The Dance of Connection

I see what you are saying. But it's hard to see how "pretending" to be happy could work without actually "acting as if". Ten days later the person could still be in the same behavior rut.

What I'm saying is that the behavior of depression or unhappiness usually centers on isolation and lack of movement. Rather than just pretending to be happy for 10 days, why not augment that with 10 days of non-depressing activity. E.g., going for walks, bike rides, working out, visiting friends, going shopping, hanging out in a coffee shop, having a beer and engaging with the patrons.

I know this is a chicken and egg thing. But those activities make one happier without pretending.

I couldn't agree more about the importance of non-depressing activity. Well put. Our suggestions are by no means mutually exclusive.

Surely your suggestion has strong echoes of NLP. Seems a pretty fair idea to me. Self-pity is the main preventative to happiness. It is impossible to feel the two emotions at the same time.
Acting 'as if' works. It's a useful tool.

I think we are connecting the dots the same way. However, what I'm suggesting is that thinking and acting are strongly coupled.

If someone "pretends" to be happy, then by extension, he'll also have to "pretend" to be bored sitting inside by himself. To sustain his happy pretense he'll have to go out and relieve his boredom. Otherwise he sinks back into distressing rumination.

Pretending thinking without pretending acting seems like a dead end.

After decades working in public relations, I seem to have what my longtime family physician calls "the PR curse", in which even if we have a migraine or a broken leg or an open bullet wound in our forehead, we still paste on a happy face so we can go tapdancing out for the press conference or fundraising event or keynote presentation or whatever's on our To Do list right this minute, as if we don't have a care in the world. Following the press conference, etc. we can allow ourselves the luxury of (privately of course) falling apart in a sweaty, messy heap.

Last year I had a serious heart attack, followed almost immediately by my usual resolve to pick myself up, dust myself off, and go cheerily on, business as usual. I was stunned to realize that I was not yet well enough to be thrown back into the juggling-multiple-deadlines world of PR and the workplace.

So rather than quietly recuperate at home, I threw myself into researching what the heck had just hit me, and before you knew it, I had transferred my PR skills from a stressful workplace to my new stressful compulsion: doing presentations in my community to other women about heart disease - our #1 killer. Because of ongoing cardiac symptoms due to damage done during my heart attack, I had to limit my public speaking to once a week max. But the more I spoke, the more requests poured in to book future talks. And I started not one but TWO blogs that I updated almost daily: www.myheartsisters.org and www.ethicalnag.org

Soon, my presentations were booked three months in advance. I was asked to speak at community organizations, womens groups, workplace presentations, and even three hospital staff Education Days (Cardiology, E.R. and Mental Health). But it took me all week to get myself ready for each talk, and one full day afterwards to recuperate from the sheer exhaustion of being 'up' and perky for each presentation. Nobody watching me 'onstage' would have guessed in a million years that I was suffering as much as I was. All I wanted was to feel "normal" again, and public speaking had seemed a natural fit for a PR person.

I became so skilled at pretending that I was just fine, that I could perform just as if I'd never even had a massive cardiac event, that just last Friday I finally experienced an embarrassing and overwhelming meltdown during a jam-packed presentation to a very enthusiastic and receptive audience. Suddenly, in a stupefyingly humiliating scene, I no longer seemed able to keep the happy face pasted on. I had been sacrificing my own physical health for months in order to MAKE MYSELF feel good again.

When a friend asked me later: "What are you trying to prove here? Are you waiting for a second heart attack before you start taking better care of yourself?" - I think I got the message.

Since then, I've been cancelling presentations like crazy, and rethinking the way in which pretending to be okay has actually been quite damaging to my physical health.

Good self-care begins with respecting the body's actual physical limitations and learning to live well within them - not to pretend that they don't exist.