I’ve been trying to up the ante with how consistently happy and harmless I can be, and it’s lead to some moments where I feel like I’m having a standoff with myself and can’t get out of feeling bad.
What if often seems like is when I’m trying to get back to feeling good (before more deeply investigating the issue) from whatever I’m feeling bad about, I have two main tactics:
- Focus on ‘priority’: because I want to be permanently happy and harmless and consider that my highest goal, it’s not worth feeling bad about anything.
- Focus on ‘control/pragmatism’: because I’ve seen that I can take effective action while feeling happy and harmless, it doesn’t help my situation to feel bad about it, I can both feel good and take action as needed.
Both of these have worked well at times, but I don’t feel like I can get either to work 100% of the time, I don’t have it down to a science. When it doesn’t work, it feels like the stress comes and goes in waves. I never fully getting back to feeling good, usually until more time passes and I’m distracted by other things in life or go to sleep. I find that for a few minutes I deeply contemplate one of these two perspectives and start feeling better and start seeing feeling bad as silly or at least unnecessary, then a new thought about the issue strikes me, and I start back down the feeling bad path.
I realize that the way I’m laying things out it seems like what I think I need is more discipline/focus to get ‘all the way’ back to feeling good, but this is probably an indicator I’m off track because I have heard many times that feeling good is not about willpower. There are times where I simply get back to feeling good by contemplating one of these perspectives, so I know it’s possible without some great effort, but I don’t really know why sometimes that doesn’t seem to do the trick.