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Happiness

Dec 06
Love1

What Happens When We Expect a Catastrophe

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Happiness

I write sometimes in these columns about thinking biases that can affect our decision making. Today I want to talk about a way of thinking that can undermine our resilience during hardship, as well as our ability to flourish and succeed.

Catastrophes happen in life. Natural disasters, tragic accidents, terrible illnesses, heart-rending betrayals, economic calamities, war, famine… Human history has been filled with these, and most of us have been at least touched by something catastrophic.

But a catastrophe is not usually the most likely scenario – if they were common, we wouldn’t think of them as catastrophes; they’d just be the kind of normal troubles we expect in life. There can be disappointments, hardships, struggles, and losses that hurt badly, requiring us to step up to challenges we would rather not have to step up to. These are not uncommon.

But a true catastrophe is rarely likely. When we expect catastrophe as a likely scenario, that expectation creates its own troubles, and they can run deep.

Yet our current media and political culture thrives on creating and maintaining an atmosphere of impending catastrophe. This is true across the political spectrum, and throughout much of the common space we share through internet, TV, movies, print media… The conversation that is mediated by every kind of media is filled with visions of catastrophe.

The very way that these threats are framed do not encourage us to think clearly, investigate deeply, or to search for practical solutions.

The way they are framed encourages us to feel terrified, enraged, and helpless. And this can undermine our capacity for success, happiness and well-being across every aspect of our lives.

This orientation is guaranteed to activate our primitive reactions of fight, flight, and freeze – reactions that are designed to give us a last-ditch possibility of surviving the mortal attack of a predator.

While these parts of our nervous system serve an essential survival function when needed, they are very rarely actually needed. They also undermine our capacity to think clearly, our desire and ability to seek understanding, empathy, and compassion for others, and our internal sense of well-being and basic trust.

Catastrophic thinking can undermine resilience, and increase our risk for anxiety, depression, and PTSD. It can also undermine our capacity for success: those who tend to not engage in catastrophic thinking also tend to be the ones who excel.

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Nov 28
Love1

Love and Playfulness

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

Most couples wait six years or more from the beginning of trouble to when they seek help with a counselor, even though prevention is much easier and more effective than repair.

When I was working primarily as a marriage and family therapist, it was heartbreaking when a couple would come to my office as enemies, having long ago crossed the point of no return.

Once trouble starts, if a couple ignores it or just “lets things work out on their own,” that bond can degenerate quickly, and two people who were once deeply in love can find themselves in an agonizing cycle of criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling (silent brooding) – what relationship researcher and therapist John Gottman calls “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

That’s why I now work with couples primarily as a coach. It seems to take less time for couples to seek a coach than a counselor or therapist. With less accumulated pain and fewer hurtful habits, we can dive right into work on that prevention part.

The problem isn’t conflict. Successful marriages have plenty of conflict. The problem isn’t even unresolved conflict. Successful marriages also have plenty of unresolved conflict.

Conflict is where our differences meet; in many ways, our conflicts help us to get to know one another. A marriage without conflict is also likely a marriage without much intimacy.

It’s how we treat each other when there’s conflict that is the essential difference between a happy marriage and a miserable – or a finished – one.

A marriage is not a game; it’s not a trophy to win or a position to battle for. A marriage is a connection between two people who love each other, trust each other, respect each other and enjoy being with each other. It’s not about winning something over the other person; it’s about achieving something together, with the other person.

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Nov 21
Love1

Consciously Creating Relationships

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

An acquaintance the other day asked me what I do, and I told her that I’m a Marriage and Family Counselor, as well as a Life Coach. Then she asked an interesting question: “Is compromise the key to a happy marriage?”

At first I was tempted to say yes. Compromise is certainly one part of two different people sharing a life together. We can’t do everything we want whenever we want it; we have to find ways of adapting to each other’s needs and inclinations.

But thinking about it a little more closely, I instead said an emphatic, “no.” Compromise is not really the key. Compromise is kind of like when one person wants a room painted yellow, the other wants it painted blue, and we compromise and get green – but neither of us may even like green. Compromise is sometimes win/win, sometimes not. There are certainly times when we compromise, but it isn’t the driving force of a great relationship.

What is the driving force of a great relationship? A winning premise; a conception of what our relationship is all about that includes a shared vision of the two of us together.

A relationship is a creative process between two people. The two of you create what the two of you choose to create – whether you do that consciously or based on unexplored habits and beliefs is what can make the big difference between a happy, successful relationship, or a less happy, less successful one.

A great relationship is founded on the premise that you and your partner are allies; that you are a team together.

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Nov 15
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:

Oct 24
Love1

The Great Enrichment

By Happiness

 

We are in the midst of remarkable times, and our relationship to money is very different because of it. Appreciating this can open up possibilities for how you think, feel and act with your money.

We all see the world through the lens of the culture and the times in which we live. People living during the Renaissance didn’t know they were living during the Renaissance and didn’t call it that. It’s often only in hindsight that we can see the pattern.

Today it’s hard to fully appreciate the truly remarkable conditions in which we live. For us it’s just life. For our ancestors, it would be breathtaking.

Consider that for nearly all of mankind’s existence, our ancestors lived on the equivalent of about $1-$3 a day. Imagine paying for your home, your food, your clothing, your medical needs – everything – from a total of $1,095 for the entire year/$91 per month. For us that would be dire poverty, yet that’s what our ancestors have lived on – and, until recently, most of the population on earth.

Something changed all that, beginning in the later 1600’s in Holland, and spreading and growing in England in the 1700’s and moving gradually – and then recently more quickly – throughout the rest of the world.

That $3 a day grew by a very conservative factor of 16, and more realistically, when you include the vast improvement in the quality of goods and services, more like a factor of 100 (how do you compare an iPhone, or antibiotics, with anything in existence a few hundred years ago?).

This was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, followed soon after by what Deirdre McCloskey calls “The Great Enrichment” – which we are very much still enjoying.

Throughout history there have been times and places of improved economic conditions. But for perspective, the best that you’ll find is maybe a raising of average income to $6 or maybe $8 a day, and that never lasted for very long; and it’s still dire poverty by our standards.

Today, worldwide average income is about $33 a day, and in the wealthier countries it’s more like $100 a day or more.

So if you’re reading this, it’s very likely that the average income among everybody in your country – not just a fortunate few – is more than 30 times what our ancestors could expect to live on. Adding the incalculable innovations and improvements (those iPhones and antibiotics again), we can conservatively more than triple that.

This isn’t the difference between having a clunky car or a nicer car; a small apartment or a large house; shopping at a discount store or a fancy store. This is the difference between a high probability of an early death by starvation or disease; or living a relatively good life until about 80.

In other words, this change since about the year 1800 is a phenomenal improvement in life for all people.

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Sep 25
Love1

The High Drama Biases of Politics

By Happiness

 

As this political season heats up, and all the arguments, indignation and accusations that go with it come to a rolling boil, I thought it would be worth having a look at some of the deeper biases that we all can get immersed in, regardless of ideology or political sentiments.

I write this, not because I think you should be apathetic about politics, or choose a particular side that I might like. I write this because the bombardment of manipulations we are subject to can cause us to lose focus on the meaningful details of our own lives; and the biases which politics are teeming with can throw off our judgment about what’s most important.

By politics, I mean the process by which we – politicians and media most strongly, but individuals as well – persuade, cajole, manipulate, trick, argue, deceive, and otherwise do everything we can to empower those we want to empower, and disempower those we want to disempower.

This is an equal opportunity inquiry. We all have our personal beliefs, and, regardless of what they are, every single one of us gets seduced by our biases.

Emotional Bias:

First of all, politics, and the media hype around it, creates an emphasis on emotion. From the regal music of the Sunday news shows, to the passionate oration of the politicians, to the choreographed sneers and eye rolls of the political commentators, politics feeds into our emotional system much more than our rational, intellectual assessments, no matter how much a given speaker may insist that they offer the “True Facts.”

Tribal Bias:

Human beings are by far the most caring, empathetic creatures on earth. We have unique wiring in our brain that makes this possible. If a chimpanzee in the wild is injured, he will not be taken care of by the troop – they will let him suffer and starve; but when current day members of human hunter gatherer bands were questioned, fully half of the members had been in just such a situation, and the band nursed them back to health.

This is significant, because the exceptions stand out in stark relief. When we see or hear about examples of people doing monstrous things to other people, it horrifies us – because this is not how almost all of us behave toward our fellow human beings. (There are examples of other animals, dogs, elephants, etc. showing deep caring; but these are moving because they seem so human – they are also, almost always, toward direct relations.)

But politics feeds into a tribal bias. That level of compassion and empathy mostly disappears when we think of people as outside of our group. These days, more than any time in history, the whole world is our group, which is a very good thing. But when we judge a politician from an opposing party, we lose that empathy and compassion. Our bias is strongly for our party, and against the other.

Which means we’ll tend to see only or mostly the good in members of our team, and only or mostly the bad in the other. Regardless of what the actual truth may be.

Immediacy Bias:

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