A simple way to be happier... and save the world in the process

The title of this post is bold and unbelievable, I agree. Luckily, it's also true, and as such would be a shame not to share. So buckle in. This is going to take a few minutes.

Why we suck at being happy

What's the one thing that everyone wants? To be happy. Even if you "just" want to be famous, you'd probably rather not be famous and depressed. So why are we so bad at it?

One common misconception (perhaps the most common) is that what we're missing is having the right stuff. The right job, the right house, the right car, the right spouse. If you honestly believe that you'd be (permanently) happier by winning the lottery, or sadder by losing an arm, then you simply haven't been keeping up with the research. That's forgivable and easy to fix: read it, digest it, and come back.

But picking the wrong targets is only half the story. The other half is far more interesting: it's about what our life is like while we're clamoring for all of those things. See, I think the biggest thing standing between us and happiness is... all those other pesky emotions. Anxiety. Anger. Irritation. I think we have them all wrong.

Your emotions are yours (and yours alone)

Say you're walking rapidly through the mall, on the way to buy your new gadget or shoes. Then some jerk steps out in front of you and starts walking slowly, seriously dampening your mojo. Irritation is the obvious result, and it's clearly that guy's fault. If only there weren't such thoughtless people in the world...

Or say you get dragged to the dreaded opera. And while you're there, you can't help but think how boring this whole thing is. Life would be better if you just didn't have to be here right now.

But an opera can't be boring. Some people actually like it, so boring-ness can't be a property of the opera, in the way that brightness is a property of the sun. Boredom is a property of you. It's merely a description of how you're not yet skilled in dealing with reality as it is. Don't wear it as a badge.

I'm very fond of the way David describes things in his blog (raptitude.com) linked above:

Annoyance is never anything but a dysfunctional relationship between you and what you experience.

A dysfunctional relationship between you, and what you experience. It’s never anyone else’s fault, and it’s never the best emotion. If you understand just this one sentence, there's hope. You're halfway to getting it.

Now, mind you, you don't have to know yet how to overcome it. We'll get there soon. You don't even need to really believe that people who get in your way aren't jerks, or that people who slurp coffee aren't doing it just to annoy you. Maybe some of them are. You just need to accept that the emotions themselves are yours and yours alone.

If it sounds scary to you to think that you have complete responsibility for all your emotions at all times, consider the alternative. If other people had buttons they could press that actually changed your emotions? Now THAT would be scary.

And if you think that brain chemistry alone is to blame, remember two things. First, our brains are malleable, and change in response to our actions and attitudes. And second, research shows that people who believe they have free will make better choices.

So take pride in owning your emotions, and remember, even if you were dealt crappy cards, there’s always time to change.

Question the motives of your negative emotions

Consider this bumper sticker:

It's popular, and I think, wildly misguided. At first, it sounds morally righteous. If you can see that our world needs help, surely the correct emotion is violent, resentful anger?

Or maybe you can be passionate without being resentful or vindictive. Outrage looks for someone to blame, something to destroy. If you remove those blinders, you get passion. Passion sees more possibilities. It's productive. It looks for the best solution going forward, regardless of “who started it.” It's certainly not apathetic, which is the usual explanation of why we need outrage.

When reason and emotion pair up, good things happen. Otherwise, what you have is raised blood pressure with very little else to show for it. Except a rad bumper sticker. Outrage is getting your panties in a bunch because it feels righteous.

I think the band The Offspring said it best:

The more you suffer, 

The more it shows you really care. 

Right? Yeah yeah yeah!

We may be addicted to negative emotions like outrage and irritation because they give us that little kick of dopamine from being right, and that feels good. So ask yourself: are you more interested in being right, or doing something about it?

There's a reason we're said to wallow in self pity. Indulging in negative emotions feels good in the same way eating a box of chocolates does: for a short while, and not for the right reasons. A great deal of the fun for me in my journey has been identifying why I'm still attached to various negative thoughts or feelings (blame, vengefulness, cynicism, annoyance, outrage, ...) so that I can better escape their siren calls in the future.

Again, I'm not saying it's bad if you feel these things now. I do, too. But it's important to take the next step. The key is to realize that for nearly every situation which involves a nasty emotion plus some result, you can get the same (and often better) result without the nasty emotion. Fewer people (including you) have to get hurt.

Once you're willing to trade in negativity for productivity, you're ready to proceed to the real core of the issue. So far I haven't told you how to resolve any of this. Now I'll show you.

You are not your X (∀ X) for all you non-geeks, that reads "for all X"

Has it ever occurred to you that you are not your body? You have a body, but even when you don't experience that body -- like in a dream, where you can take on any form -- there's something there that still unquestionably feels like you, and it sure ain't made of body parts.

You are not your emotions, either. You experience emotions. You are not your thoughts. You experience thoughts. If you are experiencing some thing, then it stands to reason that you are not that thing.

Continuing this line of reasoning, you may wonder: what, then, are you? Well, if you can be said to be anything at all, perhaps it is the awareness that is experiencing all of these things -- body, emotions, thoughts, perceptions. This is more than just a philosophical stunt. The practical implications of this fact are more profound and wide-ranging than you can imagine, once it sinks in.

At every moment of your life, you have a choice to make: you can choose to identify with this awareness that you are, or you can choose to identify with the things it is aware of -- thoughts, emotions, perceptions, etc.

To illustrate the difference, consider two ways of experiencing anger:

1. You feel angry. You have become angry, and now there's a strong sense that something must be done about it. You either need to vent it (bad), or else suppress it (bad). Your judgement is impaired. Anger has its claws in you, and feels as if it's a part of you.

2. Recognizing that you cannot be angry (you cannot be any emotion -- see above), you instead simply notice that you are experiencing the emotion "anger." If you need to act, you will. Otherwise, you can let it drift on by like a cloud in the sky. You know, right then and there, that it will pass. This prevents you from doing anything stupid, and from being deeply affected by the anger.

If you've ever felt that you did something because you were angry, it's likely you were experiencing the first mode -- identifying with the anger. In the other option, we maintain the continuous recognition that anger is just a signal to us, and that deep down our pristine, lucid awareness is unsullied and still has control. In this way we cannot be hurt or bullied by anger or other strong emotions. This is identifying with our own awareness.

The key is to remember that you -- the real you -- in some fundamental sense cannot be touched or modified. Awareness cannot be harmed in any way. Like fireworks and the sky, emotions may be stunningly bright but cannot modify our fundamental fabric.

Again, this is not some metaphysical ploy. It has real world implications. Lots of them.

The ability to witness thoughts and emotions without getting caught up in them is the fundamental skill behind extremely successful techniques for managing or curing pain, stress, depression, anxiety, panic, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, overeating, ... you name it.

Learning to see yourself as you truly are, and not as the things you're thinking and feeling right now, is not an easy process. But nothing has a bigger payoff.

Remembering to do it

Okay, that sounds nice, but I still haven't told you how. Truth is, coming to this realization while you're in the grip of a strong emotion is rather difficult. Smarter would be to first train it in easier settings. Let's look at an example.

You look at yourself in the mirror. Identifying with your body, you generate a thought about how you wish you were more shapely. Identifying with that thought, it generates a whole train of further thoughts about your body image, resulting in a feeling of worthlessness. Finally, you identify with this feeling, and your day is ruined.

There were many opportunities in this scenario to recall that you are not your body, thoughts, or emotions, and halt the downward spiral. The sooner in the process you do it, the easier it is, and the fewer the negative consequences downstream. The hard part is remembering. The only way to do that reliably is to practice.

You have thousands of opportunities a day to practice. Pretty much any time a thought pops into your head, and you're not explicitly aware that it has, it leads to another thought, and then another. We normally call this "mind wandering," and as we now know, a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

To get a sense of what it feels like to become explicitly aware of thoughts, think back to an episode where you've been reading, only to find that at some point your eyes are scanning the page but your mind is elsewhere. At that crucial moment, there's a sudden realization that "oops, I meant to be reading, but I'm thinking." You sort of "wake up." That's a brief flicker of awareness.

When you are continuously aware of your own awareness, the feeling is that of "being present" or "being in the moment." With practice, thoughts and memories can even stop being obstacles to being in the moment. With enough skill, you can even get the benefits of mind wandering without the drawbacks.

How to get started

Mind wandering with awareness is a somewhat advanced practice. Usually we end up falling into the stream of thoughts and forgetting to maintain our awareness. If you want something simpler, look into meditation classes or books.

The entire purpose of meditation is to give you a sandbox in which to practice recognizing and disengaging from stray thoughts and feelings. By itself this can make you relaxed and calm, but its real benefits are in how it transforms your everyday experience.

You may think meditation is too boring, or time consuming, or hippie-ish, but the alternative -- to live life half asleep, and in the grip of whatever thoughts and emotions feel like tossing you around -- sounds even less attractive. If you can't be bothered to spend 10 or 20 minutes a day working on the most important (and in some sense only) thing affecting your emotional wellbeing -- your mind -- then expect results to match.

And contrary to popular belief, meditation is not about quieting the mind, although that can be a nice (if eventual) byproduct. You're not "doing it wrong" or "bad at it" if you're flooded by thoughts when you try. That's like saying exercise isn't for you because you can't run as fast or lift as much as you think you should. That would suggest it is for you.

Every time you explicitly engage your awareness is once more than you would have otherwise, and the significance of that should not be underestimated. As long as you're trying to do that, you're doing it exactly right.

And if you're wondering "do I have to meditate to get these benefits?," the answer is... maybe not exactly. Perhaps you could do something a whole lot like meditation (repeatedly engaging your nonjudgmental awareness) and not call it "meditation" if that word bothers you. Sort of like you don't have to "exercise" to be healthy. You could instead... play sports.

BTW, when my own MindPing app is completed, maybe it will be useful as a gentler introduction.

...and save the world in the process

Now we reveal my true purpose (muahahaha).

What's wrong with the world today? You might say that people are too violent, or selfish, or celebrity obsessed, or materialistic, or consumeristic, or ... whatever specific problem you have decided to focus on.

What's the right way to fix things? Should we address each of the concerns above individually? If so, do we do it by telling people "hey, you're too consumeristic! Halt, heathen!"? Do we just impose our (your? my?) wills on them? Has that ever worked?

What if the easiest way to solve all (fine, most) of these problems at once is by getting people to care? And what if I told you that there's an efficient way to do that -- and that it's described above?

Think about it. Can you imagine anyone, after gaining more mental clarity and stability, becoming more interested in celebrity gossip? In buying shinier and fancier things? In stabbing kittens?

No. And the research backs this up. If you're wondering why, just think back to an experience where you felt truly present and in-the-moment. Which comes closer to describing it? Violent, or peaceful? Selfish, or selfless?

The truth is, selfishness and kindness are not simply competing tendencies of our minds, as some would have you believe. Unless you're a sociopath, chances are very good that as your awareness is honed, the parasitic emotions that cause selfishness and unhappiness will lose their grip. And that leaves a lot more time, energy, and interest in helping others. Y'know, driving this whole species forward and all.

To finish, let's return to the blog over at raptitude (emphasis mine).

It’s no secret that quality of life is all about how you come to terms with the present moment, and resentment is a woefully unskillful way to do that.

This applies to you and everyone else. Whenever you're tempted to peg people as lazy, stupid, or evil, remember this gentler and more truthful word, and how it applies to us all: unskillful. Same goes for you, when you want to blame your emotions on someone or something.

Now you know what the skill is to solve it all in one fell swoop. No more excuses. Go do it.

Addendum

Some people seem to think this implies that when one is not identifying with emotions, it means they have blunted emotions. That would indeed make this unattractive. What actually happens is that we fight negative emotions less, and we desperately cling to positive emotions less. The emotion feels more direct, but the result is less sting in negative emotions and more simple joy in positive ones. 

Inconvenience and annoyance

I recently posted about boredom. This guy has something similar to say about annoyance. I think he describes the whole thing beautifully:

http://www.raptitude.com/2010/09/do-you-make-a-moral-issue-out-of-being-inconvenienced/

But annoyance is never anything but a dysfunctional relationship between you and what you experience. 

Compare to what I wrote earlier about boredom:

Boredom is nothing more than the inability to stop fighting a reality that you have decided is insufficiently interesting to you.

Faith and devotion

I've read before that two very important traits to have on the path to recognizing awareness are faith and devotion. I don't much like those words, as they sound kinda religious, but upon further consideration, they seem to mean, essentially, trust and dedication. As in,

Trust that (continuous) recognition of awareness is in fact the goal to end all goals, and
Dedication to commit oneself to recognizing it.

I really think there's something to that...

Two faces of meditation

There seem to be two different ways in which meditation is commonly approached. It's not a clean divide, but I'll turn them into distinct categories for this post.

1. Psychological / spiritual

It's odd to lump these together, but the scientific study of meditation seems to be largely based in practices that many would consider "spiritual." This includes things like breathing practices and yoga, to calm the body and mind.

I think it commonly looks like this:

I know it's probably obnoxious of me to do so, but I can't help but laugh at pictures like that. Those people are, like, so much more groovy than me. It's like they're making gang signs. Of spirituality.

This is the approach that many are trying to secularize, so that you don't have to wear particular clothing or beads, or have a cool-looking silhouette, or rub a fat man's belly.

2. As an introduction to awareness

Some traditions (particularly the ones that call themselves "non-dual") suggest that meditation is primarily a way of calming your mind just enough to recognize "awareness": the knowing faculty of the mind. It's the thing (or non-thing) by which you experience anything at all. Once you recognize it, the idea is to make that recognition deep and continuous.

Some suggest you do it by invoking various deities. Others say it's as simple as "short moments, repeated many times." I prefer the latter approach. Relax and be cognizant. When everything is gone, what's left is awareness. Even when everything is there, what's underneath, inside, and all around, is awareness. As the recognition of awareness grows, the division between (and the need for) the absence or presence of any particular experience fades away.

Sometimes I feel it's just too simple, and so I think I have to go back to one of the more "complicated" approaches (deities, breathing exercises). But all of the awareness traditions tell you that when it's done right, it does in fact feel "too simple."

Its simplicity is also a trap. If there are no explicit signs to indicate that you're doing it "right," you can easily fall into solipsism or nihilism or some other -ism. Or maybe you think "screw meditation, I'm beyond that," even though you're not beyond anything at all.

So how do you know? I think it's just that when you know, you know. Yeah, that's not helpful, but I'm not really trying to teach anything anyway ;)


In the end, obviously, people should do whatever works best for them. But at some point, if you feel that all this "meditation" stuff is too contrived or spiritual or constrictive, consider that there's another way.

Mind wandering and creativity

New research by Schooler and Baird at UCSB builds on previous research suggesting that mind wandering assists creativity. I haven't read the original paper yet, but from its description in the SciAm article, I have a few big questions. First, to recap:

• Subjects were asked to list unusual uses for usual items.
• They took a break, which included one of four possible activities:
1. Resting
2. A demanding attentional task
3. An undemanding reaction task "known to elicit mind wandering"
4. No break
• Subjects in group 3 were much better than the other groups at listing additional uses for items they saw before the break. They were no better with new items.
• This suggests that mind wandering is great for stimulating new ideas to problems you're already working on.

Immediate questions:

• How do we know that the subjects weren't trained meditators, and thus that the undemanding task didn't elicit wandering?
• Did they measure mind wandering in the subjects and try to correlate it with the improvements? If not, why not suspect that reaction tasks are what boost creativity?
• Resting is known to elicit mind wandering. Why did this group show no improvement at all?
• How would a meditating group do? If, say, breathing meditation is not good for creativity, maybe we should be warning people.

Next step, I guess, is reading the paper itself.

Our true nature?

Often we hear that humans are innately both good and bad, with the capacity for kindness as well as selfishness, all in one big human nature soup. But is it really like that?

Imagine an old man (or woman) who has just returned from the mountain top, after many years of dedicated meditation. Is he more likely to want to: 

a) Share universal wisdom in a meaningful way to reduce suffering in the world
b) Stab kittens and puppies and eat all of his dastardly meditative competitors

Okay, those may not be the only two possibilities, and perhaps we're influenced by Hollywood and other cultural influences. But in actuality, I think something very much like (a) is really what usually happens. When we spend time clarifying our minds, compassion scatters selfishness like the sun clearing the clouds.

See Greg Burdulis or Matthieu Ricard as examples. Even a comparatively useless fellow like yours truly had quite a powerful experience of compassion that radically changed my outlook on life and its purpose.

Here's a brief outline of what I discovered (or maybe just decided) (see my other blog for more):

• Being mean usually happens when we're manifesting an anxiety or insecurity that we're unable to cope with in a healthy way internally.
• I may be hungry and irritable, but if I can maintain mental clarity, I can quarantine that miasma from other people. And not by suppressing it or otherwise worsening things for me.
• If I want to make a decision that may slightly harm someone else but benefit me, there's a little voice I have to squash first. That's easier to do if my mind isn't calm.

• Having a calm, lucid mind exposes all anxieties and insecurities as extraneous. As those melt away, there's progressively less that can hurt me, and thus less to worry about. This happiness-that-cannot-be-stolen frees up a lot of mental room to do other things. In most people who try, the inclination seems to move toward doing nice things and away from doing mean things.
• Doing "mean" things, to any degree, for any reason, no longer seems to have a purpose.
• Doing nice things still has the beautiful byproduct of feeling good.

In other words, I think there's a strong argument that compassion is a fundamental component of human nature, while selfishness and malice are adventitious (that is, parasitic). Doing away with compassion requires some brutal conditioning, whereas eliminating selfishness requires only seeing the world as it really is.

There's also a final step here. What does one do with the compassion uncovered from all this practice? In addition to straightforward ways of helping people (volunteering, charity, etc.), there's this big one:

• Having noticed the turmoil in my own mind that led to all the suffering I caused myself and others, it's reasonable to assume that everyone else is doing it, too. This gives a clear target for compassion: help them understand how beautiful things look from this other perspective.
• Decreases my need to blame other people. Instead, I'm more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt with their actions.
• Reduces the need to focus on the "details" of the world: most social problems can be solved by simply enhancing the empathy of the actors. All other strategies are forceful and thus less efficient and less durable.

So get on the train, transform your mind, and join the inevitable compassion revolution. Or keep yelling at stoplights :)

On the neuroscience of meditation

As I collect research on the effects of meditation on the brain, I'm again struck by how weird it is that the neuroscience of it matters to most people. Consider this analogy:

You're hungry. Like, really hungry. And you don't know what to do about it. Then you meet some people who have tried something they call "eating food," and they report that hunger diminishes. And they get big and strong. These are all the things you care about and want for yourself! 

But they only do this in the dark, and they can only describe the mechanism in metaphor ("it's like putting a spoon... to your mouth... but with stuff in it"). You don't fully believe them, so you do some studies and find that, indeed, they're consistently interrupted less during their day by things like hunger pangs. But this could just be some sort of misunderstanding. In your world, photons are the only things that are real, and you haven't seen photonic evidence, dammit!

So you do another study: you shine bright lights on them, and study their shadows while they eat. Lo! You can sort of make out from the shadows that spoons with stuff are being put to mouths. Now that you have real evidence, you decide it's worth learning this mystical skill of "eating." And now you can explain to everyone else why and how eating works: these shadows over here move like this!

When people meditate, they report less stress and sadness, and more happiness and empathy. That sounds pretty good, so we collect evidence. The psychological studies check out: we get exactly the skills that we want from this practice! But that's not enough. When we see blood oxygenation levels fluctuate in the right places -- as suggested by putting brains in magnets and then bouncing radio waves off them -- and infer that this is because those neurons are firing and thus needing more oxygen (fMRI), then we finally believe it. Or when we see that brains "grow" -- even though brain growth is often a symptom of pathology.

If indeed there are lasting behavioral changes, and those are the things we want, it's a bit funny to wait to discover brain correlates before trying the techniques. Of course something changed in the brain. It would be quite surprising indeed if meditators had large behavioral changes and there were no physical correlates. Now that would be a real finding.

Note: I don't mean to make it sound like neuroscience has nothing to offer meditation research. But it is surprising to see just how much it matters to people, particularly when even experts (see last four paragraphs) don't attribute as much meaning to some of the findings as we do.