Stephanie Harrison

The second lie is really deeply connected to that, which is that you have to achieve more and more in order to prove how worthy you are.

And so that becomes a coping mechanism for so many people, particularly in our culture, where these things are rewarded and celebrated.

And we end up doing things like burning ourselves out, working ourselves into sickness or ill-being, neglecting our relationships and doing all of these things in order to say, oh, I'll be happy when I get there.

And the third lie is that we're separate from other people, that the actions of another person don't influence us, that our culture and systems don't have an impact upon us, and that we can basically do everything alone.

Yeah, I fell hook, line, and sinker for old happy.

So I often say that the reason why I can write and talk about it is because I know it so well.

And I think all of us, as an entrepreneur myself, as entrepreneurs,

somebody who has worked in a number of different environments, who has relationships with people who matter to me, I can pretty clearly acknowledge that I'm not able to do any of that by myself, even if I do some of those things independently, I'm still drawing upon support and resources and lessons and wisdom from other people at all those times.

It affected me so much.

And I believe that, oh, if I can just create this perfect dream life for myself, then I will finally be happy.

But in order to do that, I had to disconnect myself from others.

I had to try and be perfect all the time.

And it was just exhausting.

And I ended up

being very lonely, very depressed, struggling with my physical health, struggling with my emotional wellbeing, with basically everything that you could think of because I was living in this way that was so deeply out of alignment with the true sources of wellbeing.

And so that's the third lie.

And eventually one day I found myself having a breakdown, lying on my bedroom floor, crying and realizing that maybe it wasn't that I wasn't trying hard enough,

or I wasn't doing enough.

It was that I was doing things in the wrong way.

And that's ultimately what led me to want to go and study the psychology of happiness and try to figure out a better pathway.