One of my mentors mentioned this to me early in my career, being happy or unhappy hardly depends on the situation. It depends on how you take-on the situation. It will also determine, whether you will sail through or drown in the situation. However, when I look around me, I see a lot of people are unhappy and disgruntled with their circumstances. When I carefully see them, few common attributes emerge which are called as ‘Secrets of Unhappiness’. They are summarised below:

Comparison Disorder: Many people have this very destructive habit of comparing one’s life to another. People compare material possessions, social popularity and relationships. And end up bolstering negative feelings. Comparison disorder burns your positivity, possibilities and potentials. It is fine to take inspiration to fuel your aspirations, but it is not fine to get yourself impacted by achievements of someone else.

‘I am not good enough’ Syndrome: If you’re a man or women who’s bought into our culture’s pervasive, self-harming programming, causing your inner critic to repeatedly tell echo the words, “I’m not good enough,” it’s well past time for you to wake up from that nightmare of negative, self-destructive thinking and focus on learning how to love yourself and practice self-care instead. Our relationships and culture have hypnotized you to believe that you are not good enough.

‘What if’ Disease: I have met so many people complaining about this disease. ‘What if, I had pursued my interest?’, ‘What if, I had chosen a different career’ etc. I am sure you must have met many people with such sentences floating in their grey-matter. Such questions drain positive energy from you and increase unhappiness, which in turn leads to a disgruntled personality who is garnering negative aura around him/her.

Prisoner of Past: Unfortunately, we all have a past which we are not particularly proud of. Spending much of your time and energy in the past and reliving old painful memories, conflicts, missed opportunities and so on can hurt whole lot. Hence, one keeps impacting his present situation and taxes itself from bringing over the baggage of the past. This effect magnifies if your present situation is not too great.

The Victim Syndrome: As we leave our youth, there is a pull towards complacency. We can start to coast, settle for what’s familiar and lose the juicy desire to expand our frontiers. We adopt a paradigm of ‘Victim’. We make excuses and then recite them so many times we train our sub-conscious mind to think they are true. We blame other people and outer conditions for our struggles, and we condemn past events for our private tears. Within this personal ecosystem, majority of us create an acceptable mediocrity. This eventually lands up being increasingly unhappy for ourselves and exuding the same sentiment to people around us.

Introspectively speaking, we are all humans with inherent imperfections have experienced more than one of these syndromes/diseases in our lifetime. Many of us are still struggling with these daily. So, what can be done and how it can be done. Few tips which I follow might help you to begin the healing process:

• Honest introspection: Talk to your inner critic and try to reason things out. Try to get few sets of actions for implementing changes in your daily affairs. Keep in mind, brutal honesty is required for this to show alleviating effects.
• Develop positive and good company of friends: Easier said than done, it takes a while to have some good friends around you to keep you in check for any traces of unhappiness.
• Accept the past as it is: The best way to unload your emotional baggage is make peace with your past mistakes, relationships and marriages. Just try to learn from it and move on.
• Be a better version of yourself: Everyday, try being a better version of yourself as compared to the one before. Try not to compare personalities, it causes more harm to you than re-affirming it.

These were certain remediation methods to alleviate an unhappy situation. If these are implemented in right spirit and intentions, one could possibly see shift in behaviour and perception of your personality.

May be life turns around and starts smiling at you 🙂

Nihit M