The Happiness Equation
It all started in late 2019 with a bullet journal to keep me busy over the summer holidays.
I’d long been fascinated by my life represented in data (to varying degrees of healthiness…), so I found it easy to start meticulously tracking everything. From every dollar spent to every unit of alcohol consumed. After a few months of methodical tallying, I started to think of this brightly-coloured tome as something like an equation for happiness.
Get x amount of exercise, spend y hours on business development, invest z dollars and, over time, x + y + z = a happy life.
And then a global pandemic sent the lift barrelling towards the ground.
Now, I’ll preface this with an acknowledgement that I live in one of the most humane and fortunate countries on earth. New Zealand’s management of COVID-19 has, thus far, been a masterclass. I have felt nothing but gratitude to be here while I’ve watched in impotent horror as my previous homes, friends and family in the UK and US have been devastated by both a deadly virus and their deeply flawed so-called leadership. But, despite our relative safety, we’ve faced many of the same challenges here as everyone else.
We’ve thought too hard and we’ve drunk too much and we’ve slept too little. We’ve repressed and denied and looked for something, someone to blame. Our most cherished relationships have faltered from miscommunications and lack of contact. We’ve grieved the loss of experiences and lives we finally admitted we could no longer have.
For me, lockdown marked the beginning of a sometimes painful period of profound growth, the depth of which I don’t think I’ve experienced in my adult life.
When I turned up to my first ever therapy appointment last August, I opened with “I’m sorry, I think I’m about 20 years late.”
Like many others in 2020, I had gone to my GP to discuss what I self-identified as generalised anxiety, exacerbated by the excessively garbage state of the world. But, as we talked, she noted signifiers in my language (words like ‘paralysed’) that more likely indicated trauma. She encouraged me to do some reading on PTSD while I waited to see a psychologist.
As I went down the research rabbit hole, I discovered something called Complex PTSD, a form of trauma response that stems not from a single event but from a prolonged period of turmoil in early life which is then carried with the individual throughout adulthood.
I learned that CPTSD has likely caused me to spend most of my life in fight-or-flight mode (or the lesser-known fawn and freeze). And that, never much of a fighter, I have somewhat unusually been able to harness my default flight response into a sort of efficiency superpower.
I. Get. Shit. Done.
But in July, as in a couple of other historical periods of extreme or compound stress, I froze.
I was very specific with both my GP and my shrink about what I wanted from therapy. I was not remotely interested in crying on someone’s couch for the next year. I didn’t want to dredge up every shitty thing that ever happened to me and look at it under a microscope. I wanted an intellectual and pragmatic approach to preventing rumination and catastrophising. I wanted some tools and strategies to enable me to manage my mental health on my own. And to get on with my damn life.
In essence, I asked for a short round of ‘mind physio’.
To support that, I wanted a few months of anti-anxiety medication to address the right-now problem. (PSA — If you’re on the fence about meds, please just go talk to your doctor about it. Like, today. There’s an overwhelming number of people JUST LIKE YOU taking often very mild medications to give themselves a little bit of extra support. This doesn’t mean changing who you are; simply sanding down the very sharpest edges of your nasty thought cycles to stem the bleeding while you get your shit together.)
Because I was able to be so specific, I got exactly what I needed out of my brief dalliance with therapy. I identified and addressed trauma triggers I carry with me from my childhood. I learned — sometimes the hard way — which memories and people and issues were worth addressing directly, and which weren’t. I worked on how to become a more impartial observer of my own thoughts and break out of futile and repetitive thought patterns.
And, outside of those sessions, I got to work on my new happiness equation.
Instead of measuring stacks of quantifiable achievements, as I had been before the pandemic, I started focusing exclusively on the things that make me feel good.
My ‘habit focus’ for January 2021 has been to spend it in the present.
I don’t see the shrink or take the meds anymore. But it’s good to know they’re there.
I’ve realised that many of us subconsciously look at mental health as the absence of depression or anxiety without realising that this is as ridiculous as viewing physical health as simply an absence of diabetes or broken bones. I finally understand that mental health is a process; it’s a collection of muscles that need to be actively exercised. And I gratefully acknowledge that I have many privileges which have enabled me to now reach this place of mental strength.
I feel like I have a better understanding of my own mind than I ever have before because I’ve spent months reinforcing it from the inside.
The result? Here’s a bit of my recent life in numbers:
It’s not always easy.
I do enjoy yoga, but I certainly don’t always enjoy it at 7am.
And if you’ve ever tried to drink the daily recommended amount of water and had any time left to do anything other than pee, I’m extremely impressed.
Meditation, in particular, has been challenging for my busy and skeptical mind. Generally speaking, I have little patience for the wider wellness industry and the swathes of ‘fitspo’ influencers who are telling me to “get centred” while doing 5-minute planks or contorting myself into a Pilates pretzel.
I’ve long bristled at the whole preachy concept of mindfulness and its faux spiritualism. As with most (all?) forms of spiritualism, I just plain didn’t believe in it.
But, as I recently admitted to one of my best and most cynical mates, “If you do nothing but count your breaths — in for 4, hold for 2, out for 6 — for 5 full minutes, you’ll be fucking furious at how calm you feel.”
