Tonight I was soul searching, trying to gain self awareness of my minds methods and emotions I have suppressed. I was merely seeking relief from my symptoms. What happened, after examining each emotion, careful to not re-repress it, another would come along. Then came love, something I quit expressing years ago. I was reminded of my childhood days when I actually felt the emotion of love toward my family, and I let that feeling rise up in me as I lay there through this exercise.

Then something unexpected happened: I realized I was suddenly feeling…Happy. The warm, positive, cheerful, tangible feeling of happiness. I was simply looking for relief, and then….happiness? I didn’t even think to hope for that. I had forgotten that it was an actual emotion, a real feeling.

What should happen after that but I search the web for a couple related key words and I come across your blog.

I’m commenting for two reasons: It validated what I had just experienced; and, I believe it validated your hypothesis.

Great, impressive work, especially for someone as young as you are (although you are older now than when you wrote this). Anyway, thanks for such a brilliant peice of work.

I like the way you think. I can never express myself easily but you seem to speak on my behalf…(don’t want to be selfish)

Great work anyway mate and keep things up!

Best wishes

I’m still having trouble seeing how that could be fearsome. Unless it’s the realisation that some aspects of happiness are immediately available if only one puts in immediate effort. And it’s the effort that people fear. Yet that seems better than the alternative, the warm fuzzy fantasy, which also requires effort to realise.

Mark,

With the emotional quality model your goal is both variety and depth. Certain emotions might require work, but the decisions that lead to them invariably create different positive emotions along the way.

Let me explain. If you set a goal to write a novel, the feeling of pride/accomplishment may take a few months. But the feelings of challenge/optimism are fairly immediate. If those emotions are of a high quality, this means the level of happiness gained from the initial decision of writing a novel is spread out from the beginning to the end, just in different forms.

No, this isn’t a cure for depression, but nothing is an instant cure. It is just one more lens from which to view the world and make decisions.

-Scott

It seems to me that reaching a significant milestone on the emotional quality path could take just as long as on the life quality path, and therefore both could seem equally distant and rosy at the start.

Someone in the midst of chronic depression is certainly not “almost already there.” And even someone who is much closer may still have a long way to go. I consider myself in that group; I’ve spent the last couple of years trying to improve the quality of my emotions and I’m seeing results, but it’s slow and steady, with a long way still to go.

However I do agree that tangible goals are more motivational.

I also agree 100% that greater happiness will come from higher quality of emotions rather than situational, context-bound aspects of life. Circumstances change; grounding one’s happiness in something which may or may not be there in the near future seems, in this rapidly changing world, a sure way to end up depressed.