Believing You 'Must' Only Sets You Up For Misery

Often at times life decides to become stressful. No matter how resilient we believe ourselves to be, everyone gets worn down from time to time. If you beat anything down for a long enough period of time, it will bend. There is so much working against us in life that it is no wonder that many get pushed past their breaking point. We all have our wants and our needs.

We each have hopes, dreams and wishes. We all set goals for ourselves and, if we are true to ourselves, we do the best that we can to attain them. Unfortunately, wanting is not enough for us to get what we desire. There are times when no matter what we do, we will not reach our aim.

During such times, life is simply out of our control and our future is not for us to decide upon. When all hope is lost and we come to accept the fact that it is so, the hit that our ego and our psyche take can be detrimental.

It’s not that the event alone has such a profound effect on us. In all honesty, the happenings of the outside physical word have no direct influence on our mind. Failing to succeed itself has no direct effect on our inner workings; it is the importance that we ourselves put on this failure, or rather the importance that we put on achieving success, that causes us so much pain.

When we think about our wants and goals, we tend to surround them by an aura of such great importance that if we were to fail in achieving said goal it would devastate us. In our inner dialogues we don’t tell ourselves that we would like to have this or that, but rather that we must have it. We must get what we want and we must create the success that we dream of.

The word must expresses necessity. We consistently tell ourselves that we must have this or the other. In other words, we are telling ourselves that what we want is something that we must necessarily have. But necessary for what exactly? Although most of us never stop to ponder over this question, we nevertheless define for what each must is necessary for.

Without realizing we associate these musts with our state of happiness. We know that attaining what we want will make us happy, therefore when we think to ourselves that we must have this or that, we are telling ourselves that these things are necessary for our happiness. If we don’t reach our goals, we will suffer from unhappiness.

This is exactly the type of torture that we expose ourselves to. Each time that we tell ourselves that we must achieve something, we are simultaneously telling ourselves that if we were to not achieve it, if we were to fail, then we must necessarily be unhappy because of it.

It is only logical that if we don’t have what we must have in order to be happy, that if we don’t have what we believe to be necessary to our happiness, then we must be unhappy. This becomes even more complicated when we set a timer and expiration date on our musts.

If we believe we must have something in order to be happy, then each moment that we do not have this something is every moment that we must necessarily remain unhappy. If something you want will make you happy, then since you have yet to have it you must not be happy at the moment.

Even for those of us who understand that it takes time to achieve our goals, the longer our achievement of said goal stretches out, the more frustrating things will become and the more stressful the thought of possible failure will become. By believing that we must have something, we are unknowingly confirming that we are currently miserable.

The worst part is that being human means having endless wants that grow and change over the years. As soon as we achieve one goal, we come up with two others. In order to live fully we must always have goals and things that we would like to do and experience. Unfortunately, if we label each of these goals and wants as musts, then we will find ourselves continually unhappy.

Think about it: you don’t really need to have anything more than what you have at the moment. Yes, your goals are very important and they may define a part of who you are — but nothing more than good health and love in your life is required for your happiness.

Everything else that you want or believe that you must have is only an enhancement. Creating happiness is an illusion. We are all born happy. The only thing that we can do is to cultivate this happiness and allow it to thrive. We are each happy at some level — albeit often at times our unhappiness makes whatever happiness we have, if only happiness for life alone, seem nonexistent.

Every time that we tell ourselves that we must have something, we are setting ourselves up for a life of unhappiness. All you must do is stay alive and stay as healthy as you can. Keep your family and friends close to you and spend as much time with those that you care about as possible.

You will one day come to agree that whatever musts you believed you had to have were just things that you believed would feed an unquenchable hunger. The only thing you must do is to never tell yourself that you must have something.

Paul Hudson | Elite.

@MrPaulHudson