Can you convince yourself you are happy if you are not?

There's a performer I like whose work I quite enjoy, but they once said to feel happy they stand in front of a mirror and smile at themselves until they feel happy, they said if you do it long enough, you convince the body that you feel the emotion and it alters your state of mind.  I find this idea disturbing.  For one, I believe every emotion is valid, both positive and negative, and I believe that you should not repress those emotions.  If you feel happy then you should feel happy, and if you feel sad then you should feel sad, emotions are a reflection of our mental and physical state, so they should be genuine.

If you were to break a leg, and you were to feel pain, and you were to try and walk on that leg and felt more pain, you would not continue to walk on it until you felt numb to that pain and were able to convince yourself that your leg is fine.  There is an obvious reason why you wouldn't do this - because you broke the leg and pretending it isn't broken isn't going to fix it, and being able to numb yourself to the pain isn't going to fix it either.

When it comes to emotions as expressions of our inner state, it is important to be honest about them.  If you were to actually take this person's advice, not only would you create a false sense of security, but you would actually put yourself in much greater danger, setting yourself up for a far greater fall when you confront your emotions in a state of mind that has allowed them to build in silent repression for too long.  Returning to our analogy, if you were to convince yourself that your leg was fine and you were to go and do something that is intensive like ice skating, you would likely cause a severe injury that might cause your leg to go beyond the point of repair, making it impossible to fix something that could have been if you hadn't ignored it.

As people we seem much more willing to tolerate mental health problems than we do physical.  If any physical illness causes us such distress and impacts our life to the point where living it day to day becomes difficult then we would seek out help.  When it comes to mental health however, even when it becomes difficult to live our lives day to day, we are often reluctant to seek professional help.  One reason people seem reluctant to do this in my opinion is the belief that if they seek help they will simply be offered medication and told to go home.  That also happens with physical health too and can be a reason many people are reluctant to see a doctor until it becomes serious.

The trouble with waiting until something becomes serious, is that our perception of what is serious is often an underestimation, or to put it another way, things become serious much earlier than we are willing to admit.  There is of course the melancholic contemplation that the reason we do this is because secretly everyone wants to die and life is about convincing both ourselves and other people that we don't.  I guess that can only lead you to one question - deep down, do you want to live?  If the answer is yes, then you need to tackle your health both physically and mentally.  If the answer is no, then you need to tackle it all the more, with the mental component being the most pressing.