WP1: My Pursuit of Happiness and Well-Being
I have spent most of my life paying little-to-no attention to maintaining my well-being. Growing up, I learned to please others. I remember being taught that other people’s happiness with me or my actions is very important. While I may have also been told that my happiness matters, that was not the lesson that stuck. And so I grew up a people-pleaser. This aspect of my identity has caused me to derive my own happiness from making other people happy. While I have come to embrace this aspect of my identity and do not wish to change, I do wish to be less reliant on other people for my own well-being. This reliance did not develop accidentally. Society intentionally trained me, specifically being a young girl, to rely on others’ approval for my own sense of self. I wish this weren’t the case. I wish everyone — especially girls — were taught to be self-reliant and find self-fulfillment, both of which are essential for the achievement of independence and well-being. I have begun to make significant progress toward obtaining these marks of independence by developing the beneficial skills of adaptive thinking and rewarding decision-making.
The effects of being a people-pleaser can be detrimental. I recently read an article by Dr. Teyhou Smyth that explores the prevalence of people-pleasing in female-identifying individuals. Titled “Are Women Pressured Into Unhealthy People-Pleasing,” the article explains that “women are suffering from greater adverse effects on both mental and physical health from these [people-pleasing] behaviors” (Smyth 2020). As a girl, I have experienced this first hand. Having many female-identifying friends and many male-identifying friends, I have been able to notice the differences between their interactions with the world around them. With the occasional exception, girls are customarily much more concerned about our image (that the ideas and opinions of those around us promote) than our male counterparts. As a girl, this focus on other people’s opinions takes away from my confidence and self-love, subsequently reducing my likelihood of standing up for myself and my ideas or opinions.
As women, we must not rely on society to fix such internal problems with confidence and self-love, as this very society is what caused these problems. We must instead look within ourselves to find the best, most personal solution. I have done this by steering away from caring about external judgment, while simultaneously learning to find satisfaction in my own actions. By doing so, I have improved my sense of self-worth, and am much less bothered by the opinions of others. This shift in my mindset has done wonders for my sense of well-being. I feel in control. I am in control. Specifically, I am in control over my emotional responses to the interactions I have with the outside world, which stem from adaptive thinking — an essential component to achieving well-being.
So, what does “thinking adaptively” even mean? I recently learned that at the University of California, Irvine, Sonja Lyubomirsky and Kari L. Tucker conducted several studies that outline this concept well. They discovered that “self-rated happy students tended to think about both [positive and negative life events] more favorably and adaptively — e.g., by seeing humor in adversity and emphasizing recent improvement in their lives” (Lyubomirsky and Tucker 1998). By my definition, thinking “adaptively” is the ability to consciously control how you interpret events.
Adaptive thinking is the most beneficial tool in my toolbox, helping me build my own sense of well-being. My ability to adopt a positive mindset when faced with seemingly negative life events has helped me achieve great success in my personal quest for well-being. This is exactly what well-being is about: the ability to take everything life throws at you — the good and the bad — and maintain an overall sense of happiness while properly processing the events.
In contrast to adaptive thinking, which takes place after events, rewarding decision-making is a helpful tool I employ before events. I define rewarding decision-making as the ability to make decisions that prioritize the ideas and experiences that align with my overarching pursuit of well-being. I used to think that the “better” decision for me was always that which (on the surface level) seemed to better prepare me for the future. However, these actions did not make me happy.
My poorly balanced decision-making process negatively affected my sense of well-being. As I explained in my recent post titled “Tick Tock,” “looking back on high school, I feel as though I missed out. I regret not adventuring more, my lack of spontaneity, and my unwillingness to prioritize anything fun over anything productive toward school and future academic success” (Wood 2021, September). This decision-making process did not promote well-being: there was no balance between immediate and delayed gratification — the scale was toppling over from the heavy weight I placed on the latter.
The identification of life imbalances and subsequently taking action to counteract them are crucial toward the development of well-being. Recognizing the imbalance in my life, “I have vowed to myself that in college I will not approach life the same way. I don’t want to look back four years from now and think — again — that I wasted time” (Wood 2021, September). To better balance the scale, I am placing more weight on immediate gratification through increased spontaneity and exploration of the current world around me. Although tomorrow is important, so is today. I want to truly live in the world around me, not just pass through it.
When I am too focused on working toward FUTURE happiness, I often overlook the joy that CURRENTLY surrounds me. In a paper I wrote my senior year of high school, I explained how “I sometimes feel that by allowing myself to live in the moment, I am in some way doing evil to my future self by not looking out for her in every single moment of my life” (Wood 2021, February). The root of this feeling is illegitimate. By combining the ideas of adaptive thinking and rewarding decision-making, I was able to realize that the choices I make in favor of immediate gratification ARE beneficial to BOTH current and future versions of myself. Learning to seek immediate gratification not only makes me happier in the moment, but provides me with tools for future happiness as well. Being able to find immediate gratification is important for my life-long maintenance of well-being — it allows me to quickly pull myself out of negative thoughts and feelings. The more I practice this, the more second nature this skill becomes.
The pursuit and maintenance of well-being look different for everyone. Societal norms make this process especially hard for female-identifying individuals by teaching us to care deeply about the opinions and ideas of others — the opposite of confidence and self-love. Once I realized that this constraint was being placed on me, I was then able to begin to actively work to free myself from its binding chains, toward an escape to greater well-being. By employing adaptive thinking and rewarding decision-making, I learned skills that help promote and maintain well-being. While this might not work for everyone, it certainly works for me. I hope it can work for you, too.
Bibliography
Lyubomirsky, Dr. Sonja, and Dr. Kari L. Tucker. “Implications of Individual Differences in Subjective Happiness for Perceiving, Interpreting, and Thinking About Life Events.” In SpringerLink Database. Previously published in Motivation and Emotion 22, no. 5 (June 1998): 155–86. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1021396422190#citeas.
Smyth, Dr. Teyhou. “Are Women Pressured into Unhealthy People-Pleasing?” Thrive Global. Last modified July 20, 2020. Accessed September 19, 2021. https://thriveglobal.com/stories/are-women-pressured-into-unhealthy-people-pleasing/.
Wood, Sydney. “Devil May Care?” Unpublished manuscript, February 26, 2021. Accessed September 19, 2021. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VBGbwmsiAva0-NsL4XXhTnPjxHgXxLUrlwVposnHrYI/edit?usp=sharing.
— — — . “Post 2: Tick Tock.” Medium. Last modified September 8, 2021. Accessed September 19, 2021. https://medium.com/@scwood/post-2-tick-tock-a05d35d72759.
