Being happy is always a good feeling. Last week I posted a blog post titled “12 Mood-Boosting Activities You Can Do When You’re All Alone and Feeling Bored”. The idea is to boost our mood, instead of immersing ourselves in the uncomfortable feelings for too long that can potentially escalate to depression. 

Ideally, when we go through any uncomfortable feelings, we’re supposed to sit and validate them, not distract and repress/suppress them.

But what I often do (and many of us do!) is to just get up and distract myself, hoping the uncomfortable feeling would go away. Because after all, happiness is a choice, right? We should always choose to be happy, so they say.

If I’m in the middle of activities that can make me happy while I’m sad, and if someone tells me to sit down and validate my sadness, I may just tell them to go hug a cactus. 

I (and I believe many of us) simply don’t like being told to go back to sadness (or any other uncomfortable feelings) and validate it with compassion. Perhaps this stems from childhood. 

For instance, when we were kids and crying, most likely we would be told to stop crying as it was too noisy. Often, we were also told that the reason we cried was so petty that we should be ashamed of crying over it.  

With this type of childhood, many of us don’t recognise the concept of ‘emotional validation’. Our feelings are seen as stupid and therefore should not exist. Consequently, many of us unconsciously chose to avoid uncomfortable emotions and walk around with fake happiness. The uncomfortable emotions, like sadness or anger, are still inside. Repressed.

What Happens if We Repress Our Uncomfortable Feelings?

Distracting ourselves instead of validating the uncomfortable feelings does seem to work. The uncomfortable feelings seem to go away. Temporarily. 

What actually happens is that these uncomfortable feelings are repressed, deep inside, ready to burst out inappropriately in an unpredictable way. 

If (we think) we’re so good at controlling our emotions, this repressed sadness or anger (or any other uncomfortable feelings) leak out through things we do or say. 

If we are artists, it can show through our creative work. If we’re not artists and have no healthy channel to let the repressed feelings express themselves, we’re likely to become slightly or even bizarrely unreasonable when dealing with people whose behaviour triggers an uncomfortable feeling within us. 

Repressed feelings can also give us various health problems. For those of you who are curious about health problems and repressed feelings, have a look at the book, “The Secret Language of Your Body”.

Furthermore, repressing our feelings for too long would result in emotional numbness. When we are emotionally numb, we can no longer feel anything. We can’t feel sad; we can’t feel happy either. Everything becomes grey. Certainly doesn’t sound like a pleasant life.

How Do We Validate Our Uncomfortable Feelings?

One way to validate our uncomfortable feelings is through a mood journal. We write down our thoughts and experiences, name the feelings and investigate what triggers the feelings.

Writing down our thoughts and experiences helps us see our patterns. It also helps us understand a situation more clearly. This may result in a better understanding of whether our reaction to a certain situation is unnecessarily negative or just right. For this, we need to first know how to love ourselves. Here is my post about what self-love is.

Another way to validate our uncomfortable feelings is through talking to people we can trust, who do not gaslight, minimise or make fun of our feelings.

All in All

Being happy is always a good feeling. But if we want to truly feel joy and happiness, we should embrace and validate our uncomfortable feelings instead of pushing them away with ‘happy’ activities.