Sunday nights have never been easy for me. An ex once told me I might have a light case of Sunday night depression, which is apparently common among people as Sunday is a daunting day (especially when your last two Sundays have been right before holidays from work). Last Sunday was especially rough on my psyche, as I finished watching an episode of Star Trek and felt the nothingness sink in. No more NFL games for the day, no more LinkedIn promoting of myself to get a job up north, and nothing to advance my day any further (it felt like).

What caused this feeling? I think it’s actually pretty easy to pinpoint. First of all, I spent the entire day doing nothing really. I did get some job leads, watched a movie, and went to dinner with family and friends, but for some reason I just felt empty. And of course there was the main thing I did — leave my browser open on dating websites.

In the coming weeks I plan on starting my own business for online dating coaching, and have thus immersed myself this week in as many online dating websites as possible. Unfortunately, doing so has made it feel like I’m getting nowhere with women (which really isn’t true, I’m doing just fine, but so many options with less than stellar response rates can feel that way sometimes). Especially sitting with JDate open today, sending messages every few hours and not getting as many responses as I’d like.

This isn’t to say if you go on JDate, you’re going to feel disappointment. Quite the opposite. Some of the greatest women I’ve dated have been from JDate or are frequent users. One of my favorite things to do is log in and hear the chat buzz from an old flame as we catch up in the most unorthodox of ways, while waiting for others to view us and we give each other feedback on messages and our profiles.

But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. The best thing to do is not to wait for the chats and messages to come in, but instead to start making your own actions the focus of your own happiness. I’ve been reading a great book called The Six Pillars of Self Esteem, and one of the main points it makes is not to let others determine your opinion of yourself and instead make yourself satisfied by doing the things you think are important.

So as time for sleep approached this Sunday, I suddenly got the urge to do some things. I write a journal every day, and after examining my entirely selfish day, decided to write some thank you notes to friends for birthday gifts and work on some projects for my nearly-completed winter internship. The fact of the matter comes down to this: you can wait for someone else to show up to make you happy and get dragged down in the process, or you can be pro-active in the areas of your life you can control, and the happiness will follow. What will you choose?