Happiness

My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where the heck she is.

• Ellen DeGeneres

It’s no secret that exercise is good for our physical health. But exercise is vital for our mental health as well; and sitting a lot and not exercising is tremendously harmful for our emotional and psychological life.

There has been an upsurge in depression over the past several decades. One major contributor to this is how little physical activity we get. Exercise is just about the best treatment for depression, yet today 50% of men and 60% of women don’t exercise more than ten minutes per week.

Yes, that’s per week.

The most popular treatment for depression is medication. It’s quick to administer, it’s easy to do, but, statistically, for mild to moderate depression it’s actually no better than placebo. It also has side effects that can be pretty unpleasant over time, and when the medication stops, so do its benefits.

Exercise isn’t as easy as medication; it takes work, self-discipline, and perseverance. It requires us to do what we often don’t feel like doing (I’ve jumped into a swimming pool thousands of times, and to this day I have never liked that moment of entering the water).

But exercise is as much as two and a half times as effective as medication for overcoming depression.

Once we develop the habit of exercise, we can easily overcome the inertia and the discomfort; then the benefits we gain against the depression continue, and the side effects are all positive.

But overcoming the inertia and discomfort – or even the self-concept – that exercise requires can be tricky.

We can develop an idea of ourselves that gets in the way of changing our bad habits to better ones: “I’m not one of those people who exercises…” There is a common feature of anything we do that challenges and grows us: our habitual feelings and behaviors can trick us into thinking that they are somehow more genuine or authentic than other feelings and behaviors that we’d like to have.

But they’re not.

What feels familiar to us is simply and purely what we’ve practiced over and over and over again, to the point that it feels natural. So when we want to change our behavior from sedentary to more physically active, the momentum of a sedentary life can make that lack of physical activity feel more genuine, more in line with our nature.

It can also feel as though our habits hold some kind of magical sway over us: something must have happened to us, or there must be some kind of genetic pre-wiring that makes us helpless to counter those habits.

But it’s not magic, and we’re not helpless… it’s just what over time we’ve told our brains to impel us do automatically. It does take considerable time and energy to establish new habits – which means that it’s not something that any of us will do lightly.

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One of the most harmful ways of thinking of ourselves is as a victim. It can make it nearly impossible to find success, financially or otherwise, and undermines our capacity for relationships.

Yet this mindset is not uncommon, we’ve probably all experienced it to some degree. But for some it can create a more pervasive atmosphere in their lives.

As researchers Rahav Gabay and his colleagues have shown, this mindset has four specific qualities that lead to three specific biases, and one onerous tendency, that can skew our view of the world.

Today we’ll look at how to move away from this kind of mindset, and re-orient toward taking effective, positive action.

Changing a victim mindset is much more complicated than the kind of “get over it” advice that’s so common – and useless. We have reasons for feeling like a victim – sometimes because we have been seriously harmed in some way; sometimes because for some reason at some point it seemed like a good strategy to deal with challenging circumstances, and eventually became a habit.

Whenever looking at our habits or mindsets, it’s essential to start with compassion, to understand that we often build certain habits of action or thought because it’s the best we can do at the time, even if it ends up harming us later.

But if our habits are harming us, it’s well worth looking at them honestly and with courage.

We’ve all been hurt, many of us have had traumatic experiences, and some of us have been the victims of abuse, crime or other kinds of serious mistreatment.

But those experiences are separate from holding an idea of ourselves as a victim. We can experience trauma or abuse and not see ourselves in general as a victim; and on the other hand, we can see ourselves as a victim when we have not been traumatized or abused. There is not a consistent cause and effect to this.

The four qualities that Gabay and his colleagues have found express a tendency for victimhood are:

• We want others to affirm our condition, and our suffering
• We see ourselves as having very high moral standards, and everyone else as immoral
• We are preoccupied with our own victimhood, to the point that we minimize, lack empathy, or are oblivious to the pain of others
• We spend time dwelling on how we’ve been wronged, and talk about what others have done to hurt us, rather than look for actions we could take to improve our situation

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I’m used to hearing from people in crisis. As a psychotherapist and life coach, it’s part of my job. It may be a crisis in a marriage, a crisis at work, a financial crisis… There are many places for crises to wreak havoc in our lives.

Some crises are unavoidable. We control only so much of what happens in our lives, and sometimes life throws hardship, tragedy, or deeply chaotic circumstances our way. I don’t make light of or gloss over the realities of life; but I do make it my business to help people to avoid unnecessary troubles, and there is one thing that we can do to prevent some of the more predictable crises of life:

Make and hold your positive commitments all the way, without reservation.

It’s no mystery that making solid commitments is central to a happy, successful life. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “At the moment of commitment, the universe conspires to assist you.” Pat Riley said, “There are only two options regarding commitment. You’re either in or you’re out. There’s no such thing as life in-between.” And then there are the famous words of Yoda to Luke Skywalker in the movie, “The Empire Strikes Back”: “Do, or do not. There is no try.”

There are so many great quotes and sayings about commitment that it’s easy for the profound truth to get lost in the platitudes. Today we’re going to ground this abstract concept into a tangible strategy for real-life results.

We all know – in theory – how important commitment is, and yet one of the biggest problems I confront with my clients on a regular basis is a lack of commitment. This undermines their work, their relationships, their striving towards the life they want to live.

So for all the beautiful sayings and lessons about commitment, something seems to be missing.

As with many fundamental skills, it may often come down to the need, as Aristotle would say, to practice this virtue until it is a habit.

Commitment requires something of a leap of faith; we are ordering our future without any assurance of what that future will bring. It asks us to remove the safety harness, forgo the escape hatch, burn the ships that could take us back to our familiar life, and believe that we can handle the risks and the rewards of commitment.

Commitment requires trust: trust in ourselves, trust in the people and circumstances we are committing to… and trust in the act of commitment itself. One way to build such trust when we don’t already have it is to practice commitment as we can; and to understand why it matters so very much.

By holding a commitment lightly, we make ourselves the victims of passing feelings, idealistic fantasies, Hollywood and pop-psychology visions of happiness, popular fads and opinion polls, and the vicissitudes of life. We are open to the lure of temptation. A pretty face can draw us from our marriage; a short-term pleasure like surfing the web can disengage us from our work.

Withholding our devotion places us in a passive relationship to life, and to the people and events that fill our lives. External forces can seduce us from our highest values as though we were simple mechanisms of stimulus and response. We “keep our options open,” and by doing so put ourselves at the mercy of whatever options may happen to appear.

We tend to use the passive voice to describe our troubles: An affair “just happened.” The project “just fell apart.” No author, no identifiable cause. The passive voice puts us at the mercy of events; the active voice is the voice of self-ownership and commitment.

A lack of commitment to our highest values can create tremendous anxiety; and turn every conflict, every decision, and every challenge, into a potential crisis. Every small problem can throw the entire commitment into question… And that is a major source of avoidable crisis.

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Happiness is hard work. It takes willpower and practice to develop habits that make a life work well; it takes conscientiousness to build flourishing relationships; it takes self-reflection to know what we value and, therefore, where to spend our precious time and energy.

So instead of wishing you a Happy New Year today, I’d like to show you how you can build yourself a strong, resilient New Year… The happiness is what you’ll earn from the doing.

There are three specific elements I’ll show you today. Let’s start with Learned Optimism.

First let me define what I mean by optimism: It isn’t about ignoring harsh realities and pretending things are great, when they’re not. Optimism is a pro-active, problem solving approach to the obstacles and opportunities we’re faced with.

An optimist is more likely to find solutions, because they’re actively looking for them. A pessimist is more likely to feel helpless and overwhelmed, because they’re actively looking for reasons that any given solution won’t work.

Optimists are more likely to succeed at work, school, and relationships, and may live 8 years longer than pessimists. They tend to do better after experiencing adversity, to bounce back stronger; while pessimists tend to do more poorly after adversity, to take longer to get their feet back underneath them.

So the benefits for living more optimistically are huge. And, fortunately, it’s also an element of our personality that’s easily available to change – with some work, of course. Here’s one way to work on this:

A. When you find yourself looking at an event from a pessimistic perspective, first identify the adversity – whatever the situation is that is causing you trouble: “My wife and I are having an argument,” for example.

B. Then identify the belief that brings you to be feeling badly, “We’re always arguing; she never understands me; I just can’t express myself ever in a way that seems to work.”

C. Then notice what the consequence of that belief is: “I feel awful, I feel hurt and angry, I feel afraid of the conflict; I have a sense of despair over how our relationship is going.”

D. The next step is disputation, challenging this belief that is bringing you to feel badly: “Wait a minute. I love my wife, and she loves me. We are not always arguing, if I added it up, we probably argue a tiny fraction of the time we have been together. She actually understands me quite well most of the time, and soon we will understand each other again. Maybe there’s a way I can help to bring that about.”

Practice this – a lot. It will not always come out perfectly, and there will likely be times when it is extremely hard to bring yourself to do this. But the more you practice this the more an effective, optimistic stance will come naturally for you.

The next element is to de-catastrophize.

When we’re faced with a challenge of some kind, hoping for the best isn’t likely to be our best approach; but neither is assuming the worst. When our tendency is to expect the worst-case scenario when trouble presents itself, it weakens us.

We’re more likely to feel helpless and overwhelmed, less likely to succeed, and more likely to struggle – including suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after a traumatic situation.

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When we think of what we’ll be like ten years from now, most of us imagine that we’ll be just like we are now. Yet when we look back ten years, we’re usually different than we were then.

We’ve learned from experiences, dealt with some hardship, maybe suffered some loss, triumphed in some things, been delighted by epiphanies, and came to understand some things we had not understood before.

If there is something we won’t do now because we “learned it the hard way,” if we have things that we regret having done that we would never ever do again, we can thank our younger self for learning that lesson for us – so we don’t have to keep re-learning it, and suffering over and over again like some cruel Groundhog Day remake.

Of course we are different today than we were ten years ago – unless we’ve removed ourselves from any experience of living. Life is a continual anti-entropy endeavor. If we don’t expend energy to create order, the natural tendency of things to move toward disorder takes over.

If we don’t mow the lawn, the lawn becomes a growth of weeds; if we don’t use our bodies in some kind of physical activity, our bodies begin to break down; if we don’t use our minds to learn and think about new things, our minds will become less active and effective.

If we don’t grow and learn and change our behavior over time to adapt to what we learn, we will become stuck in a rut, passively holding on to the familiar while the world carries on without us.

We all must succumb to entropy to some degree of course, but we also all experience things, and learn, grow, and change as a result.

We will be different in ten years than we are now. That’s a fact of life. The question is, how will we be different; and will we be different mostly as a result of events, or through conscious choice?

In research by Quoidback, Gilbert and Wilson, The End of History Illusion, they found that while we look back over the past ten years and easily see and expect that we are different now, we don’t expect that we will be different ten years from now. Rather, we tend to think that our current age is where we have finally become who we are – and who we are now, we feel, is who we will be in the future.

So, we will be different ten years from now; that’s a fact, a given, a law of the universe even. Yet we don’t think we will be different. That leaves a vacuum. There will be change, yet we tend not to think there will be, so the question becomes: “How will that change happen, if we’re not in on it?”

The answer is, often the change will happen to us. Other people, events, processes outside of our conscious awareness maybe, or outside of our conscious control, will shape us, influence us, and change us over time.

This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Good people can change us in good ways; good experiences can lead us in better directions. The point is not to avoid influence from others; that would be a lonely and rigid life, and it is not really possible to achieve. We all influence and are influenced by one another much more profoundly than most of us are aware.

In their book Connected, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler show that if we gain or lose weight, for example, our friends are more likely to gain or lose weight; if we quit smoking, our friends are more likely to quit smoking; if we become happier, our friends will be more likely to become happier.

But we can take that too far and allow ourselves to be changed and molded passively by outside events most of the time; and that’s not an approach to living that I’d recommend.

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People who are extroverts – people who are more sociable, who like to be out, talk, and interact with other people, and who gladly put themselves out into new situations – tend to be happier than people who are not.

That’s great for those who, by temperament, happen to be extroverts. But what if we’re not naturally extroverted? We can still improve our overall happiness by doing extroverted things.

The delightful truth is that, from simply taking more extroverted actions, our overall happiness grows about the same as if we were naturally extroverted.

If you tend to be an introvert, if your natural comfort is to be more solitary, shy, or quietly inward, I’m not suggesting that you deny your nature, or pretend to be someone that you’re not. There are significant strengths to introversion that I’ll discuss in a moment.

But you can get some of the benefits of an extrovert as well by practicing certain skills; then you can have the best of both worlds.

Try doing something each day that challenges you to be more outgoing. Don’t worry about doing the world’s most socially engaging activity – you don’t have to become some social thrill-seeker. What matters is the direction, not the mileage.

Start with activities that push you a little bit, but that are manageable. Find things that you’ll enjoy, that you genuinely would want to do, and do them at a pace and to a degree where you won’t be overwhelmed.

You can start by joining a group activity that you think you might enjoy. Think of what you like to do anyway… then just add people. If you like to exercise, join a fun exercise class; if you like to read, join a book club.

Nudge yourself to talk with the checkout person at the store, the person next to you on a plane…look around and notice people. Make eye contact with people more often (don’t stare), say hello to people in passing rather than looking away.

Purposefully arrange to go out and be with friends more often. Check out Toastmasters, or take an acting or improvisation class.

These are just some examples to get your own ideas started. As with most anything, the secret is to do a little bit that you can easily manage nearly every day. It’s the practice, the repetition, the refinement of skills over time that makes them a part of you.

Design these activities with success in mind. If we push ourselves for too big of a stretch, we run the risk of having it go badly, feeling awful, and being less likely to try such things again anytime soon. If we challenge ourselves – but reasonably – then we’re more likely to succeed, have a good time, and look forward to the next challenge.

You’ll find that you become more comfortable doing extroverted things as time goes on.

As the late Paul Harvey used to say, “Now for the rest of the story…”

There are advantages of being an extrovert. It’s a happier life in many ways, you’re likely to have more friends and acquaintances and get more accolades for your accomplishments; people will be more naturally drawn to you, and you’ll tend to be in a position to make things happen in a more obvious fashion.

There are also many benefits to introversion, but they tend to be, well, quieter strengths than are seen with extroversion. Quieter, but indispensable.

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Having choices is wonderful. Today we have more options in terms of goods and services to choose from than any time in the history of the human race, and the options for spending money are nearly endless. This is part of the Great Enrichment I’ve written about earlier, and when we manage it well, it can contribute to our quality of life.

When we don’t manage it well, it can ruin our quality of life – even in the midst of incredible abundance.

On one end of the spectrum, we can get into trouble with our money when we don’t think enough – we spend too much on things we don’t really like once we have them. On the other end, we can devote too much time and emotional energy on making absolutely sure that we’ve bought the very best thing, at the very best price, with everything we buy.

This is where it’s essential for our happiness that we aim for making choices that are good enough, rather than trying to maximize every single purchase we make.

This is the message of Barry Schwartz’s excellent book, The Paradox of Choice.

When we habitually obsess over our purchases, it can undermine our well-being, drain the pleasure from what we buy, and even drop us into depression.

It’s important to put the time and energy into research and comparisons for some purchases. But if you spend hours deciding between one pair of shoes or another, or days fretting over whether you’re getting the best deal on a coffee maker, you might just be overdoing it.

Doing this with one or two choices won’t cause much trouble, but cumulatively, over time, this kind of painstaking deliberation can seriously erode our sense of joy and satisfaction.

When we buy something, we adapt fairly quickly to it. That top-of-the-line super-duper convection oven that we’re so delighted with when it’s first installed blends into the background of our lives within a month or two. We spend time and energy deliberating over just the right laptop, but we habituate it within a few weeks as long as it works well, then it’s just the gizmo we do our work on.

But the more effort we put into our choices, the higher our expectations become that they will be emotionally satisfying. And over time the awareness of the trade-offs we’ve made for each purchase can multiply our negative experience, undermining our sense of well-being.

When we buy something, there are the obvious costs in terms of money spent, time and energy put into choosing and making the transaction. But there’s another, more sneaky cost: the “opportunity cost.” This is the potential benefit from a missed opportunity: When we buy one thing, it’s likely that we’re also not buying another thing – or many other things.

And we therefore miss the imagined benefits of that other choice.

We buy the fancy shoes, but we didn’t buy the more comfortable shoes. We buy the automatic coffeemaker, but we didn’t buy the cappuccino maker. We buy the tickets to the play, but we could’ve bought the tickets to the basketball game…

With every decision we make, the cost of not choosing something else affects us. The more we miss not buying the other thing, the more severely it affects us – and that negative impact grows with each minor regret.

The reason the number is important is that we have a negativity bias, which means that losses can have more than twice the emotional impact on us as gains. So even when we’re twice as happy with a choice we made versus the alternative, the net emotional impact may be just neutral.

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