Hey, I don’t have all the answers. In life, to be honest, I
failed as much as I have succeeded. But
I love my wife. I love my life. And I wish you my kind of success.
—Dicky Fox, in Jerry Maguire
IN CHAPTER 7 WE talked about people who have used the Four-Step Process to become more productive and effective in their work, and whose incomes have climbed proportionately. But that is only one measure of success. While our culture often equates success with financial riches, that is not necessarily an accurate equation, in and of itself. Success—genuine, lasting, fulfilling, satisfying success—isn’t about being rich. It’s about living a rich life.
Five Pathways to a Rich Life
The Four-Step Process does not operate in a vacuum: there are also significant aspects of how we live every day that we can change in order to create the kind of life we truly want.
Over our years of practice, in addition to using and teaching the specific tools of the Four-Step Process, we have developed a number of lifestyle recommendations we make for our clients, stemming in part from the latest in cutting-edge research and in part from our clinical experience. In this final chapter, we wanted to share the essence of these recommendations with you, too.
These are things you can do in addition to the Four-Step Process to help ensure that you live the richest, fullest, and most satisfying life you can. We call these Five Pathways to a rich life.
Pathway 1: Eat Consciously
The last few decades of the twentieth century saw a revolution in awareness about food’s impact on health. Starting with the landmark 1977 report Dietary Goals for the United States, a spate of governmental and private studies dramatically raised both public and professional awareness of the powerful link between nutrition and chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and some forms of cancer.
Today we are in the second wave of that revolution, as we gain a clearer picture of the impact of food on our mental, emotional, and psychological health.
For example, a series of studies during the 1990s demonstrated a clear link between omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids and cardiovascular health. Research showed that Greenland Eskimos eating their traditional diet of fish, whale, and seal (high in these essential fatty acids—EFAs) had extremely low levels of heart disease and excellent HDL/LDL and cholesterol profiles, and that the fish-eating inhabitants of the typical Japanese fishing village had far lower rates of heart disease and arterial plaque than residents of a similar but non-fish-eating farming village.
But the findings didn’t stop there. Researchers soon noticed that the incidence of depression closely followed the same demographic profile: for example, in populations where fish consumption was high, depression was as much as ten times lower than in the United States.
A study at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Bethesda, Maryland, found a striking reverse correlation between fish consumption and postpartum depression. “Across the board,” the study reported, “nations with high levels of fish consumption (Japan, Hong Kong, Sweden, and Chile) had the lowest levels of postpartum depression, and nations with low levels of fish consumption (Brazil, South Africa, West Germany, Saudi Arabia) had the highest rates of postpartum depression.”
There is considerable evidence that supplementing the diet with high-quality sources of balanced EFAs may have a significant positive impact on depression and on stabilizing overall mood.
The link between EFAs and mood is just one example; there are others. For instance, there are well-established links between mood and a number of vitamins and minerals that tend to be more abundant in a diet richer in vegetables and fruits and fewer refined foods. In fact, there is a tremendous amount of valuable information available today on the connection of food and mood, and it is not our purpose here to explore it in any detail. The point we make with our clients is simply this: pay attention to what and how you eat, because it makes a difference in how you think and feel. In a phrase, eat consciously.
One of the most interesting long-term studies on real-world dietary practice is the National Weight Control Registry (NWCR). In 1994, Rena Wing, Ph.D., from Brown Medical School, and James O. Hill, Ph.D., from the University of Colorado, began recruiting people to participate in an investigation of the patterns and habits of those who had not only lost a significant amount of weight but who had also kept it off. In order to enroll in the registry, you had to have lost at least thirty pounds, as documented by a health professional, and you had to have maintained that lower weight for at least a year’s time. In other words, the researchers were looking to see what factors contribute not just to weight loss, but to healthy weight stabilization.
Starting with about seven hundred adults, the registry grew to the point where today it tracks more than five thousand people. With weight reductions ranging from thirty to three hundred pounds, the average registry participant has lost sixty-six pounds and kept it off for an average of five and a half years. The participants have used a wide variety of approaches to their weight loss and maintenance. However, there are some striking features in common.
For example, 78 percent of NWCR participants eat breakfast every day—not a quick donut and coffee, not a gulped orange juice, but a real breakfast.
Perhaps when you were young, your mother told you the same thing that millions of mothers have told millions of children: “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” If she did, she was right. Eating a meal with a balance of protein and carbohydrates at the start of the day helps to set a stable pattern for the metabolism throughout the day.
Grabbing a high-sugar snack may give you quick energy, but it does so by generating a rapid spike in blood sugar, typically followed by a precipitous drop in blood sugar that can easily throw off your mood, causing irritability, poor concentration, and so forth.
This is true throughout the day. When we wait a long time before eating, often the result is that we have very low blood sugar by the time we do finally eat. (“I’m starving!” we say, even though we are likely nowhere close to literal starvation.) This makes it far more likely that we will then eat a good deal more than we really need, creating a burden on our digestive system and a whole new spike in blood sugar, leading before long to another precipitous drop in blood sugar, and around and around the cycle goes—until we crash.
Current nutritional wisdom is that nourishing yourself modestly on nutritious, healthy food five or six times a day tends to keeps your blood sugar regulated so you don’t have those fluctuations that pull your mood all over the map.
Another interesting finding at the National Weight Control Registry was that the participants exhibited a consciously structured approach to eating. In other words, they had a fairly well-established and carefully thought-out menu and eating pattern. They brought shopping lists when they went food shopping and did not do a lot of impulse buying, nor did they do a lot of impulse eating. In other words, while there was a good deal of variety in their diets, they were consistently intentional about what they ate and when they ate it.
Pathway 2: Exercise Sanely
Another common factor in the National Weight Control Registry participants’ success, not surprisingly, is exercise. Nine out of ten participants exercise, on average, about one hour per day, and 94 percent increased their level of physical activity as part of their approach to achieving and maintaining a healthier weight.
As our modern lifestyle has grown increasingly sedentary, there has been growing interest in targeted physical activities to compensate for the lack of regular exercise. Prior to the 1970s, the idea of everyday citizens (that is, nonathletes) going outside to run, just for the sake of running, was considered, well, weird. Then came the jogging craze, and people have been running ever since. Gym memberships, Pilates and yoga classes, martial arts, home gyms…the diversity of ways we have developed to replace the loss of normal physical exertion in our lives is a testament to human ingenuity.
As it turns out, moderate exercise is not only good for the body, it is also good for the mind and mood.
In a study conducted at Duke University, a group of patients were given a thirty-minute program of exercise three times a week, which proved “just as effective as drug therapy in relieving the symptoms of major depression” in a matter of days.
The researchers then followed the patients for six months and found that of those who continued to maintain the exercise routine, only 8 percent saw their depression return, while 38 percent of the drug-only group and 31 percent of the exercise-plus-drug group relapsed.
This last finding was particularly fascinating, because it means that the subjects who used an antidepressant drug together with exercise were four times more likely to relapse than those who used exercise only, with no drugs at all! Asked what could possibly explain this startling finding, the project director, James Blumenthal, postulated, “Patients who exercised [only] may have felt a greater sense of mastery over their condition and gained a greater sense of accomplishment. They may have felt more self-confident and competent because they were able to do it themselves….”
In a word: the subjects who treated their depression themselves, purely by exercising, had the opportunity to practice greater self-efficacy. The fact that they felt they could directly affect their own health could itself have had a beneficial effect on their health.
The benefits of regular moderate exercise don’t stop at depression. Mild exercise has also been shown to improve brain functioning in the elderly and may even serve to protect against the advance of Alzheimer’s disease.
A recent study showed that simply taking a good walk several times a week can have a profound impact on the physical size of the hippocampus, a fairly tiny, seahorse-shaped structure lying deep within the brain (hippocampus is the Latin word for “seahorse”) that plays a significant role in the formation of memories.
The hippocampus is especially vulnerable to the impact of trauma. For example, researchers have found that combat veterans and victims of sexual abuse who suffer pronounced post-traumatic stress syndrome also have an unusually small hippocampus, and the smallest hippocampus size correlates with the most severe experience of trauma.
The hippocampus is also one of the first regions of the brain to show signs of deterioration in the progress of Alzheimer’s disease. Even in healthy people, this part of the brain typically begins to atrophy about the age of fifty-five or sixty and may shrink as much as 15 percent. But in those suffering with Alzheimer’s, the hippocampus will atrophy from 20 percent to 50 percent more than usual.
In early 2011, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh randomly assigned 120 healthy but sedentary men and women averaging sixty years of age to two exercise groups. For the following year, one group did a mild routine including yoga and resistance training with elastic bands. The other group walked around a track three times a week, building up to forty minutes at a stretch.
At the end of the year, brain scans showed that among the yoga-and-resistance-training group, the hippocampus had decreased in size by about 1.4 percent on average. This was no big surprise: such a decrease is considered normal for members of that age group. Among the group who took regular walks, however, the average hippocampus had increased in size by about 2 percent—a significant change, especially considering that the hippocampus in these subjects was expected to have shrunk, not grown.
The interesting thing about exercise is that, as with diet, the guiding principle seems to be balance and moderation. Despite their many benefits, many forms of high-impact activity, including running and most sports, can have a negative effect on the body over the long haul. In many ways, the simplest and most universal exercise is also the most balanced and, in the long term, most beneficial: taking a walk.
The benefits of walking are almost too numerous to fully catalogue. It provides mild cardiovascular benefit. For those in midlife and older, the weight-bearing nature of the activity promotes the absorption of calcium and therefore helps to slow bone loss. Especially in its brisker form, where there is significantly increased respiration and a pronounced swinging of the arms, you have a natural corrective for the biofield’s electrical polarity.
What do you suppose the National Weight Control Registry found was the most common form of physical activity among their participants? You guessed it: walking.
Pathway 3: Wrap Yourself in Fractals
Another benefit of taking regular walks is that it puts you in consistent contact with nature—and this has a decidedly positive impact on the nervous system. For decades, longevity studies have associated healthy and relatively stress-free lives with regular contact with a natural environment.
This probably comes as no surprise. After all, it’s common sense: being out in nature makes you feel calm and peaceful. But why? As it turns out, there is a science to what nature does, and it is called fractals.
Fractals are patterns that repeat themselves at increasing levels of magnification, the recurring, “irregularly repetitive” patterns so often found in nature: clouds, ocean waves, leaves, flowers, and snowflakes. What distinguishes fractals is that they are internally organized with a sort of fuzzy logic through which they repeat themselves but never in precisely identical ways. Thus, no two snowflakes are alike, and you can stare at the clouds or the trees for hours and never see the exact same pattern twice.
Since their discovery in the 1970s by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, fractals have proved enormously helpful in quantifying the complex structure exhibited by a vast range of naturally occurring patterns, in everything from seismology and soil mechanics to human physiology and neurology. They have also captured the imagination of artists as well as scientists and the public at large and have often been referred to as “fingerprints of nature.”
Research by Richard Taylor, Ph.D., at the University of Oregon, has shown that the “drip” artwork of Jackson Pollack consists of fractal patterns. We also suspect (though this is not backed up by any research we know of thus far) that the same is true of certain types of modern classical music, such as that by Philip Glass or the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. For that matter, that familiar fractal effect of the repetition and gradual transformation of small “cells” is the hallmark of much of the music of Bach.
There has also been a considerable amount of research into the impact of fractals on our mood and nervous function. For example, studies have shown that the act of observing fractal patterns—whether occurring in nature, generated mathematically, or as found in artistic expression—generates a distinct electroencephalographic (EEG) pattern in people that includes increased production of alpha waves in the frontal lobe and beta waves in the parietal lobes and has a measurable calming impact on our physiology as measured by skin conductance.
One reason for the psychological and emotional impact of fractals may be that the brain itself is organized in fractal patterns, as a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge has recently shown—a discovery that has helped further our understanding of how the brain works.
Whatever the precise mechanisms involved, the bottom line is this: immersing yourself in fractal environments—such as taking walks out among the trees, grass, clouds, and other natural scenery—has a cooling, calming effect on the limbic system and is tonic for the prefrontal cortex. And this is not a purely visual phenomenon: the sounds and smells of nature, such as birdsong and the mix of scents that surrounds you when you are out among the foliage, and even the feel against your skin of the endlessly fluctuating air currents of nature—all these are fractal environments that are balm to the brain.
This effect does not have to stop when you come back indoors, either. For example, in our offices we have pictures and wallpaper depicting beautiful forest scenes. Even when we are not looking at them directly, simply having these fractal patterns in our peripheral vision has a constant soothing effect on the mind and mood. On the aural level, we have a water fountain in our outer office that naturally generates a soft “babbling brook” sound pattern, and through the sound system in our inner offices, a library of CDs quietly plays a fractal symphony of surf and ocean waves in the background.
Pathway 4: Build a Gratitude List
In 2003, two researchers, Robert Emmons, Ph.D., at the University of California, Davis, and Michael McCullough, Ph.D., at the University of Miami, conducted a fascinating experiment. They divided about two hundred subjects into three groups, each of which was instructed to keep a different type of weekly journal. The first group simply recorded daily events without evaluating them; the second recorded annoying and difficult events; and the third made lists of things they were grateful for. At the end of ten weeks, the third group reported a higher energy level, more alertness and optimism, better progress toward goals, and better sleep.
“Research suggests that grateful people have more energy and optimism, are less bothered by life’s hassles, are more resilient in the face of stress, have better health, and suffer less depression than the rest of us,” writes Joan Borysenko, Ph.D. “People who practice gratitude—and yes, it is something one can learn and improve—are also more compassionate, more likely to help others, less materialistic, and more satisfied with life.”
We agree, and we have for years been recommending to our clients a daily practice not unlike what Drs. Emmons and McCullough did with their third group.
Many of us, no matter how positive an outlook we try to maintain, have a tendency to keep our eye out for the negative, to be on alert for what’s wrong in our lives rather than what’s right. This is not simply a pessimistic attitude; to an extent, we are biologically predisposed to look for what is wrong, what is dangerous, what is harmful, and what is not working in our lives. For thousands of years, this was a smart strategy from the standpoint of the survival of the species. If something in our environment was out of the ordinary, it was more likely to kill us.
In today’s world, where we do not typically have to fight for survival day in and day out, this predisposition to notice the negative no longer serves us so well. In fact, it is often the force that most strongly limits our potential for living a rich life—because to a great extent, life is a self-fulfilling prophecy: what you focus on is what you get.
Here is how our recommended daily practice works:
Make a list of things you are grateful for, starting with the largest and most obvious. These basic blessings are often things we take for granted, such as:
I am grateful:
…that I can see.
…that I can walk.
…that I have food to eat.
…for the sunshine, the air, and the trees.
…that I have a car.
…that I have a roof over my head.
…that I have a friend I trust, spouse I love, and so forth.
We suggest you start by building a list of between one dozen and two dozen items.
Then, choose a time of the day (ideally, about the same time every day) when you can tick through this list mentally, item by item. We have clients who do this in the shower every day, others who make it part of their bedtime ritual, and still others who steal away for a few minutes during lunch hour to step outside the frantic pace of work and ground themselves in a moment of calm reflection.
Once you have this basic list and a time routine established for walking through it every day, here is the rest of the exercise: At least once a day, take out your list, scan through it, and add one more brand-new item. Do this every day for the next year, and you will have a list of nearly four hundred things you are grateful for.
There is something very powerful about this: in the process, you will profoundly change your brain. Spending this focused time every day on becoming consciously appreciative of a steadily enlarging list of blessings in your life is something like exercising a muscle. You can think of it as a workout for your gratitude muscle. And this is not purely a figure of speech. Neurologically speaking, what you are doing through this exercise is retraining a portion of your brain called the reticular activating system.
At every moment of every day, we are bombarded by a vast amount of sensory information, data which, if we were to think about it all consciously, would overwhelm us. In order to be able to function, our nervous system filters out all but a very tiny sliver of that information. The reticular activating system is the part of the brain that manages that selection and filtering process.
Also called reticular formation, the reticular activating system (RAS) is a network of nerve pathways that connects the brain stem and other lower parts of the brain with the cerebral cortex and cerebellum. This matrix of nerve fibers manages the transition from sleep to wakefulness and vice versa and also acts as a filter for all the sensory input your brain draws from the external world. Everything you see, hear, feel, taste, or smell passes through this fine network, which then relays the signal or message on to the appropriate part of your brain for processing.
The RAS has been described as a “Google of the brain,” a search engine that we literally program to pick relevant and useful bits of data out of the vast torrent of sensory information available to us. For example, this is what enables a parent standing outside a crowded gym to pick the sound of her own child out of the undifferentiated stream of sound coming from fifty children inside the building: she has programmed her reticular formation to filter out all the other sounds as irrelevant.
As you build your gratitude list, your RAS makes a subtle shift in its hierarchy of priorities. Rather than looking for what’s wrong, you are programming your neural search engine to look for what’s right. What is going well in your life? What’s working for you? As you tick through your list every day, your RAS starts bringing into your awareness those things in your environment and circumstances that conform to what you’ve made important.
And, just as with the third group in Emmons and McCullough’s experiment, as you focus more of your attention on the blessings in your life, they also start to increase in your life. That which you focus on, you get more of. As the character Pindar says in the book The Go-Giver:
You’ve heard the expression, “Go looking for trouble and that’s what you’ll find”? It’s true, and not only about trouble. It’s true about everything. Go looking for conflict, and you’ll find it. Go looking for people to take advantage of you, and they generally will. See the world as a dog-eat-dog place, and you’ll always find a bigger dog looking at you as if you’re his next meal. Go looking for the best in people, and you’ll be amazed at how much talent, ingenuity, empathy and good will you’ll find. Ultimately, the world treats you more or less the way you expect to be treated. In fact, you’d be amazed at just how much you have to do with what happens to you.
In explaining the concept of the gratitude list to clients, we often describe the case of a gentleman named W. Mitchell.
Mitchell went through a freak motorcycle accident that burned off parts of his fingers and left two-thirds of his body surface covered in severe burns. Several years later a second life-threatening accident (this one in a small plane) left him wheelchair bound. Today he travels the world, giving speeches on overcoming limitations, often speaking for free to groups in prisons and inner-city schools.
“Before I was paralyzed,” says Mitchell, “there were ten thousand things I could do. Now there are nine thousand. I could dwell on the one thousand I’ve lost—or on the nine thousand I have left.” This is someone who knows how to manage his own reticular activating system—and has an extremely well-developed gratitude muscle.
Pathway 5: Make Time for Renewal
In today’s fast-paced life, there is often an especially high premium placed on productivity. And make no mistake, being productive is a wonderful thing. But too often, we turn René Descartes’s famous dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” into its modern, achievement-obsessed version: I accomplish, therefore I am.
As we said in chapter 6, balance is the essential element that underlies all the aims of the Four-Step Process, and this is nowhere more true than in the need to balance productive activity with time to refresh, restore, and renew yourself.
Renewal time can mean different things for different people. We look at renewal time in terms of four aspects:
Physical renewal includes getting good sleep as well as good nutrition and good exercise. For so many of us, who normally work in relatively sedentary situations in which we are focused mostly in our minds, simply getting out and moving in the outdoors is often a major source of physical balance.
Mental renewal means doing something that clears your mind and relaxes you mentally. This certainly can include meditation, but it can also simply mean doing something that has nothing to do with all the things you normally do. For example, if your work is in engineering, then reading romance novels or biographies can completely take you away from your normal, everyday focus. Whatever you do as “work,” see if you can find something you genuinely enjoy that is wholly unrelated and utterly unlike that area.
Emotional renewal typically means spending time with people you enjoy and who have a renewing effect on you, whether family and close friends or people in your community.
Relationships are, in a sense, living entities unto themselves. They do better when they are maintained and lovingly attended to; they can wither and even die when left alone for too long. We have known people who put more consistent care and attention into changing the oil and spark plugs in their cars than they did on renewing the spark in their key relationships.
And by the way, in terms of emotional renewal time, the definition of people needn’t be limited solely to human companions. Pets can be, and increasingly are, a source of meaningful emotional renewal, too.
Spiritual renewal varies from person to person, but regardless of your personal religious or faith-related beliefs, we believe spiritual renewal is a crucial aspect of balance for everyone.
If you have a specific faith or spiritual belief system, then this may mean taking time regularly to connect with that faith tradition, whether this means physically going to a place of worship or spending time alone in your home to reconnect with your source. For many people, simply spending time in nature can be a way of reconnecting with that reality that is larger than ourselves—sitting out at night and looking at the stars, taking a walk among the trees, or hiking through the mountains. Whatever it is, the key here is that you make time for it regularly. How often? It’s something like physical exercise: it’s good to spend at least some time within this element daily, and some significant time at least several times a week.
As we said in chapter 2, when we feel that connection—to God, to nature, to the larger family of humanity, to life itself—it not only changes our outlook on life, it also changes our physical and psychological health. It gives our life more meaning and makes the experience of our life richer. As a consequence, we live more of it.
Rediscovering Our Connection
In the largest sense, all ill health and unhappiness is about disconnection, and health and happiness is about connection. This is ultimately the purpose of the Four-Step Process and the Five Pathways: to help clear away the barriers and impediments to experiencing a full sense of connection—with your true self, with others, and with life.
So many of our problems are exacerbated by the sense that we’re alone in the world. When we deeply realize that we are not, that we are each truly an integral, connected part of a larger whole, it begins to have an extraordinarily strong healing effect on every aspect of our lives.
Our colleague Larry Dossey, M.D., the prolific writer on spirituality and medicine, is perhaps best known for his exploration of the power of intercessory prayer in physical healing. In his book Reinventing Medicine, Dr. Dossey describes what he sees as three consecutive eras of medicine: Era I medicine, dealing with the physical body; Era II medicine, which encompasses the mind-body model and such approaches as energy psychology; and Era III medicine, which he also terms “eternity medicine,” in which patients are affected from a distance through intercessory prayer. Larry told us recently:
I think the larger message of all these remote healing studies is that we are connected. When you look at these studies, space and time don’t seem to matter. They are one of the great examples we have that we are all part of a nonlocal, universal mind that transcends separation and distance, in space and in time.
In his books, What Is Life? Mind and Matter and My View of the World, the physicist and Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger wrote about what he calls the unitary nature of consciousness, and he says something wonderful: “The overall number of minds is just one.” Schrödinger called this the One mind: the idea that we are all part of a greater consciousness that transcends and overcomes individuality and separation. And this is not a saffron-robed Oriental mystic talking this way—this is one of the greatest scientific minds of the twentieth century.
Dr. Candace Pert, the expert on neuropeptides and emotions, puts it this way: “We are hardwired to connect to bliss.” This observation forms the theme of her 2007 book Everything You Need to Know to Feel Go(o)d.
“But for us to be successful and healthy,” she adds, “we have to clear old traumas, so that we can send out clear electronic signals to the universe.”
We are not isolated. When we show a kindness to others, it in some small way makes the world a better place—but that also has a healing impact on us, too, as we begin to see ourselves with kinder eyes.
And it works the other way as well. Dissipating the fog of distress and unleashing the truly joyful you inside is something you do because it makes you feel better. It changes your biochemistry, changes your biofield, changes your moods and thoughts and beliefs, and changes your life. But it also changes those around you, because you are part of them, and they are part of you.
As we heal ourselves, we also heal the world around us. Your personal code to joy is also the path to a more joyful world.