The popular saying is that money can’t buy happiness. The Beatles sang that they don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy them love.
I think the Beatles were mostly right about money and love. But there are ways of spending our money that can actually make us happier. Read More
After my workout, I stopped at the cliffs above Capitola, overlooking the Monterey Bay. It had just rained lightly, so the air was crystal clear, and the brownish gold of the kelp beds at low tide made a vivid contrast with the blue gray ocean. The little bit of sun that peeked through the clouds lit a meandering path across the water and through the center of the wharf.
The Monterey Bay looks very tame from the shore, but it drops off quickly, reaching a depth in some places of over two miles; like an undersea Grand Canyon. During the right time of year it’s not unusual to see humpback whales, dolphins, and a whole host of other cetaceans pretty close in. I didn’t see any on this particular day, but I know they’re out there; along with the harbor seals and sea otters providing comic relief.
Then there are the sea monsters… the great white sharks, among other dangers. Those are the things that keep me mostly swimming just a bit inland in a chlorinated pool.
I force myself to stop on these cliffs almost every morning, because I know it’s important for me. I began doing this several years ago, when I noticed I was getting too caught up in day to day anxieties and concerns. The five to maybe ten minutes I spend gazing out at the protected expanse of the largest ocean on earth gives me something I need – something we all need, a fundamental requirement for our happiness and well being actually… and something that is all too easy to be oblivious to in these days of iphones, kindles, and reliably traumatic 24 hour news cycles.
A sense of awe.
Awesome is a word that’s now used promiscuously. If something’s good, it’s awesome! If something’s enjoyable, it’s awesome! If something’s mildly impressive, it’s awesome!
But awe is not such a mundane experience. Webster’s dictionary defines awe as, “An emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by authority or by the sacred or sublime.”
When we throw around a word like awe so frivolously; when everything’s awesome… then what word do we use to express the true intensity of awe?
Totally awesome!? No that’s not it… I don’t have a good answer, but I hope my point is clear – there is a deep need in the human soul for an emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder. For now, we’ll keep the word that bears that meaning.
What is it about awe that’s so important?
Panic: Of “Pan,” the God of woods and fields who was the source of mysterious sounds that caused contagious, groundless fear in herds and crowds, or in people in lonely spots.
—World English Dictionary
At the famous Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., the outnumbered Athenians, led by their brilliant general Miltiades, took the Persians completely by surprise, sending them into a fit of terror thought to have been brought on by the god Pan—a panic—leading to a remarkable victory. The Athenians lost 192 men to Persia’s 6,400.
Panic and panic attacks—anxiety that seems to hit you out of the blue—can be extremely debilitating. It can make it difficult to function, and its unexpected nature can lead to a general feeling of anxiety, wondering and never knowing when we might get hit by it.
Though we usually think of panic and anxiety as psychological phenomena, most of the symptoms of panic anxiety are actually physical: dizziness, shortness of breath, hot flashes, chest pain, racing heart, sweating, trembling, choking, nausea, and numbness. Only three symptoms are psychological: fear of dying, fear of losing control, and feelings of unreality.
That so many symptoms are physical may turn out to be more important that we have thought. This can open up some simple but effective strategies for coping, or even mastering, our panic or anxiety.
In Greek and Roman Mythology, Narcissus stared at his own reflection, so absorbed in his own image he was oblivious to anybody else. The idealized image that he saw withdrew him from the world. He was in an emotional vacuum, devoid of anything but what he wanted to see.
But aside from Narcissus, and those suffering from the psychological condition of narcissism, our own self-reflection can provide us the kind of useful assessment that allows us to live up to our own standards.
Researchers Robert Wicklund and Shelley Duval discovered back in the 1970s that when people were in front of a mirror and told they were being filmed, those people changed their behavior in very positive ways. They worked harder, gave more accurate answers to questions, were more consistent in their actions, and acted more consistently with their values.
About a decade later, Charles Carver and Michael Scheier looked at this in more depth, and within their larger explorations of self-awareness and self-regulation, found something fascinating.
When people sat at a desk with a mirror—not a great big ostentatious mirror mind you, just a small part of the surroundings—they were more likely to stay true to their own values than to follow someone else’s orders. They would work harder, they resisted being bullied into changing their opinion, and when they were told to administer shocks to somebody, they were more restrained in doing so.
A simple, small mirror provided enough reflection for people to better regulate their behavior.
Self-regulation is the moral fulcrum that allows all other moral behavior. Without the capacity for self-regulation, we would live in an amoral world; a world where the concept of right and wrong is meaningless. If we are not in charge of our actions, if we don’t have a choice in what we do or don’t do, then we can’t reasonably be held responsible for our actions.
Self-reflection is what makes self-regulation possible. It allows us to see ourselves in action. In these experiments, a mirror was used to enhance people’s self-reflection. But self-reflection is also enabled by the feedback we receive from others—and therefore our choice of relationships can make a big difference in our lives.
Our social nature has huge benefits, and underlies much of our resilience and success as a species. But it can also steer us in bad, sometimes disastrous directions, and can be used to manipulate us.
We are social creatures. We influence one another, we care about each other, we follow each other and are able to cooperate and act together as a team.
We’re also cultural creatures. We learn from each other – and learn most effectively by watching what other people do. It matters to us what other people say and think and do. The accumulated knowledge and habits and standards of the ages become part of our own self-concept.
For much of what we do, this works extremely well. For small bands of hunter gatherers, which is how mankind has spent most of our existence, it’s been essential for our survival and flourishing.
And yet these very qualities can be used against us to manipulate us into accepting, doing, and buying things that work against our deepest values, that we can come to regret, and that sometimes can lead us into horrible tragedy. They make cults possible; they make the most murderous regimes and criminal gangs possible. They allow us to be passive when emergency action is necessary.
The madness of crowds has led to the most ridiculous of buying fads – the Tulip Bulb Craze in Holland in 1636, stock buying and selling frenzies, and desperate mobs fighting to get a fad Christmas gift that are in short supply – often deliberately so (the toy we promised isn’t there, so we buy something else more expensive to make up for it, then we go back in January to get the initial toy we had originally promised. – it’s very effective).
Like most of our nature as human beings, this quality is not good or bad in itself. It isn’t something to reject whole cloth – living a hermit’s life is a recipe for misery. But our social nature also isn’t something to embrace unthinkingly – its dangers can be horrific.
This is a part of our nature to master: to bring consciousness to, to be aware of our own tendencies, and to be vigilant of going off the rails into groupthink.
To this end, let’s look at some specific tendencies, and then how we can bring a degree of mastery to them.
There’s a vow that, if taken by romantic couples, would go a long way toward establishing safety and trust, and limiting much of the pain that couples commonly experience – much of the pain that couples commonly inflict upon one another.
There will be pain in any relationship, we hurt each other without even trying. There’s plenty of conflict in the very best of relationships. John Gottman has found in his research that in successful marriages about 69% of conflicts never get resolved. So a happy marriage isn’t about the absence of conflict, or an absence of hurt.
It all comes down to how we treat each other given that there is conflict, and times when we unintentionally hurt each other.
In other words, it’s what we do or do not do intentionally that makes the difference.
The vow that I suggest to make between the two of you is this:
My client Frank was having a very hard time with his money. To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway’s bankrupt character Mike in “The Sun Also Rises,” money problems tend to happen gradually, then suddenly.
Frank was, fortunately, still in the “gradually” stage, feeling anxious and a bit untethered. The frustrating thing was that he knew exactly what he needed to do… he just didn’t do it.
Well, to be more precise, he usually didn’t do it.
When he saw that his credit card balances were creeping up, and he’d lost track of what was happening with his investments, and he started worrying about bills that he hadn’t prepared for, then he would pay attention to his spending and check diligently on his investments… for maybe a week, maybe a month.
But when the anxiety subsided a bit as he adjusted his behavior, he would begin to feel less urgency, and eventually the old habits would reassert themselves, slowly re-creating the same problems that had been troubling him.
And the cycle would repeat itself.
We can know the right things to do. We can know how to do them. But until and unless these behaviors become automatic habits, we will never actually do them reliably over time. It just takes too much energy, focus, and willpower to consciously think of everything all the time.
As the great American psychologist William James said about a hundred years ago:
The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.
This is one of the enduring truths of human nature. If we want to establish a behavior over time, we need to make it automatic.
Unfortunately for James, it turns out that the “miserable human being” he was describing, was himself. As his biographer Robert D. Richardson wrote, James’s was “…a man who really had no habits – or who lacked the habits he most needed, having only the habit of having no habits – and whose life was itself a ‘buzzing blooming confusion’ that was never really under control.”
Sometimes we can teach best what we most need to learn. In that sense James was a fantastic teacher regarding habits.
So how do we establish strong, positive, and consistent habits?
An essential ingredient for success at anything – beyond the most mundane of rote tasks – is curiosity.
Curiosity is about exploration and discovery; it creates energy, possibilities, and movement. It also allows us to create relationships, and to grow more deeply and delightfully connected with one another. It allows us to play – and excellence in work can be like play for adults.
In my work as a Marriage and Family Therapist, Life Coach, and Business Consultant, I would be utterly useless without curiosity as a central deliberate practice. I need to get to know, before I do anything else, who this other person is – or who these people are if it’s a couple or a work team. I need to be keenly interested in knowing and understanding them, their circumstances, and what their goals and challenges and strengths are. That’s all about curiosity.
You might think, “Well, that sounds like you start with empathy…” But empathy, in my experience, follows from curiosity. If we’re curious about the other person, that’s the portal through which our empathy and care for other people enters.
Think of your own work, your own family, your own friendships. With those with whom you enjoy a good relationship, I would bet that you also are curious about who they are as people. On the other hand, if there are people from whom you feel more distant or critical, you might find that bringing more curiosity about their internal worlds can bring fresh energy and interest – and perhaps greater compassion as well.
In our work, our success and prospects grow with curiosity. The antithesis of curiosity is a sense of or desire for certainty.
Curiosity is a quality that allows us to deliberately expand our awareness, to explore and search for possibilities.
In contrast, when we look for certainty, we’re looking to end the search, and bring the exploration to a close.
The need for certainty can reinforce the need for more certainty, as we narrow our possibilities. We become more defensive in the pursuit of being right; we’ll tend to replay events as we interpreted them, rather than wondering what we may have missed. We’ll tend to look for and hold on to stereotypes, avoiding too much empathy or self-reflection in favor of what we think we know.
When we see someone who truly excels at what they do, one quality often jumps out: they make it look easy.
But what is it that gives us the impression of ease?
They seem to take their time. Even when you’re seeing an elite athlete making lightning quick moves, it seems to be moving more slowly than the actual elapsed time. They’re not panicked, they’re not forcing things; the moves look fluid.
When someone has reached a state of mastery, with all the deliberate practice that requires, they’ve accumulated a vast store of knowledge and experience in their working memory. So when they get to work, they don’t need to take time to look things up; or when it’s a physical skill like athletics or music, they don’t have to think about the movements themselves.
Because of this, they also don’t feel rushed to act. They have time to orient to the problem or the task, and before they take action, they will have scanned their working memory for the information they need – the facts, the experience, the causes and effects they know – and then when they do act, they do so magnificently.
In my college astronomy course, our professor brought in a guest speaker one day who had once shared an office with Albert Einstein. He told us how Einstein had been on vacation for a couple of weeks, and during this time this (then very young) professor was working on a complex formula on the board in their office. He was stumped by one section of the formula, and had not made any headway on it for most of those two weeks.
When Einstein returned, he was curious about the formula, and he began asking what seemed, to this professor, to be some very simple – and kind of dumb – questions. This went on for about twenty minutes, during which time this professor was beginning to seriously question the great genius of Albert Einstein.
But then, all of a sudden, Einstein said, “Oh, well then…” and he promptly completed the formula, easily solving the problem that had flummoxed the professor for two weeks.
When approaching a problem, a true expert will approach it with curiosity, take their time, orient to the situation, and get to know the problem first, before they act.
Novices, on the other hand, will tend to jump in quickly, getting to work on the problem before they really understand what they’re dealing with.
One of the – sometimes – unspoken expectations when we buy something is that it will, to some degree, make us happy.
We buy a new appliance, or a nice piece of furniture for our home, and it satisfies an idea we had that led us to buy it in the first place. Part of that idea is that the new oven, or couch, will make us happy.
We shop for a new piece of clothing, and we expect that we’ll enjoy wearing it.
Even a trip to the grocery store is often accompanied with an expectation that the food we buy will make for a yummy meal that we’ll savor.
We can buy gizmos like smart phones or Apple watches, and we expect they’ll improve, to some extent, the quality of our lives.
And each of these purchases usually does bring us some degree of satisfaction or pleasure… for a little while.
But part of our strength as human beings is our capacity to adapt to a multitude of circumstances; from tremendous wealth and opportunities, to severe poverty or physical danger. We can expand into great flourishing, or we can make do, struggle, and muddle through rough times.
“Hedonic adaptation” is the term that researchers use to describe this capacity to adapt to different circumstances while staying within a range of overall happiness. This gift of adaptability is a wonderful advantage in a continually changing world, full of endless creativity, unanticipated events, and unpredictable possibilities, good or bad.
It also means that we adapt to good things relatively quickly, so the happiness we experience from them is often fleeting.
…then we need another good thing.
…and another.
And when we become used to the availability of good things, when we come to expect them as a regular experience of a good life, we enter what’s called the “Hedonic Treadmill.”
Needing more and more good things in order to feel what we’ve come to expect as a baseline of happiness can be exhausting. It can undermine the sense of happiness we enjoy with each positive experience.
And in that way we can undermine our sense of being happy about our life.
But there is an antidote; something we can deliberately practice and gets easier over time, and that can significantly affect our happiness:
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