How to be Happy (Step 2)

I last wrote that the first step to being a generally happy person would be to practice gratitude. Every day. Even just for 5 minutes as you start your day. It will re-train your mind to focus more on the good and beautiful people and things, both small and large, in your life, and less on your wants or desires for what you don’t have but wish you did. So what’s step 2?

Step 2: Be aware of your emotions.

Awareness of your emotions is something like being aware of the lights on the dashboard of your car. Pay attention to them and you can usually head of some problems that won’t leave you stranded on the highway. Or you can pretend they mean nothing, and eventually pay the consequences. You usually aren’t happy after that, right? Emotional awareness is part of maturity, especially since the negative emotions underneath the surface can quickly rise up, overwhelm our better decision making processes, and eventually sabotage us. So the best thing is to identify those emotions, and what they’re connected to in your life, and deal with them.

For example, a big one is being fearful, or afraid. We might use a less dramatic emotional word – concerned, anxious, worried – to capture various shades of fear. But avoiding what we fear, or just being paralyzed by it, definitely keeps us from experiencing happiness in life. We think it works the opposite – just bury that emotion, don’t acknowledge it, and you’ll be much happier. That can work for a little while. But its a short term strategy that yields lots of emotional, mental, and even physical problems in the end. Eventually, your car breaks down.

Think of all the normal fears that can derail us; like fear of failure, (or success), or fear of other people’s opinions of us, and fears about our family, our finances, our futures. Many fears are fears of the unknown that we treat as if they are real. They start in our minds with “what if…” and usually involve some worst case scenario.

Jesus said that His perfect love casts out fear. The more we experience the security of His love for us, the less the other fears will have their hold on us. Don’t condemn yourself when you discover your fears. Your human, we all fear things to various degrees. That’s normal. But the idea is to not allow the fears to dominate us, to have power of us. And they will if we keep them in the dark and never identify them. When they come up on the dashboard, you need to take some appropriate action.

Here’s a couple of ways to apply this. One is to grab a feelings list and go through it to identify your feelings. Maybe you do this daily, or 3 times a week. Some kind of regular rhythm. (I can email you a feelings list I’ve used for years if you can’t search online and find one you like.) This is just a “check in” with yourself to name what your feeling and what its connected to in your life. And then you can give that fear and that topic to the Lord in prayer. You can also process it with a good friend, counselor, or pastor to help you gain perspective. Or journal about it to sort through if that fear is founded in reality or has become the alligator under your bed. Remember, though fear is a normal emotion, it doesn’t have to control you. And courage is taking positive action despite that fear.

Here are a couple of questions I ask myself as I start most every day that help me go deeper into my motives, which often connect to how I’m feeling about a given situation. It requires some honesty and self evaluation, but its worth the effort. I don’t always like what I discover, but it pays off to read the lights on the dashboard.