How do you know you're happy?

How do you know you're happy? And what is happiness anyway? I'd been thinking about these questions in my own life when I found them repeated in a very interesting book by Harvard psychology lecturer Tal Ben-Shahar, called Happier. The reason I'd been thinking about them is because I recently started using a couple of measures of happiness to track my mood (more on the reasons for this in another post). The content of the measures included the obvious things like finding life more pleasurable than painful, and enjoying one's daily routine, along with less obvious things like finding life meaningful and one's perception of how quickly time passes. I scored quite high on things like finding life meaningful and loving my work (in fact I scored the highest you can score). But for me this is not what happiness is about. The first day I did the test (called Authentic Happiness Inventory, from the Authentic Happiness website) I scored reasonably high but actually felt slightly unhappy. The next time I did the test, a few days later, I felt very happy, but actually scored lower than the previous time. All this made me think about what happiness means to me, and how I know I'm happy.

Tal Ben-Shahar, looking mildly happy!



So when Tal Ben-Shahar asked 'How would you define happiness?' and 'What does happiness mean to you' I was ready!! I quickly replied (to myself, silently!) 'it means contentment, serenity, enjoying my daily routine, and having pleasurable feelings'. By the last comment I don't mean pleasurable feelings from having an orgasm, buying a new pair of shoes or eating chocolate. I mean the more difficult to define pleasurable feelings that feel like they occur in the cranium, and that any depressed person will tell you are lacking. Not only lacking, but replaced by painful feelings. It's not about the highs, not about bliss, but about feeling comfortable in myself, able to enjoy the many pleasures in life without experiencing them through a filter of painful emotions. I think it's great that I find life meaningful, that I love my work and that I feel like I make a positive contribution to the world. But these things do not constitute happiness to me. They help my happiness, but to me, happiness is in the pleasant, stable feelings that allow me to enjoy life to the full.

So back to the question, 'how do you know you're happy?' which Ben-Shahar also asks. While it's interesting and useful to track my happiness using the Authentic Happiness Inventory and General Happiness Scale (also from the Authentic Happiness website), I've decided to add another measure - one I invented myself. I've called it My Happiness Scale. Ben-Shahar says in his book that he doesn't think happiness is dichotomous, that is, that you're either happy or not happy. Based on my experiences I disagree. I do tend to feel either happy or not happy (although some days I can switch from one state to the other and back again). But it does differ in intensity. My scale recognises this by using 9 points. It goes like this:

Right now I feel:

9 Extremely happy
8 Very happy
7 Pretty happy
6 Slightly happy
5 Neither happy or sad (I know I said this doesn't happen to me, but I felt I should put in a neutral option to be thorough and fair!)
4 Slightly sad
3 Quite sad
2 Very sad
1 Extremely sad

My scores are based entirely on my subjective feelings at that moment. And guess what? I feel happy with my measure of happiness!

UPOs - happiness out the blue

What is a UPO? Not an Unidentified Plying Object, but an Unexpected Positive Occurrence! It's something that makes you feel good that happens completely out of the blue. For example, finding $10 on the sidewalk, or a phone call from a friend you haven't heard from in a while.

I came up with this concept during a long and dark depression many years ago. It helped me remember that - no matter how gloomy my current circumstances seemed - there was still hope of good things happening completely out of the blue to make my life much better.

Over the years I've gotten into the habit of writing down the UPOs that happen, whether small or big, in the section at the back of my journal dedicated to tracking the good things in my life. I also swap lists of UPOs with friends by email. Here is a list of my recent UPOs.

• a friend rang out of the blue to offer me a whole swag of veges from her garden, which meant I needed to buy almost none in my weekly grocery shop
• my neighbour, who I've not always got on wonderfully well with, offered me a bag of fresh plums from the tree in his garden
• a friend rang up to say she'd bought me a jar of the delicious red pepper dip I like from a discount deli shop for $1 when I hadn't even known she was going there. Bonus!
• I took my dogs to a different place to walk from usual because our normal park was being used for sports. We had a wonderful time across the other side of town walking beside a stream lined with gorgeous trees. The dogs had a ball in the different surroundings and I found all the stresses of the day just floated away
• a friend rang out of the blue when I was feeling ill and was incredibly supportive, even offering to pick up some groceries if I needed her to
  
• I left home in the rain and was dreading driving over a range of hills in the wet weather but just before I reached them the bad weather cleared up and I was able to drive over them in bright sunshine
• a friend rang and invited me and another friend round to afternoon tea, something she's never done before, and
  
• I got an email from someone interested in coming to the writers' group I coordinate.

Has something nice happened to you out the blue and boosted your spirits? If so I'd love to hear about it. To post a comment, just click on the 'x comments' line at the bottom of this post.

When one door closes, another one opens

Sometimes it seems like the bottom has fallen out of your life. I know it felt like that when I got so sick I had to give up my much-loved career. It felt like the end of my dreams.

For a while it was. I was too ill to work more than a few hours a week, and couldn’t find anyone who wanted to hire me for that little time. But I knew it was important to focus on a goal, to have a sense of purpose so that I didn’t get depressed. Luckily, I had the book I’d been working on in my spare time for some years.

I started a routine of trying to work each day on my book. I turned the period of illness around and looked at it as a chance to write. Some days I couldn’t manage it at all, other days I wouldn’t feel well enough to write until evening. But I kept on with it, and got an enormous amount of satisfaction and pleasure out of it.

It took me a while to find work. After a couple of short-term jobs I hit the jackpot. I got a job writing articles for a national website. Over a year later I’m still doing the job, and loving it. Writing articles was the kind of work I’d been wanting to do for a while, but had found it difficult to break into. So while getting ill was stressful and unpleasant, and closed a door to one successful career, it has opened one new door for me that I feel very happy about.

Have you had an experience where as one door has closed, another one opened? If so, I'd love to hear about it.

All the techniques that make me feel good

Wine is not on this list, much as I love a glass of good merlot! Neither is chocolate, even though I consider it one of the essential food groups. Instead this is a list of all the strategies and techniques I use to keep my mood positive, and lift it when it drops.

I'm always interested when I hear one thing being recommended as the answer to depression, whether it's an antidepressant, cognitive therapy or exercise. That's because my experience is that I needed a whole range of things to transform my depression into happiness. I kept adding one thing after another until I reached a critical mass that pushed me over the edge - in a good way! I still use all these things to maintain and protect my good mood. They include:

• writing down the good things that happen to me most days, three or more things, or however many I want. (If I don't feel like doing it, I don't.) Some people prefer to do this once a week and doing it that often seems to work just as well
  
• writing down the things I am looking forward to and ticking them off when they happen, especially small, predictable things, like my delicious fruit smoothie for breakfast
  
• planning social times with friends, acquaintances, and family
  
• getting as much exercise as I am able without making the chronic physical illness I suffer from worse, particularly walking with my dogs
• getting out in the daylight, even when it's raining, even if it's just sitting in the car with the window rolled down while the dogs run around in the park!
• taking 6000mg of fish oil each day (half in the morning, half at night)
• planning my day and week so it doesn't seem overwhelming, I keep on top of chores and finances, I get some work done each week, and I have fun times
• listening to my thoughts and being alert to any of the cognitive distortions, particularly a focus on the negatives and ignoring the positives
• talking back to them in my head, and if that's not working, writing them down and looking for holes in my logic or facts that I can correct
  
• doing things that build my positive emotions, such as watching TV programs that are funny or inspiring (like Monk, about the annoying but brilliant obsessive compulsive detective), or reading books that make me feel good (although these are harder to find than visual media), spending fun times with people, working on my book or blogs, going for walks
• mindfulness - now this is a challenge as I find it pretty boring! My best technique so far has been a recorded grounding meditation which doesn't focus on breathing (my pet hate - not breathing per se, but focusing entirely on it, especially through my nose. I just don't find my nose that interesting!). I like mindfulness because it focuses on what I hear, feel, see, smell and taste inside me and outside me, and I can open my eyes and even move around while I'm doing it
  
• when I feel a painful or negative emotion just accepting it and feeling it, not panicking or rushing to try and change it
• eating a diet that's low in sugar and caffeine, and reasonably high in protein and fibre, with less omega 6 and more omega 3 essential fatty acids than the average diet contains (that means avoiding processed foods and eating fresh food and wholegrains as much as possible)
• doing things that are creative and put me in a state of flow, where I lose myself in the activity, like cooking a new dish or writing
• and one of my favorites, work, whether paid or unpaid. There's a lot of research showing that people who are depressed and unemployed feel much better when they find work, as long as it's not too stressful (i.e. with more demands than they can realistically manage). Work involves so many things that are useful in themselves - planning, social contact, flow, the satisfaction of achieving goals. I call it the therapy I get paid to do
• savoring the enjoyable sensations and events in my life by noticing them when they happen and celebrating them with others
• building up my relationships by responding very positively to the good things that happen to others and keeping mainly to positive topics in the conversation as well as asking questions and finding things to agree with in what people say
  
• using problem solving skills to deal with practical problems so they don't become overwhelming and de-rail me
• noticing the danger signals that my mood is likely to go down (poor sleep, crying, conflict in relationships, irritation) and acting quickly to make sure it doesn't happen
  
• there are probably a few things that I've left out but that's enough for now!

I find that building these things into my daily and weekly routine results in a more stable and positive mood, and much more happiness.

Do antidepressants make depression worse?

I just read a book that made me wonder about the adverse effects of antidepressant meds even more than I usually do. I've had my own terrible experiences with them, but I thought that once I was off tricyclics and on St John's Wort my problems with harmful (and in my case, life threatening) med side effects were over. But apparently that might not be the case.

The book that got me wondering is Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker (the link above will take you to his website if you want to find out more about it. The madinamerica link takes you to his blog and a whole lot of other interesting stuff). The book is about the impact psychiatric drugs have on a whole range of mental illlnesses, including depression. The author (whose smiling face appears to the right - this is the look a best selling author wears!) investigates how much these drugs actually help and harm the people who take them in the long term. His conclusions make disturbing reading, but I didn't expect them to apply to my life. It appears I might be wrong.

As I read about people with schizophrenia developing tardive dyskinesia (uncontrollable twitching), intellectual decline, and the inability to hold down a job, while getting progressively worse than people not taking antipsychotic drugs, I thought 'those poor people'. As I read about people who took tranquillizers becoming addicted, developing depression and ending up worse off than anxious people who didn't take the meds I again thought 'those poor people'. But when I read about how taking antidepressants - tricyclic or SSRI - can result in worse and more frequent symptoms of depression compared to not taking the drugs, I thought 'that's outrageous!' Because that's about me. I took a tricyclic for the best part of 16 years. I've been on St John's Wort, which has some SSRI type properties, for the best part of 14 years. That's 30 years of antidepressant medication all up. Just what has this been doing to me?

What Robert Whitaker said about the long-term effects of antidepressant use truly shocked me, and made me re-evaluate my experiences of depression. He said that prior to the introduction of antidepressants, in the 1950's and 60's, an episode of depression usually cleared up by itself within a year and the majority (around 70%) of people went back to their normal lives. This rang a bell because I remember reading this when I first got seriously depressed, in 1982. The reason I had forgotten it is because my experience for many years was of chronically relapsing depression. I had assumed that this was just the way it went, and this assumption was echoed by what I read. What did I know?

But according to research cited in Anatomy of an Epidemic, people who use antidepressants are likely to relapse more, and have less relief from their symptoms than those who don't use meds (62% decrease in symptoms over 6 months for those off meds vs 33% decrease for those on meds). An international study by the World Health Organisation found that the people who did best after an episode of depression were those who didn't take any meds. The people who did worst were those who did as recommended and kept taking the pills.

All this has made me wonder whether the continual relapses I suffered during the 80's and my 'nightmare years' during the early 90's, when I was almost continously depressed and suicidal for 4 years, were due less to the natural progression of the illness and more to the fact that as soon as I was diagnosed with major depression, I was prescribed tricyclic antidepressants. The irony is that they didn't stop the depression. If anything, they made it harder for me to feel happy - things became a lot greyer and less fun while I took them.

My personal triumph is that I persisted with learning and using cognitive and behavioral techniques, along with other approaches proven to reduce depression, and succeeded in becoming happy despite any ill effects the meds might have had. But what I'm wondering now is...if I had never taken antidepressants would have I avoided a lot of that misery? Would the full impact of CBT unimpeded by meds have led to a consistent happiness? If so, that's a terrible thing. That means all those years of misery were unnecessary and avoidable, and that I was robbed of a huge part of my life. I'm only glad I got off tricyclics and onto St John's Wort. But now I'm wondering...is even that safe? I'm pondering the wisdom of taking a drug holiday and seeing what happens. But I've learnt my lesson - if I do I will cut down my meds very slowly and carefully because I know if I stop too quickly, disaster could be waiting - but more on that in a future post.