Happy: ‘So what if it hurts me?’

Like most of my posts, the title of this one pays homage to a song lyric, but it also references the best book I’ve read in a long time: Happy by Derren Brown.  This masterpiece gives the reader a whistle-stop tour of the history of happiness philosophy, and provides some simple insights and advice that can help us to live happily. I’d like to share some of those thoughts here.

When it comes to happiness (or indeed lack thereof), the problem that we have in modern Western society is our fierce attachment to the ‘hedonic treadmill’: we are led to believe that possessions, people, fitness crazes, holidays, TV shows, etc etc, will bring us happiness. We buy the latest iPhone and experience a fleeting joy, until the next model comes out and we are left wanting again. This is because possessions do not bring real, lasting happiness. Similarly, neither do holidays or relationships.

Why is this? As the ancient Bhuddist saying states: “Wherever you go, there you are”. Possessions, relationships and holidays never bring true contentment, because whatever we buy, whoever we spend time with, whatever our material riches and however many luxury holidays we take, we are always ourselves.

That we can never escape our own bodies and minds is a somewhat terrifying thought, but a liberating and insightful one too. Once we realise the significance of this fact, it is a powerful tool for cultivating contentment. If I’m not happy at home, chances are I won’t be happy in an exotic beachside location, because I’ll still be me. So, the solution is to become more ok with myself. This is the only path to true peace and happiness.

I’d like to take this opportunity to draw your attention to a video that describes wonderfully the distinction between the fleeting joy that things, people and positive life events bring, and that robust happiness that can be located and nurtured within. Tara Brach is a psychologist and a mindfulness teacher, and offers great insight into the world of true happiness. Feel free to take some time to close your eyes, relax and listen to her wise words.

Becoming more ok with ourselves, and therefore connecting with our inner happiness – which, by the way, we all have the capacity for – involves being open and accepting of our experiences, both positive and negative. We have a tendency to believe that happiness is linked with not experiencing pain, suffering or negative events, so we try to avoid such experiences. Although counter-intuitive, avoiding difficult thoughts, feelings and events isn’t the answer. It’s part of the human condition that we will all experience challenges across the life-course, and it’s human nature to have fluctuations in mood and energy levels. Rather than beating ourselves up about this, we do better to acknowledge and accept our experiences in any given moment, whatever they are.

If this notion seems contradictory and counter-intuitive, that’s fair enough – it kind of is! – but even so, I hope you will be willing to give it a go and see how it impacts on your life. A good starting point might be to try some guided meditation practices – you’ll find loads of these by searching online - personally I can recommend the Dorset Mindfulness Centre’sSoundcloud page. These practices can help you to connect with your thoughts and feelings and become more accepting of them, which in turn can help you to experience a sense of inner peace and contentment; in other words, true happiness.

In sum, happiness isn’t about running away from life’s difficulties, but turning towards them and becoming more ok with ourselves. This is vital, since you are always you, no matter where you go or what you do. Instead of relying on external objects, people and places for comfort, we can find it by connecting with, getting to know, and coming to be ok with, our internal worlds.

I’d like to finish by quoting Leona Lewis’s song about happiness, which sums up these ideas quite nicely:

So what if it hurts me?

So what if I break down?

So what if this world just throws me off the edge

My feet run out of ground?

I’ve gotta find my place

I’ve gotta hear my sound

Don’t care about all the pain in front of me

I just wanna be

Happy

Your Hallelujah

One of my favourite things about this time of year is listening to Christmas music.  Over the last few years I’ve really enjoyed Leona Lewis’s album Christmas, With Love, which delivers the perfect balance of fun and lower-tempo songs, originals and classics, and really showcases lots of different sides of her personality and musical talent.  Anyway, one of the slower tracks on the album is Your Hallelujah, a beautiful, emotionally charged song.  I was driving home from work the other day and found myself almost in tears when the song came on, which compelled me to write a few words about the song and what it means to me.

The song, for me, brings absent loved ones to mind.  Not just my own, but others’ too.  In fact, the first time I heard it was around the time I’d found out a colleague had lost his dad.  I didn’t even know the guy that well and he’d probably think it a bit strange if he knew this, but I felt quite affected by the incident and wished there was something I could’ve done to help.  I remember thinking of this guy and his family when the song came on, and now it reminds me of other people whose absence is always felt more at this time of year.

Remembering lost loved ones at Christmas

The first verse and chorus of Your Hallelujah go like this:

Winter's cold, in the light
Somebody's waiting
Feel the warmth, safe and sound now
All the joy, all the fears
You can let go now
Watch the snow gently fall down

Someone needs you
Someone loves you
Hallelujah
Now you're coming home
Hallelujah
Angels calling out to you
You can hear them sing your hallelujah

These lyrics, along with the beautiful melody, strike a chord with me and make me feel a little more connected to those I know who are no longer with us.  I envisage those people at peace, and wish a little that they were coming home as the song suggests.  In my post Save You I talk of a chap I knew who had recently taken his own life, and how I wished, as most of us do in these situations, that he could have known how many people would have begged him to stay.  The lyric someone needs you; someone loves you reminds me that we should always make sure the people around us know how much we value them.

So, at this time of year, I feel it’s really important to tell and show our friends, family, admired acquaintances, inspiring colleagues, and any other important people in our lives, that they are important to us.  That we need them and love them.  And this has also got me thinking of those people who are unfortunate enough not to have any loved ones to celebrate Christmas with.  When I see homeless people in the street, particularly around Christmas, I occasionally sit and have a chat with them as I think sometimes this might be more needed than a few coins or a coffee - well, actually, a chat AND a coffee is my preferred offering! – just to give them a feeling that they are valued; they are needed as much as anyone else in this world.  I hope I’ll find some time this year to spread some festive cheer to the less fortunate members of my local community, perhaps even by doing some volunteering with the Salvation Army or some such organisation.

To sum up, I’m making a big effort this Christmas to make as many people around me as possible feel needed and loved.  Spending as much quality time with friends and family as I can, making sure they know how grateful I am to have that time with them, and extending some of that kinship to those who may be lonely.  I love that by doing this I will be lifting my own spirits as well as that of those around me (hopefully!) and hope that you will all do the same and have a very Merry Christmas :)

The Stairway To Heaven, Oh It Starts In Hell

Hello readers, and welcome to the latest instalment of On My Cloud, where I like to ramble on about things I feel strongly about!  I say ramble partly in jest, as I hope that in reality the things I say are considered valuable by others too and strike a chord with at least some readers.  The reason I write this blog at all is that I feel the things I’m writing about are incredibly important and need to be in public awareness, so as always I welcome and encourage comments and sharing with others who may be interested in what I have to say. (Thanks!)

Having experienced a few dry spells with my writing, at the moment I’m a bit inundated with ideas for things to write about, largely due to my current reading around psychiatry and mental health services.  Most notably, I am presently reading a book entitled Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm than Good by James Davies (a fantastic read that I’d recommend to everyone, although it makes my blood boil!).  I don’t need to explain what it’s all about, since the title does a good enough job of giving you the gist. 

 

I was prompted to write this post when reading a chapter that addresses cultural interpretations of emotional suffering and mental distress, just one issue amongst the many revealed by Davies in the book.  This particular topic, though, somehow struck a chord with me in a way that inspired me to write about it first above everything else, perhaps because of the personal significance it has for me as well as the wider social and cultural questions it raises.  As a result, what I think we’re going to end up with is a piece that not only addresses one of the widest and deepest cultural issues I’ve written about yet, but also one that is more personal and self-disclosing than anything I have written previously.  I hope it makes for a good read!

(Having already taken three paragraphs to introduce the topic!) I’d like to start by posing some questions: what does emotional suffering or mental distress mean to you?  What function do you believe it plays, if any?  Or is it just something that gets in the way and needs to be gotten rid of as promptly as possible?  In Cracked…, Davies notes that in Western culture, mental suffering has come to be perceived more and more as something that does not serve a purpose or function, and needs to be removed by any means possible.  Psychiatry has purportedly contributed significantly to this perception, as I will explain briefly now.

To give some context, one of the key objectives of Cracked is to expose the arbitrary and corrupted nature by which mental illness is defined by psychiatry, and the building of a mythical world in which mental distress is caused by some physical or biological phenomenon.  In fact, what you’ll find if you dig deep is that there is actually no scientific backing for this notion.  However, as psychiatry has gained power (largely though the financial rewards associated with pharmaceutical industry links), the notion that mental distress is biologically rooted has taken hold in our culture, therefore rendering mental suffering as a result of abnormality, to be eradicated by psychiatric interventions (which sadly almost inevitably means medication). 

Mental distress: part of being human or bioliogical abnormailty?!

Eradicating suffering and emotional distress sounds great on the surface, so one might argue that it’s wonderful that psychiatry offers a solution to this.  Aside from the fact that there is little-to-no scientific backing for this approach (to be discussed further in later posts!), there is another problem here.  Before we started to view mental distress as a sign of illness and abnormality, we relied much more heavily on psychological and spiritual explanations and ways of coping.  Addressing distress in this way, I believe, is far more productive.  By recognising the causes of distress, often traumatic events or general life stressors, we can also properly deal with the problem rather than blunting it.  Furthermore, we can learn and develop from the experience.  As the aforementioned Mr Davies notes, “from affliction there can be derived some unexpected gain, new perspective or beneficial alteration”.   

The above statement rings true and resonates with me, and I feel uncomfortable with the fact that more and more suffering is being medicalised and passed off as something to be blunted and controlled.  More and more things that were once accepted as a normal part of the human experience are now defined as symptoms of mental illness.  I feel that resilience is one of the most important things in the maintenance of psychological wellbeing, and the medicalisation of distress is not helping us to build a resilient and mentally healthy population.

As already hinted at, I am of the school of thought that distress can be learned from and help a person to develop and overcome life’s challenges, and that this is being stifled unnecessarily and unhelpfully in many cases by the current misguided tendency, through psychiatry, to associate mental distress with biology.  (To illustrate my point: how many times have you heard the phrase ‘chemical imbalance’ in relation to mental health?  If you were to read Cracked, you’d realise this is an unproven and therefore dangerous notion, which is why I am so concerned by the view of suffering that psychiatry instils). 

I’ll illustrate my own personal stance on this topic using a combination of anecdote and music.  As regular readers will already know, I am a huge music fan and like to give each blog post a lyrical title and refer to relevant music within my writing!

To quote a cliché and indeed song title, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.  And let’s be honest, clichés generally materialise because there is an element of truth in them to begin with.  Most of us have probably had times when we could really relate to this statement, times when we’ve come through adversity feeling stronger than before.  For me, the best example is a relationship break-up I went through a few years ago.  It felt like the worst thing ever at the time, like the pain would be endless and insurmountable.  Of course, this wasn’t the case!  As beautifully articulated by Matt Cardle in his song Porcelain:

All the things in this life that you thought you just couldn’t bear

It’s the pressure inside makes the diamond that’s shining there

All the pain and the heartache can break you and shape you like clay

Now you’ve come through the fire and that makes you porcelain

It took a long time, but once I’d got over it I felt so much better than I had whilst in the relationship.  Not only this, but I realised that I’d learnt a lot and gained new perspective on certain things.  For me, the gaining of perspective is perhaps the most important benefit of coming through adversity and dealing with distress in a productive way. 

Many people who have experienced bereavement will be able to relate to the idea that such events, whilst horrendous, really have the power to make us appreciate life, the world and, most importantly, the people around us, more than we did before.  I myself experienced a significant bereavement during my teenage years: I am one of triplets, and unfortunately one of my two brothers took his own life when we were just 14.  Of course, this is a horrible thing for my family to go through, but it has undoubtedly altered my perspective on life and made me so much more grateful for my loved ones.  Indeed it has probably also, on some subconscious level, influenced my aspirations in life and driven some of my passion for the very things I write about now.

Of course there are negatives as well: for instance, the incredibly sudden and unexpected nature of the incident meant that for a while I experienced high anxiety around thoughts of similar things happening again, and still do to a certain extent.  However, I can now recognise this as a fairly normal, if slightly irrational, reaction to a traumatic experience.  If I were to read the DSM (or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which lists

all the conditions psychiatry has decided constitutes a mental disorder), I would probably find that I could diagnose myself with several ‘disorders’ based on this and other features of my personality, experiences and feelings.  Since I have worked through these difficulties and gained something from this, I hope you’ll agree that receiving a diagnosis of a mental disorder would not have been helpful to me, but this is what’s happening to people every day when they end up in mental health services.

What worries me is that more and more normal human experiences are being medicalised by psychiatrists.  This is characterised by the fact that each time the DSM is revised, the number of disorders it lists grows.  This is surely serving to reduce our ability to view distress as a normal part of human experience and enhancing our propensity to view it as a sign of illness that must be treated.  I find this thought quite scary, particularly considering that the diagnostic criteria set out in the DSM are based on nothing more scientific than the perceptions and discussions of a bunch of guys who work for the APA (American Psychiatric Association).  Anyway, I think I’m going off on a bit of a tangent here, so I’ll leave it there for you to ponder if you wish, with the promise of more on this in a later post.

I remember hearing a psychologist called Rachel Perkins speaking at a mental health conference last year.  There is one thing that she said that I remember very well because it resonated with me at the time, and I’m glad I remembered it because it is even more poignant for me now!  She noted that culturally we have come to rely on ‘experts’ (ie healthcare professionals, psychiatrists, etc.) to deal with our distress for us.  Why has this happened?  Shouldn’t we all in fact be the experts in managing our own distress and helping those around us to do the same?  I would agree with Ms Perkins that the answer is yes, we should be turning more often to ourselves and our support networks and less often to medicine to deal with normal human suffering. 

I myself am a big advocate of using support networks to overcome challenging times.  Yes, I’m incredibly fortunate to be blessed with a wonderful family and great friends, where others aren’t so lucky.  But that’s what support groups and such like are for, and all the more reason to invest more money in community-based, non-medical approaches to wellbeing, over medication and hospitalisation.  It’s amazing how beneficial a good chinwag can be, whether this be with a friend, family member, counsellor, support group, teacher,

Coffee and a chat: Something I find very therapeutic!

hairdresser, or a stranger you met on the bus! 

To me, it makes so much more sense to take this positive view of emotional suffering, to work through it and gain something from it, rather than demonising and abnormalising it (abnormalising isn’t actually a word but I’m using it anyway as it sounds good in this context!).  I’m not suggesting this is true for all cases of suffering because of course there are times when people are so severely distressed that a more intensive form of intervention is needed.  My point is that as psychiatry and the social constructs of mental illness grow, so does the perception of distress as abnormal, which I suggest is not a healthy feature of modern society. 

To lighten things up a bit, I’ll give you a few more anecdotes about my own ways of dealing with distress.  In previous posts I’ve talked about lifestyle elements and their impact on wellbeing, but I also use simple thinking processes to work through emotional difficulties. 

Something I actually find very helpful is, when I’m feeling really low or anxious, to consciously tell myself that this is a normal part of the human experience, or an understandable reaction to whatever is going on in my life at the time.  I find that this helps to ground me and perhaps to start problem solving whatever the problem is, which in turn helps me to steer clear of turning to ‘professionals’ for support that I don’t actually need.  I think there’s also something to be said for taking some of that distress and turning it into something positive, for example, channelling anger or hurt over an unfortunate experience into working harder to achieve my goals.  Another thing I find useful is to remember that without the bad times there wouldn’t really be good times either: in the words of Thomas Hardy, “If a way to the better there be, it first exacts a full look at the worst”; or, as Matt Cardle puts it, “The stairway to heaven, oh it starts in hell”.

If the above and other coping strategies don’t quite work as well as I need them to, then I know there are options available for further support, and have indeed made use of input from counsellors and psychologists in the past (I’m not completely adverse to the use of services and hope it doesn’t appear that way from what I’ve said here.  If it does, then be assured that this is only because I feel so passionately that the alternatives need greater attention!)

There is a fine balance to be struck between developing the right services, education and awareness (along with stigma reduction) so that people can access the support they need when they need it, and not becoming overly reliant on such support, which culturally we are in danger of doing.  Unfortunately there is a lot of work still to be done on all these fronts, and getting each one of those things to the level they need to be at is a very tall order (and once which I hope I can make a worthwhile contribution to fulfilling!).

To summarise, there are two main ways of perceiving mental distress and emotional suffering:  the positive view that it is a natural part of the human experience that can ultimately be gained from, and the negative view that it is the result of some kind of abnormality of the brain or biology.  There is some place for both, but as psychiatry has grown the negative view has seeped stealthily into our culture, leaving less and less room for the positive one.  I myself am an advocate of favouring the positive view a little more, and I’ll finish by leaving you with a couple of songs that depict my stance on the topic quite nicely.  Thanks for reading!