THE MYTH OF CONSTANT HAPPINESS: WHY FEELING EVERYTHING IS GOOD FOR YOU
By Lillian Snellenburg
When we reflect on the end of 2025, it seemed chaotic on a level that everyone felt.
Inboxes overflowed, we were all overbooked and there were more tasks than hours in the day. Personally, my eyes were rimmed red and felt as though they were full of sand. I wanted to unsubscribe from the silly season.
A man in an incredibly pink festive shirt said to me, “Hopefully it makes me look happy on the outside,” and I laughed because, Good Sir, why are you pretending?! Be the grinch if that's what you feel, honour that low mood inside of you.
Why do we have to be toxically happy just because it’s December?! Bells certainly aren’t jingling for everyone, and many, many people spent Christmas day with a bunch of folk they avoid all year and will probably need three sessions of therapy to come down from.
the myth of constant happiness
A lot of people enter my office wanting me to “fix” how unhappy they are. Like something is wrong. And yes, clinical depression can mean something is wrong with the neurochemistry in one’s brain. But why is a feeling wrong? No one is coming to me saying, “I feel too happy and overjoyed all the time, something isn’t right”. A feeling is an experience, designed to be felt, and to guide us. This is where the myth of constant happiness begins to unravel.
From a psychological perspective, happiness was never meant to be a permanent state. It is not a baseline, a benchmark, or a measure of mental health. It is an emotion... a transient thing, contextual and responsive to meaning and safety. Like sadness or anger or fear, it rises and falls, doing its job before moving on and turning into something else. A beautiful constant flux.
Our nervous systems were not designed for perpetual positivity
They were designed for flexibility. To mobilise when there is threat. To soften when there is safety, to feel joy in moments of connection, and sorrow in moments of loss. Emotional wellbeing is not about staying in one state, but rather it is about the ability to move between states without getting stuck.
Yet somewhere along the way feeling good seems to have become synonymous with being well. Discomfort began to look like failure. Sadness like pathology that we need to immediately medicate. Anger like ingratitude. Grief like something to “work through” quickly and quietly and “move on” from. We learned to override our internal signals with affirmations, reframes, productivity, or politeness.
This is what toxic positivity actually looks like. Not optimism or hope, but the subtle pressure to remain pleasant and palatable regardless of what is happening inside us. The insistence that we should cope better rather than feel honestly. The idea that a regulated nervous system is one that is always calm, cheerful, and agreeable. So, so far from our evolutionary roots.
Suppression is not regulation
When we repeatedly dismiss or override our emotions, they don’t disappear, they just relocate. They show up as chronic stress, irritability, anxiety, exhaustion, numbness, or a vague sense of disconnection from ourselves.
Many high-functioning people mistake this for resilience. It isn’t. It’s a nervous system that has learned to perform rather than process. Cue mental illness. All because we pretended to be happy.
Psychological health is not the absence of difficult emotion. It is the capacity to experience the full range of human feeling without shame. Sadness helps us integrate loss. Anger carries boundary information. Grief is love with nowhere to go. Anxiety is often a nervous system trying, sometimes clumsily, to keep us safe.
These states are not signs that something is wrong with you. They are evidence that your system is responding appropriately to your life. Wellbeing, then, is not about feeling good all the time. It is about feeling able. Able to stay present when things are uncomfortable, to opt out when something is draining. Able to say no without justifying it. Able to honour your internal experience rather than override it to meet an external expectation.
Perhaps the quietest act of self-care is not forcing yourself into joy, but allowing yourself into honesty. You were never meant to feel happy all the time. You were just meant to feel.
THE WOMAN BEHIND THE WORDS
Lillian Snellenburg is a registered psychologist, writer, and director of a private psychology practice on the mid-north coast of New South Wales. Her work is grounded in the treatment of anxiety, depression, trauma and major life transitions, with a special focus on the reclamation of feminine identity and power. After the stillbirth of her son, Sunny, she began writing from the raw edge of loss, drawing upon myth, nature, and the underworld as her compass. Connect with her @the.millennialpsych.
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ISSUE 09