🎈Are You Sick with Seriousness?

Being serious is self-sabotage…

Can you remember what it's like to be around someone who is serious? How does it feel? Not good, hey? It activates the nervous system and doesn’t feel safe. Ironically, it hinders progress toward goals. When you’re in the company of ‘serious adults,’ something inside you needs to prove itself or show trustworthiness.

Being serious kills joy. Unfortunately, serious people are trusted more than jolly people. This is a flaw of Western culture.

It’s a flaw because being serious makes the brain less efficient. Happiness research shows that when the brain is joyful, it operates more effectively. For more on this, refer to Shawn Achor’s book, The Happiness Advantage.

When you are serious, this is what happens: people around you feel less safe to express emotion, your brain operates less efficiently, and maintaining a positive mood becomes impossible.

Let's zoom in on your happiness. How does your seriousness impact it? First of all, you cannot be serious and joyful simultaneously. The more often you are serious, the less often you are joyful.

How does it impact your relationships? Well, people want to feel good. Being serious around others does the opposite; it makes people feel tense. It encourages catastrophizing, where the human mind makes a problem bigger than it is. No problem is as big as the mind makes it out to be.

So, maybe being serious is merely a response to the mind making a big problem out of nothing. This mindset manufactures suffering and is self-sabotage. The opposite is seeing events as they are, not negative or positive, but neutral.

When negative events are thrown at you by life, how do you want to respond? Do you want to be weighed down by seriousness, or do you want to stay calm, chuckle at your bizarre situation, and then deal with it from a place of acceptance and excitement?