Friday 24 June 2011

Controlling Our Fears

Coming across an interesting article detailing the mass of anxiety problems within the city, it hit home a little:
'Mindfulness training – which teaches you to stay in the moment and pay attention to all your mental and physical sensations without attempting to judge or fix them – is what saved me. And there's an increasing amount of scientific evidence that it's an effective way to treat both depression and anxiety, whether urban or rural...I recently sat alone in pitch darkness on the beach and realised I was perfectly OK with the immenseness of it all, the small dot of me in this enormous world. I wasn't in control, not at all, but so what? I was there, and that was enough.'
I want to say more about this but am finding it hard to put my thoughts into words. Mine lie with thoughts of, if anxiety doesn't get sorted out you may end up killing yourself-slowly or literally.

A life of long unhappiness is my ultimate fear, but in a large number of ways it is in my control whether this happens or not. There will always be factors in or out of our control which affect how happiness turns out; as said in the above quote, we have our own sensations which tell us when things become too much and we have to start listening to ourselves-as much as we keeping telling self we must go on, sometimes you need to stop and rest too.

I wonder how indestructible we can adapt ourselves to external factors which affect our levels of happy. There are so many parts to our brain and continuously do I realise my lessons have been learnt only when it is too late-it is then when things become clearer and more apparent. However I love this notion as well. I feel much more accomplishment in having moments of clarity when I take myself away from something. It feels like reward. In a way, it makes what seemed so complicated even easier to achieve-only to enhance my happiness.

Personally, I have always said you can't reach the high until you truly feel the low; of course there are several levels of low (some being quite dangerous) yet once action is taken to bring yourself back up again (using positive methods) only happiness can be achieved once more.

1 comment:

  1. Having been through a rough patch the past couple of years, I've found that happiness follows happiness. A kind gesture or even a simple smile can make the world of difference to someone. I hate to sound like a greeting card, but a smile is definitely the most infectious thing on the planet.

    The crux of this is, if you're in a bad place, the last thing you want to do is smile. Even if you force it, people can spot that it's fake in an instant. There have been studies looking in to this, having people smile at others and gauge the reactions. The natural reaction to someone smiling at you is to smile back, so some of the people being smiled at had objects in their mouth to prevent them replicating the smile. Fake smiles are picked up because, in copying the smile, the person relates the facial expression to a past experience/emotion, so either happiness ensues with a true smile, or a slight awkward feeling with a fake one. The people with objects in their mouths were much less likely to tell the difference between a fake smile and a real one.

    This weighs up with well known line from Solitude by Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

    Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
    Weep, and you weep alone.

    http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/solitude/

    Happiness follows happiness and so, sadness follows sadness. Both can be seen as spirals, happiness being an upward spiral, often seen of people who always have smiles on their faces and seem to have the whole world bending to their whim. Sadness is also a spiral, nobody wants to hang around a negative nancy or moaner, which forces isolation from friends and equally negative reactions from unavoidable acquaintances, such as work colleagues.

    I've re-written this last paragraph several times, as it's so complicated to give any sort of solution to the spiral of depression, but I'm completely stumped. All I can do is finish with a simple quote which sums up my ethos of life:

    Every cloud has a silver lining.

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