The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living

Product Information

Sooner or later we all will come face-to-face with a crisis, disappointment and failure. This means that in one form or another, we are all going to experience painful thoughts and feelings. What is ACT? The acronym also stands for the process Accept your internal experience; Choose a values-based direction; Take action! It has proven effective with depression and addiction. Despite everything you’ve tried over the years, isn’t it a fact that your mind still produces unpleasant pictures?” – p. 75 It must reveal something if I feel cagy about advertising that I've read a book subtitled "How to Stop Struggling and Start Living." Who doesn't imagine people are paying way more attention to your insecurities than they really are? "Gracious, I didn't know Josh was struggling! The poor dear. Let's make him some soup." Values: Clarifying what is most important to you in your life, what sort of person you want to be, and not just focusing on external goals – focusing more on the expression of those values (e.g., “I want to practice connection with people” instead of “I want to be married to a romantic partner”)

I’m not saying ACT is worthless, that all of it is stolen, or that it should be discarded in favor of more religiously and culturally traditional practices. I *am* saying that instead of distancing ACT from obvious Eastern connections, it would seem more appropriate to deliberately and respectfully highlight the connections, give credit where credit is due, and *then* point out that it’s possible to utilize some of these ancient practices with modern Western cues, in a non-religious way in service of our mental health (as Easterners figured out, like, forever ago). Defusion: Recognizing thoughts, images, memories, and feelings as what they are – just words and pictures – without fighting them, running from them, or staying too focused on themWe all enjoy happy feelings, so it’s no surprise that we chase them. However, like all our other feelings, feelings of happiness don’t last. No matter how hard we try to hold on to them, they slip away every time.

The book explores a number of tools you can use to accept your experience of those things and make choices that will make you feel good long-term.

I had grown up with the idea that I had to fight my own thoughts and feelings to keep an average level of happiness. If I had a thought that wasn't in line with how I wanted to live or feel, I would stop everything and try to rationalize my way out of thinking it. Of course, thoughts like "my parents are going to die and I'm going to watch them die" aren't irrational, just horribly unhelpful. So instead of finding some loophole to rationalize thoughts like that, I would just end up getting beat up by them. I've spent years of my life thinking "I'm so tired of fighting." And this book helped me realize I don't have to fight!!! A grande rasgo, el autor propone percibir nuestros pensamientos como lo que son, solo palabras, y prestarles atención solamente si son útiles para poder construir una vida plena y llena de sentido. Y este último es el otro gran elemento de la ACT. Para ello, el autor define qué entiende por "una vida plena y llena de sentido" y propone identificar nuestros valores, o dicho de otra forma, qué es más importante para nosotros, y emprender acciones y objetivos para vivir en consonancia con estos valores. Must practice connection, like building muscles--the more you practice, the more strength you have to change your life. An excellent book I would recommend to anyone interested in mental health, either their own or those around them, or the concept at large. In The Happiness Trap, Russ Harris crafts a persuasive, intelligent argument for why we should stop aiming for happiness and instead aim for a mindful, values-driven life. His ideas in this book come from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a newer, third-wave cognitive behavioral therapy that has shown promising effectiveness in research studies. He starts the book by dispelling “happiness myths,” such as how happiness is the natural state for all humans, or how to live a better life we have to get rid of negative feelings. After this first section, he goes on to provide several strategies for increasing psychological flexibility, core principles that help us cultivate a rich and meaningful life. I will provide a super brief synopsis of each one:

Turn the struggle switch to off--stop struggling against physical or emotional pain. Sure it's unpleasant and we don't like it, but it's nothing terrible.... Without struggle, what we get is a natural level of physical and emotional discomfort, depending on who we are and the situation we're in (= "clean discomfort"). There is no avoiding it. But if we struggle with it, it becomes "dirty discomfort", the emotions are amplified when the struggle switch is on. The fight-or-flight is often triggered in situations where it is of little or no use to us.” – p. 85 I take issue with two things in relation to this book. First, there were a few times as I was reading that the tone felt condescending. I felt very little empathy or understanding in relation to how difficult it can be to endure the kinds of things that go beyond the basic, universal aches and pains of life. I found this particularly weird given that the author is a therapist himself…I don’t think most people believe THESE myths. I think they believe truths that are very closely related to these that get twisted. I don’t know how I feel about this book. It’s basically a client-friendly overview of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) and offers instructions on how to implement associated techniques and interventions. I want to hate this book. It's so patronising and at times seriously flawed, logic-wise. It explains things with lots of exclamation marks! And drawn-out metaphors! And basically it's just the author going on, without drawing on any examples from the real world!