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Stop Thinking, Start Living: Discover Lifelong Happiness
Richard Carlson
Revolutionary in its simplicity and accessible to all, this bestselling book offers commonsense methods that allow you to let go of depression and tap into natural joy.In this indispensable handbook, Richard Carlson demonstrates how we can change everything in our lives – earn more money, meet new friends, get a new job – yet still feel dissatisfied. Happiness, he says, is not 'out there' but within, a state of mind that is independent of circumstance: 'If you begin to see that your thoughts are not the real thing – they're just thoughts and as thoughts they can't hurt you – your entire life will begin to change today.'Carlson's step-by-step guide explains:• How your thoughts determine how you feel.• Why thinking about problems only makes them worse.• That thoughts come and go – you are free to choose at any moment which to hold on to and which to let go.• Straightforward methods for conquering depression.• How to dismiss negative thoughts and discover inner contentment.• How to overcome lifelong pessimism and start really living.




Copyright (#ulink_d317f191-61f3-5f30-988a-b31323de173e)
HarperElement
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 london Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)


and HarperElement are trademarks of
HarperCollins Publishers Limited
Originally published as You Can Feel Good Again by Thorsons 1993 First published by Thorsons 1997 Published by Element 2003 This edition published by HarperElement 2012
39
FIRST EDITION
© Richard Carlson 1993
Richard Carlson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
Paperback ISBN: 9780722535479
Ebook edition © August 2012 ISBN: 9780007383092
Version 2016-10-21
Contents
Title Page (#u320795ee-8341-5944-b23f-1eb67eefe730)
Copyright (#ulink_43aefec9-d4c8-5baa-9091-aa3d287ddc4e)
Introduction (#ulink_9c281304-4112-5bdf-beaa-c3f17d9375a4)
1 Possibilities (#ulink_d35a338a-02dc-544b-9cd2-c676c73e2118)
2 Your Thoughts and the Way You Feel (#ulink_78a65553-4f4c-558a-abe6-11a6022d12d5)
3 Healthy Psychological Functioning (#ulink_34c3740c-db94-5650-843e-bc8c6f75c86b)
4 Dismissing Thoughts (#litres_trial_promo)
5 Wisdom (#litres_trial_promo)
6 Thoughts Grow with Attention (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Thought Systems (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Choice Points (#litres_trial_promo)
9 The Thinking Habit (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Moods (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Living in the Present Moment (#litres_trial_promo)
12 Life Is Like a Pendulum (#litres_trial_promo)
13 Mental Health and the Dynamics of Unhappiness (#litres_trial_promo)
14 Grief and Loss (#litres_trial_promo)
15 Illness and Death (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Many Problems, One Solution (#litres_trial_promo)
17 Unhappiness Is Your Curriculum (#litres_trial_promo)
18 The Art of Optimism (#litres_trial_promo)
19 Happiness and Gratitude (#litres_trial_promo)
Footnotes
List of Searchable Terms (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction (#ulink_1b15bb21-b579-5ffe-b5f6-38f6734803f9)
I respectfully ask that you try to forget everything you have ever been told about unhappiness, pessimism and depression – where these feelings come from, how serious they are, and how difficult they are to overcome. Try to forget about all the attempts you have made that have failed and all the approaches that promised results but did not deliver. Even though I am going to explain how you can begin to feel better today, I don’t ask you to believe me with blind faith. Instead, I ask that you use your own common sense when evaluating what you are about to read. By the time you finish this book I believe you will not only feel better, but also understand exactly why most approaches failed you before.
The way to get the most out of this book is to approach it with an open mind. See whether it makes sense to you and if it sounds like something that you already know intuitively. Some of what I propose will be quite different from what you have been exposed to before. Don’t let this be an obstacle to getting the help you deserve. Keep in mind that if what you have already learned was the answer you were looking for, you wouldn’t be reading this book today. You would be out enjoying your life.
The information given here is different because it represents a new understanding in the field of mental health. It doesn’t build on other approaches you may already be familiar with. If you can digest and ‘take to heart’ the information in this book, you will feel better right away. There is very little effort involved; all you have to do is understand what you read on an intuitive level and make a gentle effort to put your understanding into practice. As you will see, I don’t offer any fancy techniques or any sophisticated psychological theories to sift through. What I offer you is a simple yet profound commonsense-based understanding of mental health and happiness that really works, and that can be implemented immediately. I have seen people who have been unhappy or depressed for as many as 30 years walk away from my office feeling better than they can ever remember. And what’s more, the good feeling you will learn to tap into sticks with you.
I am a stress-management consultant who teaches people some very simple facts about their own internal functioning – what makes them tick and what makes them fall apart. The principles that I teach are generic, meaning they apply to everyone. I receive referrals from therapists around the country who have seen their clients rid themselves of depression as a result of what I teach. As people learn about the habitual processes that contribute to their own misery, and the ways that they use their own minds to sabotage their lives, they quickly discover a natural and relatively effortless way to escape the grips of unhappiness and lifelong pessimism.
My approach is based on a set of principles known as the Psychology of Mind.
It is being used by growing numbers of therapists, consultants and educators, with spectacular results! The methods you will learn have been extrapolated from these principles in a way that is geared towards freeing you from unhappiness.
Many professionals now teaching this approach have come to believe that a majority of the more ‘conventional’ therapeutic approaches available today to treat unhappiness can actually make matters worse instead of better. This is not to say that there aren’t excellent, well-qualified therapists practising traditional therapy – there most certainly are. What you may discover, however, is that many of the practices that therapists currently use tend to fuel an already depressed state. Clients are directed to ‘get in touch’ with their most negative feelings and analyse their pasts in order to transcend their present situations. They are asked to study, if not relive, their childhood as well as their more recent past so that they can better understand the psychological damage that was inflicted on them.
One of the consistent problems I have seen in working with clients who have ‘given up’ on traditional therapy is that each time a new trauma is uncovered, the client is in effect starting over again. There are always new sessions designed to get to the bottom of each additional ‘issue’ and to explore the negative feelings that go along with recounting them. Each specific issue entails more negative feelings to explore. Many therapists insist that unless people deal head-on with their negative experiences and unconscious drives, they will be miserable forever. You must keep in mind, when deciding whether traditional therapy makes sense to you, that the therapists who tell you this are almost always paid by the hour!
In defence of therapists, I don’t think I’ve ever met one who would intentionally keep a client longer than they felt was absolutely necessary. Nevertheless, there is a certain conflict of interest to be very cautious of: if you get better, the therapist loses you as a client! If you have been in therapy for an extended period of time and are still unhappy, you may want to reconsider your treatment. Is more of the same really going to help? Is going deeper into your pain and suffering really going to help you experience joy? Is getting in touch with more negativity really going to make you feel less negative? I doubt it. History shows us that this route often doesn’t work.
Does this mean that therapy is useless? No. I would say, however, that success in therapy depends far more on the mental health and happiness of the therapist than it does on reliving past traumas and pain. A skilled therapist who is also a happy, vibrant person will most certainly be able to pass along at least some of her happiness almost regardless of the specific approach she uses.
One of the most striking observations that many people make when attending a Psychology of Mind seminar or when they have a private session with a consultant, is that the people who teach Psychology of Mind are very happy people themselves. I have come to believe that unless a person is happy himself, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to teach someone else to be happy. How can an unhappy person, who is caught up in personal problems, teach an already unhappy person to feel joy? I feel grateful to be able to say that I am, indeed, a happy person, and I hope the feeling I bring to life will touch you as you read this book.
Who Is this Book for?
Carl Jung once said, ‘The greatest affliction affecting mankind isn’t serious mental illness – but the general uneasiness and unhappiness that is so prevalent in our society.’ Jung believed, as I do, that many people experience life in a ‘lifeless’ manner. Many if not most people have lost touch with the mystery and magic that surrounds us. The first step towards living fully is simply feeling better.
This book was written for anyone who would like to feel better than they presently do – anyone who frequently experiences ‘the blues’, ongoing sadness, a pessimistic outlook, frequent unhappiness, internal misery, a lack of gratitude about the gift of life – or someone who simply wishes to feel better. It is an outgrowth of an earlier book, You Can Be Happy No Matter What (New World Library, 1992). I received hundreds of letters and phone calls from readers who appreciated the principles of happiness that I spoke about, yet wanted to hear more specifically about how to get themselves out of the ‘lower states of mind’ that pessimistic people find themselves in.
The approach to happiness outlined in this book can help virtually anyone improve their mental outlook and the quality of their life. It should not, however, be used in lieu of professional treatment if you suffer from serious depression, suicidal urges or other serious mental illness. If you experience serious depression, please seek professional guidance before reading this book and attempting to implement the philosophy. Your doctor or counsellor may want you to use the ideas presented here in conjunction with your therapy. I certainly hope so, but please check first.
This book was written to address Jung’s assessment of the state of humankind, the general level of unhappiness that surrounds us. I will show you how to rid yourself of the negative feelings that can take over your life and replace them with the feelings of gratitude, happiness and love.
I will also show you how to access a place within yourself where ‘feeling good’ already exists, as well as how to detect those mental processes that take you away from this place. I have never met a person who didn’t feel better after learning this simple approach. Once you learn how you create unhappiness in your life with your own thinking – and once you learn how to stop this pattern – you will certainly be far more hesitant to continue or return to any destructive psychological tendencies you may have.
Approach the ideas here with an open mind and a curious heart. Don’t discount anything as being too simplistic until you have had an honest chance to practise what you learn and assess how you feel. If you read with your own common sense as your guide – remembering that your goal is to be happier – I believe you will be pleasantly surprised at how good you can feel. It really is true: you can feel good again.
One / Possibilities (#ulink_353139fa-3426-5d05-b114-1138d8fc91ce)
Jim and Yvonne had been married for 32 mostly unhappy years when they discovered that Jim had a cancerous life-threatening tumour. Prior to discovering this information, the couple had lived together in an almost constant state of irritation. There was frequent conflict and anger, ongoing disputes and disagreement on virtually every issue surrounding their lives together. Their love for each other had been, in Jim’s words, ‘lost many years ago’.
A curious thing happened the moment they found out about the tumour. Both Jim and Yvonne experienced a sudden shift in their consciousness. The anger that had suffocated their love for so many years disappeared, their disagreements faded away and now seemed insignificant, and their love for one another resurfaced, almost magically, as though it had never left to begin with.
What happened? This couple experienced what is commonly referred to as ‘a change of heart’. No one knows exactly how or when this kind of sudden shift or change will occur, but we do know that they exist and that they are possible.
A sudden shift in consciousness can occur in any area of human life that has to do with how we feel, whether it be relationships, feeling anxious, feeling down, or any other immobilizing emotion. Consider an eight-year-old child who goes to bed every night frightened by the thought of an imagined monster behind the wardrobe door. Suddenly, one day, out of nowhere, she realizes that the monster isn’t real, that it exists only in her own mind. Interesting questions include: Why did the child have this realization on this particular day? What was it that made her realize the monster wasn’t real? The answers to these questions are surprisingly vague. We don’t know for sure, except to say that a new level of understanding surfaced within the consciousness of the child.
Another example of a sudden shift is the person who swears that he is going to stop smoking. Week after week, year after year, he promises he’s going to do it. You, as a friend, have heard the same story many times. Then, one day, for no apparent reason, your friend tells you the very same thing, only this time you know that he means it. Something is different. Something has changed. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but you know he will never smoke again. And indeed, he never does.
While the particulars of each sudden shift are unique, there are common denominators that seem to exist in all cases. First, the ‘shift’ itself doesn’t necessarily build on what we already know, but instead is seen suddenly, as if out of nowhere. In other words, the amount of information we have on the subject isn’t the critical factor. For example, I was working with a client, George, who had spent his entire life feeling prejudice about people of a specific race. He had a sudden shift in his perspective and realized (in his words), ‘What a fool I have been.’ What made this particular example so intriguing to me was that the two of us had never spoken about his prejudice. I never even knew he had this problem. His realization came about as he was discussing how his own thinking sometimes got in the way of his relationship with his wife. The shift that occurred in his consciousness was achieved without obtaining additional information about ‘the problem’. He had intellectually known for years that all prejudice stems from ignorance, yet he still felt prejudice, until that moment. Something shifted within him while he was thinking about something else.
I had a sudden shift of my own that is equally difficult to explain. I had spent my entire life frightened to death of public speaking. The very thought of speaking to a group made me sweat, and in two instances I actually fainted! Then, one day while eating lunch with some friends at a conference I was attending, I realized there was nothing to fear. I can’t explain exactly why or how I had this insight, only that it happened. To this day, I am very comfortable speaking to groups of any size and do so quite frequently.
Second, sudden shifts are accompanied by a feeling of inspiration, sometimes described as ‘a light feeling’, or ‘a nice feeling’. Yvonne and Jim each described their sudden shift as a ‘feeling of incredible relief’, as though a huge emotional burden had been lifted. Many clients have reported to me similar feelings of being ‘uplifted’ in some powerful way as they experienced an insight that changed the way they looked at life. This feeling is often described as a sense of self-confidence. Later, I will discuss this in a context of your healthy psychological functioning.
Finally, sudden shifts are permanent in nature. When a shift occurs, there doesn’t seem to be any turning back, at least not all the way. For example, it’s hard for me to imagine being frightened by the act of speaking to a group. I can, however, have empathy for those who do, because I remember what it feels like. The idea of Yvonne and Jim hating each other, as they did for so long, seems ridiculous. And my client George chuckles at the thought of disliking someone because of the colour of his skin. This is the nature of insight – it happens, and from that moment forward life looks different.
An interesting and important point about sudden shifts is this: there is no relationship between the ‘feeling better’ aspect of sudden shifts and the external appearance of life getting better. So, for example, a person who experiences a sudden shift in the way she feels about her finances didn’t do so because she had just inherited a large estate or won the football pools. She experienced the shift because she looked at the same set of facts in a new way. Whatever it was that she saw, it affected her enough that money will no longer be a source of inner conflict in her life.
Certainly Yvonne and Jim were no better off. To the contrary, Jim was given a terminal diagnosis. Yet both he and Yvonne felt more love for each other than ever before.
Likewise, the child who had the realization about the imagined monster in her wardrobe wasn’t any better off. The monster was never there to begin with! This is the nature of sudden shifts. They occur through a shift in understanding – not through a change in circumstance.
This is a book about possibilities. Be open to the possibility that this book will help you have your own sudden shift. If you do, your experience of life will change before your eyes. You will feel better, more joyful, more relaxed, and more secure. Absolutely nothing needs to change in your life in order for you to feel better. You simply need to see something about the nature of your own thinking that you didn’t see before. Your sudden shift can happen instantly and it can be profound.
Commitment
As you will see throughout this book, happiness is a moment-to-moment choice that each of us makes. In order to be happy, you must first decide to be happy. You must make a commitment to happiness.
It’s important to know that commitment to learning the art of happiness is not exactly what it seems to be at first glance. Most people make the mistake of confusing commitment to happiness with the decision to make their life better in some way. Although these two ideas seem related, they are not necessarily so. As you have probably noticed, you can change everything in your life without affecting your level of happiness one single bit. You can earn more money, get yourself out of trouble, meet new friends, get a new job, solve a problem, get a degree, get married, or acquire something you have always wanted, yet still feel unsatisfied. The reason for this is that happiness exists independently of your circumstances; it’s a feeling that you can learn to live in.
The way to get the most out of this book is to approach it with the understanding that it’s possible to learn to be happy without changing anything in your life – except your relationship to your own thinking. The American philosopher Emerson once said, ‘The ancestor to every action is a thought.’ Everything in your life is a function of the way you relate to your thinking. As you think, so shall you be.
Commitment is a powerful tool for change. It takes pressure off you by removing the uncertainty that often accompanies a lack of commitment. Marriage, for example, is a commitment. When a couple gets married there is a reasonable belief that, regardless of what might happen, the commitment will carry the couple through. Prior to marriage, people often feel insecure about losing their partner. The commitment relieves their anxiety and gives them the freedom to ‘let go’ of their concerns; it fosters hope.
Without commitment, success in any venture is difficult. Whether you are dieting, studying for an exam, learning to play tennis, starting a project or deciding to be happy, commitment is an important step.
When you make a commitment to happiness you are in effect saying: ‘There is so much in life that I can’t control – the world, other people and their choices and reactions, accidents, imperfections, suffering, hardships. Yet this is my life and regardless of what happens, I’m going to be happy.’
Whenever you attach conditions to your happiness you won’t 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 two’s, or when she has enough money to meet her growing family’s 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, I’m going to practise the mental processes that will lead me to happiness.’
Being happy isn’t 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. I’ve made it to happiness land.’ Obviously, this isn’t 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 let’s get started!
Two / Your Thoughts and the Way You Feel (#ulink_79c5f992-2f42-5020-aca8-2370d64b55f3)
We are all constantly thinking – and it’s a good thing that we do! Without the ability to think, our lives would seem to have little significance. It’s important to realize that you are constantly thinking. Don’t 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 you’re doing it.
Thinking works the same way. Because you’re always doing it, it’s easy to forget that it’s 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 weren’t 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 don’t. 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 it’s 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, ‘It’s about time they included a happy story. The papers are always filled with bad news,’ you wouldn’t 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, it’s neurologically impossible for you to feel anything without first having a thought – you simply wouldn’t have a reference point. Try feeling guilty without first thinking guilty thoughts. Try feeling angry without thinking about something that makes you angry. You can’t 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, it’s not your life, your circumstances, your genes, or your true nature that is creating your unhappiness – it’s your thinking. Unhappiness doesn’t, and can’t, exist on its own. Unhappiness is the feeling that accompanies your negative thinking about your life. In the absence of that thinking, the unhappiness can’t 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.
It’s 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 don’t 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
Let’s 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, isn’t it? The event has already taken place, it’s long over. But now, as you think about the event, you start to feel bad. Clearly the event itself didn’t make you feel bad. It happened seven days ago and you didn’t 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.
Think of a more mundane example – snow. For some people snow means snowballs, sledges, skiing, and snowmen. For these people, snow is cause for great celebration! For others, however, snow means dead batteries, a slushy mess, cold weather, and so on. In short, the snow is cause for a lot of complaining. Take note, however, that the snow itself doesn’t care how you think about it. The snow is neutral. It just exists and goes on being snow. It doesn’t cause the positive or the negative reactions and feelings you may have. Only your thinking can do that for you. I hope this illustrates how you use your thinking to create emotional responses which give you an experience of life. Your thinking, not the events themselves, cause your emotional responses.
Your Thoughts Aren’t Real
If you could understand that your thoughts aren’t real you could stop reading right now, because you would feel a tremendous sense of relief and you would have realized how to create happiness in your life – forever. And even though it is going to take some explanation on my part, the statement is true. Think about it: your thoughts aren’t real. They are real thoughts, but they’re not the same thing as concrete ‘reality’.
When you think, you are using your imagination to create an image or picture in your mind of an event rather than the real thing. If you are driving home from a football match, reviewing the game in your mind, you are merely imagining what the game was like. The game is no longer real, it’s now only in your mind, in your memory. It was real once, but not any longer. Similarly, if you are thinking about how bad your marriage is, you are considering it in your mind. It’s all in your imagination. You are literally ‘making up’ your relationship. The thoughts you are having about your relationship are just thoughts. This is why the old saying, ‘Things aren’t as bad as they seem’ is almost always true. The reason things ‘seem so bad’ is because your mind is able to recreate past events, and preview upcoming events, almost as though they were happening right in front of you, at that moment – even though they’re not. To make matters worse, your mind can add additional drama to any event, thereby making that event seem even worse than it really is, or was, or will be. Even more important, your mind can review the imagined event dozens of times in a matter of seconds! This is very important to understand, because while an actual event such as an argument with a friend can last a minute or two, your mind can recreate that very event, magnify it, and make it last three hours – or an entire lifetime. But that argument is no more real now than an argument you had with your father ten years ago. The point is that now, when your life is really happening, that remembered argument is just a thought, an event being created within your own mind.
If you can begin to see that your thoughts are not the real thing – they’re just thoughts, and as thoughts they can’t hurt you – your entire life will begin to change today. I have witnessed many times this very same realization transform someone from a life of fear and depression into a life of happiness.
What would you say to a nine-year-old child who was convinced that a nasty witch was behind her door? Would you have her come to your home weekly to describe the witch to you in great detail? Would you have her think about it constantly? No, you would probably tell her that the witch wasn’t real, that it was only an imagined witch. With your help, eventually the child will understand that the witch was only real in her mind. Once this happens, she will no longer be frightened.
Taking this same understanding one step further, what would you say to the same child if she said to you, ‘My life is a failure, no one likes me, I never have any fun, I don‘t want to live’? Wouldn’t you also try to teach her that the thoughts she was having about herself were just thoughts? I hope so. There is nothing holding those ideas in place other than her own thinking, her own internal dialogue. If the nine-year-old were able to see what you were trying to teach her, if she were able to establish a different type of relationship with her thinking, wouldn’t she be better off than if she believed that her thoughts were real? She certainly would be. Wouldn’t it be nice if she could relate to all of her thoughts in the same way?
Understanding that You Are the Thinker
You are the thinker of your own thoughts. Sounds obvious enough, but read on and I believe you will discover that, until now, you may have lost sight of this important fact.
Thinking is something that you are doing, moment by moment, to create your experience of life. But because your own thinking is so close to you, it’s easy to forget that you are the one using your own thoughts against yourself. Here is an example. A gentleman came into my stress-management office and said, ‘I’m mad at my boss. I don’t like my job. I don’t like the people that work with me. No one appreciates my work. I’m really angry.’ When I began teaching him about how his own thinking creates his angry feelings he said, ‘With all due respect, Dr Carlson, I’m angry almost all the time, but I almost never think angry thoughts.’ Do you see where he was being fooled? Until that moment, he believed that ‘thinking’ meant the same thing as ‘pondering’. Even though he may not have dwelled on his misery for hours at a time, he was nevertheless continually thinking negatively, a moment here and a moment there. He spent nearly all of his time thinking about the little things that irritated and annoyed him. It was almost as if the unstated goal of his life was to analyse it and to give his opinions on how various things affected him. His negative thoughts were creating his negative feelings and emotions and he didn’t even know he was thinking them. He was a victim of his own thinking.
Because my client didn’t even realize that he was thinking, he had no way of knowing that his feelings were coming from his thinking. He thought his feelings came from his job and from the people he worked with. Until we spoke, my client had never realized that he was the thinker of his own thoughts – and that those thoughts were the source of his unhappiness. He believed that his thoughts were being generated by what was going on around him, rather than from within him. He didn’t realize at a deep enough level that he is the author, the producer, and the creator of his own thinking, that his thinking is something he is doing all day long, and that his doing it is the cause of most of his emotional suffering. Once he realized this he had a very inspiring insight that I have since used over and over again with clients: Being upset by your own thoughts is similar to writing yourself a nasty letter – and then being offended by that letter! This insight came from a man who had spent most of his life depressed.
You are the manufacturer of your own thoughts. You are the one doing the thinking that is upsetting you; you are doing it to yourself. Once you understand this important point, it’s silly to go on being angered, annoyed, frightened, or depressed by your own thinking. If you are thinking negative, pessimistic, sceptical, or angry thoughts and not realizing it, it’s understandable and predictable that you will be depressed. And this will happen each time you lose sight of the fact that you are thinking depressing thoughts.
There is only one way out of this negative loop, and that is to understand that you are the one doing the thinking and that it is your own thinking that is creating your pain. Once you start to see that your thoughts are just thoughts, that they are not ‘reality’, you will be able to dismiss them and not allow them to depress you. Any thought or series of thoughts can be dismissed, but to do so effectively you must first realize that you are the one creating them. All of us will accumulate thousands of thoughts about ourselves throughout our lifetimes. Very few of us, however, remember the fact that these thoughts, regardless of their content, are just thoughts.
Just Like a Dream
One of the easiest ways to understand the harmless nature of your own thinking, and to create some distance between yourself and your thinking, is to compare thinking with dreaming. Almost everyone has had the unfortunate experience of a nightmare. While it’s happening it seems very real, but when you wake up, you realize that it was just a dream. And what is dreaming but thinking while you are asleep. That’s it! While you are asleep you are still producing thoughts. Like daytime thoughts, these night-time thoughts also create an emotional response, and they can also be frightening. Just a few nights ago, one of my children woke up in the middle of the night from a bad dream. It seemed so real to her that she was actually sweating from the experience. Once she woke up, however, she felt very different. Even though she is only three years old, she realized that her dream wasn’t real, that it was just her thinking.
Your wakeful thinking can be looked at with the same perspective and clarity. It seems real, but it’s still just thought. And each time you forget that it’s just thought, it will seem every bit as real as a nightmare. You can frighten or depress yourself with your own thinking in a matter of seconds if you don’t realize that you are doing it. You can be sitting in your living-room relaxing and reading a book when a thought crosses your mind: ‘I’ve been depressed for so long,’ or ‘My marriage is no good.’ Can you see how seductive and tricky it can be? If you understand thought in the way that I have been discussing, you can dismiss those thoughts and others like them – you can let them go. Or, if you choose, you can follow the thoughts, remaining aware of what you are doing to yourself. As long as you know that you are in charge, that you are the one doing the thinking, you are protected. Again, it’s no different than dreaming.
A person not suffering from depression will have thoughts just like yours, but with one major difference. When he has them, he will say to himself, ‘Here I go again,’ or something to that effect. Sooner or later, he’ll remember that he is the thought-producing machine – that he is doing it to himself. As soon as he has this realization, his mind will slow down and begin to clear and he will sigh with relief. He will begin to feel better and will go on with his day.
An unhappy or depressed person, on the other hand, not seeing her thoughts with proper perspective, may follow the train of thought, believe it to be real, and submit herself to ongoing pain. Even if she doesn’t follow this particular train of thought, she will eventually follow some negative thought pattern which will lower her spirits. Without the understanding of how her thinking is creating her negative experience, there is little she can do to prevent her negative thoughts from spiralling downward towards depression. After all, she believes that her thoughts are real.
The solution is to see your own thoughts as thoughts, not as reality. Create some distance from them. Just like your dreams, your thoughts are coming from within your own consciousness. Your thoughts are not real, and they can’t harm you, just as your night-mares are harmless. As you create some distance and perspective from your thinking you will be freed from their effects.
Certainly, everyone has his share of negative and self-defeating thoughts. The question to ask yourself is, ‘How seriously do I really have to take them?’ Your thoughts have no power other than what you give them.
More than Positive Thinking
Even though positive thinking is obviously preferred to negative thinking, positive thinking alone isn’t enough to pull you out of a depressed state for very long. ‘Positive thinkers’ are just as much at the mercy of their own thoughts as negative thinkers – that is, if they believe that thinking is something that is happening to them rather than something that they are doing. This is a subtle but key point.
Positive thoughts are still just thoughts. Granted, they are nicer thoughts to have – but they are still just thoughts. If you believe that you have to think positively all the time, what’s going to happen when a negative thought enters your mind?
You no longer need to feel you have to make yourself think positively – you don’t. If you’ve spent time being depressed (and if you’re reading this book you probably have), you’ve heard hundreds of well-meaning suggestions from all sorts of people to ‘think more positively’. Unfortunately, what most people who have never been depressed don’t realize is that when you’re depressed you can no more think positively than get in a spaceship and fly to the moon! Thinking more positively will happen naturally, without effort, as you pull yourself out of your depression. Thinking more positively is a natural extension of knowing that your thoughts can’t hurt you.
The idea here is to have a different kind of relationship to your thinking – one that allows you to have thoughts of any kind without taking any of them too seriously. You can get to the point in your life where you can have a negative thought (or a series of negative thoughts) and you simply say to yourself, ‘There’s another one.’ It will no longer be ‘front page news’ in your mind! As this happens you will be able to resist the urge of following every negative train of thought that enters your mind.
If you could somehow climb into the mind of a genuinely happy person, you would notice that she isn’t necessarily thinking positive thoughts. Instead, she isn’t thinking about much at all, other than what she is doing. Happy people understand, either instinctually or because they have been taught, that the name of the game is to enjoy life rather than to think about it. Happy people are so immersed in the process of life, absorbed in what they are doing at the moment, that they rarely stop to analyse how they are doing. If you want to verify this concept first-hand, spend some time watching a roomful of preschool children. The reason they’re having such a good time is because all of their energy is directed towards enjoyment. They are immersed in whatever they happen to be doing; they aren’t keeping score.
Please don’t make the mistake of thinking, ‘It’s different with children because they aren’t grown up with real problems.’ To a child, problems are every bit as real as yours are to you. Children deal with very difficult, age-related, problems: parents who fight or who are separated, adults who tell them what to do, people who take away their things, and the need to be included and loved, to name just a few. The difference between adults and children and their level of happiness isn’t tied to how real their problems are, but to how much attention is placed on those problems.
If you are constantly analysing or ‘keeping score’ of your life, you will always be able to find fault in whatever you are doing. After all, who couldn’t improve? Many people even pride themselves on their ability to be on the look-out for ‘what’s wrong’. But if you follow thoughts like ‘Life would be better if …’ you will once again be at the mercy of your own thinking. One thought will lead to another, and then another, and so on. It’s just a matter of how much negativity you can handle. Sooner or later you’ll be down in the dumps. True happiness occurs when you quiet down your analytical mind, when you give it a rest.
Once you realize that your thinking is what creates your experience of life, including your depression, analysing your life will lose its appeal. You’ll prefer simply to do the best that you possibly can in any given moment and pay attention to enjoying what you are doing, knowing that you can always do better.
I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t improve your life. Your life will inevitably improve as you pay more attention to living and less to how you are doing.
Thoughts Floating Down a River
Have you ever sat next to a river and watched leaves floating peacefully by? It’s a very therapeutic thing to do. Each leaf is independent of the others but is still connected by the river. You can watch any leaf until it disappears out of sight. It’s a very impersonal process. What I mean by ‘impersonal’ is that the leaves just keep on floating. They don’t care if you like them or whether you’d rather they floated differently.
Your thoughts can be looked at in much the same way. Your consciousness produces an ongoing series of thoughts, one right after the other. When you focus on any particular thought, it is present and visible. Once your attention goes elsewhere, the thought disappears from your mind. Your thoughts come and go. You have surprisingly little control over the content of your own thinking unless you are actively trying to control it. Once you understand that you are the thinker of your own thoughts, and that your mind doesn‘t produce ‘reality’, it produces ‘thoughts’, you won’t be as affected by what you think. You’ll see your thinking as something that you are doing – an ability you have that brings your experience of life – rather than as the source of reality. Do you remember the old saying ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me’? Thoughts could be substituted for words. Your thoughts can’t hurt or depress you once you understand that they are just thoughts.
When you start to view your own thinking in this more impersonal way (in other words, looking at your thinking instead of being caught in it), you will find yourself becoming free of depression. Your thinking goes on and on, and it will continue to do so for as long as you live. But when you step back from your thinking and simply observe that you are doing it, your mind becomes free, and you open the door to experience.
Attention and Your Thinking
If your thinking determines how you are going to feel, then it’s very important to understand exactly what happens when you focus your attention on your negative thinking.
Use your own common sense to answer the following question. If negative feelings are caused by negative thinking, then what possible good can it do to overanalyse the negative parts of your life? If you spend a great deal of time rehearsing potential problems, dwelling on what’s wrong, and thinking and talking about problems, only two things are certain to happen. First, you will become an expert in your problems! Not an expert at solving your problems, but an expert in describing them. Therapists will love you! Second, you will be depressed – or at least your spirits will be low. This is true because there is a fundamental law at work here: thoughts grow with attention! The more attention you give to what you are thinking, the bigger that thought becomes in your mind and the more important that thought will seem. If I ask you to think of what is bothering you, you can probably provide me with an answer. If I explore your answer with you and ask you to describe it further, and speculate as to what else might go wrong, I draw you deeper into your pain. The more specific and detailed you get, the bigger the problem will become.
Now hold on a moment. A few seconds ago you were fine and you weren’t even thinking about the problem. Now, with my help, you are describing a painful event as if it were really happening! But it’s not happening – except in your mind. I’m the first person to admit that it is important to acknowledge a real problem. But acknowledgement and commitment to solving a problem takes a moment or two, at most. Acknowledgement is very different from dwelling on and rehearsing, or doing endless post-mortems on situations or events.
Remember, the way you feel is determined by your thoughts. So guess what: the more attention you put on anything that is negative, the worse you will feel. Again, I ask that you use your own wisdom and common sense to decide whether or not to believe me. Despite the popular idea that talking about and working through negative emotions is a good idea, I’m suggesting that common sense dictates otherwise. After all, people have been working through endless negative emotions for years now – and very few are much better off than when they started and many are worse off. The questions to ask yourself (and your therapist if you have one) are: when does it (the analysis) stop? When have I had enough? When do I get to feel better?
If you believe that your thoughts are real – and you are encouraged to work through the worst of them – you will end up with even more to contend with. The more you think, the bigger and more important the thoughts will seem and the more of them there will be to deal with. Because your feelings are determined by what you think, you will, by necessity, sink even lower. And, unfortunately, because you are lower, you will think even worse thoughts, which you now have to ‘work through’. This endless negative spiral never takes you upwards towards the place you want to be. The spiral will end when you decide that ‘enough is enough’, when you ‘start over’ with a clean slate, with a clear mind, and when you realize that the only thing holding your depression in place is your own thinking. You must stop focusing on your depression.
Humility
As you learn this approach, and as you begin to pull out of depression, try to be easy on yourself. It takes a great deal of humility to admit that your own thinking is the cause of your suffering. Everything you have learned prior to now may have suggested otherwise. Before you realize that your thinking is causing your depression, it’s easy to blame other people and the circumstances of your life for your misery. The reason for this is clear. When you feel bad, you will have the tendency to come up with a theory as to why you feel the way you do. Without knowing the actual cause, it makes sense to create a reason. As long as you can create reasons for your depression – your marital status, your job, your children, your genes, your financial situation, your future, and so forth – you can maintain the false hope that things will get better when … But you can probably see that, in actuality, this is not true. The mindset that says, ‘Life will be better when …’ will create further conditions that must be met as soon as the initial conditions are satisfied. You need only to look at the countless times in your life that you received what you wanted – and happiness still eluded you – to realize that changing your circumstances isn’t the answer to your problems. If it were, you’d already be happy! You wanted to graduate, you graduated. You wanted a mate, you got one. You wanted a pet, you got one. You wanted a pay-cheque, you got one. And so on. Tens of thousands of times in your life you got exactly what you wanted and yet you’re still unhappy!
The solution is to have the humility to admit that all along you have been creating your own pain through your own thinking. Don’t worry; almost everyone else is doing the same thing. The good news is that as soon as you see that this is true, you’ll be on your way to a far better life. No matter how depressed you have been, or how long you have been depressed, the moment you can see that it’s only your thinking that is holding your depression in place, you’re on your way to freedom.
You Cannot Think Your Way out of Depression
In many respects, if you want to escape from depression, it’s just as important to know what not to do as it is to know what to do. If you have followed what you have read thus far you will have no difficulty understanding the statement You cannot think your way out of depression. You could think and think for a hundred years and you would never escape from the grips of depression. The reason: when your spirits are low you will generate negative thoughts. All you will see is negativity. You already know that your thoughts determine how you feel; thus, when you think in a depressed state of mind you will only make matters worse. The famous American football coach, Vince Lombardi, once said, ‘Just because you‘re doing something wrong, doing it more intensely isn’t going to help.’ No idea applies better when you are depressed. It’s your thinking that lowered your spirits to begin with; doing more of the same will only make matters worse.
Fuelling the Fire
When you are depressed, the single worst thing you can do to yourself is to continue thinking – especially if you are attempting to use your thinking to pull yourself out of your depression. To do so is only ‘fuelling the fire’. Perhaps you believe, as many people do, that you can’t stop thinking when you’re down in the dumps. And although it can be difficult to ‘stop thinking’, there is an enormous difference between doing something while believing it’s natural and necessary – and doing that very same thing knowing that it is the cause of your suffering. Once you realize that what you have been doing has been hurting you, you will find a way to stop doing it! The only reason you have tried to think your way out of depression in the past is because you knew of no other options. But you wouldn’t put salt in your wound once you knew it was going to sting like crazy. Thinking while you are depressed is similar to pouring a bucketful of salt over a deep cut! As you begin to understand the dynamic between your thinking and the way you feel, you will be able to ease off your thinking, in much the same way that you can ease off your car’s accelerator when you are stuck in the mud. Before you understand that trying harder to get out of the mud doesn’t work, you are tempted to put your foot down onto the floor. After you understand the relationship between the weight of your foot and sinking deeper into the mud, however, you ease off a little bit. If you’ve ever been stuck in the mud in your car, you know how tempting it is to try to force your way out, even when you know that accelerating makes matters worse; but because you do know better, you are able to resist the urge. Resist the urge to think your way out of your depression and you will find yourself out of it quicker than you expected.
Three / Healthy Psychological Functioning (#ulink_8f6f0b6b-32c8-514e-b8e1-85ec68ee7424)
At the core or centre of your being is something you were born with, your ‘healthy psychological functioning’. Healthy functioning is not learned, it’s inherent, it’s your birthright, and it’s always present when you are not engaged in your thinking mind or your ‘personality’. Your healthy functioning is innate, it’s your most natural state of mind. It’s not who you think you are (your ego), it’s your higher self, who you really are and who you can be. Your healthy functioning is where your wisdom lies, it is your peace of mind, your common sense, your satisfaction in life, and your feeling of wholeness.
I will refer to your healthy functioning in different ways, with words like wisdom and common sense. It doesn’t matter what you call it, the words are interchangeable. Your healthy functioning is the part of you that sees beyond unhappiness; it’s your source of emotional buoyancy, the part of you where true and lasting happiness exists, and the part of you that isn’t disturbed when the circumstances in your life are less than perfect.
It’s important to know that you were born with healthy functioning, and that it wasn’t something you had to learn. The truth is, you had to learn how to have ‘unhealthy functioning’, you had to learn to be unhappy. No one is born sceptical or negative. Self-doubt, self-criticism, negativity and pessimism are the result of negative thoughts that you have learned to take seriously. Your self-image and personality are a compilation of thoughts that you have about yourself, some of which may be negative. If you had never learned to take seriously negative thoughts about yourself, you wouldn’t experience the feelings that go along with them today. You are the sole creator of all your negative thoughts. Your thoughts have no power to harm you other than the power you give them.
Unfortunately, if you are not taught that the thoughts you have about yourself are just thoughts, you will start to believe that they describe the way you really are. The more you believe your own thinking, the more obscured your healthy functioning becomes. Poor self-esteem is healthy functioning that has been obscured with self-doubting thoughts you have learned to take seriously. Consider this: a young child wouldn’t think of asking himself, ‘Am I good enough?’ He would have to learn to ask himself such questions. Prior to learning these types of self-doubting thoughts, a child’s self-image is quite healthy and intact. If you can learn to accept negative thoughts about yourself, then you can also learn to disregard and take less seriously the negative thoughts that run through your mind. And as you do, your healthy functioning will return very quickly. As the thoughts are dismissed, a more elevated feeling will return.
Your healthy functioning is an invisible but knowable force within you. It’s not something that you can touch or prove, but then neither is a dream. Yet you know that dreams exist! The first steps in tapping into your healthy functioning are to trust that it does indeed exist, and then simply have the desire to access it. Remember, there are plenty of miraculous aspects of life that are invisible – thoughts, dreams, creativity, intuition, common sense, and wisdom.
The reason that healthy functioning may be so foreign to you is that when you are experiencing it, you usually don’t even know it. It’s such a simple, uncomplicated feeling that you don’t take notice. It’s not a feeling like excitement that you can easily describe. In fact, healthy functioning is easier to describe in its absence.
Healthy psychological functioning is the feeling you have when everything seems OK, when life seems simple and you have a sense of perspective. It’s the feeling you get when you are able to be touched by the simple things in life – watching a child playing, the leaves falling from a tree, or the motion of a door opening. When you are engaged in healthy functioning you are able to maintain a sense of internal equilibrium irrespective of what happens to be going on around you. Healthy functioning exists independently of the external parts of your life. It’s a feeling within you that you can learn to access.
Once you understand that healthy functioning is a part of you, you will open the door to noticing its presence in your life. Healthy functioning will become your normal mode of emotional functioning when you accept the fact of its existence. Think back to the last time you woke up on ‘the right side of the bed’ and you felt a sense of gratitude about your life – the last time you said to yourself, ‘Life seems magical.’ Even eternal pessimists have moments when the magic of life inspires them. Try to recall the last time something happened in your life that you wish hadn’t happened, yet you maintained a sense of perspective, you kept your cool. Why is it that sometimes you are able to maintain your sense of perspective while at other times you feel as if you are going to lose your mind? The answer is that sometimes you are tapped into your healthy functioning and sometimes you aren’t. It’s interesting to note that if you have ever felt the feeling I am describing here – your healthy functioning – then you already know that it exists. It doesn’t have to disappear into nothingness and then reappear by pure chance every once in a while. Like intuition, healthy functioning is an invisible force within you that you can call upon. It’s a feeling that you can learn to live with. You just have to know that it’s there for you and to want it to appear – and it will.
Accessing and Aligning with Strength
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could learn to live in the state of mental health that I’ve been describing? The first step in doing so is to open your mind to the possibility. I have seen it happen to so many people that I believe it can happen for you. Know that if you have ever felt peaceful during a crisis, if you have ever kept your cool when others weren’t able to do so, then the possibility exists for this to occur on a regular basis. This book is about helping you to align yourself with your healthy functioning, your inner feeling of peace and strength. In order to overcome unhappiness and become a happier, more joyful person, you must find something in your life that is more powerful and important than your unhappiness. Healthy functioning is more powerful and beautiful than any source of misery. Once you begin to recognize healthy functioning in your life, it will become the most important factor. Discovering your healthy functioning is all you need to live a genuinely happy, productive life. If a problem can’t be solved while you are tapped into your healthy functioning, then it simply can’t be solved.
Two simple facts can summarize much of what you need to know about people. We are all very different – and we are all very similar! When our personalities or thought systems are turned on, we are but one of literally billions of separate people with our own individual stories, ideas, complaints, and dramas. In this domain, there is separateness, friction, stress, strife, and lots of unhappiness. Everyone is actively thinking and, unfortunately, believing most of what they are thinking. There is a great deal of confusion in this domain because everyone thinks that their way is the ‘right’ way. But when our minds are quiet, when we are simply ‘being’, and are aligned with our healthy functioning, we are all, in a very important sense, the same, at least in the ways that really matter. We are peaceful and filled with peaceful feelings. We are understanding of our differences, loving, and kind to ourselves and to others. We see the bigger picture, the innocence in our differences, and we can access the beauty of life.
As I just said, you cannot get rid of something as powerful as unhappiness unless you have something even more powerful to replace it with – your healthy functioning. This part of you is so much more powerful than anything you could ever ‘think of’. Your healthy functioning is a place inside yourself where you can rest in your being instead of being active in your personality. It is a place of meditation – but you don’t have to meditate to get there. You only need to know that it exists – and prefer to be there – to get there. Your healthy functioning allows you to live your life from moment to moment, always doing the best that you can. It allows you to remember that the most important aspect of life is enjoying it and feeling peaceful. When you feel this way, you are truly at your best, and everything tends to work itself out – and if it doesn’t, you know that it also would have if you weren’t engaged in healthy functioning.
Once you realize that healthy functioning is something that resides within you, and is every bit as real as any other part of your life, you can begin to call on it as a resource when you need it. You must, however, treat your healthy functioning as something that does exist; it must be more than an idea to you. It must be something you trust, like intuition.
Your Thought System versus Healthy Functioning
Your thought system is concerned only with the details of your life, how you compare with others, your worldly pursuits, your intellect, your ego gratification, and your endless supply of wants and needs. You can’t satisfy your thought system. Its job is to think, compare, contrast and analyse. It is concerned with what happens in your life. The set of guidelines within which it operates is totally inconsistent with enjoyment. When you align yourself exclusively with your thought system, as so many people do, you are doomed to a life of frustration and unhappiness.
You can’t think your way to happiness, nor can you do anything to make yourself happy. Happiness is a state of mind, not a set of circumstances. It’s a peaceful feeling you can learn to live with, not something you have to search for. You can never find happiness by searching because the moment you try, you imply that it is found outside yourself. It isn’t. Happiness is the feeling of your own healthy functioning. When you accept the idea that healthy functioning is a significant part of yourself, you can stop trying to be happy and simply learn to be happy.
If you don’t learn to trust in and access your healthy functioning, it’s impossible to learn to be happy, because rather than learning to look for a feeling within yourself, you will continue to pay attention to the negative thoughts that run through your mind.
Your healthy functioning is not concerned with what happens in your life. It has a more expansive vision. It is concerned with how you relate to what happens in your life. Obviously there is a tremendous difference between these two modes. Your thought system comes up with what ‘it thinks’ would make it happy. Your healthy functioning, on the other hand, is what makes happiness possible. If all you had was your thought system, you would never be happy. You would be able to think of plenty of things that might make you happy, but you could never actually feel happy. Your thinking mind would keep coming up with conditions that would supposedly make you happy, but when the conditions were met, your thought system would begin to process all over again – coming up with new conditions that must be met. Your thought system will come up with ideas like, ‘I’ll be happy when my financial circumstances get better.’ If you won the lottery, however, your thought system would start all over again: ‘I wish the jackpot had been bigger,’ or ‘Oh no, what if I lose the money?’ or ‘What if they run out of money and can’t pay me?’ Such thoughts would again start to fill your head.
Your healthy functioning is that part of you that allows you to feel happy whether or not your financial circumstances are what you would like them to be. It’s a place within you that always feels content. Your healthy functioning is not interested in what happens, it’s only interested in how you feel and how you relate to what happens. All events, the good and bad, come and go. It is only your memory, your thinking, that keeps any event alive and relevant. The key to unlocking your inner happiness is to realize that you are the creator of those thoughts. Your healthy functioning is the part of you that knows that the true power in life is in the thinker – you – and not in the thoughts themselves.
Your healthy functioning is not just a theory or a passive entity to be read about and then forgotten. It’s a very real, positive and living force within you that you can learn to access. And as I have stated, you have already accessed it many times in the past, at those moments when everything felt just right. The key to eliminating unhappiness and replacing it with joyfulness is to learn to recognize healthy functioning when it is present in your life, and to help it grow and develop.
Your mental health can never be completely lost, it can only be covered up by negative, habitual and insecure thoughts that you have learned to take too seriously. The more seriously you take your own thoughts, the more distant your healthy functioning seems to be. Becoming aware that you have not just a personality and thoughts about your life, but also this other part of yourself, this ‘healthy functioning’, is a major weapon against unhappiness. When you know deep in your heart (even in the midst of a depressed state) that beneath your negativity lies a peaceful and light-hearted feeling that is ever present, you will regain the hope and confidence that a nicer, non-depressed, feeling is just around the corner – which it is. The only factor holding your unhappiness in place is your own thinking. All you need to do is relax and open your mind to the possibility that there is more to life than what you think about, and a new richness and sense of peace will begin to unfold for you. Begin by appreciating the simple, powerful feeling of your own healthy functioning.
If you are a parent, try to think back to the moment your first child was born. Remember the bliss, the joy in the way you felt. If you aren’t a parent, remember an instance when you were completely ‘present’, a time when your mind was nowhere else but right where you were, a time when everything seemed ‘just right’. It may have been a time in the beauty of nature, in a forest or by the sea. Perhaps it was a time when you fell in love. Everyone, no matter who they are, or how depressed they have been, has had at least some moments of healthy functioning in their life. No one had to teach you how to feel your own mental health. It just happens, all by itself, when you slow down your thinking and turn off your thinking mind. Your healthy functioning exists in the now. It occurs when you take your focus of attention off your concerns and problems, and instead allow your mind to feel at rest.
As you begin to realize that your healthy functioning comes from you and not from external sources, no matter how beautiful they may be, you can begin tapping into this beautiful place whenever you wish. Becoming conscious of your healthy functioning can be learned. You can learn to tap into it as easily while you are with your children or at work as you can while you are sitting in front of a fire or walking in a forest. All it takes is understanding, intention, patience, and practice.
Your healthy functioning is not only a place you can tap into on rare occasions or when you are sitting quietly by yourself, it’s a place in which you can live. Ask yourself daily, even hourly, ‘Where is that place in me? I know it’s there because I’ve felt it before.’ Your search for, and recognition of, your healthy functioning must be a significant and integral part of your life.
Your worldly pursuits, your dreams, and your aspirations are not jeopardized when you learn to tap into your healthy functioning. On the contrary, you will begin to see the bigger picture, you’ll see what truly motivates you and what you really want in your life. You will also see what activities and pursuits would be better left alone. This ability to leave things alone will also be true with regard to your thinking. Once you see where a particular train of thought is leading you, and you don’t like where you’re headed, you’ll be able to change course. You’ll spend less time doing things mechanically, and more time doing things for the love of it. Instead of believing ‘Anything worth doing is worth doing well: you’ll start to see that ‘Anything worth doing is worth doing because you enjoy it.’ You’ll have authentic inner power, a greater ability to say ‘no’ when it’s appropriate, and the wisdom to know what you really want. Accessing your healthy functioning allows you to see information in new and creative ways, and allows you to make rational, productive decisions in a timely manner. It allows you to enjoy, rather than struggle with, the ebbs and flows of life. It encourages your wisdom and common sense to surface.
Your healthy functioning can be pointed to and it can be felt. You can see the effects of its energy. You can see acts of loving kindness, compassion, and caring. You can see people who used to be angry and depressed who are now peaceful, loving, and happy. You can see people who have so much love and self-respect in their hearts that they rarely get defensive, upset, or critical of others.
Looking for the Clues
You can begin to look for clues to point you in the direction of your healthy functioning. To begin, you must first acknowledge that you have it in you – and then appreciate it when it is present. Don’t just look for healthy functioning when you feel upset, but pay attention to it when you are feeling good. In this way, your healthy functioning can grow. As more and more of your energy and attention are directed towards this other part of yourself, you will find yourself experiencing it far more often. The better feeling you experience will feed on itself, giving you more confidence and more hope, setting forth a positive, life-enhancing cycle. Over time you will be able to see yourself moving in and out of your healthy functioning, and eventually you will be able to live in this state of mind most of the time. Even when you aren’t able to tap into this happier state, you will at least know that it exists. This knowledge will protect and shield you against the grips of unhappiness and depression.
Your healthy functioning must become more important and more real to you than your unhappiness has been in the past. If it does, you will see new light and new hope emerging in your life. The moments of mental health you have experienced in the past will become minutes, then hours, and finally a way of life. If you can see the truth in what I am saying, that there is so much more to you than your unhappiness and your negative thoughts about yourself, you have reached the start of your road to freedom. You must begin to acknowledge that you do indeed have mental health, that you do have healthy functioning. You must realize that even if you don’t feel it at the moment, it’s still there, waiting for your attention.
Imagine that you have a special pair of orange socks that you have lost but would like to wear. If you are certain that you own them, and you know what they look like, and you really want to find them, then you are a thousand times more likely to find them than if you don’t even know that you own them! How would you ever find something if you didn’t even know what you were looking for – or for that matter that there was even anything to look for?
If you begin actively to search out, explore, and yearn for your own inner sanity, you will find what you are looking for. As your understanding and faith in the existence of your healthy functioning increases you will discover a better feeling surfacing. As this part of you that is never depressed is recognized and acknowledged, it will begin to conquer your unhappiness in the same way that sunlight will bring life to a plant that has been left in the dark. Light is more powerful than darkness. Healthy functioning is more powerful than unhappiness. Once your inherent mental health and happiness are acknowledged, they will be too powerful to remain an inactive force in your life. Once you recognize this feeling for what it is, it will become self-reinforcing until it overshadows any unhappiness that remains.
You don’t find light by studying the dark. I know this sounds obvious, and to a certain degree, it is. But this common-sense way of approaching life is anything but common. More often than not, therapists and friends will get you to describe your pain and look at the implications of it and the ‘reasons’ behind it in an attempt to bring you to a state of peace. You will be asked to explore the parts of your past that were painful and to ‘get in touch’ with your negativity and your dark side. If you are depressed, you are already in touch with your negativity. To become happy, you need to travel in the other direction – towards your healthy functioning. Please don’t misunderstand what I am saying: a good listener and a sympathetic ear can do wonders for the soul, and is a sign of a good friendship. I’m not attempting to place judgment or criticize typical therapeutic approaches and certainly not good friendships. Instead, I’m showing you how to decide for yourself what is going to bring you what you want in life. If you have a dark side, fine. Acknowledge it and move forward. Excessive thinking about your past and your problems will only convince you that you do, in fact, have good reasons to be upset and unhappy.

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