productive and enjoyable.
- Ask work to let you work from home 1 day a week.
- Ask work to let you work from home full time.
- Move closer to work.
- Change jobs
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