Stop fighting your thoughts: the happiness trap
It is Friday evening after a brutal week. You promised yourself you’d go for a run, call your sister and cook properly. Instead you are on the sofa, scrolling, with a vague sense of dread about Monday. You tell yourself you’ll feel better once you’ve rested. Three hours later you feel worse.
The Australian doctor and ACT trainer Russ Harris explains this pattern in The Happiness Trap, a book that has sold over a million copies. His argument starts with evolution. The human mind developed to scan for danger and keep us alive, not to keep us happy. So when we treat every uncomfortable feeling as a problem to be fixed, and chase good feelings as the measure of a good life, we end up in a constant fight with the way our minds naturally work. The fight tends to increase distress rather than reduce it.
Harris gives people a simple map for this called the choice point. When difficult thoughts and feelings show up, you can get hooked by them and make what he calls away moves, things that take you further from the life you want. Or you can unhook and make towards moves. The sofa on Friday night isn’t good or bad in itself. It depends on whether it is genuine rest or a way of avoiding the dread.
In therapy we use this map with real moments from your week. We get specific about what hooks you, what your away moves look like, and what a small towards move would be. It is less about thinking positively and more about noticing the hook earlier, which is a skill that improves with practice.
If stress has you running on empty, this is often a more useful starting point than trying to relax your way out of it. Read more about therapy for stress and burnout, or get in touch.