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Key points
- Internal conflicts can fuel emotional tension and generate impulsivity and poor life choices.
- External conflicts to happiness are easier to manage, while internal obstacles are harder to spot.
- Happiness-destroying habits include holding grudges, self-neglect, and creative stagnation.
Everyone wants to be happy, right?
Yet many of us engage in activities that derail our happiness and point us toward misery.
Why would we willingly engage in happiness-destroying activities?
External obstacles to happiness
External obstacles to happiness are easy to spot, such as financial hardship, a failed relationship, a sudden accident, or illness. Such unsettling events jolt us into action: We apply for new jobs, start dating again, follow a doctor's guidance, and hopefully regain health. Like a movie hero, we see external obstacles are a call to action. They challenge and push us to make bold choices. It's the stuff of great drama. (See my new book "Shortcuts To A Happier Life: Essays on Life, Love & Parenting")
Internal obstacles to happiness
Internal obstacles to happiness are harder to spot and less noticeable. Often there's no sudden change, no one to blame, and no transparent barrier in front of us. Internal obstacles ultimately lead to unresolved conflicts with ourselves, opposing impulses that create emotional tension and frequently lead us toward self-destruction.
Frequently, we engage in behaviors that we know are bad for us, yet we can't stop ourselves. The wish for instant gratification or relief from emotional tension tends to drive such impulsiveness and self-sabotaging life choices.
When we don't have mastery over our negative habits, lasting sustainable happiness will always remain elusive.
6 Happiness-Destroying Habits
1. Grudges. Walking around wishing ill will on others is a terrible way to go through life. Worse, the grudges you nurse weigh you down and can trigger depression, increase anxiety, and zap your creative energy. (See "How Grudge-Dumping Destroys Relationships.")
2. Compare and despair. Comparing yourself to others and coming up short warps your world outlook. Some pitfalls of comparison and despair include lower self-esteem, a weaker core identity, and growth sabotage.
3. Creative Stagnation. Curiosity will keep you young. Taking classes, exploiting new activities, and taking in art, theater, or dance stimulates your yearning to expand your life. Creative stagnation can breed despair and hopelessness.
4. Self-neglect. Shakespeare wrote, "Self-love…is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting." Poor diet and exercise, lack of mindfulness, media bingeing, creative dullness, and intellectual decline are some outcomes of self-neglect. When you neglect yourself, all other aspects of your life decline.
5. Social isolation. Few people thrive in isolation. A recent U.S. Surgeon General's report declared loneliness to be a national health epidemic in the United States; another report from the BBC shows increases in heart disease, stroke, and dementia among men who struggle with loneliness. Why are people so lonely? Buddhist peace advocate Daisaku Ikeda suggests that the depersonalization of society has resulted in more isolation and a loss of community.
6. Addiction. Nothing can derail happiness faster than addiction. It destroys families and relationships, snuffs out creativity, and robs life of lasting joy. Whatever the substance, it's undoubtedly going to end badly.
