Why are we afraid of being happy?

When we take into consideration how much we want to be happy, we might say that when we are faced with a possibility for happiness, we would seize it without complications and as a natural thing to do. But for many of us,

however, as attached as we would be to the notion of happiness, the actual acceptance and application of it in our lives or even just in some moments, is prevented by feelings of fear and uncertainty.

We sometimes prefer the comfort of anger, fear and anxiety, than taking a risk in enjoying positive experiences and associating them with a good mood, with happiness. Shorter said, we are afraid of being happy.

This fear can sometimes be tracked down to our childhoods. There may have been events in our early years that attached us to the state of unhappiness and it has developed into a normal state of being in which we feel comfortable and always prepared for the worst situations. Perhaps someone we very much admired or loved was being unhappy and so in order to honor that person and to identify with them more, we chose to follow their example. So now every time we feel a glimpse of happiness, we think of it as betrayal towards that person. As much as we want to be happy, there is a part of us that wants to stay with them, thus without realizing, we keep ourselves from enjoying life as we should and as we’d really wish to.  There could also be the case that someone we cared about was being jealous of our achievements and joys, and so we learned not to show our pride anymore, in order to avoid conflict.

We may also have grown in an environment in which unhappiness was the normal state of being and because of that, we lack an appropriate role model for happiness. This one is a very common case. It’s like, we want to be happy, but we don’t really know how, because all we’ve seen our whole lives was misery and sorrow. In such environments people grow up thinking that being panicky and anxious is the norm, and also that picturing worst-case-scenarios is normal. Also, this mentality is sometimes developing into an excuse and we might add a layer of emotional superiority to it in order to legitimize our behavior: happiness is for the narrow-minded, the ones without perspective or perception of the real world, and the intelligent people are sad because they really understand the world.

Such positions do nothing but harm our psyche. In times in which we will be in love, or archive one of our “life goals”, or be on holiday, we will start to panic, because we wouldn’t know how to react. We would have been soaked in unhappiness for so long that our senses would be jammed. We would have been sabotaging our own happiness.

There is nothing greedy, stupid or superficial about happiness. The ability to enjoy good times appropriately is an important psychological achievement. It is a proof of great seriousness to be able to laugh, enjoy playing with a pet, watch the stars, enjoy a hot bath, savour an ice cream, appreciate a flower and be amazed by a painting. Fear is safe, there are plenty of reasons to be sad, like, all the time. It is of course easier and safer to prepare for a catastrophe, whenever it may happen. But a truly courageous move would be to dare to lessen down on the preparations for catastrophe, to resist the fears engraved in us and once in a while to believe that, astonishingly, for a time, there may truly be nothing to worry about.