The Art of Choosing to be Happy
Mikah Jones talks about how he is taking back control of his mental health.
Written by By Ella Edwards
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"How does that make you feel?" Mikah Jones, a mental health and wellness content creator, knows this phrase well. Personifying a positive mental attitude, he has the unique talent of finding a way to turn everyday conversations into moments of enlightenment and growth, a skill that has allowed him to support his following that ranges in the millions. Detractors of social media criticize the platform for being artificial and causing disconnection from others. And yet, with every video, every post, Mikah has demonstrated the positive social media can have on those who use it.
Growing up in San Fernando Valley in a difficult home environment, Jones sought to discover who he was and what he wanted to be. "I grew up in a household that was very sports-centric and if you're going to do something, you had to be the best or not do it at all. And that determined whether I got love. So if I didn't do well, I got no love that day."
Jones openly talks about his upbringing, and his vulnerability has helped many of his followers feel understood and connected to others who have had similar experiences. "When I got to about 14, I was really fed up with feeling so unstable. The way that I saw stability was happiness. I didn't have someone that I could reference, but I knew it was out there. I would see happy families. And I knew joy was possible. I kept asking myself, ‘why am I not feeling that?’"
Jones's self-development breakthrough came after a period of depression and anxiety spanning over ten years. For the longest time, he sought out things that made him temporarily happy. "I didn't like the instability of that and I wanted something more permanent, tangible, and consistent." Jones was the person that others went to for advice – friends, family, and even strangers – but he never knew where or who to go to with his troubles. At 16, he met his first spiritual mentor and began to discover the stability of spirituality. "I still have major dips in my mental health, but life is kind of like a wave. There are always going to be dips, and I thought that you could make yourself linear. I found that you need to just find the tools that can make you linear when the waves happen."
Jones's mental health journey has never been linear. During his childhood, he felt constant pressure to be what everyone else wanted him to be. He played basketball because it made him feel loved by his father, but it led to insecurity and eventually severe depression and anxiety. . "Happiness was easily the greatest thing to me as a child. I spent my entire childhood watching people, picking up their patterns and things that made people unhappy, so I didn't do those things.”
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Jones realized that we can't completely get rid of our negative emotions, but we can reframe the way we look at them. "How I look at the world doesn't change, regardless of how I'm feeling in my body. The more I tell myself I'm depressed and anxious, the more I reinstate who I think I am." Jones talks about the challenge of “labels” when it comes to emotional well-being. "We put these polarizing, right and wrong, likes and dislikes on everything. We've made it very difficult to accept things that just need to be accepted, and one of those things is emotions. My whole life, I labeled emotions. I accepted joy, love, happiness, and positive emotions, and anything that was not those three was a negative emotion. But the problem with that is we treat emotions like property. You're not doing anything for me right now, so I just throw you out. That's a problem."
With guidance from his mentor, Bijan, or @lifewithbeej, Jones developed a new outlook on where he gets his happiness. "We have a door that represents our love and happiness. We've given ourselves all of these keys – our friends, our family, our hobbies, and our work. Those things help us experience love and joy. But the biggest issue that most people have is they act like their external environment is the only thing that has the key to that experience. I just started to focus on how I could find my key. Because it seems like everything else outside of me controls how I feel, and I began to work on how I could change that and get back in control of my own internal existence."
Happiness is something everyone strives for – seeking outside sources such as other people, material possessions, and a variety of other external sources as a way to achieve it. When Jones was asked what he's good at, he replied, "I am really good at being happy." Jones has found a way to show his followers that happiness isn't this complicated unachievable goal, but it is an accessible possibility if we put in the necessary internal work to find it.
"I've spent the last two years of my life in this thing I like to call, ‘surrender.’ I don't have goals or anything. I think of myself as a pebble in the stream, and I just trust the stream will take me to where I need to go. I've already told it my intentions. I know it's pushing me in that direction. So I am continuing to trust that stream and not be afraid of it."
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