Definition: Relational Trauma
Relational trauma is the emotional and psychological harm that occurs when early relationships — especially those with caregivers — were unsafe, unpredictable, or neglectful. It’s not about having had a perfect childhood or needing a dramatic story of abuse; many women with relational trauma grew up in families that looked fine on the outside but left them feeling unseen, misunderstood, or emotionally unsafe. For high-achieving women, this early wounding often underpins a deep, quiet struggle — a persistent sense that connection requires performance or that vulnerability might lead to rejection, even when success is visible to others.
Definition: Nervous System Regulation
Nervous system regulation is the ability to bring your body and mind back into balance after stress or emotional overwhelm. This is not about forcing yourself to ‘snap out of it’ or pretending you’re fine; it’s about learning to recognize when you’re activated and gently guiding yourself back to a state where you can think clearly and feel more grounded. For driven women who often push through discomfort to get things done, understanding and working with nervous system regulation is key to building lasting wellbeing that doesn’t collapse under pressure or emotional intensity.
Lowering your standards for how often you feel happy doesn’t mean giving up — it means freeing yourself from a constant, exhausting bar that sets you up for disappointment.
Quick Summary
- You may find yourself chasing happiness as if it’s a finish line you haven’t crossed yet, only to feel frustrated when it slips away or feels out of reach.
- This post invites you to hold the both/and: that happiness isn’t about being ‘on’ all the time, but about working with your nervous system and relational wiring to broaden your emotional capacity.
- By lowering impossible standards, investing in fulfilling work, and protecting your emotional energy from draining relationships, you can build a more resilient baseline of well-being that holds steady even when life gets hard.
One of the most frequent questions I receive as a therapist is this:
SUMMARY
Happiness isn’t a destination driven women reach after the next achievement. These 5 evidence-informed strategies invite you to work with your nervous system and relational wiring — not against them — to create a baseline of genuine wellbeing that doesn’t collapse when life gets hard.
“How can I be happier?”
And each time I’m asked, I have five responses that most people usually don’t expect.
To learn what they are, keep reading.
Honestly, this is a bit of a tricky question because I actually don’t think happiness, per se, is the goal. Not of therapy or of any personal growth work.
Sure, it’s lovely to feel happy, yes, but the goal of life isn’t to remain in a static state of happiness.
Rather, I personally and professionally believe that the goal, that our personal growth work goal, is to increase our capacity to tolerate more and more of life’s broad range of emotions – the highs as well as the lows – increasing our ability to more fully show up and engage with the richness of life.
And that said, there are actually some paradoxical tips that I would argue can actually “boost our happiness” as we work towards this other goal of increasing our engagement with all of life’s emotional experiences.
5 Surprising Tips To Boost Your Happiness + Free Resources
1) Lower your standards.
So many of us expect that we should be consistently happy most of the time that we set a fairly impossible bar for ourselves and are often disappointed when we find ourselves unhappy and “falling short.”
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t continue to strive towards happiness. Recognize it’s only one part of the emotional experience you’re going to face during your days and weeks.
By lowering our standards, our expectation that we “should” be happy all of the time, paradoxically we can increase our sense of overall well-being and contentment by reducing the disappointment in ourselves when we feel something other than “happy.”
2) Invest the time, inquiry, energy, and even finances into cultivating work that truly fulfills you.
The reality is that most of us will spend our lives working to make our way in the world.
Investing all the necessary time, inquiry, energy, and even finances into making sure it’s work that fits you well, harnesses your strengths, and fulfills you, is one of the most worthwhile investments you can ever make as since you’ll be spending a vast majority of your waking hours doing it.
Check out the bottom of this article for some great career-clarifying resources I highly recommend!
3) Decrease or eliminate contact with those who drain, criticize, dislike or don’t support you.
This may sound obvious, but the people we spend time with impact our well-being and happiness enormously. And yet many of us think we’re stuck. Especially if we happen to have family or in-laws or old friends who don’t make us feel good.
You’re never stuck and you always get to choose who you want contact with! Even if this is family.
I’m not saying you have to estrange yourself from them. (Though if you choose to do this if it’s right for you that’s totally valid!), but decreasing the amount of time you spend with them is always an option and increasing the amount of time and contact you gave with people who genuinely uplift you will do wonders for your happiness levels.
4) Take a holistic, integral physiological and psychological approach to your happiness.
With professional support from your doctor, rule out any underlying physical health challenges that may be contributing to a sense of depression or lack of well-being.
Work with a therapist to address any unresolved trauma or chronic distorted thinking patterns that may be interfering with your happiness.
You can start doing all the new happiness-inducing habits in the world, but if you’re suffering from unprocessed trauma or a low-functioning thyroid, for instance, you’re swimming upstream when it comes to your happiness.
5) Work at appreciating what you actually already have.
So few of us fully appreciate the healthy functionality of our bodies, the relative ease of our Western lives, or the fact that we’ve woken yet again to live another day.
As the timeless Joni Mitchell song goes, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone…”
Taking the time to regularly take stock of your life and notice what’s going well, what’s already present can do wonders for boosting our happiness levels.
My favorite way of doing this is a daily gratitude journaling practice where I list 10 things I’m grateful for, 10 ways I experienced abundance lately, and 10 ways I was shown love lately.
You can make this exercise your own by listing out 10 things you may need to consciously focus on like, for instance, 10 ways you feel safe in the world, 10 ways your life is actually pretty great, etc.. Open up a Google Doc or crack open your journal and spend ten minutes on this. You’ll likely feel an emotional shift by the time you complete it.
How about you?
Now I’d love to hear from you:
What’s one unexpected (or expected) tip that you’ve personally found helpful in “boosting your happiness”?
Leave a message in the comments below so our community of blog readers can benefit from your wisdom.
Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.
Warmly,
Annie
Resources:
- Blog post: “So what kind of career do you want anyways?”
- The Pathfinder by Nicholas Lore (#1 resource I recommend to all my clients wrestling with this question).*
- So What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up? Workbook by Martha Beck.
- Little Red Shoes audiobook by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Why doesn’t achieving more make ambitious women happier?
The achievement treadmill is real: each success raises the baseline and the next goal appears just out of reach. Lasting happiness requires nervous system regulation, genuine connection, and processing the childhood beliefs that tell you nothing is ever quite enough.
What is the surprising connection between gratitude and the nervous system?
Gratitude practices activate the parasympathetic nervous system, reducing cortisol and increasing feelings of safety and connection. For women with relational trauma, this can be a gentle, accessible way to shift out of chronic vigilance without requiring a major therapeutic breakthrough.
Does happiness come from relationships or individual work?
Both. Research consistently shows relational connection is the strongest predictor of wellbeing. But the quality of those connections depends on your own attachment health and your willingness to do individual healing work that makes secure relationships possible.
Can you boost happiness even during grief or difficulty?
Yes — not by bypassing pain, but by building the capacity to hold both. Acknowledging what’s hard while also noticing what’s good isn’t toxic positivity; it’s the emotional range that comes with a regulated nervous system and real self-awareness.
Are there free tools for improving happiness?
Movement, time in nature, journaling, deepening existing relationships, and gratitude reflection all have strong evidence bases and cost nothing. The most powerful shifts often come from slowing down rather than adding more.
DISCLAIMER: The content of this post is for psychoeducational and informational purposes only and does not constitute therapy, clinical advice, or a therapist-client relationship. For full details, please read our Medical Disclaimer. If you are in crisis, please call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or text HOME to 741741 (Crisis Text Line).
You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.
References
- Diener, E., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Very happy people. Psychological Science.
- Kok, B. E., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2010). Upward spirals of the heart: Autonomic flexibility, as indexed by vagal tone, reciprocally and prospectively predicts positive emotions and social connectedness. Biological Psychology.
- Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLoS Medicine.
- Brickman, P., & Campbell, D. T. (1971). Hedonic relativism and planning the good society. In M. H. Appley (Ed.), Adaptation-level theory: A symposium.
- Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.). American Psychiatric Publishing.
- Linehan, M. M. (1993). Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. Guilford Press.
- Berman, M. G., Jonides, J., & Kaplan, S. (2008). The cognitive benefits of interacting with nature. Psychological Science.
- Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Basic Books.
What’s Holding You Back?
You’re achieving a lot, but something still feels off. Take this free quiz to uncover what’s truly running your life and build a life that feels as good as your resume looks. Take the free quiz now.
