Choosing happiness

[JennaW]

One amazing thing about life is that deeper understanding, more knowledge, and allowing one’s self to have multiple perspectives of something allows a person more choices. I found a post today that reverberated with me deeply: the choice of hanging around happy people.

This post is important to me for two reasons. First, for most of my life, I couldn’t—via inheriting clinical depression and anxiety from my father—choose a life of happiness. For ~10 years of my life, I struggled with 1) why am I so depressed, for so long, for no reason? and 2) why can’t I just choose happiness (i.e. why does my mood always end up downhill despite my best efforts)? It wasn’t until neurochemistry stepped into the limelight in my life that I realized that one could have a chemical imbalance that affected moods, personality, and emotional behavior. Much like insulin suddenly becomes a diabetic’s topic, neurotransmitters became mine. I realized that I had been struggling with a bad case of this, as I needed the highest dose of medication for anything to happen; by researching and reading on this, it was as much of a reality that I could turn off my asthma that I could turn off clinical depression.

Years later, having been “cured,” I realize that being in the normal range offered me a choice I’ve never had in my life: the choice (within normal constraints) to not pick depression, anger, and hatred. And after 10 years of unchosen depression, anger, and hatred, why in world would I pick those things when I now can pick joy, laughter, and balance? And part of that choice, for me, in a person who is neurochemically balanced, lies in choosing people to hang around with that lifts you up rather than any alternative. So it saddens me when people who have normal neurochemistry choose to focus on the negative. It seems like a waste of life to be able to choose but then choose destructive patterns of behavior.

More knowledge has given me more choices, and this is why I value the open pursuit of knowledge. I know what it’s like to be trapped in misery without a choice.

Secondly, I am interested in group dynamics, in the general sense as well as in the sense of humans interacting with each other. Interacting with one individual may not have as much of an effect as with a group; but it is observable in one’s self (if you’re not a complete hermit) or when observing others. I’ve had small tidbits of fun with this, where in public I will see what other people do when I do something—like turn around to see if the train is coming. Every time, a few heads will follow me to whip their heads around in the same direction. The same is true of people in groups—just watch sports fans at a ball game, or my favorite pastime, watching a group of men. While it may be easier to choose whether to interact with a group from the get-go, it may be harder to navigate within the group and not be affected by group dynamics.

The folks at Creating Passionate Users did a post called Angry/negative people can be bad for your brain:

Spend time with a nervous, anxious person and physiological monitoring would most likely show you mimicking the anxiety and nervousness, in ways that affect your brain and body in a concrete, measurable way. Find yourself in a room full of pissed off people and feel the smile slide right off your face. Listen to people complaining endlessly about work, and you’ll find yourself starting to do the same. How many of us have been horrified to suddenly realize that we’ve spent the last half-hour caught up in a gossip session—despite our strong aversion to gossip? The behavior of others we’re around is nearly irresistible. [This is called “emotional contagion”, addressed in the post].

When we’re consciously aware and diligent, we can fight this. But the stress of maintaining that conscious struggle against an unconscious, ancient process is a non-stop stressful drain on our mental, emotional, and physical bandwidth. And no, I’m not suggesting that we can’t or shouldn’t spend time with people who are angry, negative, critical, depressed, gossiping, whatever. Some (including my sister and father) chose professions (nurse practitioner and cop, respectively) that demand it. And some (like my daughter) volunteer to help those who are suffering (in her case, the homeless). Some people don’t want to avoid their more hostile family members. But in those situations—where we choose to be with people who we do not want to mirror—we have to be extremely careful!

[snip] Can any of us honestly say we haven’t experienced emotional contagion? Even if we ourselves haven’t felt our energy drain from being around a perpetually negative person, we’ve watched it happen to someone we care about. We’ve noticed a change in ourselves or our loved ones based on who we/they spend time with. We’ve all known at least one person who really did seem able to “light up the room with their smile,” or another who could “kill the mood” without saying a word. We’ve all found ourselves drawn to some people and not others, based on how we felt around them, in ways we weren’t able to articulate.

Sometimes I’ll talk to my friends about “the vibe” of an event. Well, this is what I meant—the mood of a place, or of an event. The group dynamics, the interactions, the language. It’s the resulting, additive situation a person becomes aware of when they walk in on a very heated argument between two people, or when a fight is about to start at a bar. Sometimes it can exist as a general direction of the individual or group—like a group of people planning a prank, or a political rally (I’ve been to both). A more sensitive, intuitional person can probably delve deeper into noticing specific details that contribute to “the vibe”.

What I get out of my past, my field, and this post is that I—having lived a little and having been treated for clinical depression—am responsible for how I treat my brain so that I don’t end up hurting myself in the long run. And my awareness of how brains work guides me to exercise this type of choice with a conscious effort. It’s not the cure to all ills, but I would say that a greater awareness of options, of brains, and of social/group dynamics has certainly helped me establish the active power of (my) choice, and a more secure sense of who I am.