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I was reading Richard Templar’s The Rules of Wealth when I came across an expression that immediately caught my attention: handling excitement. I wasn’t surprised to find it in a book about money. Money and our ability to navigate emotions are closely connected. The money game is not purely logical, strategic or intellectual; to a considerable extent, it is also emotional. When we win, earn or succeed, we may feel elated. When we lose, make a poor decision or experience financial uncertainty, we may feel anxious, disappointed or miserable. Money involves risk, and risk can provoke very different reactions in different people — fear, stress, anticipation, exhilaration, hope or excitement. Learning to regulate these states wisely matters.

And yet the phrase “handling excitement” stayed with me. We constantly hear about learning to handle stress, grief, disappointment, anxiety and anger. Entire industries have been built around coping with difficult emotions. But I had rarely, if ever, heard anyone talk about learning how to handle excitement. Positive psychology is relatively young, and the closest thing I had encountered was advice about increasing positive emotions or practising gratitude. But does excitement itself actually need to be handled? If it is a positive and desirable state, why should we have to learn what to do with it? The more I thought about it, the more I realised that perhaps positive emotions require emotional skill too. Happiness, freedom, excitement, peace, joy, liberation and even love can feel surprisingly difficult to receive when we are not accustomed to them.

Negativity as the Social Default

If you listen carefully to everyday conversations, you may notice how often people connect through negativity and complaining. I became particularly aware of this when I still worked a conventional nine-to-five job. If it rained, colleagues complained about how miserable the weather made them feel. If the sun was shining, they complained that they were trapped inside the office. There always seemed to be something available to dislike.

At the time, I was going through a significant change in mindset. I had begun keeping a gratitude journal and paying closer attention to where I directed my attention. What struck me was not that complaining was somehow morally wrong, but that it was astonishingly ineffective. Complaining about rain does not stop the rain. Complaining about being trapped in an office on a beautiful day does not open the office door. If a situation cannot be changed, I would rather look for something within it that I can appreciate. And if it can be changed, then eventually there comes a point when action is more useful than another conversation about how dissatisfied we are.

So when it rained, instead of focusing entirely on the grey weather, I would remind myself that I was somewhere warm and comfortable. When the sun was shining and I was working indoors, I could still appreciate that I had a stable job and a reliable income. But gratitude did not mean convincing myself that I had to remain in a life that no longer suited me. I began to realise that I did not want to spend years repeatedly complaining about circumstances I actually had the power to alter.

There is an important difference between accepting what cannot be changed and passively enduring what can. Complaining can sometimes create the illusion of movement because we are expressing dissatisfaction, analysing it and repeating it to others, but nothing in the external world has actually shifted. Eventually, I wanted action rather than another conversation about feeling trapped. So after eight years, I stopped complaining about being trapped and did the one thing that could genuinely change the situation: I left. Then I went travelling around the world. And that was when I discovered something unexpected. I had assumed that once I created the freedom I wanted, happiness would simply follow. I certainly felt excited — intensely so — but that excitement arrived mixed with something I had not anticipated: guilt.

That is where the question of handling excitement became much more personal. It is one thing to imagine freedom when we do not have it. It is another thing entirely to receive it and discover that part of us does not yet know what to do with it.

Why Do We Sabotage Positive States?

We often fail to notice how quickly we interrupt our own happiness. It is not necessarily because we do not want to be happy. Sometimes it is because nobody ever taught us how to remain inside happiness without becoming suspicious of it. Hardship often appears more legitimate than joy. Struggle feels serious. Worry looks responsible. Complaining can look realistic and socially acceptable. Joy, meanwhile, may be treated as frivolous, temporary or even childish. Excitement is frequently associated with children and teenagers, while adulthood is expected to involve seriousness, restraint and a respectable amount of gloom.

But what if that hierarchy is completely backwards? What if peace, freedom, excitement and joy do not have to be occasional visitors — transient clouds passing briefly through an otherwise grey emotional landscape? What if we can train ourselves to inhabit them rather than immediately dismantling them? That idea feels almost rebellious.

We are taught endless techniques for stress, anxiety, grief and anger, but almost nothing about what to do when we are intensely excited, inspired or suddenly flooded with possibility. Yet excitement can destabilise us too. The mind accelerates. Sleep patterns might get disturbed. Ideas start to multiply. The body feels electrically charged. We feel fire in the belly. The challenge is not, “How do I suppress excitement?” but rather, “How do I use this energy constructively without dispersing it?”

Learning to Carry Joy

Perhaps abundance and excitement can feel uncomfortable precisely because they are unfamiliar. We know how to carry burdens. We know how to brace ourselves, tolerate disappointment, endure unpleasant circumstances and expect things to go wrong. But nobody teaches us how to carry joy without immediately jinxing it it, feeling guilty about it or scanning for strings attached to it.

For years, I became very good at surviving difficult emotional states. I learned how to endure, anticipate disappointment and function in environments where I did not feel particularly wanted, appreciated or accepted. But nobody taught me how to receive happiness, beauty, freedom or love without immediately interrogating them. So when something beautiful appears — freedom, travel, sunlight, creative possibility, an unexpected opportunity, or even attention from a man I find extraordinary — my mind does not always respond simply with: Wonderful. Let me enjoy this. Instead, another mechanism can switch on:

Why me? Why would he choose me when there are millions of other amazing women out there? Is it really possible to be this happy and this free? What will it cost me? Am I making myself less relatable simply by being happy?

That does not necessarily imply lack of gratitude. Sometimes it implies unfamiliarity and inability to receive extraordinary gifts.

When Misery Becomes an Operating System

Some people sabotage happiness not because they secretly want to suffer, but because suffering is the emotional language they were taught most fluently. Misery feels familiar; joy feels destabilising. They know how to complain, endure, brace themselves and sacrifice. They know how to expect disappointment, failure, loss and protect themselves against it. What they may not know is how to receive, expand, trust, relax or remain present when life becomes easier, better and more fulfilling. So they return to default paradigm of unhappiness almost automatically and call it realism.

Misery can become a default operating system not because people enjoy it, but because their nervous system has been conditioned to recognise it as familiar. Familiar pain can sometimes feel safer than unfamiliar possibility. At least the familiar can be predicted. It is known. It is like an old friend. Joy, abundance and freedom, by contrast, can feel strangely destabilising and dysregulating because they ask us to loosen our grip on the defensive strategies that once protected us.

My Own Emotional Reprogramming

I began recognising this mechanism in myself. When freedom arrived, I experienced guilt. When I chose a more adventurous life, I found myself thinking about people who were not in a position to travel. When exciting possibilities emerged, part of me immediately searched for the complication, while another part simply could not believe that something so good might actually be possible. When connection appeared, I questioned whether I deserved it. Even love could feel implausible.

I had spent years learning how to survive difficult and challenging situations, but almost no time learning how to receive happiness. Freedom frightened me because some part of me regarded it as undeserved and strangely frivolous. Joy could make me feel guilty because it seemed to separate me from people who were still suffering. Abundance could make me suspicious because I had been conditioned to believe that being sensible meant being content with simply living within my means. So my task is no longer simply to create a happier life. I am also learning how to remain inside the more authentic, abundant and rewarding life that is beginning to unfold. I want to learn how to accept beautiful emotions and experiences without immediately questioning them, diminishing them or searching for reasons why they shouldn’t last. I want joy to become something I can embrace fully and cherish with all my heart rather than something that pays me occasional visits. I want freedom to feel natural rather than illicit. Perhaps this is another kind of emotional maturity: not merely learning how to survive what hurts, but learning how to receive what is good. And perhaps abundance is not something we prove ourselves worthy of.

Perhaps it is something we slowly learn not to question and refuse.