Epilogue

In these pages I have tried to present the importance of employing the Adult brain under stress when those around us are in the Toddler brain. Not only can we reduce the self-
obsession and reactivity that run rampant in our time, we can use the most profoundly evolved part of the brain to soar above them.

To soar above is to go beyond limits, to become greater, to become the most authentic and humane adults we can be. This is not a birthright or an entitlement. Rather, it’s something we must earn. This epilogue reviews the major points that, when practiced, help us earn the ability to soar above. It goes one step further. But you’ll have to wait until the end for that.

The necessary conditions for soaring above are:

Use Pain to Grow Greater

This, I believe, is the evolved function of pain: not to suffer or to identify with suffering or maltreatment, but to grow beyond them. (The natural motivation of pain is to motivate behavior that will heal, correct, and improve.) We don’t so much heal emotional injury as outgrow it.

Do What Makes You Feel Valuable, Rather Than Temporarily Powerful

We get stuck in the Toddler brain when we confuse loss of self-value with loss of power. We’re then apt to respond with temporary feelings of power—anger or resentment—driven by low-grade adrenaline. Most of the time this unfortunate habit leads to further violation of our deeper values and ultimately more feelings of powerlessness. We can and must develop habits of doing what makes us feel more valuable. Whenever we feel devalued, we must increase self-value by improving or appreciating or protecting or connecting (intimately, communally, or spiritually).

The only way to change Toddler brain habits is to override them with new Adult brain habits. Insight and desire do not change habits. Thinking about the desired change, imagining it in detail, and assiduously practicing new behaviors—TIP—is the path to lasting change.

Create Meaning and Purpose

Try to focus on what you want to value, not on how you feel. If you act on your values, feelings will eventually follow, as you’ll feel more genuine. But acting on feelings will make you violate your deeper values and lead you, sooner rather than later, to feel guilty, ashamed, and phony, with the only available confidence due to the temporary adrenaline-driven illusion embedded in resentment and anger. Fidelity to your deepest, most humane values creates a sense of meaning and purpose. Insofar as feelings enter into choosing behaviors, the emphasis should be on how you want to feel. Focusing on how you feel invokes the past; attention to how you want to feel leads to a more meaningful present and future.

Balance the Grand Human Contradiction

In the Adult brain, you feel authentic, with no impulse to struggle for autonomy. You don’t dwell on Toddler brain alarms: how bad you might feel and who’s to blame. Rather, you think of how to make your situation or your experience of it better. You might feel like sulking or zoning out or getting away from a distressed partner, but the desire to improve, appreciate, protect, and connect is more important than indulging that temporary feeling. Acting on your deeper values makes you feel more autonomous and more connected.

Love Like an Adult

When interactions with anyone you care about start to get stressful, shift into your Adult brain. Focus on how to improve, appreciate, connect, or protect. Strive for binocular vision: the ability to see other people’s perspective alongside your own.

Adults in love understand that their only chance of getting the partner they most want to have is to be the partner they most want to be. Learn from your partner how to love him or her, and teach your partner how to love you.

Use the Web of Emotion to Make the World a Better Place

On a visceral level, we continually draw energy from—and contribute energy to—a dynamic Web of Emotion that consists of everyone we interact with and everyone with whom they interact. Whether we like it or not, we’re emotionally connected to virtually everyone we encounter on any level. Our only choice is to make the connection positive or negative, to put out compassion or take in resentment, to clean up emotional pollution or contribute to it.

Now the good news: the smallest positive contribution to the Web of Emotion makes the world a little better place. If you focus continually on making the world a better place in this small way, you and those you love will be happier, and your life will have more meaning and purpose.

Develop a Legacy

Now is the time—the only time—to prevent regret. And the best way to start is to consider your legacy—what you want to leave behind, what you want to contribute to humanity.

Look for the Light

Humans have evolved many ways of experiencing and expressing spirituality. From a psychological standpoint, it doesn’t matter which way you choose, whether it’s some notion of God or a higher power or the cosmos or the sea of humanity or communion with nature. We function at our best with a sense of connection to something larger than the self, something that overrides purely selfish concerns. What all forms of spirituality have in common is a striving to find light.

But light also makes shadows, and shadows fill up with doubt. We must not be afraid of the dark, as we have much to learn from it. When we look deeply into darkness, light begins to reemerge.

Strive every day to look for the light. The ultimate in spiritual experience comes from as bright a light as we can muster from a multitude of sources, creating a supernova of humanity.

The more light we create, the more we soar above.