Are Your Thoughts Helping You Change Your Behavior?

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Your mind beats you up and criticizes you in order to help you change your behavior. It wants you to shape up, warns you about the consequences of your actions, and tries to save you from failure or rejection. Negative thinking patterns like worrying and catastrophizing are your mind's way of preparing you for potential dangers and keeping you safe. Every negative cognitive process has an underlying purpose of helping you avoid something you don't want or achieve something you do want, although it might approach it clumsily.

Happiness is the subject of thousands of articles, podcasts, and scientific studies. Yet all this focus on happiness doesn't seem to be making people any happier. In fact, the more they try to be happy, especially by fighting to get rid of bad feelings and cling to good ones, the more unhappy people often become.

My guest would say that the first step in escaping this negative cycle is redefining what happiness even means — thinking of it not as a state of feeling good but of doing good.

His name is Russ Harris and he's a therapist and the author of The Happiness Trap.

Today on the show, Russ explains how struggling against difficult feelings and thoughts just makes them stronger — amplifying instead of diminishing stress, anxiety, depression, and self-consciousness — and how simply obeying your emotions doesn't work out any better. He then unpacks the alternative approach to happiness espoused by Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. With ACT, you allow both hard and pleasant feelings to coexist, and unhook from the latter so that they no longer jerk you around. This allows you to focus on taking action on your values to create a meaningful, flourishing life, or in other words, real happiness.