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May 08
Love1

Psychological Challenges are More Interesting than You Think

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Habits and Strategies, Happiness

When we approach any problem, how we approach it begins with an idea, a belief, a story about what that problem is, and what needs to be done about it.

To considerable extent, we can choose the fundamental belief or premise from which we approach any problem… and how we frame a problem can be the very key to success or failure.

In the movie Apollo 13, when the spacecraft was in grave peril, and people at Mission Control were freaking out expecting disaster, Gene Krantz (played by Fred Harris) stopped them and said, “What do we got on the spacecraft that works?”

With that one powerful question, he reframed the situation from helpless disaster to solvable problem. Everyone immediately shifted from disaster mode to focusing on the strengths and resources available to bring the astronauts home safely – which they did. The story would probably have ended much differently – and tragically – had they stayed in disaster mode.

How we approach our psychological challenges also begins with an idea, a premise, a story.

Currently, the widely accepted premise is that psychological problems – depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), addictions et al – are abnormal phenomena.

They don’t belong here. They were brought to us by some unfortunate circumstances – an unhappy childhood, a personal weakness, a society that’s sick. They’re polluting the system, like a harmful bacteria or virus, and we want all trace of them eliminated immediately.

But what if that premise is wrong?

I’ve been working with people as a teacher, a marriage and family therapist, and a life coach for well over 40 years now. I started with that premise of problems as aberrations – the “disease model” of psychology. I don’t buy it anymore.

Let’s explore a different premise and see where it takes us.  The exploration starts with asking certain questions:

  • What if the underlying tendencies of these trouble are naturally occurring variations in human experience? What if they are not aberrations or pollutants, but challenges to overcome?  What if their severity can be intensified or minimized depending on our experiences, thoughts and actions?
  • What if depression is largely a natural response to feelings of helplessness, too much passive activity, or an unnatural lack of physical activity?
  • What if a certain percentage of us come into the world with a tendency toward depression, and part of our challenge is to master that tendency – just like any of us has to master other physical and intellectual strengths and weaknesses?

We might find that the most effective interventions for depression involve more exercise, identifying effective actions to take, and discovering, in a very personal way, what sort of thoughts and behavior help us move away from feelings of depression.

This is exactly what researchers have found. In fact, physical exercise is the most effective treatment for depression – 2 ½ times as effective as medication (currently the most popular treatment).

We also know from Martin Seligman’s work that depression is often a symptom of helplessness, and that actively changing how we think and what we do can move us strongly out of depression.

Even something as simple as regularly thinking of three good things at the end of each day can move some people out of the depressed range.

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May 01
Love1

Pressing the Pause Button

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions

Anybody can become angry – that is easy; but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy. – Aristotle

It’s easy to get caught up in emotions, to follow the flow and intensity of our impulses. It’s natural… animal… primal. And without intervening with our consciousness, it can be dangerous. This is how we operated throughout much of human history… which is why most of human history was so terribly, horribly violent.

But it’s not how most of us today usually operate, because we have a choice. Over time, particularly through the Enlightenment, we’ve culturally refined our ability to choose – and that ability is central to what makes us human.

When we feel like reacting with anger, fear or hurt feelings – anything that feels like it’s an automatic, purely emotional response – we can react without thinking, blindly following the tides of our emotions.

Or we can choose to do something different.

Stephen Covey talks about this ability to choose as being a “pause button.” A moment between stimulus and response, that transforms that response from an automatic, rote behavior to a conscious, human one.

When we feel like reacting to a situation, instead of going right into the reaction, we can “press the pause button” and consider what we genuinely – from our consciously chosen values and priorities – want to do.

During the ‘60s, ‘70s and well into the ‘80s, the idea that we should “let our feelings out” was a common message in psychology that found its way into popular culture.

This had a positive side. Our emotions are where we live. Awareness of our feelings deepens our experience, and can help us understand one another and even think more clearly. Love, joy, excitement, elation, satisfaction, peace, warmth… as well as fear, pain, grief, anger, and sadness… These all bring us essential information about how people and events are affecting us.

Our emotions are how we experience the meaning of life. To be more in touch with our emotions is to be more in touch with ourselves. To be able to easily and appropriately express our emotions allows us to live a rich, full life with satisfying connections with others.

“Appropriately” is an important qualifier here, though. There can be a downside to emotional expression, in two ways:

  1. It can be harmful over time to practice “releasing” anger. Because anger – particularly intense anger or rage – is fueled by the fight branch of our sympathetic nervous system, it’s often less of an emotion and more what I call a reaction: a more primitive protective response. Because of this, anger doesn’t actually release, it just intensifies. It becomes a well-worn path; a stronger habit.
  2. Emotions are useful if we integrate them with our conscious awareness. Without conscious awareness, our emotions can guide us all over the place. Maybe some good places, maybe some bad places, but almost never the places we consciously want to go.

When we practice venting our anger, we get very good at venting our anger, with all of the interpersonal and health problems this can bring.

The fight branch of our sympathetic nervous system gives us a burst of power and focus to fuel a last ditch effort to fend off and escape a predator. That’s what it’s for. That’s the level of intensity that flows into our system. These days, a powerful expression of anger is almost like our appendix: a vestigial remnant of a bygone function. There is very little use for a full-blown blast of anger for most people most of the time.

The pure emotion of anger may have served a stronger purpose long ago when the world was a much more violent place (the world or our ancestors was, taken as a whole, far more violent than it is today. See Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature and Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization).

As an emotion, anger is often a response to a sense that a boundary has been violated in some way. The difference between an emotion and a reaction is that a reaction includes a full burst of energy to escape a threatening situation (or with a freeze reaction, a drop in energy to endure and survive it); whereas an emotion is more about learning how to respond better next time. (I go into much more detail about this, with references and skills to practice, in my Mastering Emotions, Moods and Reactions Workbook).

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Apr 24
Love1

Self-Esteem is More Complicated Than You Think

By Happiness

In a study by Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, she found that college kids today are more likely to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, while their test scores and hours spent studying are decreasing. Their tendency toward narcissism has also increased over the last 30 years.

Today I want to look at what I consider one of the sources of this trend: the unearned self-esteem movement.

Many years ago, when I was young psychology graduate student studying with Nathaniel Branden, I remember him talking one day about how he had been invited to be part of The California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem, lead by California State Assemblyman John Vasconcelos.

Nathaniel couldn’t see why he would be involved in that, since he did not see a role for government in the development of self-esteem. Nonetheless, the Task Force carried on, and created guidelines for building “self-esteem” in a way that Branden would never have advocated.

According to a New York Times article about the study group in October of 1986:

Mr. Vasconcellos, a 53-year-old Democrat, is described by an aide as “the most radical humanist in the Legislature.” Mr. Twombly said the study group was an attempt by the Assemblyman to translate into political action his 20 years of “personal emotional work” in various forms of psychological therapy at Esalen Institute near Big Sur and other places.

”I’ve explored a lot of alternative ways of being and relating,” Mr. Vasconcellos said. The bill that created the 25-member study group says its aim is to compile “the world’s most credible and contemporary research regarding whether healthy self-esteem relates to the development of personal responsibility and social problems” such as crime, drug abuse, teen-age pregnancy and welfare dependency.

Whether it was Vasconcelos’s intention or not, the model of self-esteem that the task force has effectively encouraged was the one that my favorite social psychologist Roy Baumeister showed did nothing to improve a person’s happiness, success, or character.

The common definition of self-esteem, and the one used for research purposes, is, “feeling good about yourself.” By that definition, the population with one of the highest levels of self-esteem is criminals (I’m not kidding, they feel great about themselves).

In contrast, Branden’s self-esteem is “the reputation we build with ourselves;” or put another way, it’s earned self-esteem.

Branden’s self-esteem is much more complex and involves many different facets – which also makes it very difficult to study as a distinct quality. In fact, self-esteem as Branden describes it has not been studied directly (though elements of it , such as willpower, self-regulation, self-efficacy, and – as we’ll see in a moment – mindsets, have), which makes the term difficult to use as he used it.

The differences between these two visions could not be more consequential. It is the difference between inflating a student’s grades so that their self-esteem is not injured, versus giving a student clear and honest feedback on their performance so they can take the action they need to improve.

It’s the difference between giving awards for participating in an event, versus giving awards for actual performance.

It’s the difference between praising a child for simply being in a situation and praising them for the effort and focus they bring to a situation.

It’s the difference between encouraging a fixed trait mindset versus a growth mindset.

Carol Dweck’s research on mindsets is relevant here. A fixed trait mindset is one where you think of yourself in terms of set qualities, like intelligence, talent, attractiveness, etc. A growth mindset is where you think of yourself in terms of what you do, the quality of your attention, effort, and willingness to learn.

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Apr 17
Love1

How Trade Has Helped Make Us Human

By Happiness

One day in East Africa, deep in our primitive past, an exceptional innovator carved a palm sized, pear shaped, razor sharp axe head out of stone. This must have revolutionized the ability for he or she and their band of hunter-gatherers to hunt, to butcher food… and to wage war on their neighbors.

This was about seventeen hundred thousand years ago, long before homo sapiens had even appeared on earth. Over time, others learned to copy this stone ax head, and the innovation spread throughout the relatively small population of pre-humans, known as homo erectus, or “upright man.”

The identical design of what archaeologists call Acheulean hand stone axes has been commonly found at many different archaeological sites throughout different eras, and up to about a hundred thousand years ago they were still being made, in exactly the same way, by our homo-sapiens ancestors.

For over a million and a half years, as far as we can tell from the archeological record, this was the extent of human and pre-human innovation. That was it! Nothing new for over 1,600,000 years.

Then, something revolutionary happened; something that changed the nature of humanity and transformed our cultural growth as a species… the world’s first jewelry was invented.

One day, about 90,000 years ago, something new appeared in the heart of Africa. Beads. Beads, made of the shells of a tiny marine snail called Nassarius gibbosulus, painted, and with tiny holes drilled in them.

What was truly transformational, though, wasn’t the beads themselves, it was the mystery they presented. How did beads originally found at the seashore of Mediterranean Algeria make their way hundreds of miles to the south? That would be crossing the Sahara Desert now, but back then it was a lush, green hunter’s paradise.

They were brought there. Not as some one-time haul from a murderous raiding party – which would have been the most likely way up to that point for one tribe to get something from another tribe.

No, these beads were part of something new; something that from any evidence we currently have, had never been seen on the face of the earth before; something we take completely for granted today:

Trade.

This was the first evidence of humans trading with one another. These shells weren’t just jewelry, they were likely used as the first money, as well.

Sure, lots of animals do reciprocal things, like picking the lice out of each other’s hair, or helping each other with a hunt. But to trade different things or actions of different value was brand new. I have some meat, you have some berries, and we figure out a mutually agreeable amount of each to barter so we’re both happy… win/win.

But then to use something as a medium of exchange – the money we use today, or the painted Nassarius shells our distant ancestors used in Africa – accelerated the benefits of trade exponentially.

Eventually, our ancestors developed intricate trade networks, inspiring innovation and cooperation that had never been possible before. In a very real sense, trade is what has made us human. It encourages the better angels of our nature – to borrow the title of a magnificent book by Steven Pinker on why violence has declined.

Trade, among other things, encourages curiosity about other people – and therefore empathy. It encourages us to create what’s called a “theory of mind,” the ability to imagine what another person’s internal world might be like.

When we trade, there’s a benefit to wondering what other people – who are not members of our immediate family or tribe – are interested in, how they communicate, what their habits and customs are, how to approach them in a peaceful and respectful manner, and what we might bring to them to exchange for something they have that we want.

Trade encouraged a whole dimension of curiosity that would never have occurred to our ancestors otherwise.

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Apr 10
Love1

A Happy Life is Not Perfect Happiness

By Happiness

There’s a great misunderstanding about what it means to live a happy life, and it can be summed up in the popular symbol of the smiley face.

Now, I like to smile. I love feeling that kind of glowing, delighted state of emotional bliss. It’s wonderful to be full of joy and love and laughter. But feeling those things doesn’t in and of itself make for a happy life; and just because you don’t happen to feel them in the moment doesn’t mean you are unhappy.

In fact, if simply feeling those emotions all the time was what constituted happiness, then it would be a simple matter to find the right combination of drugs that would perpetually bathe our neurons with joyful chemicals, and we could all be perpetually happy.

But this smiley face view of happiness is not the whole story, at all. And we all know it.

A happy life is an engaged life, an active life, an ethical life, a life that you create; a life you can be happy about, a life you can be proud of.

It is not a perfect life.

If you have a view of happiness that tells you that to feel sad or angry or afraid is a sign of failure, or a moral shortcoming of some kind, you’re actually setting yourself up for a miserable bind. The “negative” emotions of life are just as important as the “positive” emotions, in their own way.

Nobody wants to walk around feeling afraid all the time… or angry, or sad. These feelings, in and of themselves, don’t make you happy either.

But they do provide you with important information about what is going on. Used well, they are responses to actual circumstances.

  • Anger is often a response to trespass – if somebody crosses a line where your territory or integrity or values are being violated or crossed, anger lets you know to check this out, and it gives you the emotional energy to push back and protect what matters to you.
  • Fear is often a response to perceived or imagined danger. The challenge becomes discerning whether a given feeling of fear is in response to something real or imagined.
  • Sadness is often a response to loss. The challenge with sadness can be to let it run its course, and allow other, more positive feelings to come back around.

This list is not exhaustive, of course, but it can give you an idea of the value of some of the emotions that are not as pleasant as the “happier” emotions. (I go into much greater – and very practical – detail in my book, the Mastering Emotions, Moods and Reactions Workbook)

A happy life includes the entire range of feelings, an expansive vision of possibilities, and a grounded and accurate relationship to reality. To navigate your emotional life is to integrate what you feel with a clear assessment of reality, and to choose what you want to do with the information and experience contained within your emotional life.

You don’t want to dwell on and become overwhelmed by fear, or sadness, or anger, but neither do you want to avoid these feelings, or judge them as some kind of moral failing.

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Apr 03
Love1

Positive Subtraction

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions

I met my wife Sue about 34 years ago at a Thanksgiving party with some friends of ours. Normally I would have been with my extended family – Thanksgiving was always a favorite of my parents – but this year they hosted our family dinner on Friday, so other family members could be with their respective in-laws.

Had my parents not changed the routine that year, Sue and I might never have met; we never would have been married, we would never have had our kids, and the life we know would be different in so many ways it’s hard to fathom.

Many other circumstances lined up just right to lead to that night that might not have worked out – my wife might not have come to the dinner (she almost didn’t), one or both of us might have lived in another town, we might not have known these particular friends…

It’s pretty remarkable if you think about it, that two people ever meet. But people do, and we did.  If you’re married, it might be worth considering there’s a chance the two of you might never have met.

Doing this deliberately can also make you happier.

In the classic Frank Capra movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey is so despondent from events that he’s on the verge of committing suicide. Clarence, a new angel hoping to earn his wings, shows him what life would be like for those he cares about had George not existed. George comes to appreciate the many ways he has deeply affected people, and how much he had taken his good effect toward all those people he held dear for granted.

Seeing clearly what his absence would have meant – and would mean – for so many people he cares for puts suicide out of the question, and brings him to a state of profound gratitude.

That’s more than a sweet story and a classic movie; there is something very true and strong in it that has consequences for a life well lived.

In a study by Koo, Algoe, Wilson, and Gilbert, It’s a Wonderful Life: Mentally Subtracting Positive Events Improves People’s Affective States, Contrary to Their Affective Forecasts, they showed that when people consider the absence of a positive event – as George’s angel helped him to do – they feel more positive than when they think of the positive event itself.

More specifically, those who wrote about how they might never have met their partner were more satisfied in their relationship than those who wrote about how they did meet.

This falls into the category of very worthwhile things to try. If you’re married, think about what life would be like had you and your partner never met. Or think about the people in your life whom you love and care about. What if you had never met? What if something didn’t work out so that a particular person who’s dear to you had never been in your life?

And we can think of the ways that other very positive events might not have ever come to pass.

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Mar 27
Love1

The Shocking Impact of Personal Influence

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions

It‘s easy to underestimate our effect on others. We go about our business in our own world, and assume that everyone else is going about theirs.

New parents can be stunned sometimes to hear their own words coming out of their kid’s mouths; their own actions being recreated by their children. But our impact on each other runs deep, and extends far beyond our immediate family.

Those we are close to, and even those people who are three degrees of separation away from those we are close to – friends of friends of friends – are our sphere of influence… and we are theirs. What we say and do makes a real impact on those around us, and even on those a moderate distance away.

Appreciating this can be a great motivator for living our best life.

In studies by Christakis and Fowler, drawing from the Framingham Heart Study subjects, they found just how powerful our personal contacts with people can be. Here are some examples:

  • For every happy friend we have, our likelihood of being happy ourselves increases by 9%.
  • Our chances of becoming obese increases by 57% if we have a friend who becomes obese.
  • Among pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling becomes obese the chance that the other will become obese increases by 40%
  • If one spouse becomes obese the likelihood that the other spouse will become obese increases by 37%

That’s for our immediate connections; in other studies, they found that we can have a remarkable effect on others even several steps removed from our direct contact:

  • If our friend’s friend’s friend quit smoking, we are much more likely to quit smoking ourselves.
  • Even happy people we’ve never met, three degrees of separation away, have a positive effect on our own happiness.

Good and bad behaviors pass from friend to friend; we influence each other’s health and happiness just by our social interactions.

But the impact of our behavior in one arena is particularly significant… shocking even.

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Mar 20
Love1

The Most Destructive Emotion

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions

 

Envy is an ugly emotion with awful effects. Many religions forbid or warn against it, as with the 10th commandment in the Old Testament; storytellers show its horrible effects. We all know that it’s bad on a feeling level, yet envy persists as a powerfully destructive force.

It isn’t about having very little; we aren’t particularly unhappy when we have very little. But we do become very unhappy, depressed, and bitter when we dwell on having less than our neighbor.

Yet there is an antidote to envy: empathy, curiosity, admiration, and the effective redirection of our initial impulses. It can also help to more fully understand this destructive and bitter emotion.

Envy de-humanizes the person envied. When we envy another person, we are not seeing that person for who they are, we are seeing him for what he has. It breeds malevolence; when we envy, we are not happy for the success of our neighbor, we are resentful of it.

Envy diminishes our capacity for empathy, and this lack of empathy makes it possible for people to do horrible things to one another.

It also reinforces a self-image of helplessness and impotence. Envy implies disbelief in ourselves; it presupposes that we don’t believe we can create the wealth, the relationships, the values that we see in others, and this helplessness can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, limiting our ability to work toward what we would like to create in our lives.

But like any negative emotion, by catching ourselves and understanding what we’re feeling, we can redirect our actions in a way that works much better for us.

Envy is, initially, an impulse – a reaction to perceptions. It’s not unusual to see something that someone else has and desire it – as an impulse. We’ve probably all felt at least a twinge of envy at some point in our lives.

But that’s not where the danger lies. The important thing is what we do with that initial impulse.

Do we hang onto it, indulge it, and follow it? Or do we take that impulse and transform it into useful action – in the case of envy, thinking of how we might earn the money to buy what we’d like, or use it to recognize something we may value, something we may admire in another person, and seek to develop those qualities in ourselves?

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Mar 13
Love1

Fear, Famine, and Finances

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Habits and Strategies

Money troubles can tap into the most primitive emotions, including intense fear, and even reactions of flight and panic. But there are ways of using these signals, so we don’t get lost in them.

Matt wakes up in the middle of the night, anxious and troubled. Breathing shallow and high in his chest, thoughts racing… The severity of his financial troubles has just hit him. His investments have dropped significantly, and his spending has been putting him deeply into debt surprisingly quickly.

At least it feels like it was quickly. The habits had been established some years earlier, but he hadn’t modified his spending in relation to the real income he could draw from. For many months the trouble had been building, but credit created a buffer that allowed him to avoid feeling it.

Then one morning, at 3 am, it hits him. He’s in trouble, big trouble. So big that he couldn’t see a way to solve the problem. Panicked and overwhelmed, he soothes himself with a positive fantasy of things turning out okay. This calms him enough to get back to sleep.

When he wakes up, he’s forgotten the urgency, and dives into his day. The soothing fantasy providing a reprieve from the anxiety. Until another week passes, and he wakes up again in a panic…

In this case, the panic is Matt’s friend; his own awareness trying to break through his defenses so he can face the real problems. And there are ways of solving these problems. But nothing happens until he’s willing to acknowledge the reality first.

Why is this panic around money so severe?

Remember that money is a medium of exchange, a means of storing and standardizing wealth. It holds in abstract form the concrete stuff of survival– food, clothing, shelter. But the mortal danger of losing those things were a regular part of life for our ancestors.

Our security today is in the form of our investments and savings; for our ancestors it was abundant game to follow, or a portion of seed for the next season’s planting. Those things were often unpredictable for them.

So when we feel the panic of money troubles, we’re also feeling the echoes of a more desperate past.

For our hunter gatherer forebears, the risk of starvation was a continual threat. But after the agricultural revolution there were still often crop failures and famines.

Pre-modern Europe endured famines every few decades. In France at the beginning of the 18th century the typical diet was as desperate as Rwanda’s in 1965, the most malnourished nation for that year.

Today it’s not uncommon when we’ve gone without lunch or breakfast to say lightly, “I’m starving!.” But what we’re experiencing is nothing like starving. Famine and the mass starvation that it brings is a horrible, nightmare scenario, that was commonplace for our ancestors up to a few centuries ago, and was still significant up to a few decades ago. It happens still in some parts of the world, but at a much lower rate than ever before.

When we feel afraid of going broke, or losing our home, the intensity makes sense, because it mirrors to some extent that primal and common fear of starvation.

But we can also feel that fear when we suffer a significant investment loss, or aren’t sure how we’re going to make all the payments this month, or we see our credit card debt inching up.

So what can we do about this?

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Mar 07
Love1

Why it’s Hard to See What’s True

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

 

A healthy relationship with the truth is essential for a happy, successful life.

But this is not a simple thing; the ability to see, acknowledge, and accept what’s true – about ourselves, our circumstances, our relationships; our own strengths and weaknesses, and the challenges we face – is actually much harder than it may seem.

We have all known people in our lives who are smart, self-aware, and curious, but they keep making the same mistakes over and over in one particular area of their lives. You see it, other people see it, but they don’t seem to see it at all.

It’s even more difficult when other people are seeing things that we don’t see – and seeing that we don’t see them.

I remember as a young psychotherapist in my 20s (I’ve been doing this for a very long time!) discovering a new approach or technique that seemed to do wonders. All I could see was the success, and it was exciting.

What I wasn’t seeing was my own confirmation bias, that would minimize my assessment of where it didn’t work very well, and maximize where it did.

It took some time and experience to see that every approach has its strengths and weaknesses, and every client I work with is unique – what’s helpful with one person may do nothing for another.

And this sort of confirmation bias is something I still have to stay continually vigilant about – because our biases never disappear.

We are made for learning and growth. Our success in life depends, to a significant extent, on increasing our awareness and understanding of the world. Yet we have a tremendous array of biases that color our interpretation of what we perceive, what we experience, and what we think we know.

These biases are not flaws in our system, they exist because they are functional. Like our habits, in most situations, most of the time, these biases work pretty well for us, and the automatic nature of them allows us to live without being continually overwhelmed with bringing consciousness and willpower into every tiny aspect of our lives.

We generally work very hard to confirm our existing beliefs, stories, and biases – because the familiar story that we live within gives us a sense of security and constancy. It’s comforting to feel that what we think we know is true, that what we believe is true, that our sense of the world is true.

…even when it’s not actually true.

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