When I used to work in private practice, there were many days in the office where I just had a general feeling of discontent. Nothing seemed right. The staff were at each other's throats, the patients were needy, and I had way too many phone calls to do before I could go home.
On those days, I was much more likely to snack on the doughnuts someone brought in that morning, eat a couple cookies that the drug rep brought with lunch, and mindlessly eat animal crackers while I finished my charts and prepared for the end-of-the-day marathon of phone calls.
The reason I was eating all of that was to try to make myself feel more content.
From a very early age, we are bombarded by messages that we should be happy most of the time, and if we're not, something has gone wrong. Marketers let us know that if we just take this vacation, eat this food, drink this wine, and join this gym so we can fit into this size 2 bikini, then we'll be happy.
When you ask people what they really want out of life, so many will say, “I just want to be happy!”
But the truth is, we don't want to be happy all the time.
What we're seeking is a feeling of contentment.
I found it fascinating to look up the definition of content in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. They define content as “Pleased and satisfied; not needing more.”
Isn't that what we all really want?
When we feel like we are constantly chasing after the elusive happiness that is dangled like a carrot in front of us, we are neither pleased nor satisfied. We continue to believe that if we just buy the latest gadget, the newest phone, and the latest fashions, then we'll be happy. Or if we just make some Pinterest-worthy cupcakes for our kid's class, have a Crossfit body, and completely renovate our home, all while still having a raging social life, then we'll be happy.
But even if we acquire and achieve these things, we're still right back where we began: believing we need more.
We have to get to a place where we are content with our lives where we are, right here and now, before we can start to even know how to change our lives for the better.
The good news is that this is completely possible.
There is always a root cause for every single feeling, or emotion, that we ever feel. Emotions don't just come over us out of nowhere. But the fact is, that for most of us, we have no idea why we are feeling the negative emotions that we feel. Rather than trying to identify what the cause of these emotions is, we buffer, or dull, that negative emotion to make it more tolerable by eating food.
Every single feeling is caused by a thought.
If you haven't read my post about sensations vs. feelings, you can read it here. In that post, I dig deep into what a feeling is and how to identify it.
So my feeling of discontent was caused by thoughts that I was having about my job. I had thoughts about how the staff were treating each other and how it was being handled (of course, I thought it should be done differently), which made me feel discontent. I had thoughts about how my patients were acting (the meaning I was assigning to their actions was that they were needy), which made me feel discontent. And my thoughts about the number of phone calls I had sitting on my desk (too many!) caused me to feel discontent.
Because of my interpretation of the neutral day's events (my thoughts about them), I was creating my own misery.
Unfortunately, I didn't really understand this or believe it until I became a life coach myself. I see now how I could have made my experience of working in clinical practice so much more enjoyable for myself, without anyone or anything else having to change.
I also did not know this extremely critical life truth:
It's completely normal and expected to experience negative emotions at least half the time. Nothing has gone wrong if you are not happy constantly like the advertising execs want us to believe.
What we have to learn and believe is that we can experience these negative emotions, without acting on them. We do not have to buffer them by overeating, overdrinking, doing drugs, overspending, or working too much.
I will cover how to do that in next week's post!
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