Can We Make Ourselves Happier?

Toward Completeness With Jay Woodford

Can We Make Ourselves Happier? | By Jay Woodford

I know for me the times I’ve set out to help others when I’m feeling out of sorts has, without exception, always made things brighter.

Yet it’s fascinating to me how easily I forget that lesson and how, almost by default, I revert to individualistic and self centered methods of trying to feel better. For me, that was almost always work but like I said before, it unequivocally always served as just an escape and not a remedy.

I’m convinced we need each other a hell of a lot more than we know. This journey toward wellness over the last two years has shown that to be true perhaps more than anything else.

We like to think we can do it all on our own. We can’t. That just serves the egoic and self-aggrandizing side of ourselves which rarely, if ever, leads us in the right direction. If you feed the ego, you starve the soul as they say. Maybe that’s just platitudinous bullshit but it sure rings true.

The people who study these things say that we’re one of the loneliest societies on earth. When surveyed, 39% of people said they had no one they could turn to and lean on during a time of crisis - a percentage that is woefully higher than ever before.

That strikes me as a time bomb just waiting to explode. Or maybe it is exploding and the carnage that’s happening behind the scenes is the proof.

The downstream effects, I can only imagine, will be nothing good until we hit rock bottom, humble ourselves and realize we desperately need each other whether we like it or not.

Maybe at that point, we’ll soften our hearts towards each other and toward ourselves and find our way back to each other.

Hopefully it doesn’t take us hitting rock bottom because I suspect there will only continue to be a catastrophic amount of devastation along the way.

Brené Brown has famously stated from her research and that of others, that loneliness is the single biggest predictor of depression, anxiety, disease, addiction, violence and premature death. I have no idea whether or not that’s actually true but it sure seems like it is.

I can not control how others live but I can do something about how I live and all I know is when I allow myself to descend into a judgemental and indifferent position towards people, it never ends well. It always, without question, makes things darker and to the contrary, when I’ve helped ease another’s burdens in whatever capacity that ends up being, sought to understand instead of judge, it always, without question makes things substantially brighter.

How can that not be the way it is? I hope this comes to mind next time you’re feeling less than happy as it did for me. This practice works better than anything else without exception.

I don’t think it’s any accident that tightly connected communities have far less anxiety and depression.

Maybe therein lies the beauty of our suffering. It’s a pain that, like any pain, drives action toward a resolution and if that resolution is deeper connections, greater understanding and love, I can’t imagine that that wouldn’t make for a much better world for all of us...

Click here for the rest of the article.
(I'd post the whole thing here, but due to character limits, I can't :( )