Happiness is only steps away…
My technique for changing my emotions in an instant
I’ve always been obsessed with achieving
As a kid, I wanted to be a best selling author. In high school, I prided myself on doing advanced classes and working part time. After university, I did everything I could to kickstart a photography career.
But no matter how hard I pushed myself to achieve my dreams, it never really made me happy.
In fact, for the first 24 years of my life, I rarely experienced true happiness at all.
Sure. Whenever I achieved something I felt proud. I’d take a couple days to celebrate, and do a bit of bragging. But almost immediately, I’d fall back into a state of stress, frustration and shame, as I began the long climb towards my next achievement.
After two decades of following this mindless pattern, I got fed up.
I was tired of feeling miserable everyday, despite all the good things happening around me. Despite all my effort, I felt stuck. I didn’t feel like I was making any progress.
So I stopped.
I quit my photography career, bought a one-way ticket to Albania, and started a new life as a digital nomad.
For the next 2 years, I devoted all my time to working out what makes me happy. After a lot of research, and even more trial and error, I finally found the answer I was looking for.
I discovered a 2 step system that will always returns me to happiness no matter what.
And the best part is, anyone can use it.
But before I can share it with you, you need to understand the difference between conditional happiness, and something I call Intrinsic Happiness.
Conditional Happiness vs Intrinsic Happiness
Most self-help advice presents our emotions like this:
At the base of the pyramid, we have our needs.
At the very bottom, is our need for comfort. Typically, this includes physical needs like food, water, shelter, and safety needs like personal security. But the end goal is the same: we want to feel safe & comfortable.
It’s believed once we fulfill that need, we move up to social needs. This is the desire to feel accepted by the people around us, and to have a positive self-esteem.
Put simply, we want to feel like a good and valuable person.
In theory, if we manage to fulfill both of these needs, we can reach the top of the pyramid, we can reach happiness.
We typically think of happiness as a consequential emotion. As a reward, that we earn by slogging through our negative emotions for long enough.
We believe it’s next to impossible to be happy all of the time. To try to be would mean giving up on personal growth, or even the “richness” of life.
Throughout all of human history, we have always associated small bouts of happiness with long periods of hard self-discipline and suffering.
But I believe this is wrong.
Think about the times in your life when you’ve been the happiest. When you’ve felt that bubbling energy of joy.
For me, the first memory that comes to mind is when I boarded that flight from Australia to Albania.
It was just after the covid lockdowns, so tension was high. I’d decided to leave everything I knew to travel through Eastern Europe with my two dogs. Safe to say, it was not an idea that was well received by my parents. My social needs were definitely not being met. And with only two suitcases, no knowledge of the language and no friends in Europe, my comfort needs weren’t being fulfilled either.
And yet, I was the happiest I’d ever been. I felt surprisingly calm and was determined that everything was going to go great, and it did.
Despite having none of my “needs” being met, I had reached happiness.
So how do you explain that?
You see, we’ve been missing something.
For so long our reward-based model of emotion has distracted us from the true nature of happiness.
Currently, we associate happiness with indulgence or success. You eat a donut, you feel a little happy. You get a raise, you feel a little happy. But that’s conditional happiness. That tiny little top of the pyramid that we have to fight tooth and nail to reach.
True happiness, the kind I felt as I walked away from all I knew in Australia, that looks more like this:
Underneath our desperate need for survival, beneath our desire to fulfill our needs, is what I call Intrinsic Happiness.
It is what we feel when we put our defense mechanisms aside and let ourselves simply experience life. It’s the joy, curiosity, confidence and excitement that we feel even when things are hard. When we still have responsibilities and all the same troubles, yet we almost vibrate with happiness.
For most of us, it’s a rare feeling. Before I discovered my system, I’d only felt intrinsic happiness a handful of times.
But now, I can honestly say, I experience it almost every single day.
That’s not because I live some fast-paced, glamorous lifestyle now. I spend most of my time working…
It’s because I’ve learnt how to change my emotions in an instant.
Here’s How I Do It!
The underlying principle to my 2 step system is that our emotions are actually incredibly simple.
They can be condensed into 5 core emotional states.
One base emotion: Intrinsic Happiness, and four defense mechanisms.
Our emotional defense mechanisms align perfectly with our supposed “needs”. With 2 mechanisms for sourcing comfort and 2 for justifying our value.
They are:
1. Comfort seeking
When we rely on something outside ourselves to bring us comfort.
2. Comfort controlling
When we try to gain as much control as possible in order to feel safe or comfortable again.
3. Value earning
When we make decisions in the hopes of being seen as valuable.
4. Value shielding
When we put up mental or physical barriers in order to protect our self-esteem.
Each of these defense mechanisms feel natural & justified in the moment. We feel as if we’re responding fairly to a situation, but all we are doing is chasing that unachievable little glimpse of conditional happiness.
The first step in my 2 step system is becoming aware of when you’re acting through a defense mechanism. When you are trying to reach conditional happiness, instead of intrinsic.
This takes a bit of practice so I’m gonna give you a little technique for catching yourself.
Whenever you feel some sort of negative emotion — be it anxiety, jealousy, anger, or just plain boredom — ask yourself:
What am I defending myself from?
It’s a simple question, but you’d be surprised how often we get caught up in our emotions, but aren’t actually conscious of what we’re trying to do with them.
Once you’ve asked yourself: What am I defending myself from? Try to identify what defence mechanism you’re using in order to do that.
Are you comfort seeking, and trying to gain reassurance from someone or something else?
Are you comfort controlling, and using aggression or forceful energy to try to regain control over the situation?
Are you value earning, and making decisions based on what will make you feel more valuable or worthy?
Or are you value shielding, and shutting down a social interaction in order to protect your value?
Once you have identified the defense mechanism you’re in, you can move onto step 2.
Step 2
I want to introduce you to the concept of emotional independence.
It ain’t new. You’ve probably heard the term before.
Put simply, emotional independence is the ability to regulate and manage your own emotions without relying on others.
It isn’t the most popular term. It normally loses out to its big brother “emotional intelligence”.
Most likely because it feels a little patronising, and honestly, half-baked. It’s easy to manage your emotions when everything is good, right? But how often do we succeed at managing our emotions when life is beating us down?
The power of emotional independence is often ignored because, up until now, we didn’t have a good enough understanding of our emotions in order to regulate them independently.
If we go back to our simplified emotions, we can notice a pattern.
- Comfort seeking.
- Comfort controlling.
- Value earning.
- Value shielding.
Each of our defence mechanisms relies on someone else in order to be fulfilled.
- We seek comfort from another.
- We try to control others to regain comfort.
- We compare ourselves to others to feel valuable.
- And we shield ourselves from the “wrong” others in order to maintain it.
Now look at our last emotion: Intrinsic Happiness.
By definition and practice, it is the absence of any defence mechanisms. It is curiousity in the face of the unknown. Authenticity in the face of social comparison.
It is the only emotion that doesn’t rely on another person to be fulfilled.
It is emotionally independent.
Step 2 of reaching Intrinsic Happiness, is choosing to act through emotional independence.
But we still have the same problem, right? How do we do that?
Well, like all good things, it’s actually surprisingly simple.
You see, we have a new system of understanding our emotions now.
Because we’ve simplified our emotions into just 5 terms, we don’t have to mess around with the 3000 words that exists in the English language. We no longer have to fish around for the right word every time we want to feel better. Or spend hours trying to decide if what we’re feeling is jealousy, anger or just plain fatigue.
Instead we can now identify the behaviour, the feeling and the source all in one question.
Regulating our emotions has never been easy!
So, how do you take this second step?
You’ve identified the defence mechanism you’re in, now you need to ask yourself:
How can I deal with this emotion independently?
If you’re comfort seeking, how can you bring yourself comfort without relying on something outside of you?
If you’re comfort controlling, how can you feel more comfort without having to be in control of everything?
If you’re value earning, how can you feel confident without relying on how you compare with others?
And if you’re value shielding, how can you feel at ease with your decisions without having to protect them from others?
I’ll leave you with one last titbit. Our emotions only exist within our minds, and they only exist within the instant we’re feeling them. Once we move onto another emotion, the emotion we were feeling is gone forever.
That’s what allows us to feel excited in once instant, and have a sense of dread in the next.
But it’s also what allows us to control our emotions.
If we can create a technique simple enough to use on intuition whenever we need it, we can have full control of how we feel.
We can go from feeling cr*p to being happy in a matter of seconds. We just have to develop the skill.
Once you can do that, the possibilities are endless!
Hey! I’m on a mission to make our emotions as simple as possible! For the last 2 years, I’ve dived deep into philosophy, psychology and my own mind.
But now I need your help! I’m hoping to build a community of people to help me push my research further. All you need to do is let me know what you think about the ideas I share. I want to hear what you have to think.
How does this idea relate to you? Do you agree? Do you disagree? Let me know!
