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your messy garage or your car, then it’s probably fairly easy to take your mind off it. Why? Because in the larger scheme of things, it’s simply not that important. If you don’t do it, the sun will still rise tomorrow and you will continue to draw breath. All that will happen is that your garage or car will remain messy. But suppose you suddenly developed a large, suspicious-looking black mole on your arm and you avoid going to the doctor. Would it be easy to take your mind off it? Sure, you could go to a movie, watch television or surf the Internet and maybe, for a little while, you could stop thinking about it. But in the long term, you will inevitably start thinking about that mole, because the consequences of not taking action are potentially serious.
    So, because many of the things we avoid are not that important, and because many of our negative thoughts and feelings are not that intense, we find that our control strategies can often make us feel better—at least for a little while. Unfortunately, though, they can give us a false sense of confidence; that is, we start to believe that we have much more control than we actually do. And this false sense of control is only compounded by the myths we encountered in the last chapter.
What Has Control Got To Do With The Happiness Trap?
    The happiness trap is built through ineffective control strategies. In order to feel happy, we try hard to control what we’re feeling. But these control strategies have three significant costs:
    1. They take up a lot of time and energy and are usually ineffective in the long run.
    2. We feel silly, defective, or weak-minded because the thoughts/feelings we’re trying to get rid of keep coming back.
    3. Many strategies that decrease unpleasant feelings in the short-term actually lower our quality of life over the long term.
    These unwanted outcomes lead to more unpleasant feelings, and thus even more attempts to control them. It’s a vicious cycle. Psychologists have a technical term for this inappropriate or excessive use of control strategies: ‘experiential avoidance’. Experiential avoidance means the tendency to keep trying to avoid, change or get rid of your unwanted thoughts and feelings—even when doing so is harmful, costly, useless or destructive. Experiential avoidance is a major cause of depression, anxiety, drug and alcohol addiction, eating disorders and a vast number of other psychological problems. So here is the happiness trap in a nutshell: to find happiness, we try to avoid or get rid of bad feelings—but the harder we try, the more bad feelings we create. It’s important to get a sense of this for yourself, to trust your own experience rather than simply believing what you read. So with this in mind, take a moment to complete the following sentence: The thoughts/feelings I’d most like to get rid of are...
    Once you’ve got your answer, take a few minutes to write a list of every single thing you’ve tried in order to avoid, change or get rid of these unpleasant thoughts or feelings. Try to remember every single strategy you have ever used, whether deliberately or by default. Don’t try to edit or troubleshoot your answers. The goal is to come up with as many examples as possible, such as avoiding situations where the feeling occurs, using drugs or alcohol, taking prescription medications, criticising or chastising yourself, going into denial, blaming others, using visualisation or self-hypnosis, reading self-help books, seeing a therapist, using positive affirmations, procrastination, praying, talking it through with friends, writing in your diary, smoking cigarettes, eating more, eating less, sleeping more, sleeping less, putting off important changes or decisions, throwing yourself into work/socialising/hobbies/exercise, or telling yourself ‘It will pass.’
    Once you’ve done that, go through your list and for each item, ask yourself:
    1. Did it get rid of my painful thoughts and feelings in the long