Happiness Lies Within

In her 20 years of experience, psychiatrist and mindfulness expert DR SHEFALI BATRA has seen numerous pain-filled instances with her patients. It sparked the inspiration to filter her learnings to help a larger public, she tells Shraddha Kamdar

- Shraddha Kamdar

A childhood experience with a classmate who dropped out of school because she felt "she wasn't good enough." A bright med-school colleague who gave up studying medicine because his sadness wasn't acknowledged by his family members. Her own former professor committing suicide. For psychiatrist and mindfulness expert Dr Shefali Batra, each of these were signs of the nagging helplessness and suffering in the world that were going unnoticed, undetected, and unattended. Her qualification in psychiatry gave her a professional basis to heal emotional concerns, but it was only when she started spending more time trying to work out why people felt sad that she began to understand. "Twenty years of listening revealed that people's attitudes, personality, self-concept, perfectionism, tolerance to frustration, communication, feelings of guilt, coping styles, sense of purpose and, most importantly, long-standing beliefs about themselves, others, and the world were influencing the quality of their mood," she tells us. "One tablet wasn't going to change all this magically. More was needed."

When working with behavioural and cognitive therapy principles, Dr Shefali realised that pessimism was a ruling thought in many of her patients' minds. "When I started imparting basic and advanced life skills through mind-altering cognitive techniques, people started feeling more content and happier for longer periods of time," she says.