Happiness On Demand

Hello Reader,

If you’ve read my newsletter and blog since last summer, you know I’ve been struggling with depression… again.

This wasn’t the first time I experienced depression.

The first time was almost 14 years ago now when I lost my brother.

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back, since there were other things causing anxiety and depression-like symptoms in my life as well.

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Looking back, the big themes were about being out of alignment.

I was living a life that didn’t feel truly mine.

I had done what everyone else had told me to do: study hard, get a good job, climb the corporate ladder, make money, and so on.

The problem was that none of those things was what I really wanted to do.

The end result was a life where I had to battle against my core values and “my true self” every single day. It was exhausting, it caused stress and severe anxiety, but at the time, I had no idea why.

After all, to my knowledge, I had it all together, and I had done what needed to be done to be happy and successful. Why would any of those things cause me pain?

Another problem was my inability to express ANY emotion in a healthy way.

I had learned to hide, repress, neglect, and ignore every emotion.

My father never showed any emotion whatsoever. Not love or care (at least in a way I could recognise as a small child). My mother was emotionally a wreck, suffering from anxiety and severe depression after divorcing my dad, plus losing loved ones early in life.

(I don't blame either of them, they did only what they had learned from their parents.)

This all happened when I was very young, so I grew up not knowing how to deal with emotions, how to express them (even the positive ones), and subconsciously decided that the best thing to do was to avoid feeling anything at all.

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Looking back, all of that sounds pretty depressing in and of itself.

I could say I wasn’t in alignment with any aspect of my internal life: emotions, values, aspirations… any of it.

Long story short, recovering from all of that took many years, but it was an interesting and rewarding journey (in retrospect), leading me to found “Happiness on Demand” for helping people get access to things they can do themselves to solve mental health problems.

Life was great for many years, but then it all started to fall apart again.

Emotional issues were still lingering in the background.

My path towards my dream life was beginning to take twists and turns, eventually feeling like I was taking steps backwards.

Everything was just a mess, and I couldn’t keep it together. I became depressed again.

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At this point, I was so used to living a happy and healthy life that I thought I just needed some time to recover.

But when the time came that I could lift my feet up and breathe a sigh of relief, things didn’t feel any better.

In fact, everything became much worse.

It was like a proverbial dam had broken, behind which I had piled all my negative emotions, thoughts, and beliefs.

Once they were released, I just broke down and couldn’t function anymore.

I was left lying on the bed, wondering if this time I had broken down for good.

And I just lay on my bed for two days. I couldn’t do anything but wallow in grief and sleep.

But deep inside I knew I was at a crossroads.

One option was to seek professional help. I was one tap on my phone screen away from contacting my healthcare provider and booking a time for a psychologist.

Yet, something at that moment guided me to pursue the second option:

I could do this myself.

I had beaten depression before. I had all the tools and knowledge at my disposal to make it happen.

And beyond all the depression I felt, it was as if the “universe” had posed me a challenge: You talk the talk, now walk the walk.

I had written about tools, techniques, and mindset for healing depression for years.

Now it was time to put my money where my mouth is.

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At that point in time, at the end of summer 2025, I still thought I was depressed because my life was a mess.

I had my physical health and friends, but everything else had gone down the gutter:

I lacked money, close relationships, travel, community, spiritual connection, and so on.

I felt like I was stuck within the same four walls, the same mental patterns, the same schedule, and none of it was what I had envisioned my life to be like.

So I rolled up my sleeves and started to use every tool at my disposal to create (or manifest, if you will) the life I wanted to see myself living. A life where I had the freedom to be wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted, with whomever I wanted.

I knew these tools and techniques could work. I had used them very successfully many times before.

But after three weeks, the unexpected happened:

my life hadn’t changed on the outside

but on the inside, I was a new “me”.

I was a completely new person in most ways. And the depression had almost vanished.

When I started, I graded myself at a 0 (out of 10 on a happiness scale where ten is the happiest I’ve ever dreamed of).

After three weeks of daily practice, I was already at a 5 out of 10.

One week later, a solid 8 out of 10.

I felt great.

And as even more time has passed (almost 5 months at the time of writing this), I can grade most of my days as an 8/10 or a 9/10.

No signs of depression, anxiety, or even stress whatsoever.

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It’s amazing to say the least.

And the important lesson I learned in the process is that the mind doesn’t need just time to heal;

it needs new input.

This new input can come from new relationships, new environments, new events in life…

but it can also come from your imagination.

The mind doesn’t necessarily distinguish between what’s real and what’s imagined. It doesn’t live in the past or the future; it operates in the moment of “now”.

The past doesn’t have to define you; the same loops don’t need to repeat themselves over and over again.

You don’t have to be anxious about the future either. You can imagine what you’d want it to be like instead of letting your mind run worst-case scenarios to keep you alert.

Imagination is enough to feed the mind new input.

In my case, it was enough to heal my depression.

So I chose to live as if my dream life had already come true without waiting for it to actually change. In doing so, I discovered that the happiness, health, and positive emotions I thought were dependent on my life changing, were already accessible right now.

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What’s truly interesting is that after I had healed myself, I started to think, act, and speak differently.

That internal change led to new ideas and new opportunities.

And the social contacts that I already had became more meaningful because I was now behaving differently.

The external change I tried to accomplish actually led to internal change… which in turn led to external change.

That’s almost poetic in a way.

Poetic or not, it reflects a deep truth about life, the universe, and everything:

You are not creating your life, you are creating yourself.

Every thought, word, and action is a statement of who you are. Those choices are then reflected back to you in every situation, relationship, and event you encounter in your life.

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IAM - The Inner Alignment Method available on February 22nd.

Before you go, a quick heads-up…

In three weeks, on February 22, I’m releasing a new book called The Inner Alignment Method.

It’s the exact process I used to heal depression, narrowed down to a ten minute daily practice.

Of course, there's a lot more, but just this ten minute routine worked wonders for me, as hopefully became evident in this newsletter.

The book explains the whole philosophy and method, and all the practices that have been helpful in my healing process. It's basically 20 years of personal self-help experiments compressed into a single book.

I'll even pack the book launch with some pretty awesome bonuses!

If you’re like me and have thought "that's it, I'll never be happy or healthy again", because you’ve tried everything and nothing really stuck,

this book was written for you.

I’ll share more very soon.

Until then,

Think happy thoughts!

​- Atte

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Happiness On Demand

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