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THE HAPPINESS HANGOVER

As a fretful, chronically anxious kid, when I worried about exam results or where life would take me, Mum and Dad would say, ‘Jilly, we don’t care what you do, just as long as you’re happy.’ They meant it, as so many parents do, as a statement of unconditional love. It was a way to take the pressure off. But every time I fell in a heap of worry or sadness, I felt that somehow I was doing life wrong. All they wanted was for me to be happy, and I wasn’t.

Happiness is our society’s holy grail. From the moment we hear that first bedtime story, ‘happy ever after’ becomes life’s goal. In a spiritually malnourished Western world, happiness is a proxy religion.

In fact, the idea of happiness has become so central to our understanding of what makes a fulfilling existence that it is being prioritised in ways we could not have previously imagined. Since 2012, the United Nations has commissioned the annual World Happiness Report — a cheerfully coloured document filled with smiling faces from around the globe, which ranks Australia tenth in the international happiness stakes. UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said the index recognises that social, economic, and environmental wellbeing are equal pillars of a happy nation. It follows the lead of Bhutan — a peaceful Buddhist country that has replaced gross national product with gross national happiness as a measure of a thriving nation.

As a general philosophy, putting people over profits seems like a no-brainer. But when you’re told that the cornerstone of personal and global success is happiness, and you routinely feel sad, frustrated, or unfulfilled, what then?

The tension between what we’re expected to feel and our everyday reality has led to a desperate scramble to fill the gap. In the past few decades there has been an explosion of apps, websites, conferences, life coaches, and social media stars positioning happiness as the principal foundation for a good life. Books on how we can best achieve it rocket to the top of the New York Times bestseller list (and straight onto my bookshelf — there is nothing I haven’t read about the quest for joy). Yoga and meditation studios have sprung up on every corner, and a booming ‘wellness’ industry promises to restore balance through detox cleanses, superfoods, clean eating, and ancient healing therapies. ‘Do what makes you happy’ and ‘follow your bliss’ have become meaningless totems in a movement that leaves us trapped in an endless search for contentment.

This spiritual chasm has been a boon for Big Business. From diet fads to home renovation, fashion magazines to luxury cars, we’re sold the idea that the gap can be filled by pouring dollars into it. One of the world’s most famous corporations, Coca-Cola, has co-opted happiness in a series of clever branding exercises linking the consumption of the soft drink to a fulfilled life. Its ‘choose happiness’ campaign involved the brand giving away cans of Coke at London’s major transport hubs, and launching a ‘happiness meter’ on 300 digital billboards across the city to measure residents’ happiness levels (based on the number of positive or negative ‘mood words’ used on Twitter). The corporate world’s hijacking of happiness has been slick and effective, and ultimately designed to bolster its bottom line, with some major corporations employing ‘chief happiness officers’ to keep employees smiling and boost productivity. Over at Google, their CHO is known as the ‘Jolly Good Fellow’, whose job description is to ‘enlighten minds, open hearts and create world peace’.

But for all that business is booming, the happiness industry is doing a pretty crappy job of delivering results. If it were a shonky car salesman, Today Tonight would have run it out of town a long time ago. In the past 50 years, rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide in the developed world have skyrocketed. In Australia, an estimated 45 per cent of people will experience a mental-health condition in their lifetime. If current trends continue, clinical depression will be the second most disabling condition in the world by 2020, behind heart disease. More people are medicated for mental-health problems than at any time in our history. In the absence of genuine contentment, we have learned to anaesthetise ourselves with manufactured highs, as rates of alcohol abuse, obesity, gambling, and drug addiction continue to climb. Anxiety is now the most common mental-health disorder in the world, with one in 13 people affected. In any given year, around two million Australians will grapple with the condition. It’s more commonly reported in Western societies than in the rest of the world, even among countries experiencing conflict. At a time when we have become more affluent and aspirational, why do we appear to be more miserable than ever?

I grew up in an era when the self-esteem movement was king, and ‘positive thinking’ was the cornerstone of psychological practice. These trends came to prominence in the 1980s as an antidote to rising rates of depression in Western society, borne out of a turbulent post-war period of social, economic, and technological change. For so long I believed that not being able to just think my way to happiness was the albatross of all failures. The positive-thinking movement taught me that all I had to do was repeat affirmations every day in the mirror until my psyche became bulletproof and my self-doubting inner monologue was silenced.

But my internal critic was prolific. Imagine a ball-breaking, bastard love child of Regina George from Mean Girls and Nurse Ratchett in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. She sneered and undermined and liked to loudly point out at every available opportunity that despite my wins, I remained a hopelessly broken loser who was destined to die alone under a pile of empty pizza boxes in a hovel reeking of cat wee. For every I am strong, I am beautiful, I am happy I parroted at myself in the mirror through gritted teeth, Regina would counter loudly with, You are weak as piss, you are ugly, you are a misery whore. It was like bringing a teaspoon to a gunfight. Nothing stuck. The harder I tried to convince my anxious mind that I was happy, the more I felt like a miserable failure. The obsession with positivity taught me that uncomfortable emotions were abnormal. I had come to believe in a divine right to live in a state of permanent bliss, which only made every minor setback feel like I was backsliding all the way to Sadsville: a desolate town with a population of one.

A 2017 University of Melbourne study of people with depressive symptoms found that the more societal pressure a participant felt not to experience the emotions of sadness or anxiety, the more likely they were to show an increase in these symptoms. The study’s co-author, Associate Professor Brock Bastian, said this helped explain why countries that place a premium on happiness are experiencing higher rates of depression. ‘In Eastern — particularly Buddhist — cultures, people aren’t happier than their Western counterparts, but they are less depressed,’ he told the university’s Pursuit site. ‘This over-emphasis on happiness we see here doesn’t happen in those countries in the same way and they seem to embrace a better balance of the whole emotional repertoire. Feeling at times sad, disappointed, envious, lonely — that isn’t maladaptive, it’s human.’

And yet, in our quick-fix, consumer-driven society, we have come to believe that negative feelings need not be tolerated. Painful emotions are increasingly seen as unnatural and abnormal. We refuse to accept that we can’t always get what we want.

In his book The Happiness Trap, British-born Australian doctor Russ Harris maintains that everything we’ve been taught about happiness is a lie. The notion that we should be happy at all times and any deviation from this is an aberration is a major driver of angst and misery. Harris told me ahead of a happiness conference I covered for The Age, ‘So many people now think, if I’m not happy, there’s something wrong with me. We seem to have forgotten that feelings are like the weather — changing all the time. It’s as normal to feel unhappy as it is to have rainy days.’

The crash that followed the release of my book was not just a mental collapse; it was in many ways an existential crisis as I struggled to reconcile my depressed mood with society’s expectation that I should be fulfilled. Not only had I achieved my childhood dream to write a book, but that book was a critical and commercial success. It completely blindsided me that reaching this goal, along with the other strides I had made in my professional and romantic life, would not only not deliver the happiness I’d anticipated, but make me question the entire purpose of my life. I had a very real sense that with my dreams realised, far from achieving the fairytale ending and basking in it, I had little left to strive for. My friend Kath, who had spent years completing a PhD only to feel empty and rudderless when it was finally handed in, had warned me of this looming pitfall. But I scoffed, thinking how could I possibly be anything but fulfilled when my book was on the shelves? And yet there I was, successful and miserable.

Compounding the angst was an overwhelming sense of guilt. I was a middle-class white woman with a good job, great friends and family, and her own home, complaining that the publication of her first book was making her sad. I was the living embodiment of #firstworldproblems. What right did I have to be so maudlin?

Exacerbating that guilt was my new unwanted role as the poster girl for sobriety. Readers were in regular contact, telling me my book could have been written about them. Most of the correspondence was quite lovely — touching tales of how the book had opened gateways to deep reflection. There were letters, emails, Facebook messages, and tweets from people all over the world, asking me to update them on the next chapter of my life. I sensed a quiet panic in some of the questions. Had I learned to drink in moderation? Had I found peace with my rate of alcohol consumption? Even though my book was about developing a healthier relationship with alcohol, and I’d never suggested I wouldn’t drink again, I felt like I owed people an explanation. In a culture that makes moderate drinking such a challenge, I felt compelled to tell them that a year of sobriety had led seamlessly to a life of clean living, emotional clarity, and unbridled happiness.

In the immediate aftermath of my year off the booze I definitely did have a healthier relationship with alcohol. I was much more mindful of how and when I was drinking, and drank far less than I used to. It was rare for me to stumble home in the early hours of the morning or wake up with only hazy memories of the night before. But by midway through 2014, things were different. As my mental health deteriorated, old habits began to creep in. Maintaining a healthy balance became more of a challenge. Every time there was new research released about binge drinking, I’d be rolled out by the media to give my two cents’ worth on the problem, and I’d wonder if maybe I should start to decline the requests. One night, I appeared on Channel Ten’s The Project as an ‘expert’ talking head on Australia’s alcohol culture. They filmed me sitting at my kitchen table drinking a pretend cup of tea and flicking through pages of my own book — because that’s totally what authors do to relax — and even had me jogging around the local park to illustrate just how much day can be seized if you put down the bottle and get your shit together. The very next night I was downing Jäger shots and dancing on a bar at 3.00 am with two of my girlfriends.

I’d be in the pub with mates and a stranger would sidle up and ask, ‘Aren’t you that chick who wrote a book about not drinking?’ while raising an eyebrow at the beer in my hand. On Instagram, I posted a picture of my delicious box of ‘breakfast’ doughnuts and confessed I was slightly hungover, only to be shamed by a follower for my lack of clean living after my year off the booze. Some people — like the UK radio presenter who said there was no point reading my book because ultimately I’d returned to drinking — had expectations about my abstinence that I couldn’t possibly live up to. If I wasn’t behaving like a nun, it was as if I had somehow let people down. The self-awareness was draining. I’d spent several years immersed in the issue of drinking, both personally and journalistically, and I was over it. I just wanted to be able to have more than one glass of wine without forensically examining my motivations from every conceivable angle or being branded a hypocrite.

I never claimed to have all the answers — for myself or anyone else. Yet I still felt pressure to be what people wanted me to be: sober and serene. But my life was moving in the opposite direction. I felt like a bride who’d planned for her big day for so long that when it was over there was nothing but hollowness.

A 2015 paper published in the Journal of Family Issues found that almost 50 per cent of brides suffer from postnuptial blues. One participant said: ‘You … think it’s … this fairytale, and the wedding is the climax, and then you come home and you have to go to work the next day. And nothing is different. Nothing is different at work, nothing’s different with your friends, nothing’s different.’ Another told researchers, ‘It’s like life was punctuated by these really exciting, big events. Then it was like, “Well, this one’s [the wedding’s] over, so now what am I gonna do? It’s over, and we have nothing to look forward to.”’ As Fairfax writer Kasey Edwards observed, the results are reflective of a culture that seduces women throughout their lives with the ‘Hollywood perfect’ wedding, from childhood storybooks all the way to reality TV shows and a booming bridal industry: ‘For many women, “I do” is seen as the end point in a lifelong romantic narrative. It’s therefore not surprising that so many brides wake up the next morning with a sense of grief and fear that nothing in their life will ever compare.’

This could apply to so many of life’s milestones. Anticipation is often better than gratification. We’re taught to plan for the wedding, not the marriage. The birth, not the baby. Buying a home, not servicing the mortgage. Reaching the goal is meant to bring the reward, and when it doesn’t it can spark a psychological shitstorm.

I recently watched an ABC Four Corners investigation into the struggles faced by elite athletes post-success and found myself nodding furiously in recognition. It revealed widespread depression and substance abuse after the glory faded. Among the Australian sporting heroes to share their stories was retired cricketer Nathan Bracken, who was once the world’s top one-day fast bowler. Now he works for his father-in-law, laying asphalt. He told the program that becoming a professional cricketer had been a childhood dream: ‘It’s a fairytale. It’s probably more than you ever wished for. As a kid, you sit there and it’s what you want to do and aww, how great would this be? And all of a sudden you’re in a position where it’s just bigger and better than you can imagine.’ But when he was forced to retire in 2011 due to a knee injury, he lost not only his income but also his identity. Without the adulation of the crowds, his sense of self crumbled. Trying to prove himself again to the world, he became a contestant on the TV show Dancing with the Stars, only to be eliminated in the first round, compounding his sense of failure. It wasn’t long before he could barely leave the house. He set himself the simplest of daily goals: getting out of bed, making breakfast. ‘I remember times you’d just sit there and you’d think … I felt a failure. I went from “I [can] provide for my family” to all of a sudden, days where, yeah, I couldn’t,’ he said.

American swimming champion Michael Phelps had a similar experience when he fell into the ‘darkest place you could ever imagine’ after winning a record eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. At the same Games, Australian diver Matthew Mitcham won gold at the age of 20. Mitcham later told SBS’s Insight program that he had spent his whole life wanting to be the best in the world at something. After retirement, he was completely unprepared for how to fill the gap left by the sporting accolades:

My self-worth ended up being reflected back to me in the judges’ scores. If I got an eight they liked me, if I got a nine they really liked me, and if I got a ten I was perfect, and my whole self-esteem was based on these numbers that I was getting from the judges or the feedback that I was getting from the coach or, you know, how many Twitter and Facebook followers I had. Like, all these external sources that are all really quite fragile.

You don’t have to reach the dizzying heights of Olympic success or international fame to feel this boom-and-bust emotional cycle. The gulf between what we think we’ll feel when we reach career and life goals and what actually happens when we get there can be vast enough to swallow any of us.

I’d long thought that publishing a book would symbolise success and recognition and provide evidence that I was not an imposter. But nothing changed. At some point in my past I’d set the benchmark so high I’d need stilts and a rope ladder to get within touching distance. Every achievement had come with a self-sabotaging inner dialogue, with my inner Regina George refusing to accept anything short of perfection. A career in the media, in which I had to present myself to the world for approval or opprobrium on an almost daily basis, had perhaps not helped. An editor once told me there are two types of journalist: the anxious and the useless. I suspected I had broken the mould by being both.

Living with Regina is exhausting. It’s like being constantly tuned to You’re Shit FM, and she’s spinning all the tunes. When I’m in a good place, I know these statements in my head are not facts. I can turn the station down to a low hum and get on with my day. But as October 2014 approached, the noise was deafening. It should have been a warning of what was to come. It had been more than a year since my book had come out, and I was meant to be happy. Instead, I was running out of energy to combat Regina’s missiles. Life felt like it was behind glass. Through the lives of people around me, I could see what it might be like to live freely, to find peace in the easiness of breathing in and out, of not being held hostage by my own brain. But I couldn’t get there. Relief was fleeting. I always seemed to return to a horror show of hyper-awareness, an overarching sense of dread — to a world that existed only in the future and in the past, where I time-travelled at breakneck speed between what had been and what was still to come. I had whiplash from the back and forth.

Over the course of a week I began to write down every negative thought I had, just to get it out of my head. Committing these statements to paper, I was struck by how unspeakably mean I was to myself. I would never dream of directing these comments to my friends. And yet, I insulted myself in cruel and unusual ways, over and over again. The way I looked, the way I thought, the way I communicated: the very essence of myself was laid bare in an excoriating onslaught of self-flagellation.

One night after work I met Chris in the pub. He could tell straight away that something was wrong. I parroted a few of the journal statements, stringing them together in a seamless script of self-doubt. When I was done, I said, ‘I just can’t believe after all these years and all the things I’ve achieved I’m still this shit at life. I’m so pathetic.’

Chris, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking Canadian who likes to deliver me wisdom through a vehicle he calls the ‘sledgehammer of truth’, rolled his eyes and gave me his usual forthright assessment of the situation. ‘You’re so freaking harsh on yourself, Starkers. When are you going to give yourself a break?’

‘You have no idea,’ I answered, thinking of the notepad in my bag that contained the full extent of my shame. Then I thought, perhaps the only way to disarm the power of that shame was to share it with someone who could bear its weight.

‘I want you to read something.’

‘Of course,’ he said, taking the A5 jotter with the appropriate pattern of skulls and love hearts on its cover.

It’s a strange experience watching someone climb inside your head. At first there’s a wry smile as they recognise your voice. Then, the wince of confusion as they try to reconcile their version of you with the distorted image outlined on the page. And then, worst of all, the moment they crumple as they realise just how much craziness you’re housing. He cried. Just plain broke down and cried.

‘Oh doll,’ he choked, looking at me with an expression you never want to see on anyone’s face.

‘I don’t want your pity,’ I said with a sob.

He was out of his seat and on me, enveloping my diminished self. ‘This isn’t pity. This is love.’

And I knew then what it feels like to be seen — truly seen, deep into your being, for all that you are and all that you wish you weren’t.

It would be Chris who made the phone call to the doctor not long after this, one Friday morning as I lay on my lounge-room floor, shaking. There was no more pretending. I needed help. It was the start of a five-month absence from work and an emotional journey that would turn everything I knew about happiness on its head. I had lived the dream. Now it was time to live the reality.