Many people postpone happiness with an "if/then" belief — if I had more money or a different relationship, then I could be happy. Research on vulnerability suggests joy is difficult to feel because it exposes us to loss. Learning to find happiness in present circumstances is a significant protective factor for mental health.
Being afraid of joy
In a lecture on vulnerability, Brené Brown discusses something that sounds paradoxical until you recognize yourself in it: our tendency to be afraid of experiencing joy.
Her observation is that when we lose our tolerance for vulnerability, joy becomes foreboding. She describes never having encountered an emotion in her research as difficult to feel as joy — that it may be the most vulnerable emotion we have, and that we hesitate to soften into it or lean fully into it because we are waiting for the other shoe to drop.
In my experience as a clinician, I have watched this in my clients and I have watched it in myself.
Leaning into joy means acknowledging how much you have to lose. Bracing feels safer. And so a great many capable, well-functioning people move through their lives holding good things slightly at arm's length, in a kind of pre-emptive defense against a loss that has not occurred.
The if/then factor
I have come to believe that one of the larger risks to a person's mental health is refusing to find happiness in their present reality and their present relationships.
Many of us spend more time with our own fantasies than we do with the people we claim matter most to us. And we start running our lives on what I call the if/then factor.
If I had more money, then I would be happy. If I had a different partner, or a different relationship, then I could be happy. If I had the other job, the other house, the other body, the other life.
We can run that sentence for years — decades — never actually arriving at the thing it promises. It sounds like ambition and it functions like postponement. Because the reliable feature of the if/then factor is that when the condition is finally met, the mind produces a new one almost immediately.
So the day never comes when we simply have joy. We keep longing for it, which feels productive, and which is exactly how the years pass.
The comparison problem
Then we compare.
We look at the people around us and assume they have the happiness we are looking for. Their marriage seems easier. Their children seem less complicated. Their careers look like they are going somewhere.
What we forget in those moments is that our friends are almost certainly doing the same thing back to us.
They are measuring their private difficulty — the argument last night, the worry they have told nobody, the thing about themselves they find hard to accept — against our composed public surface. And they are coming up short, for the same reason we are.
Most of us cannot see this, because we struggle to find the good in our own present circumstances while it costs us almost no effort to see the good in someone else's.
What helps
I want to resist making this sound simple, because it is not, and "just be grateful for what you have" is thin advice that has never helped anyone.
What I have seen help is narrower than that.
Noticing the if/then sentence when it runs. Not arguing with it — just noticing it, and noticing how many times the condition has already changed. That alone tends to weaken its authority.
Spending real attention on the people who are actually in the room rather than the ones in the fantasy. This is the specific thing I see reverse fastest, and the one with the most immediate return.
And practicing tolerating joy when it arrives. Which mostly means, when something good happens, resisting the reflex to immediately scan for what might take it away. That reflex feels like preparation. It is not; nothing is actually being prepared. It only removes the good thing from the time you had it.
When it is more than this
An important caveat, and I want to be direct about it.
Everything above describes a pattern of postponed happiness. It is not a description of depression, and the two should not be confused.
If your low mood has been persistent for weeks, if things you used to enjoy no longer register at all, if your sleep or appetite has changed, if you have withdrawn from people, or if you have found yourself feeling hopeless — that is not the if/then factor and it will not respond to a change in perspective. Depression is a treatable condition, and treatment is the appropriate response.
If you are having thoughts of harming yourself, please call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
For everything short of that, this is workable territory, and it is a good deal of what therapy is actually for. Our clinicians work in Orem, Murray, and online across Utah. Start with a free 30-minute consultation: 801.272.3420, text 801.997.8760, or book online.
Related care at Connections
Learn more: Depression Therapy.
