Show notes:

This episode shares three important lessons I’ve learnt regarding happiness in my journey so far. Through the lens of someone who possesses traits of a “Highly Sensitive Person” (HSP) and is often caught up in states of anxiety, you will gain insights on what anxiety feels like for someone going through it and also explore how can one find happiness from deep within. By revealing bits and pieces of my raw unfiltered self, this episode will share another perspective for those who have always been feeling insecure and “small” about themselves to find the courage and strength to move forward. Chill in now!

Additional note:

In this episode, I spoke on what anxiety feels like for me. It does not represent what others with the same challenge are going through. Do note that anxiety comes in different forms. It does feel different from people to people. Some people display physical symptoms but for some others there are no visible signs and it is mostly from within. 

Full Transcript of Episode:

(Intro)

The topic of today’s episode is Happiness.

It took me quite long before I decided to do an episode on this topic on happiness, yet it has always been something I’ve been wanting to talk about. Initially I felt that this topic was beyond me. I was thinking who am I to talk about happiness. I find myself thinking to myself if I am ever even qualified to talk about happiness.

Firstly, it’s a broad topic and I think there’s no one universal key to happiness and it looks different to different people. And then secondly, I felt that I am not the happiest person around. In fact, I think a large part of my day is often filled with a lot of anxiety and worries. I am someone who constantly worry a lot about everything, including my worry about handling this this episode (laughs). Even though I am still on this learning journey of discovering myself and what happiness means, it doesn’t mean I have to shy away from talking about it. I just thought that it’s an important topic to explore and discuss. Part of the reason why I am doing this is so that I can put it out there to learn from you guys as well. 

Through this journey of finding myself, I realised a few changes in myself that I just thought that it would be worth sharing. Even right now, to be very honest, most of the time I don’t feel happy, but I do feel that I am more fulfilled now in life as compared to the past and I think in that way I can say I am in a “happier state”. Yet, it is still a challenge for me to define this “happier state” as well because it is not a state where see myself laughing more or being all joyful and bubbly in my day-to day. I used to think being happy is all about that- being cheerful all the time. But then, I realised that more often it’s something that comes from within you (like if it’s ever quantifiable, it should be quantified from within and less about what it seems on the outside). I have to say that this episode is a highly opinionated (and also an exploratory one).

THREE POWERFUL LESSONS FROM WITHIN

In today’s episode, I am going to share with you three powerful lessons I’ve learn from my own experience so far, which brings me a step closer towards happiness.

Lesson #1: Happiness means coming to see and accept myself for who I am, even when nobody else does. 

I think one big difference between the past and now is that I am able to see the self within me. I mean I have always been able to see the self within me, but I am able to see it more clearly when I started consciously looking from within. Specifically, that side of how I am constantly stressed about almost everything and how I often absorb people’s feelings all the time. This also means I constantly think about how would people feel when I do something. Like if I am not feeling well enough to go out to meet my friends, I would feel stressed out when I have to reject people because I tend to absorb and really take in people’s feelings especially towards people whom I care about. I’ve came to learn and look hard into myself and see why am I feeling this way.  To be honest it’s not something that I can control as I am wired in a way that I sometimes put myself into other people’s emotions a lot more.  Now, I pretty much still do to a large extent but the main difference was I was more aware of my tendencies. 

Also, I came to realise that there is this term called highly sensitive person and I may just be one of them. A Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) is a term/ trait describing those who are thought to have an increased or deeper central nervous system sensitivity to physical, emotional, or social stimuli. This mean that they get triggered more easily and they feel more, when exposed to certain things. It could be noise, lights, or large crowds. I’ve been called “too sensitive” so many times in life that I sometimes have grown to hide that part of me pretty well. And regardless how care-free I look on the outside, probably I’ve just built that as a defence mechanism for myself over time. Internally I know that I feel those emotions strongly. It doesn’t matter whether I have built a defence mechanism on the outside, but internally I still feel those emotions to a large extent. More strongly than probably the average person.

To some extent I really hated this part of last time without knowing what it was. I would ask myself: “Why are u being like that?” I would tell myself: “This isn’t something normal people would care much about and I would tell myself to stop being so sensitive and stop caring so much…like just stop… and be “normal” instead.” Those self-talk to some extent add another layer of stress. When you know that people are not accepting you and you come to not accept yourself as well. Hence, I realise it’s so important to have self-compassion for yourself and to accept yourself for who you are. Even when others don’t. 

To do this you have to be really self-aware and know what is really you. So what exactly changed was probably my perspective. I came to accept and see myself for the person I am. I see this part of myself more. I see myself with someone with “high empathy”, instead of being “too sensitive”. I guess in a way I am actually “re-framing” of my thoughts and how I am seeing things. 

It is true that it will always remain a challenging thing for me in many situations. When I go to crowded noisy places or when I go out with big groups for a long time, I get overwhelmed. When I’m in professional work situations where I have to leave my emotions aside, I get uncomfortable as well.

Over time, I came to accept that side of me. I’ve came to embrace it more and I know there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. I started to accept myself and see that I have the power to accept myself first and see that these traits that I have are not a bad thing. They are not a bad thing as long as I can manage them properly. There’s nothing wrong about being too sensitive. So how I accepted myself was I saw the beauty of this trait I possess. This trait of mine allows me to form deeper bonds with people. It is true that I may get more overwhelmed and I get sucked into people’s emotions more. Yet, on the other side of things, I can feel for others more, I get deeply moved by the beauty of things around me. I am also someone who cries a lot (haha) when it comes to watching dramas, especially the particularly heartwarming ones. I cry for both pleasant and unpleasant emotions.

And then once I accepted it, I started to think about how can I cope with it (i.e how to cope with the not so good parts). For instance, how I cope would be:

Let’s say if I am watching a news with a lot of violence which can feel rather intense for me, I can choose to move away from it. I can choose not to watch it, so that it doesn’t get to me. Of course, it’s still important to watch the news. However, if certain news bring a lot of discomfort, I have the power to choose to move away from it. I also noticed that I’m someone who needs a lot of rest and downtime. Like if I haven’t mentioned, I can be alone for weeks and you wouldn’t see me complaining about that. I love being alone. My friends call me a loner (sometimes). You wouldn’t see me complaining about being alone because I just feel a high need to retreat to a very quiet place or room. I often catch myself having a lot of emotions and complex thoughts that I need to sort out. So I do need a lot of time to myself to manage that. I came to prioritise that more. It is not something that comes to me, but I actively manage it by asking for that rest time.

It had come to a point where I want to fully be myself now and embrace that part of me. I can tell you that this gives me happiness when I come to accept myself for who I am. I enjoy managing myself and I see that it isn’t a bad thing like I used to tell myself. Just by that itself, I am actually off-loading a lot of stress which I previously had put on myself. I think start to look from within to see who you really are and embrace that part of you which nobody wants to accept and the part of you that you often feel insecure about, sometimes it’s really not a bad thing. You will learn to see beauty in those things that you previously felt so insecure about.

Lesson #2: Being a “happy you” doesn’t mean being happy all the time. That’s just unrealistic.

I’ve learnt that being happy, being a “happy you” doesn’t mean being happy all the time. Even when when I say I’m happier now it does not mean that I’m always feeling happy. In fact, I must say that through this journey of finding the self, I feel a lot more feelings of discomfort, and it has never been more challenging for me. It’s a type of challenging feeling which I have never felt before. I don’t know how I can describe it but I would say that I’m feeling challenged yet I do feel connected. You know that feeling when something is so damn hard but yet it still feels so damn right. It does feel right to me. I feel it’s right to some extent that nothing good comes easy. Everything has its thorns but choose your thorns wisely and carefully.

So if I have to describe what I’m feeling at this moment to you, honestly if I look within myself right now, am I feeling happy? I think…I’m actually feeling more anxious than happy to be very honest. I still get nervous because I am not the best speaker around. Public speaking has never been my strength even though I’ve done it (recording an episode) a few times and I love doing it, each time I record I still get nervous and anxious. Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s exciting for me to be able to share all these internal things with you but there are challenges that comes with it.

So it goes back to the self. As a perfectionist towards almost everything in life, or rather towards the things I care about in life, I think the anxiousness comes from the expectations I often set for myself. Sometimes my expectations can be sky high, like crazy high. The need to be better than who I was from yesterday, and the idea of perfection drives me crazy. It’s crazy and like I can’t describe this overwhelming feeling I feel but I do feel overwhelmed easily by not living up to my own expectations. Sometimes as an idealist, I think my expectations for myself are sometimes unrealistic. Last time, I used to have an expectation that I have be happy everyday. You know how crazy is that?  Sp that’s one big thing I need to learn, which is not to set expectations which are too high and unachievable. Because then, you might end up feeling disappointed, and that just brings you one step away from happiness. 

It still gets to me every day to be honest. I feel that I am someone who is quite hard on myself. Even for this episode’s content, it is my third time recording it and I have changed the content three times before I decided to do an episode on happiness. If this time doesn’t work out, I would have to find other content. But you know where the happiness comes from for me? It comes from the fact that I am doing what I like to do. I like to express myself. I have a need for self-expression which I talked about in the last episode. Helping others through sharing my personal authentic experiences is something highly meaningful to me. And each time I get drained out I go back and I ask myself: Why? Why am I doing this? And I always tell myself that this is something I choose. I always tell myself that it is because what I am doing is something that truly matters to me, I derive fulfilment from it. It is not from the fact that I need to re-record my episodes when it doesn’t meet my expectations, but it’s from the fact that each time I re-do something I am actually bettering myself towards who I desire to become. So the why has to be strong and the goal has to be clear. What truly matters to you has to be clear to you. I have a goal for myself. Not disclosing that now, but a goal that is specific and measurable, such that each time you better yourself towards the goal that truly matters, you derive happiness and fulfilment from being one step closer to the goal. If that makes sense. In my case, I get better at self-expressing, I express in a way that is closer to who I actually am, and that gives me fulfilment. This gives me a lot satisfaction. 

So the point here is definitely is not to discourage the setting of expectations but more of setting realistic expectations for yourself as you are working towards your goal. As long as there’s healthy progression, it’s all good. Even if we don’t meet them, we know that we have been making progress since the start of the journey.

I came across this somewhere and it says that— “Resting is part of being productive.” Resting brings you one step closer to where you want to be. Even now, I still self-remind myself on this everyday. Because it’s hard. To be honest, it’s easier said than done especially if you are a perfectionist like me. However, I do notice that the way I’m talking to myself is different now. I can feel the difference personally when I make a conscious effort to be kinder to myself and talk to myself with greater compassion. In the past it would be probably like:

“I need to fix myself!”
“Why did I not hit my expectations?”
“I need to get myself together.”

I often find myself being very hard on myself. But now I am just learning to really let it go and slow down for a bit and be realistic about things we set out for ourselves. Even if it falls short of what we set out to achieve, I would say embrace the down times. It’s normal that sometimes we feel dejected, or rather feel down when we don’t meet the expectations we set out for ourselves. But embrace the down times, and being happy doesn’t mean that we have to be happy 24/7. That’s what I have came to realise.

Lesson #3: Being happy is knowing you have the power to choose what to accept and what to let go.

This lesson is so important to me that I really have to share it with you. More specifically, what do we want to choose to accept and what do we want to let go? There are a lot of things but today I am just going to focus on one thing- which is our thought patterns.

We want to specifically choose what thoughts we want to accept and what thoughts we want to let go of. Let’s face it, we all have uncontrollable thoughts and impulses, but we can always choose how we want to respond. It’s in our control to choose the thoughts we want to let inside of us and the the thoughts we want to let go.

For instance, I am someone who never feel that I am ever enough and I always over-worry about what is going to happen. I know I have said this more than five times in this episode. I always worry about what is going to happen next even when something hasn’t even happen yet. I think to some extent we all do, and that is exactly what steals my peace away from me. 

I started to also realise that what caused me to feel stressed out and constantly put me in states of anxiety, is often these (negative) thought patterns of “what if” and they are mostly external things that I can’t control, which often stresses me out. For instance, I would find myself asking:

“What if my podcast content doesn’t meet expectations?”
“What if people don’t like it?”
“What if I’m not good enough?”

I have to admit there is a certain kind of pressure and responsibility I have to uphold once I decide to put myself out in the public and putting myself out of my comfort zone. I think it’s natural to some extent to hold those thoughts but they are also precisely the thoughts that are causing my anxiety and my stresses. And also, the “need to” thoughts. I often catch myself thinking:

“I need to be good enough before I can do this and that.”
“I need to prove myself first and be successful and to be accepted by people around me- my parents, my partner, my friends etc.”

Some people may say that wow it must be tiring being you. And yes, it is really very tiring internally. I might look okay from the outside, but internally I am feeling very tired. That is what people with anxiety are facing right, you can’t tell that they are being anxious, because it’s all inside you because it’s all from within. Yet, these thoughts might not even be true, they are associations that we make up for ourselves (eg.“You need to be good enough first before you can do something” is not true, but it is what we keep telling ourselves right?) Yet, it is also hard to stop these thoughts from coming to me. They exist and it is a reality, and I just feel these thoughts just intrude into my mind without my permission and they keep appearing.

And this is exactly the source of my anxiety as well I would say (to pinpoint what anxiety looks like to someone having it) So anxiety do come in different forms, it does feel different to different people. Some people may display physical symptoms but for some others, it is all from within. For me, I don’t usually display physical symptoms but there is a lot going through inside me. It’s that general feeling of fear and worry. A person may look okay from the outside, but in the inside they may feel like it’s a battle that they are fighting. So, don’t assume right. Don’t assume that people are okay just because they look okay. On this note, try to be kinder to people around you. This is something that, I really feel for and I really want to spread this more. I myself am consciously trying to do this everyday. I try to be kinder to people around me. Because I do not know what are the battles they are facing.

So the fact that I am giving away my power, I am worrying about things that can’t be seem to be in my control, or rather out of my control, all that kind of thoughts make me feel restricted. It comes to me in waves all at one time and it really stresses me out. It makes me feel small. It makes me feel that I can’t do anything significant. These are feelings of self-doubts that I always had to battle no matter what situation I put myself in. It does not matter the situation but it’s something I realised that is within me. They are the mechanisms inside me that I might need to start unlearning and de-associate (if there’s even such a word). “De-associating” in my definition means unlearning those associations that I create in my head.

No matter how much you value being kind to others, someone else might not. They might not think twice about being unkind to you. You have absolutely zero control over that. So I’ve learnt that if you attempt to control what people say or do, that’s when we get stressed. We let these define how we act. We let their words dictate us and stop us from moving forward towards the direction we want to go. It hinders us. 

Others’ opinions started affecting me less as part of growing up and as part of my growth in this journey. How I see it is everybody is their own context. They have their own stories and battles, shaped by their childhood and traumatic experiences. Sometimes, I’ve learnt that what people say has nothing to do with you. It has a lot to do with them. How you choose to respond has everything to do with you and your relationship with your self. Everything starts from the self first. It starts from self- healing. It starts from within. 

When you start to focus on the relationship you have with your self, you find that happiness come from knowing that you are more in control. For instance, when I have those thoughts of whether I will ever be worthy enough or whether people are going to accept me. These are mostly external things that I can’t control. And you know what? I have to let it go. If I continue to hold these within me, I am not able to move forward. What I can control/ allowed to do is:

-Accepting that I am enough.
-Accepting that success means doing my best every day in my own capacity (I re-define my idea of success every day depending on my progress).
-I accept that I can go as slow as I need to as long as I am comfortable with pace.
-I choose to focus on what I can do now that is within my control, that is within me

Somehow when I do all the above, I feel happier with myself. I have less to worry about. I have less expectations to meet other than my own expectations that I set for myself. Although that can sometimes be sky high as well and out of reach sometimes which also gives me a lot anxiety. That’s something I have to start unlearning as well as a perfectionist. It’s hard man, it is really hard.

Here is a recap on my three lessons learnt:

Lesson #1: Happiness means coming to see and accept myself for who you are even when nobody else does. It is often through shifting of perspective and re-framing of thoughts about the perceived negative parts of ourselves.

Lesson #2: Being a happy doesn’t mean being happy all the time. It’s also about knowing how to show self- compassion during the low times and be kinder to yourself even when things don’t go the way you expect them to be. 

Lesson #3: Being happy is knowing you have the power to choose the thoughts that you want to accept and the thoughts that you want to let go. It is about how we respond and react to things. 

If I may add in a fourth one, (I realised that these days I have a habit of adding additional content at the summary but I just felt it’s an important one to share as well) I think being happy is also about living in the present moment, and there’s this quote I came across a few weeks back, and I found it to make perfect sense:

“If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are then living in the present.” 

I can’t agree more because being at peace is only found in controlling what we can do in the present moment. What we can do now. If we are always thinking about what we can do tomorrow, or what has already happened (e.g if someone has previously hurt you and you hold on to that grudge), it is going to invite a lot of stresses.

DEFINING MY OWN HAPPINESS

Right now if you ask me how I would define happiness, I would define it as a feeling of being at peace with myself, where I feel more comfortable in my own skin and also knowing that I have no power over others and I should stop trying to change others or the past situations. I don’t have to be right. Being at peace is more important than being right. I have no control what other people say about me but I have the power to choose how I want to define things and how I want to live my life. I accept my inner self, my thoughts, my drives and my motivations. Accepting myself doesn’t mean not trying to improve myself, but it’s more of seeing myself for who I am so that I can improve in the direction that speaks to me. Not in the direction that others want me to become. It comes from how I view myself, how I view my work, how I validate myself and know that my thoughts and my emotions don’t define who I am. And that is the improved relationship with the self that ultimately gives me happiness and that comes from also finding myself first. That is really where it comes from. That’s my definition of happiness at the moment and the most accurately I can put it (in terms of how I am feeling) this point.

LAST WORDS

There are 101 ways to define happiness and then I think probably even if I define what happiness means to me today it might be a different definition tomorrow. It is constantly changing and people are constantly changing everyday. We have different goals every day, and also define our idea of “success” differently over time. I think it is normal. But right now, I am on my journey of finding myself, so these are the three ways I’ve identified that would help me derive happiness in my day-to-day. The secret to being happy starts from within and it starts from the relationship we form with ourselves.

[But First, Let’s Chill] 
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