Why learning to live with distress may be as important as learning to get rid of it!
By Guru Rajesh Ananda
Adapted and Edited by Constandinos Tsindas
Editor’s Foreword
I don’t have much to say this time. Once again, the guru turns established thinking and the way we carry ourselves in daily life, on its very distressed head, pointing out what should have been obvious.
How can we ever think or become proverbially sucked into the illusion that life is always happy or perfect? It is really absolutely mind boggling that we even dwell in this utopian approach, persuading ourselves that going through something difficult constitutes mental imbalance, depression or a situation that we must deal with in fight or flight mode?
We’ve all had those moments. When waking up wanting to sleep more, going to work feeling like exploding from anxiety, speaking to colleagues and experiencing highly illogical fear dizziness or trying to get out of commitments we used to love lest something happens whilst where in the middle of them. Public humiliation.
Without replacing the need for professional assistance when necessary, he essentially puts forward the meditation argument that we don’t always need to be so ‘buttery’, if you could excuse the language plainness.
Sometimes experiencing our difficulties, might be the best therapy we can offer ourselves in the fast-paced social media circus where everything is advertised as endless happiness ride and life distress-mostly of the psychological kind-is viewed is weakness, to be quickly and drastically rid of.
That’s by constantly trying to persuade others-unknown to us-that we’re really fine and celebrating our dinners and instagram moments.
So ‘enjoy’ yourselves being unhappy sometimes. It’s part of life, it always will be.
Help will sometimes be needed to be sure. This is also part of life and a healthy one at that. But don’t give up without a fight. It will lead you down a brighter path, stronger and more aware.
Have we forgotten how to be unhappy?
Something extraordinary is happening to how we experience our emotions.
For example, in England, around one in seven people now receive antidepressants. NHS (National Health Service) figures show that 8.75 million people received antidepressant prescriptions in 2023-24, compared with 6.88 million in 2015-16.
Here in Cyprus, the figures are comparably much smaller, but the trend is equally thought-provoking. In 2023, 64,611 people received antidepressants through the national health system — equivalent to roughly one in fifteen of the population. That figure had risen from 33,470 in 2019, an increase of more than 90% in just four years.
Cyprus introduced antidepressants through GeSY in 2020, significantly increasing access and changing how their use was recorded, whereas entirely private prescribing is not included. Nevertheless, both countries raise an important question.
Why are so many people struggling with the way they feel?
And perhaps there is another, more uncomfortable question:
Have we forgotten how to be unhappy?
When Did Unhappiness Become Something to Fix?
Professor Tanya Byron recently raised this question in The Times, arguing that our growing reliance on antidepressants may be undermining something fundamental: our ability to cope with distress.
Life was never designed to be an uninterrupted experience of happiness.
We will experience disappointment. Relationships will sometimes fail. People we love will die. We will face rejection, uncertainty, loneliness and fear. Some mornings we wake up full of enthusiasm; on others, simply getting through the day feels difficult.
These experiences are not necessarily evidence that something is wrong with us.
Sadness can deepen our appreciation of joy.
Disappointment can teach acceptance.
Frustration can develop patience.
Failure can produce wisdom
Grief tells us that we loved.
Even anxiety can sometimes be the mind’s response to uncertainty rather than evidence of illness.
This does not diminish the reality of clinical depression or anxiety disorders. These can be debilitating conditions requiring professional treatment, and antidepressants can be extremely valuable and, in some circumstances, life-saving.
But perhaps we have allowed the boundary between human suffering and human illness to blur further.
The Importance of Distress
Psychology uses the term distress tolerance to describe our capacity to experience uncomfortable emotions without immediately needing to escape from them.
I find this concept fascinating because it reflects what meditation has taught for thousands of years.
We do not have to react to everything we feel.
An emotion can be present without becoming our identity.
There can be anger without I am angry.
There can be fear without I am fearful.
There can be sadness without I am a sad person.
Meditation gradually creates a little space between the experience and the experiencer.
And within that space lies freedom.
Instead of immediately asking, How do I make this feeling disappear?, we can begin asking:
What am I experiencing?
Why has this arisen?
Can I simply remain present with it for a while?
That does not mean wallowing in unhappiness. Nor does it mean refusing help when you need it.
It means developing the inner capacity to recognise that feelings change.
Like waves upon the ocean, they arise, gather strength and eventually dissolve.
The ocean remains.
Medicine Has Its Place
Any discussion about antidepressants must be responsible.
People should never abruptly stop taking prescribed antidepressants because of something they have read in an article. Individuals should make treatment decisions with an appropriately qualified healthcare professional.
Indeed, another recent article in New Scientist highlighted the growing medical recognition of antidepressant withdrawal.
For some people, particularly after long-term use, withdrawal symptoms can be significant. Current UK-based NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) guidance therefore recommends reducing antidepressant doses in stages rather than stopping abruptly, with the process monitored and adjusted according to response.
The debate should never become medicine versus meditation.
That would be both scientifically simplistic and potentially dangerous.
Instead, we should be asking whether medicine is only one part of a much larger picture of mental and emotional well-being.
Medicine may sometimes help change what we feel.
Meditation can help change our relationship with what we feel.
The Science of Stillness
When people hear the word meditation, they often imagine relaxation.
But meditation can go considerably deeper.
Regular practice can help us become more aware of our thoughts and emotions without reacting automatically.
Research has linked meditation and mindfulness-based practices to improvements in stress, anxiety and emotional regulation, although results vary between individuals, and meditation should not be regarded as a universal substitute for clinical treatment.
The deeper benefit, however, may be something more fundamental.
We begin to discover stillness.
Most of us live very close to the surface of our minds.
A thought appears, and another immediately follows. We analyse yesterday, anticipate tomorrow, rehearse conversations, imagine disasters, remember disappointments, and construct futures that may never come to pass.
A thought appears, and another immediately follows. We analyse yesterday, anticipate tomorrow, rehearse conversations, imagine disasters, remember disappointments, and construct futures that may never come to pass.
Because we are continually immersed in thought, we begin to believe that we are our thoughts.
Meditation gently challenges that assumption.
When the mind grows quieter, even briefly, we discover that awareness exists beneath all this mental activity.
The thoughts and emotions are still there.
Life has not magically become perfect.
But our relationship with them begins to change.
This is why stillness should never be confused with escape.
True stillness does not remove us from life. It allows us to experience life without being continually overwhelmed by our reactions.
Perhaps We Are Trying Too Hard to Be Happy
Modern society has developed an extraordinary preoccupation with happiness.
We measure it. Pursue it. Advertise it. Post photographs of it.
And somewhere along the way, perhaps we came to believe that happiness is our natural state, and therefore unhappiness represents failure.
But no human life works like that.
There cannot be courage without fear.
There cannot be forgiveness without hurt.
There cannot be resilience without difficulty.
And perhaps there cannot be a profound appreciation of happiness without occasionally knowing its absence.
The objective of life cannot therefore be to eliminate every uncomfortable emotion.
Perhaps the greater objective is to develop sufficient inner stability so that we are no longer frightened by everything we feel.
Resilience is not the absence of distress. It is our capacity to remain present as distress moves through us.
And What Are We Teaching Our Children?
This may be even more important for the next generation.
Naturally, we want to protect our children.
But protecting children from unnecessary suffering is very different from shielding them from every disappointment, failure, rejection or uncomfortable emotion.
A child who loses sometimes learns how to lose.
A child who fails discovers that they can survive failure.
A child who experiences disappointment learns that disappointment eventually passes.
A child who feels anxious and discovers they can stay with that feeling begins to build confidence in their emotional strength.
If we must immediately remove, distract from, or fix every uncomfortable emotion, how do we ever develop resilience?
Perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can give our children is not a life without difficulty —but the inner resources to meet difficulty when it inevitably arrives.
Meditation and age-appropriate contemplative practices may also play a valuable role here: teaching young people to pause, breathe, observe, and recognise that a difficult thought or feeling does not define who they are.
A Different Understanding of Mental Health
Perhaps we need to reconsider what mental health actually means.
Mental health cannot mean being happy all the time.
Nor should emotional pain be automatically romanticised as something we simply have to endure. Sometimes we need psychological support. Sometimes we need medication. Sometimes we need someone to listen. And sometimes professional intervention is essential.
But alongside treatment, perhaps we should also be teaching inner strength.
How to sit quietly.
How to observe our thoughts.
How to recognise an emotion without immediately becoming consumed by it.
How to distinguish between what is happening and what our mind fears might happen.
How to be still.
For thousands of years, meditation has invited human beings to turn inward to discover something within ourselves that is deeper than those difficulties.
Perhaps our growing use of antidepressants should prompt a much broader conversation.
Not about whether medication is good or bad.
But what kind of emotional resources are we developing within ourselves before, during and alongside medical intervention?
Perhaps we do not need to learn how to be happy all the time.
But how to remain whole when we are not.
English: www.fisumeditation.org
Further English Philosophy: www.fisumeditation.org/Philosophy
Greek: www.dialogismos-fisu.org/
Rajesh’s Author Site: www.rajeshananda.guru
