One of the great paradoxes about lowering your mood is that it often works best to strike out in the direction of happiness rather than aiming straight at misery. The quest for uplift often hides a stairway leading sharply downward.
The use of a chemical assist to raise one’s mood is a classic example. People drink alcohol, smoke pot, and practice other forms of “informal pharmacy” largely to elevate the mood. In the short term, these substances often perform precisely as advertised. In the long run, however, the diligent user can reap a substantial harvest in unhappiness.
Despite our culture’s tendency to cluck disapprovingly about self-medication to alter mood, the most widely used drug is both legal and socially acceptable: alcohol. It causes more deaths (both directly, via organ damage, and indirectly, through traffic fatalities and other mishaps) than any other drug of abuse. Population-wide, it also creates the most misery. Moderate consumption of one to two drinks per day, however, appears to be relatively benign for most people. This is unlikely to assist you to your goal unless you have a familial vulnerability to alcohol dependence, in which case any use at all can help you find the fabled slippery slope.
For the maximum effect, you will want to drink more than a glass of wine with dinner. Alcohol is a depressant, so even if it affects no other aspect of your life, it will insidiously begin downshifting your mood. Two methods seem to be employed most often:
Either of these strategies will work, though the former is somewhat more likely to have the added effect of physical dependence, which will make withdrawal a misery as well.
The overuse of alcohol can have an impact on all areas of your life. For example, it tends to anaesthetize the inhibitory pathways of the brain. This is one of its biggest attractions for the shy. They can relax, open up, converse more easily, and drop rigid boundaries (and sometimes clothes). The hidden benefit for our purposes is that inhibition is critically important for proper functioning in social settings. We may feel tempted to make fun of a friend’s outfit or political opinions, but normally we refrain from doing so. With overuse—and it’s always difficult to calculate the ideal dose just so—alcohol will take the brakes off the mouth, allowing us to careen downhill into the realm of the social pariah.
Further, alcohol reduces the capacity for self-reflection. Under its influence, we may think we are performing well at work, being funny at a party, and driving with perfect skill—but we’re not. One of the reasons that people are not more miserable than they are is that, sober, they instinctively respond to feedback and hold themselves back when they see they are coloring outside the lines. Given enough alcohol, however, we can no longer detect the lines and so push fearlessly beyond them.
Longer term, the pinball of alcohol dependence can carom off of any of life’s surfaces, intensifying and accelerating at every step. It can impair career success, friendships, marriages, child raising, the deeper stages of sleep, finances, and almost any other aspect of an otherwise-fulfilling life.
What about other drugs? This book is far too brief to describe the myriad downward possibilities offered by each substance on the prohibition list. Broadly speaking, however, the pattern is similar to that for alcohol—with the added bonus of illegality and all of the fun and consequences that can bring.
There is one more substance worth considering, however, and it is again a legal one: caffeine. Sharp observers in North America have noted the increase in urban coffee shop density over the past few decades, concluding that if the pace continues there will be no room for any other form of business within twenty years.
Caffeine can trigger a stress response with the attendant fight-or-flight flavors of unhappiness: anger and anxiety. Small doses, for most people, do not seem significant and may only serve to sharpen concentration and motivation. But once one graduates to a more heroic habit (as little as three cups of drip coffee per day), anxiety, anger, or both are likely to be accentuated. You may even be able to trigger panic attacks or outbursts of rage. More often, you will experience a grinding uneasiness and irritability.
Plus, if you drink enough—of either coffee or alcohol—you will always have to be within 150 yards of a bathroom.