We don’t have to reprimand ourselves for our negative feelings
The season of rejoicing is upon us. Bask in the glory of the succah, rejoice with the Torah on Simchas Torah. Sure. But what about all my problems — my stress, my marital conflict, my struggles with the children, my health, my life? Where am I supposed to put all that on these “happy days?”
In his book The Trail to Tranquility, Rabbi Lazer Brody writes about “self-induced misery” — a state we bring upon ourselves through our faulty thinking habits. We can think ourselves into a chronically unhappy state by regularly focusing our attention on everything that’s wrong, unfair, or unpleasant in our lives. We’ll never run out of content to feed our misery mill.
On the other hand, Dr. Rick Hanson, in his book Hardwiring Happiness explains in detail how we can reprogram our neural networks to produce a constant state of happiness by focusing our attention on everything we experience as right, good, and pleasurable.
This idea has been well established by our sages and is brought to light in Rabbi Zelig Pliskin’s Gateway to Happiness and Rav Shalom Arush’s Garden of Gratitude, among many other works. Apparently, despite the circumstances of our existence, we have a great deal of power to influence our own moods.
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