Can I Really “Choose to Be Happy”?
Short answer: Yes. Long answer: it’s complicated.
“Choosing happiness” is one of those phrases that gets thrown around a lot — but the reality is far more nuanced, and for many people, far more painful than the advice suggests.
Before diving in, let’s define a few key terms:
- Happiness — a sense of purpose and general safety, accompanied by a balanced experience of emotions on both ends of the spectrum. It is not the absence of pain or sadness.
- Pleasure — a positive sensation in the body, driven by hormones your body learns to seek out. Being happy increases your capacity for pleasure, but the two are not the same.
- Hope — a belief that you can be happy, even if you aren’t right now. Rarely can you choose happiness without it.
The Problem With “Just Choose Happiness”
The common version of choosing happiness usually looks like this: avoid stressful thoughts, don’t dwell on the past, do more pleasurable things, and practice gratitude. These habits can temporarily increase feelings of safety and pleasure — but alone, they don’t last.
Pain is inevitable. When we try to suppress what’s inevitable, we end up numb, with emotions finding maladaptive ways to surface. Staving off pain is not the same as building happiness.
There’s also the Viktor Frankl school of thought — that you can find meaning, and therefore happiness, even in the midst of suffering. A deep sense of meaning can sustain hope through traumatic circumstances. But for many people, no amount of reframing or coping strategy brings meaningful change. They’re too overwhelmed by pain to simply “choose” their way out of it — and the pressure to do so only adds shame to an already heavy burden.
A Different Way to Choose Happiness
Here’s a different framework: choosing happiness means fully acknowledging the pain in your life, and fully expressing the fear, anger, and sadness you feel — then addressing the sources of those feelings and changing what you can.
- If you acknowledge your fear, you won’t just cope with an abusive relationship — you’ll leave it.
- If you accept your anger, you won’t suppress resentment toward your parents — you’ll seek resolution, repair, or set boundaries.
- If you accept your sadness, you won’t mask shame from your past — you’ll process your trauma and begin to heal.
Instead of avoiding pain, you lean into it until it heals. This is significantly harder than avoidance. It involves more intense experiences of pain, often over a long period of time — especially if you’ve spent years stuffing or numbing your feelings. It’s even harder if you were never taught to identify and process emotions in the first place.
Coping Still Has Its Place
This isn’t to say coping is wrong. On the journey toward happiness, we have to manage pain — we can’t take it all at once. And we absolutely need to make room for the positive: expressing gratitude, recalling good memories, being present in safe and intimate moments.
But trying to restrict your emotional experience to only the positive actually diminishes its meaning. We can only recognize joy in contrast to pain.
So What Does “Choosing Happiness” Actually Mean?
- Choosing to learn how to feel the full emotional spectrum — and take responsibility for those emotions.
- Choosing to change your environment where possible, rather than just coping with it.
- Choosing not to numb your thoughts or feelings, and being intentional about when and how to cope.
- Choosing to accept your whole life experience — the good and the bad — rather than trying to erase the past.
This is far more demanding than it sounds. No one can blame you for not jumping in immediately, for not knowing how, or for having more ground to cover than someone else. The truth is, not everyone starts from the same place. Some people face tremendous hurdles to reach levels of happiness that others arrived at with far less struggle.
This isn’t a race with equal starting positions. It’s okay to acknowledge where you’re starting — and to extend that same grace to others who may be starting even further back.
