The Human Experiment

[Punxsutawney Phil]

Hello everyone.

For the next week I am going to very consciously be happy, in spite of whatever happens, as an experiment, and see what effect it has on my life. I am not going to mull over CBT techniques, positive thinking, negative thinking or anything else. I am simply going to try to retain a sunny disposition. Not to please anyone else, but rather to make myself feel good about the fact I exist. 'Happiness is an option' will be my motto.

I have realised of late that my misery is not a direct result of my problems, and in actual fact the reverse is true: I have been unhappy all my life and this has created problems for me. The negative effects I witness in my present are simply more obvious to me than the roll my past played in setting this up in the first place, so I naturally assume something needs to be fixed outside of myself. But SA plays many tricks and one of the biggest is making us believe that the problem is somehow 'out there' in the big cruel world. The truth is though the world has perhaps been cruel to us in the past, this is now stored up and effecting the way we experience the present, preventing us from seeing it truthfully. Nothing that I think I am experiencing is actually real. I am the only bully in all this, no-one else.

So that's it. No matter how 'out of character' or forced or painful it may be for me, I am going to be happy for the week.

I will report back next week. Wish me luck!

PS: Before you cynics out there pounce on me for being naive, I just have to say that I am the biggest, most completely negative doom and gloom pessimist on the face of the earth. That is why this is an experiment for me. Instead of once again merely proving to myself how right I am about how awful the universe is, I am going to try something that I wouln't normally do...

[emgee]

If only it was that simple, you can't switch happiness on and off at will. Worth a try though, I suppose.

[007]

If the weather is as nice as this all week it should be easy.

[Innervision]

Originally Posted by Punxsutawney Phil

I have realised of late that my misery is not a direct result of my problems, and in actual fact the reverse is true:

This is not as daft as it may seem to some people.
It's pretty clear to me that what is going on around us at any given time can seriously affect our level of happiness and our quality of life. You, however, are stating that it's past, not present, issues that have been problematic.

This being so, current happiness, or lack of, is simply a state of mind which can be influenced by how we think, perceive and then approach our life.

Isn't this basic CBT anyway?

There is a quote I often see on this site, one from a Radiohead song. It states that "We do it to ourselves". In many cases I believe it to be so true. if we really do do it to ourselves, maybe there is more than just the one option of unhappiness and misery. I believe this to be so, so since adopting this approach my life has changed for the better. I've not been miserable for 4 years now, despite SA and other issues still being present.

If we can think ourselves miserable, surely we can think ourselves happy too.

[Holly]

Hey Phil,

Anything's worth a try and everyone's different so good luck with it. Doesn't work for me though - I attempt to maintain a facade of positivity and joviality all the time when at work (nature of the job - lots of banter and can't avoid social interaction), but, as I'mgonnabeawheel said, it leaves me feeling exhausted as the way I'm acting is in direct contrast to how I'm feeling.

I sometimes think the problem is in just trying too hard - there have been times I've resigned myself to going into work and allowed myself to feel miserable - as a result I haven't expended any unnessacary energy on "pretending" to be ok so as just to fit in, and paradoxically, I've felt much better and been able to feel relaxed and myself again.

It's oh so complex...I think a lot of the time I'm just at the mercy of my moods and there's not a lot I can do to manage them! (Despite CBT etc.)

[Winnie57]

I've thought along similar lines before but not really gone through with it as I've found it hard to keep up the being happy despite everything.

Let us know how it goes and if your result is positive I may try again

[blubs]

good luck with this...I think it might work if you find a way to actually be happy..by concentrating on good things...like the nice weather as someone mentioned....rather than just acting happy.
Interesting point about being a bully...I never thought of SA like that...but I suppose we do bully ourselves mentally.

[Ross PK]

I've tried to make myself feel happy when I've felt depressed, and tried to make myself not feel anxious when I feel anxious, but it just makes me feel worse.

[Punxsutawney Phil]

Well, my week's experiment being happy is over and it has certainly been interesting. I have felt genuinely better, less tired, grouchy and fed up than I have in a long while.

Someone used the word facade in reference to this, which is something worth clarifying. A facade implies putting on a show that betrays your actual feelings. This would indeed leave you exhausted by the end of the week, which has often happened to me too. I used to think by trying to be act positive, I could somehow do a deal with life that would reward me with a way out of SA. But it doesn't work like that. If your inner feelings are incongruent with the outer facade, the world you get back will be a reflection of your inner state of mind. This presents a big problem. If we have to genuinely feel better in order to get better, where do we start when we feel so bad?

As most of us are well aware, whether we are acting positive or negative is really of little significance when we are struck once again by painful self-consciousness. There is nothing nice about it and everything horrible about it and changing it is beyond our grasp. As far as I can tell the only thing left remotely under my control are my attitudes - my feelings about my feelings.

This last week, I have been trying to feel as genuinely happy as I could, and see what effect it had on my external world. I wasn't trying to adopt another trick to try and get people to react to me differently. There is a distinct difference. We have to forcibly remind ourselves we are doing this therapy selfishly and solely for us, not others. If we see people being more open and friendly back to us as result then that is a nice side effect, but it isn't our goal to get them to do that. I really think happiness - or perhaps I should say the ability to choose happiness - is one of our most powerful weapons in life. This is unique to human beings. We are like animals in that we cannot force our feelings (like emgee said, you can't switch happiness on and off), but we do have attitudes, which makes us unique among species. In CBT when they talk about using your positive feelings what they are really referring to are these positive attitides, which you can develop and learn no matter what you actually feel. It is important that these attitudes are congruent with what is really going on, regardless of what you are feeling which is not congruent as it is related to past trauma. Anyway, you've heard all this before. It's all basically CBT and it's always down to how we respond to it as individuals.

But I would say have as happy an outlook as you can for the week. A cure to SA it isn't, but for saving yourself countless hours merely increasing your pain, I thoroughly recommend it.

[bluebottle]

This is a very interesting thread indeed! I used to be the most negative person anyone could imagine, right until the beginning of this year. I often found it hard to say anything positive about anything, sometimes I even refrained from contacting people for that very reason. However, after a series of events which made my life look like a very bleak place indeed, I just needed a change - it was either giving up totally or changing my attitude about life. The book "Feel the fear any do it anyway" by Susan Jeffers has been a great help to me in this. I have seen this book being picked apart elsewhere in the forum, and I do admit, it doesn't help much with SA, but it did help me tremendously to get a more positive outlook on life. I have found out that it is really possible to choose how to react to a certain situation, and how to feel about it - I have been able to just stop and say "no, I don't want to feel miserable now" - and in most cases it worked, sometimes immediately and sometimes it took a while. Positive self-talk, reading affirmations, and listening to positive music have also made a huge difference for me. I used to be a victim of my wildly changing moods, now I can control them much better, my lows are not half as bad as they used to be and they don't last very long as I know what to do to feel better - it's amazing!! I haven't felt miserable for over 2 months now and that is definitely an all-time record for me.

To the OP: I'd be interested to know whether you intend to keep up your experiment??

[Punxsutawney Phil]

Thanks for the responses.

Yes, bluebottle, I'm definately going to keep this going. Keeping in a more positive frame of mind doesn't solve your problems, but it allows you to see more clearly what the problems are. It's like keeping your head just above the water to stay afloat. From this perspective you can see that land isn't so far away. If you let your head under water you will drown. Likewise, when we sit in the sludge of negativity it prevents us from seeing what is actually going on for us, and what options are available to us. Positivity won't 'make us better', but negativity prevents us moving forward at all, as it is a force of resistance (to fear). It is completely understandable and explainable but it is essential that it must be removed first before we can even begin to work on anything else.

I once read on a website about healing trauma that "negativity is just the conscious mind's resistance to the pain of your emotions that wish to emerge. You will find that when you connect emotionally with yourself, the negativity justs evaporates since, like a valve on a kettle, you are no longer under pressure from within to keep yourself down." Well, after reading that little gem I naturally thought I didn't have to stop my negative thoughts anymore since I was assured they would go when I'd done enough 'feeling'. What ensued was several years of wallowing in the mud of my unpleasant feelings under the illusion that I was somehow getting better. While I still agree with the statement, it is a little misleading. The negativity will indeed vanish, but not for the time being! We have to consciously remove the negative obstacles that stop that healing taking place.

I think I am finally beginning to understand what Dr Richards' tapes were constantly banging on about. We really do have to "call anxiety's bluff". We are under the spell of an illusion and the worst thing we can do in response to our scary and obsessive beliefs is reinforce them by responding negatively.

You can argue me on this one but for my money, essentially, this is the SA cure: if we don't respond to negativity by getting negative it shows fear in its true colours: powerless, meaningless nothingness.

[Innervision]

Originally Posted by Punxsutawney Phil

... We really do have to "call anxiety's bluff". We are under the spell of an illusion and the worst thing we can do in response to our scary and obsessive beliefs is reinforce them by responding negatively.

You can argue me on this one but for my money, essentially, this is the SA cure: if we don't respond to negativity by getting negative it shows fear in its true colours: powerless, meaningless nothingness.

No argument from me.

I called it's bluff on my lifelong severe blushing problem. It rarely bothers me now, yet it crippled me previously. These things only have as much power as we believe they have. It does take time to turn this on it's head, but it can be done.