Better Health & Living
Stop Sabotaging Being Happy
A locked room almost ruined her pleasure. What she learned about herself can help you enjoy the good things in your own life.
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After living in Rome for two years, my husband and I moved to a farmhouse in the Italian countryside. The centuries-old, stone Umbrian home had been lovingly restored and beautifully furnished. It came with a 60-tree olive grove, flower and vegetable gardens, and spectacular views of the medieval hill town of Orvieto from nearly every window.
On lease-signing day, our elderly landlady, Signora Barone, took us back to the house for lunch and gave us a personal tour. There, she unlocked a door I hadn’t seen on our earlier visits with the realtor. I was stunned. Behind it was a beautiful studio with a wood-beamed ceiling and a fieldstone fireplace. I couldn’t believe our luck—the room made the cozy, country farmhouse feel like a spacious villa. I began thinking of it as my office.
The next day, however, the Signora called to say that she had decided to keep the room locked. She wasn’t being mean spirited; although the room contained treasured possessions, her concern was not that something would happen to them. She and her husband had spent many hours there and wanted to keep the room sacrosanct to preserve their link to the house they both loved so much. She was so sorry, she told me.
So was I. Although it was still the same exquisite house we’d rented, I began to feel that it was now somehow less without the extra room with its built-in bookcases and sweeping meadow views. I felt like a kid whose Christmas bike disappears on December 26. It wasn’t fair; it was wrong; I was being deprived.
The more I dwelled on the “if only” (if only I could curl up with a book in front of that fireplace), the less I was able to enjoy what I’d loved about our new home. Being shut out of one room was sabotaging all my joy in this exciting new experience. I needed to find out why I could focus on only the one thing I didn’t have and seemed to no longer care about the many wonderful things that were mine.
Scared to Be Happy?
“You might be sabotaging your happiness because you fear it,” Yu Harumi, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Utah‘s counseling center, told me. Some people fear happiness because they think they don’t deserve it. Although it sounds counterintuitive, if you’ve had very little happiness in your life, you may be afraid of the unknown. If you’ve ever been “punished” for success in the past—by colleagues, friends, or family members who resented you for it—you may fear that.
Recognizing your feelings is the first step toward eliminating self-destructive thinking and behavior, says Dr. Harumi. Once you’ve identified those thoughts, you need to challenge them, he explains. If you’ve just gotten a coveted promotion, for example, look for evidence that supports or doesn’t support your feeling that you’re “just not good enough for this job.” Did anyone tell you that you didn’t deserve a promotion? Why would you have been promoted if you weren’t qualified? Then turn to the most logical and likely explanation for your success: “My boss thought I was doing such a good job, I deserved to be promoted.”
In Control and Miserable
Fear wasn’t really my problem. These days, I’m lucky enough to be happy most of the time. Another personality trait could be to blame, suggested Lisa Lewis, Ph.D., director of psychology for the Menninger Clinic in Houston: a tendency to micromanage every detail.
“Some people unwittingly sabotage their happiness because they want to feel in control,” she told me. As it turns out, it’s actually easier for them to manage the effects of self-inflicted unhappiness than it is for them to manage unhappiness caused by chance. As anyone who knows me well will tell you, I do, um, have a few issues with control.
So what does a control freak like me have to do to start enjoying her lovely home—and what can you do to be happy with the good things in your life? I turned to Judith Beck, Ph.D., director of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, and clinical associate professor of psychology in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. Not only did Dr. Beck have a clear take on why I was making myself miserable, she also helped me get over it—fast—with the following six steps.
- Find out what it means. Identify the significance of the obstacle to your happiness. Ask yourself, “What’s so bad about [fill in the blank]?”
- Determine the impact. Dr. Beck suggested that I ask myself these questions, which you can modify to suit your own situation.
- Does the locked door make me unable to focus on the many wonderful aspects of the house?
- Does it hinder my enjoyment of living there?
- Does it limit my ability to entertain friends and family when they visit?
- (When my answer to all of these questions was no, my disappointment began to diminish. I began to see it really didn’t affect my life at all.)
- Make yourself get real. Ask yourself this, advises Dr. Beck: “Ten years from now, how much will this bother me?” This helps put your disappointment into perspective.
- Draw up a list of pros and cons. “List all the disadvantages and advantages that result from paying so much attention to this problem,” Dr Beck advises. In my case, I couldn’t come up with a single thing I gained by being upset about the room. Listing the disadvantages to my moping around was a cinch, however. I found 10 great reasons to stop bumming myself out over a room I couldn’t have, not the least of which was that it was starting to make my wonderful husband unhappy, too.
- Focus on benefits. Contemplate all the good things surrounding your problem (in my case, they were everywhere I turned) and write them down, suggests Dr. Beck. “Creating a list of positive things is a very powerful move, because it makes you realize how real and important the good things are. What’s more, the act of making a list helps you change your focus from the one negative thing in your life to all the positive ones.” At the end of every day, read your “good things” list and add something new to it.
Get help if you need it. Try all these strategies for a couple of weeks and see how you feel. If you’re still not over the hump, consider seeking some short-term, cognitive behavior therapy, suggests Dr. Beck. Within 8 to 10 sessions, a therapist can teach you the skills you need to get past the obstacles to your happiness.
I was able to beat my happiness demons pretty easily, and I no longer feel deprived when I look at that door. In fact, my husband began leaning his guitars against it, and it gives me pleasure to see them there.
Happiness? Bring it on!
Freelance writer Sara Altshul lives happily in all the open rooms of her Italian farmhouse.
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