ELF: How to be Even
Better at Unhappiness
Note: If you’ve skipped straight to this chapter it’s going to get a bit weird and confusing in here for you; for it to make sense I’d strongly recommend reading the book in order instead.
For the purpose of this book I’d include the following terms under the grey umbrella of unhappiness:
You’ve probably already recognized that the ideas in this book could be used to resolve more serious issues of unhappiness, such as depression. However, this is not the purpose of this book and if you have more complex issues then it’s best to work through them with an experienced practitioner trained in the Lightning Process (for more information about finding a practitioner, see CD audio programmes).
Having explored the recipe for the Low Self-esteem ELF (see Step 1: Filter), you’ll be more familiar with the slightly strange phrase:
‘In order successfully to dû unhappiness you must dû the following things. It simply will not work properly if you don’t.’
Let’s look through the recipe book that celebrates the genius of the Unhappiness ELF (Excellence of Limited Function), but mainly at how easy it’s going to be to finally fail at being a genius at it.
You’ll remember the ‘filter for red’ exercise where looking for red objects made red things show up?
Well, in the recipe for unhappiness, the first step is to be brilliant at filtering for:
1. More evidence of:
» How unlucky we are.
» How we are always let down, misunderstood and unappreciated.
» The number of sad things, disappointments, failures and disasters that happen to us.
» The unfairness and hopelessness of our situation.
» The absence of good and nice things.
2. The anticipation of bad things happening.
Exception filter
To avoid ‘the danger of happiness’ breaking out, when nice things happen the Unhappiness ELF:
As a result, this news that ‘things seem to be going right’ doesn’t stand a chance – it doesn’t make us feel comforted or reassured at all. Here’s the filter in a handy table for quick reference:
| Pattern | Single event | Creates prediction | Filter |
| Unhappiness | One thing goes wrong in the morning | The whole day is ruined | Signs that everything is going wrong; things to be disappointed about |
So you can see that if you are good at running the Unhappiness ELF then:
When you see it this way you can see how perfectly designed it is as a foolproof mechanism for getting you to stay unhappy. Truly a work of genius!
Do you sometimes use any of the above filters?
Yes/No
When you dû that does it get you a life you love?
Yes/No
Remember, these are things you dû, so there will be some times when you aren’t dûing them; naturally, in those times, you won’t experience unhappiness.
The Power and fragility of the ELF
It is easy to see how this will rapidly cause a spiral of unhappiness, yet in spite of its powerful appearance this ELF is also fundamentally a fragile and easily exposed confidence trick.
Failing at the ELF
Notice what happens when we consider what would naturally result from swapping these filters, and instead:
» How lucky, supported, understood and appreciated we are
» The abundance of great things, successes, achievements and positive events that have happened already, or are just around the corner
» How we can recognize that we are being rewarded for what we do
» Why we should have a sense of certainty and hopefulness about the future.
Clearly, taking this on, a sort of ‘learned optimism’, as Marty Seligman11, the father of positive psychology would say, produces a very different, and much more fulfilling version of the world.
If, when reading this, it strikes you as a distorted way of looking at reality, you would in some ways be right. However, it’s no less distorted than the Unhappiness ELF, which is a distortion that discards any positivity and amplifies all negativity to exactly the same extent. If this ELF can be so powerfully disruptive in our lives, then starting to put energy into excellence of happiness will have an equal, yet opposite, effect. The question to ask is probably not ‘is this a distortion?’ but:
Which one would you rather have?
This, in common with the other ELF recipes, uses the familiar words of generalizations:
But, due to the specific focus of the Unhappiness ELF, the types of phrases used are different from other ELFs.
Unhappiness generalizations
Do you sometimes find yourself using these ways of thinking or speaking?
Yes/No
When you dû that does it get you a life you love?
Yes/No
Notice what happens when you use that simple question mark approach: ‘Every single time I think things are getting better, something bad always happens.’
Ask: ‘Really, “every” single time?’
Once again, this shows up how fragile the ELF is and how easy it is to disrupt it.
As mentioned earlier (see Failing to use the ELF):
| Pattern | Step into | Step away from |
| Unhappiness | Unhappy, bad feelings and painful experience | Pleasure, good times and good feelings |
To maintain high levels of unhappiness, ensure that whenever possible you step fully into Unhappiness and bad feelings, and immerse yourself in painful experiences. Disregarding positive experiences, not stepping into or enjoying pleasurable and fun feelings will also massively help in maintaining unhappiness.
Do you sometimes find yourself devaluing or distancing yourself from positive memories and experiences, and immersing yourself in disempowering or negative memories or anticipations?
Yes/No
When you dû that does it get you a life you love?
Yes/No
It’s easy to see that if we just switch this around, so we immerse ourselves in positive life-affirming memories, anticipations or experiences and step away from the disempowering ones, then the whole ELF just falls apart, and instead we become a genius at happiness.
We can see from the chart below the specific uses of time in the Unhappiness ELF:
| Pattern | Past | Present | Future |
| Unhappiness | Bad, should have been different | Polluted by past | More of the same |
To develop a strong experience of unhappiness, it really helps to focus fully on how bad you’re feeling now, to the exclusion of anything else good in your life, ever. It’s also important to focus on what has happened and how bad it was, or how you should have done it differently. Finally, trust implicitly that this poor state of affairs will continue, forever.
Do you sometimes find yourself having these kinds of relationships to your past, present and future?
Yes/No
When you dû that does it get you a life you love?
Yes/No
It’s easy to see that if we just change any part of this, then the whole ELF just falls apart, and instead when we take on a ‘happiness approach’ to time, we become a genius at happiness.
Good indicators of playing an internal negative soundtrack include phrases such as:
It also really helps if you can include any phrases that discount or marginalize any periods of happiness and contentment, especially those that compare your life negatively to others or predict a bleak future.
Do you have a negative soundtrack that sometimes encourages unhappiness?
Yes/No
When you dû that does it get you a life you love?
Yes/No
Failing at the ELF
If this is your ELF, you should recognize some of these examples. Imagine if you started to say the opposite things to yourself with the same conviction and authority that you currently use to tell yourself the negative things – just notice what would naturally happen, as a result. If you start to do (consciously and intentionally) the things that people with happiness dû without thinking, then the ELF couldn’t work any more and you’d naturally start to feel the same about yourself as they do about themselves.
To maintain unhappiness it really helps to increase inertia, reduce physical activity and sigh more. Research shows that exercise is a good antidote for depression.12 Therefore, any avoidance of exercise or movement always helps to maintain the Unhappiness ELF.
Do you sometimes notice your posture encourages feelings of unhappiness in certain situations?
Yes/No
When you dû that does it get you a life you love?
Yes/No
Failing at the ELF
Simply moving yourself around differently, being more active or changing your posture will prevent effective running of this ELF.
When any one of the ELFs is at work, it really feels as if it’s all just happening to us and there is very little we can do about it. It’s as if we just have to wait for it to pass, which puts us completely in the passive, powerless position of a victim – discussed in the chapter on Dû.
It also leaves us with the sense that, since we can’t sort it, we’re therefore reliant on others to fix it. We feel we must need someone else’s support or an external remedy, such as friends, drugs or therapy to cure or stop it. This is a problem, especially when we find those external supports either don’t work or simply aren’t always available when we need them – what do we do then?
With unhappiness, the fact that we can’t even sort out our own lives makes us completely doubt our ability to be happy and creates one of the many beautifully designed destructive, self-perpetuating spirals that populate so many areas of life and create trouble for us.
Failing at the ELF
As soon as we begin to recognize we do have some power, this piece of the ELF ‘machinery’ melts away. This is because the ELF thrives on, and needs you to have, a sense of powerlessness to keep you trapped in it; once you’ve seized back the reins of control, the ELF just can’t function and it completely fails.
Having looked through this pattern, you should have noticed that when you dû unhappiness you use these styles of thinking. And when you don’t think in that way, you don’t feel ‘unhappy’.
Consider the bit of the recipe that you use most often – check out what would happen if, instead of dûing what you normally do, you started to do the opposite – what would happen to those feelings of unhappiness then?