Happiness anxiety

There is one particular type of anxiety that affects many of us. I call it ‘happiness anxiety’.

In the UK we live in a culture where seeking comfort isn’t just a value but a pressure. Clearly seeking comfort, happiness and health is a good thing, but could it generate a problem when there is an intense pressure to seek these things? We want to be happy, but are we going to be happy if we pursue it so hard that we become anxious that we are not happy enough?

We are influenced by the deeply rooted US value of the ‘pursuit of happiness’, defined as a right in the US Declaration of Independence. This is a good thing, the freedom to do this, but if it becomes a pressure we can develop this ‘happiness anxiety’.

To help with this we can remind patients that however difficult or easy their life is they are still valuable as humans. We do not need our lives to be perfect for us to be valuable. We do not need to be happy or healthy to be valuable. We want to be healthy and happy, of course we do, but life will always have its difficulties.

Patients’ beliefs about health are affected by their doctors. The WHO definition of health is ‘A state of complete physical, social, mental well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. If we require complete well-being in all these things to define a person as healthy, it could be argued that to be healthy is an extremely hard thing to achieve. It is not too different to the pressure to become happier. We all want to be healthy but I don’t think I have ever been healthy if this is what health is.

Would not a better definition would be ‘A degree of physical, social and mental well-being that does not lead to unmanageable distress’? This is not as black and white as the current definition; but health usually exists in shades of grey. Let’s pursue health and happiness but not to the point it consumes us with anxiety.

Happiness anxiety just leads us round and round in circles. We want to be happy, we try so hard to be happy, this makes us unhappy, and so we want to be happy. Let’s remember we are valuable simply because we are human.