5 Powerful triggers of unhappiness in life

This is a question I ask myself and I’m sure a lot of people do too. One minute you are in a state of perpetual joy and happiness. The next minute something else is creeping in, trying to grab all that feeling of warmth, happiness and replacing it with worry and anxiety.

One thing I’ve come to understand though is that these “doomsday” feelings don’t just appear out of the blue. But, do so as a result of some debilitating habits we expose ourselves to. If you remember quite clearly, you can testify to the fact that, all that made you happy as a child were fickle things. I mean, for no reason at all, that happiness was always there.

You smile for no concrete reason. You wake up happy and you see every new day as the start of a fun new adventure in life. But what exactly killed that freedom we enjoyed as children. What deprives us of having long periods of joy, happiness and satisfaction as we used to have when we were kids.

Prolonged anger

One example of that thing which has the power to be a thief of joy is anger.

Yes, there will be times in life when some situations or even some people get you absolutely furious. And even if that anger is rightly justified, letting it linger without taking that extra step to patch things up is a potential joy stealer. Because prolonged anger leads to bitterness. Everything or anything that person does begins to irritate you.

Your emotions go haywire when you’re around that person. When you think about them, resentment starts to creep in and your inner peace is disturbed. Funny enough, the said person may not even know they’ve done something to offend you if you don’t talk to them about it. But you continue to carry the burden of that anger with you thereby causing an imbalance in your emotions.

For me personally, I like to be free internally, so therefore I don’t withhold hurt and anger. I like to air it out by making my feelings known to the said person so I can be free from hurt. This also helps me grant forgiveness and reconcile my feelings towards the person. This in return helps eliminate every form of negative energy between us.

Ambition

There is nothing wrong with planning out our lives, setting goals and being ambitious. But when that ambition becomes the sole focal lens through which we see ourselves, then it becomes a potential joy stealer. And how does that happen ? Well, this is going to be long but let’s take for example, the career path of a content creator just starting out.

Firstly, you are not even sure if people are going to like the type of content you want to put out there. But nevertheless, you build up your resilience and go for it. At the beginning, you’re mostly content with just your family and friends engaging with your posts. So your motivation doesn’t waver because creating content is your passion anyways.

You find joy in sharing knowledge and being of help to others. Then one month into this, the algorithm of the platform you use opens a bit for you and your stuff gets liked by 50 people outside of your immediate circle. Instantly, you get this rush of happiness and joy because absolute strangers are starting to see the value in you. Then you begin to see a greater potential in yourself like, “if 50 strangers can like this, there can be more”.

Although you are actually overjoyed to have those 50 on lock because it feels like a million to you. But you still begin to set milestones for yourself. You start with 200 so you don’t get too ahead of yourself. But then shortly after, you hit 200 and the feeling of joy is not as intense as when you first hit 50.

Then you say to yourself, maybe when I hit 500 I would be happier. And then you achieve that and still don’t feel a thing. Because you’ve taken for granted the joy that comes with every small growth or win. Then you set a higher number, maybe 1,000 because you feel that’s such a large number and you’re almost sure you’ll be ecstatic when you hit it.

Then you hit it but you’re still not as happy as you want to be. And it goes on and on like that. You spend your whole life chasing that high. Thinking if I could just achieve that milestone, surely I would be happier but the hack away from all of these is gratitude.

To fully appreciate and relish every single win because true happiness comes from within and not from any external source.

Comparison

This right here is a very big issue that plagues the world we live in.

Comparing ourselves to another person whose back story we do not even know. Measuring our lives by the successes of others which eventually leads to ENVY, RESENTMENT and HATE. Three huge joy stealers. One way to overcome this is to stop looking at what everybody else is doing and focus more on yourself and your growth.

It’s one of the reasons why I went on a social media break earlier this year ( I wrote all about this here ). Comparison doesn’t do anything more than make you feel very inadequate. But the hack is that there is only one you. Nobody else can do it like you do.

We all don’t have the same journey nor thesame strengths. So eliminating comparison from your life is one way you can get rid of potential joy stealers from your life.

Being ungrateful

Complaining and being ungrateful is another big joy stealer. It makes you no longer focus on the positive but on the negative. And this stems out of belittling everything and anything you’ve accomplished. You begin to see all the things you have as mundane.

Then you start complaining about them while at the same time coveting another person’s stuff. There is a place reserved for contentment and gratitude in every human’s life. And if we don’t fill up that space with all the positivity we can find, we will never become truly free from the pangs of envy and sadness.

Regret

The question “what if” has the potential to raise heavy waves of regret and sadness in our lives.

What if I didn’t study Psychology and studied Engineering instead, maybe I would have been raking in lots of money by now. What if I had gotten married at 23, I probably wouldn’t be as lonely as I am now etc. But the honest truth is that there is a reason why you chose the path you’re currently on. And if that reason still stands, then I don’t think you made any bad choices.

The best path for you is the one you are on right now. Because you really don’t know the end points of all those other paths you’ve been fantasizing about. And if you did make bad choices, there is always room to start all over. What is not ok is to to give yourself over to regrets.

Because all it does is bring you wave after wave of sadness which is a big joy stealer and not good for your mental health. I wrote extensively about life paths and regrets here. Do check it out.

What did you think of this piece ? I would love to hear from you. So let’s chat in the comments.