Living a Happy, Anxious Life

Paul, over at AnxietyGuru, asks the question, “Can You Live A Happy Anxious Life?”

It’s an interesting question, and I had to sit down for awhile and think about what my answer would be.

Paul posits:

Relative happiness is the kind you get when you buy something, say shoes or a motorcycle or whatever. It is temporary and subject to the whims of external change. Whereas inner happiness is yours no matter what, like all those fabulous bits of information you learned in school that you can’t use anywhere else, but yours they are.

I’m talking about inner peace and happiness. Now, admittedly you can be a Buddhist monk and never get there, but you can if you try. The fact that you can try should be, I hope, a signal that you can do more to be happy than you’re doing right now.

Dictionary.com has the following entry under happy:

1.         delighted, pleased, or glad, as over a particular thing: to be happy to see a person.

2.         characterized by or indicative of pleasure, contentment, or joy: a happy mood; a happy frame of mind.

3.         favored by fortune; fortunate or lucky: a happy, fruitful land.

4.         apt or felicitous, as actions, utterances, or ideas.

5.         obsessed by or quick to use the item indicated (usually used in combination): a trigger-happy gangster. Everybody is gadget-happy these days.

Anxiety, by the very nature of its presence, makes it difficult to achieve #3, since we anxious folk are generally skeptical of fortune or luck. But if we use #2 as our guiding light, which is what I think Paul was doing, then the answer is a resounding yes.

One of the very best things I learned in my treatment was to acknowledge and embrace the reality that things happen that are out of my control, and all of those years of pre-planning and proactive worrying didn’t change that a bit. It certainly gave me the illusion that nothing would go wrong, or if it did, I would be able to rapidly respond to the crisis. But it burned up energy and time for no good reason.

The downside of that – well, there were scores of downsides, but this is one of them – was that I was never in the moment during those times, because my mind and my emotions were perpetually skewed toward scanning the horizon for the next bad thing.

Once I began to let myself be present in the moment and feel the emotion that was appropriate for that snapshot in time, it became much easier to feel happy in an enjoyable way, not in the “if I let myself feel joy or peace, it will be crushing when it ends, because it always does” manner of my high anxiety years.

So when I stop to think about the things that make me happy, it’s much easier now to have clarity around what that means. I find great joy in time spent with my family, and I now allow this sense of calm, contentment, and happiness to wash over me like a waterfall, soaking me for as long as possible. Will this moment end, and will I eventually dry off again? Of course. But for that moment, that hour, that day, I’m drenched and soggy, which feels so much better than before.

I would call out these instances, these events, as reminders of my happiness, not happiness itself. I’m not engaged in some zero-sum game anymore, where I need to track and measure my level of joy, peace, and tranquility. I’m just me, a pretty happy guy, who often gets reminded of my happiness by people, places, and things. Other times, things don’t go as well, and rather than dwell on that, I seek out those very same people, places, and things that I know will keep me going until the dark cloud of anxiety passes over me.