At some point, just about all of us have pretended to be happy when we actually felt like we were dying inside. Maybe it was when a relationship or job was going sour, but we didn’t have any other options that would have allowed us to leave it at the time. Or perhaps it was after a devastating loss, where we were overcompensating with positivity to force ourselves to get over the grief and pain as quickly as possible.
The problem with faking happiness, however, is that it can be far more exhausting (and damaging) than working through difficult emotions when they arise. Here are 8 reasons why.
1. Denial is a powerful river to traverse.
If you’ve ever paddled a canoe, kayak, or other oar-propelled boat, you know how difficult it can be to navigate strong currents. You’re doing all you can to keep your little craft afloat and going in your preferred direction, while the churning waters around it are determined to flip it or drag it downstream.
One of the most common areas in which people fake happiness is in their personal relationships. You’ll have folks living in miserable marriages for years because they can’t bear the reality that they’re horribly unhappy. After all, that will open doors to stress, financial instability, and countless other personal woes.
But life’s difficult emotions are like those powerful river currents: it takes an extraordinary amount of strength and energetic output to fight against the flow. Ironically, when you stop fighting and let the current take you, you may find it plops you into a pleasant stand of reeds near the shore you need to be on anyway.
2. Insisting on being positive all the time can lead to serious health issues.
One of my extended family members decided a few years ago that she would remain positive and upbeat no matter what happened. When her elderly mother got ill, and her husband needed heart surgery, she was chipper and bubbly through both ordeals, refusing to “allow” any difficult emotions to dampen her spirits… and she then had an aneurysm a couple of months later.
Pretending that difficult emotions don’t exist involves bottling them up and tucking them into a cupboard. They don’t actually go away, but instead percolate and ferment, building up an extraordinary amount of pressure until they explode and blow the cupboard doors off like a homemade moonshine bomb. Research shows that people who suppress emotions are at risk of countless health issues and may even be more likely to die prematurely or suffer from various cancers.
3. Trying to force yourself to be happy may cause you to push yourself beyond healthy limits.
I often saw behaviors like this when I was working as a personal trainer: someone would be determined to get fit as quickly as possible after years of being sedentary and eating poorly. They would invariably end up injuring themselves or damaging their digestive systems because they worked out obsessively, i.e., more than their tendons or joints could adapt to in such a short time, and maintained caloric deficits that didn’t allow them to function properly.
The same can be said for emotions. You may be determined to push through the difficult emotions you’re experiencing and put all your will into faking happiness, but the pendulum will swing hard in the opposite direction the second you drop your defenses. It always does. “Fake it ‘til you make it” might work in some circumstances, but not when it comes to challenging emotional ordeals. It’s much healthier to actually process those difficult emotions than try to bulldoze through them.
4. Knowing that you’ll need to be performative might make you self-isolate.
Spending all your energy on pretending to be happy and optimistic is completely exhausting. As such, if you know that you’ll be expected to be the effervescent life of the party every time you hang out with other people, you may self-isolate in order to protect yourself from getting too drained.
This may cause you to turn down invitations to events with friends and family, avoid places where you might run into others you know, or come up with a wide range of excuses (like work obligations, contagious illness, etc.) to keep others at a distance.
Although you may see it as a form of self-preservation, the reality is that loneliness can exacerbate depression, anxiety, and other difficult emotions, making this a self-perpetuating cycle that’ll only make things worse in the long run.
5. The relationships you cultivate by being fake will only depress you further.
Many of us have put on false pretenses in order to be more palatable to those around us at some point. For example, cultivating a chipper demeanor with colleagues at work, even though the job is awful and we don’t want to be there. The problem with this is that the people who get to know our fake selves end up developing a relationship with that facade, rather than who we really are.
As a result, after you’ve gotten to know each other a bit more and you allow your real self to come through, or something devastating happens that causes your facade to drop entirely, they’ll end up feeling like they don’t actually know who you are. You’re suddenly a stranger to them, and they’ll feel that they’ve been manipulated or baited and switched. This almost always results in alienation and ostracization and will make your day-to-day life even more difficult to deal with.
6. The illusion you’re creating will keep growing.
The tangled webs we weave when trying to deceive — both others and ourselves — just keep growing and getting more intricate the longer we keep creating a false reality. That “little lie” told to fake happiness one day may lead to a bigger lie the following week, which may then require more lies to more people over time.
It’s exhausting to try to keep track of the ever-expanding illusion you’re creating with the untruths you’re telling everyone else, as well as yourself. You need to remember everything you’ve said to whom, and keep up appearances to align with your lies, all while smiling and joking despite screaming on the inside. When that web finally collapses, which it will, you will fall down hard.
7. The coping methods you use to maintain the illusion of happiness may weigh you down further.
For many people, the approaches they take to maintain the happiness they’re faking can come with a costly price tag — sometimes quite literally. Let’s say a person uses shopping therapy to maintain their high dopamine levels. They make item acquisition a major aspect of their personality, and maybe they get temporary highs from posting unboxing videos on social media, cultivating cute collections to share, and so on.
Those acquisitions cost money, and the high of buying new things can wear off quickly. As a result, the person in question may end up spending an exorbitant amount of money to keep their happy high going, which may land them in debt. This will require them to work more to pay it off, which will depress them further, which will in turn cause them to need more retail therapy to feel better, and that’ll keep expanding into a Fibonacci spiral of ever-expanding misery.
8. Denying half of what you feel means denying who you really are.
We’re not talking about embracing depression and spending your life wallowing in lugubrious grief, here. Yes, some gothic types make sorrow their entire identity and are okay with it, but most of the people who embrace depression as a lifestyle choice will end up wasting their beautiful, precious lives in dark thoughts and potentially harmful ideation.
What we are saying is that joy, excitement, and warm feelings of romantic connection are lovely to experience, but they’re also temporary. Seeking to constantly ride the high of the latter can mean that the former aren’t given the time and space needed to process them, which may cause them to be even harsher and longer-lasting in the future.
The key is to find a healthy balance between acknowledging challenging feelings when they arise and then letting them go in favor of love, joy, and contentment when they appear naturally. Not forcing them because they’re more pleasant to experience.
Final thoughts…
It’s important to note that sometimes, faking happiness is the best option available for a situation. For example, sometimes you need to put on a brave face and be a source of strength and calm when those around you are afraid. Or you might act happy with the goal of sparking happiness in your children, partner, or vulnerable family members.
While this behavior isn’t sustainable and may even be damaging to all in the long run, short bursts of it may be absolutely necessary from time to time. The key is to recognize it as a vital short-term behavior, rather than a permanent expectation.
