For a long time I was afraid to be happy. I was afraid to laugh too strongly, I was afraid to get carried away with any overly positive feeling because it would make me nervous.
It sounds strange to say but I was holding on to myself tightly (emotionally speaking) so I wouldn’t lose control, or at least that was the thought process. Anxiety has a way of doing all kinds of things to you and destroying your sense of joy is a major one.
It took me years before I realized that laughing hard wasn’t fatal and that smiling and talking to others in an engaging way was a good thing. Ultimately we have to realize that the reason we are afraid to be happy is because we are afraid to let go.
Being happy is relative and has more to do with your state of mind than with anything else. It’s not to say that dealing with anxiety is easy, but it is to say that in many ways being happy, laughing more, and talking more are all choices. You should choose happiness because the alternative sucks.
Watch: This two minute video by Web Md that talks about the power of laughter – Click Here .
Excellent ideas here. I think as someone who has suffered for so long, I would indeed be scared to be happy. Primarily because as an anxious person I’d just be waiting for the ball to drop and the happiness to go away. Always expecting the bad…thus another trait of negative thinking. I think that a lot of this stems from that and simply the fact that change is quite scare for many sufferers, so to stay the same (even though it’s like hell) is better than to go through change.
Anxiety sufferers feel guilty about being happy for one and secondly they feel that anxiety symptoms like chest pain might strike them from nowhere right at the time when they are happy so as to punish them for being immoderate. I faced these real hard.