The psychologist Silvia Álava demystifies the idyllic idea of happiness and instead defends emotional well-being, a more realistic and accessible concept for people
This is how she exposes it in her latest book “Why am I not happy?” (Ed. HarperCollins), in which she reviews the enemies of happiness and presents a method to increase emotional well-being.
“If we understand happiness as being joyful, happy, doing satisfying things 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, we are already on the wrong path because it is completely impossible”, Silvia Álava values.
In her opinion, “the definition of happiness must be adjusted very well. Happiness is feeling calm, peace, being comfortable with ourselves, and being careful with the myths and misconceptions that have been sold to us. More than happiness, it is about achieving well-being and emotional balance”.
Can you be happy in a pandemic? We asked this expert.
“Let’s be honest and realistic: it’s harder to be happy in the middle of a pandemic. The pandemic has taken a huge toll on us emotionally and mentally, all of us, we see it from young children, adolescents, very affected, and adults.
The psychologist lists different enemies of happiness, an issue that she analyzes in a large block of chapters in the book.
Rumination, which is getting hooked around and around something, putting the brain in centrifuge mode; irrational ideas and automatic thoughts; social comparison; envy and jealousy; the films that we make like a film director, or the mobile phone as an emotional anesthetic.
“We have to learn to live more closely to the ground, see things from reality, there is no such thing as the country of the lollipop,” Silvia Álava points out.
Genetics, exposes the expert, has in happiness “much more weight than can be believed, for better or for worse, up to 50 percent”.
Circumstances only influence 10 percent, and there is a 40% improvement that “depends on us,” she adds.
This is where the method that the psychologist proposes to increase emotional well-being comes in. In it, tools such as flexibility, fostering resilience, making our actions and tasks flow, developing gratitude and kindness, or internalizing a sense of humor are very useful allies.
And the social networks?, we asked Silvia Álava.
“Social networks can contribute a lot for good, but also for bad. Where is the difference? In the type of use that each person makes. If you use the networks as a showcase for social comparison, it is a problem, but if it is to inform or entertain you, no problem”, she maintains.
Álava states that in order to advance emotional well-being and improve mental health, in addition to giving the population tools to know how to manage their emotions, it is necessary to “increase the ratio of psychologists in the National Health System; the ideal is that in each primary care center there is a psychologist who can intervene to care for the population”.
Regarding emotional well-being and happiness in the coming years, the psychologist is optimistic and hopes that, with what has been learned in the pandemic and the development of extended emotional skills in society, the 1920s will be happier than the earlier this century.