Chapter 3 Training Our Thoughts and Our Feelings

Happy the Man, and happy he alone

He who can call today his own:

He, who secure within, can say,

Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

–– from Horace, Ode 29, translated by John Dryden1

In the 1960s Aaron Beck was a young psychiatrist who treated his depressed patients with Freudian psychoanalysis.2 The idea was that depression was caused by repressed anger and could be treated by dream analysis in which the unconscious anger could be brought into consciousness and thus dispelled. Beck decided to test whether this was true, so he and his colleagues compared the dreams of depressed patients with those of other patients. And he found that they actually contained less anger than other people’s dreams.

But they did contain many themes that were quite similar to those in their waking thoughts. The depressed patients had extremely pessimistic views of themselves, of the outside world, and of their own future. And those ‘automatic negative thoughts’ arose minute by minute in their waking life too. It was those thoughts that were maintaining the depression. Thus was born cognitive therapy – the idea that we can help people by helping them to observe and manage their thoughts. As Beck found, it was possible to empower the conscious mind enough to remove many depressions.

So that is what this chapter is about – the fact that we can train our minds by conscious processes, which, if all goes well, become so habitual that we hardly notice them. Psychological therapy works that way, so does ‘positive psychology’, and so does meditation. They are the next major element in the happiness revolution. To learn these skills some people need help from a therapist, but millions have taught themselves.

The new psychology

The first scientific breakthrough in psychology preceded cognitive therapy. In the 1960s a South African doctor called Joseph Wolpe found he could treat anxiety disorders by behavioural methods: he exposed people gradually to what they feared until the fear went away.3 Gordon Paul then subjected these methods to the first systematic randomized experiment in clinical psychology.4 In it people with a phobia about public speaking were treated either by systematic desensitization or by a Freudian insight-oriented therapy. The first of these therapies worked much better than the second.

Then in the 1970s Aaron Beck introduced cognitive therapy. Its basic idea is that thoughts affect feelings and vice versa, but the most effective way to break a negative cycle between thoughts and feelings is to address the thoughts. We can learn to observe our automatic negative thoughts, to challenge them and then to develop more positive thoughts.5 This idea has the widest possible relevance to all of us and how we can manage our emotional life.

Eventually the cognitive and behavioural strands came together, because much behavioural training also works through its effects on thoughts.6 Thus was born Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). This is particularly effective in treating anxiety disorders, with 50–70 per cent recovery rates and very low relapse rates for those who recover. CBT is also effective in ending episodes of depression, with 50 per cent recovery rates during treatment and a halved rate of subsequent relapse. For depression, other effective psychological treatments also exist with good experimental evidence of success. For adults, these include interpersonal therapy, couples therapy and brief psychodynamic therapy, and specific forms of counselling are also recommended. For children with disturbed behaviour or ADHD, parent training has long-lasting effects, as has CBT for most other problems with children.

Unfortunately, however, few of these psychological therapies are widely available to most of those who need them. What is most widely available in the West – and is a major aspect of our new culture – is counselling of all types. This is an extremely positive development for at least two reasons. First, people are acknowledging their needs – the fact that we are all screwed up in some way or another. This is much better than pretending that we are all perfect. And, second, it implies that our mental processes are the central issue – how we think.

We can all improve our thoughts and thus our happiness. But this needs to be based on solid science. That is the message of Emotional Intelligence, popularized by Daniel Goleman in his book of 1995.7 And it is the purpose of the new Positive Psychology, launched by Martin Seligman in 1998, as a means to greater happiness for everyone. Seligman had spent much of his life working on mental distress, but he now conjectured that the basic ideas of cognitive therapy could also be used to make all of us happier – whether we were initially distressed or not. So positive psychology starts with the idea that your thoughts affect your feelings. But it then focuses less on your negative thoughts and your personal weaknesses, and more on using your existing strengths in order to generate positive emotion. Seligman recommends a whole set of exercises for making yourself happier. These include two exercises around gratitude.8 In one of them you write down each evening three things that went well during the day. And in another you write a letter of gratitude to someone whom you feel has really helped you in your life. Seligman and his academic colleagues have now trained a small army of positive psychologists, who are influencing individuals and policy-makers around the world.

These new developments are home-grown in the West. But equally profound in cultural terms has been the spread of ancient wisdom and practice from the East. The Western and Eastern strands have much in common, and they reinforce each other.9

The rise of meditation and mindfulness

In Hindu and Buddhist thought the central idea is the importance of the mind. It is your mental state that matters and you can learn to control it.

The first major wave of Eastern influence into the West was in the swinging 60s, as part of the revolt of youth against conventional culture. The symbolic figure was the Hindu guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who taught Transcendental Meditation (TM) as the route to a deeper level of consciousness – finding the beauty within. This practice involves sitting absolutely still and repeating a mantra. The Maharishi’s many followers included the Beatles – this was the hippie generation.

But by the 1980s the economies of the US and Britain had become less buoyant – jobs were scarcer and neo-liberal philosophy was on the rise, led by President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The younger generation became more sober, but they too wanted good experiences. So the search for wellbeing ceased to be perceived as a drop-out, New Age activity and became instead a mainstream activity for people from all walks of life, from education to banking. Yoga became increasingly popular – for its physical benefits in the main, but also for its calming effect on the mind. And more and more people began to meditate.

Here the main influence in recent years has been Buddhism, with its clear philosophy of the working of the human mind. The leading figure is the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people-in-exile and a deeply wise person with a great sense of fun. As he explains, everyone wants to be happy, but they are often deluded about what brings happiness. The greatest happiness comes not from getting, but from giving. And it also requires control of your own mental activity. This can be attained through the practice of meditation.

The most popular form of meditation in the West today is probably mindfulness.10 This means focusing your awareness on some aspect of the present moment, without judging it. For beginners the starting point is to focus on your breathing. Attention then extends to the whole body, including any physical pain. From this it can move to your mental activity – including any painful thoughts. Remarkably, when these painful thoughts and sensations are just observed, as if from the outside, they become less painful, less all-consuming. The overall result from practising mindfulness is greater peace of mind.

Unlike many other spiritual practices, mindfulness has been subject to rigorous scientific evaluation, using randomized controlled trials that compare the happiness of participants with those of non-participants. These studies have centred especially on the eight-session course known as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts hospital in Amherst.11 Trials of MBSR have shown that four months after the course, participants were less anxious compared with those who had not taken part.12 They also had better brain measurements and a much stronger immunity to flu (after a flu jab). Other trials have shown that mindfulness also protects against depression.13 MBSR courses have now been taken by over a million people and many more have learned their mindfulness in other ways, including via some wonderful apps like Headspace. Most practitioners will say that mindfulness is more than just a form of meditation – it’s a way of life, a way of noticing and appreciating the world around you and inside you.

The appeal of mindfulness is partly because of its non-religious, semi-medical character: it overlaps significantly with cognitive therapy and positive psychology. But, according to critics, both mindfulness and positive psychology (if narrowly conceived) lack one key element: altruism.14 They are mainly about how to make yourself happier, not other people. By contrast, altruism is about caring for others.

Altruism

Matthieu Ricard is an expert in altruism and a Buddhist monk in the Tibetan tradition. He practises Compassion Meditation. When you meet him, he is wearing his robes and you would not believe he was once a promising French molecular biologist. At the age of twenty-six he moved to the Himalayas to be near his spiritual teacher. He hardly visited the West again for the next twenty-five years until he became a part-time French interpreter for the Dalai Lama.

From his early childhood, the Dalai Lama had a strong interest in Western science. As a boy (and at the same time Head of State) he insisted on dismantling his official car to find out how it worked – and then reassembling it. But he was, and remains, a deeply contemplative person, meditating for five hours each day. So he naturally came to wonder if Western science confirms the Buddhist theory of the mind.

To investigate this, the Dalai Lama has been meeting regularly for thirty years with Western scientists, including Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin, to discuss the similarities between Buddhist philosophy and Western cognitive psychology and neuroscience.15 As a result of this contact with the Dalai Lama, Davidson has been leading a research programme into the neuroscience of meditation. At one point in this research, Matthieu Ricard was wired up and, as a result of his exceptional brain measurement, he has been called ‘the happiest man in the world’.

The meetings with the Dalai Lama, run by the Mind & Life Institute, have resulted in a number of excellent publications on such issues as the control of destructive emotions and the practice of caring.16 A key theme of all these books is the necessity for altruism. Neuroscientists have now confirmed that altruism is an intrinsic element in human nature and have found that the human brain includes at least three important circuits. The first two are well recognized in neo-conservative philosophy: they are the ‘appetitive’ and ‘aversive’ circuits. But there is also a third circuit which is ‘affiliative’, or, to use plain English, loving.17

Like all our faculties, this ‘affiliative’ circuit only exists as a potential attribute – it has to be actively cultivated. So our aim should be to carve into ourselves the disposition to love those who come our way. In Ricard’s words, the aim must be ‘unconditional benevolence’.

Conclusions: the new culture

Thus the new culture that is emerging includes a revolutionary insight – that we can gain control over our mental life, at least to some extent. We are not simply receptacles for our emotions; we can make ourselves mentally fit. We can work out mentally, just as we can work out physically.

Physical fitness took off first, but mental health is following hard on its heels. This concept of mind-training offers new hope to those who are struggling with their mental health and is central to treatments such as CBT. But it also offers liberation to all of us. The gentler culture includes at least three complementary elements:

This is not a philosophy of selfish hedonism, but neither is it an austere philosophy of self-sacrifice. We need to care for ourselves, to have fun and to care for others. A wonderful teacher whose work includes all three elements is the Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Born in Vietnam, he tried unsuccessfully to mediate in the Vietnam War, and since then he has lived in exile in France. In 1975 he published The Miracle of Mindfulness – which includes the clearest possible account of the link between mindfulness (as a practice) and ethical living.18

He states, ‘With mindfulness, concentration, and insight, you are capable of generating a feeling of joy and happiness whenever you want. With the energy of mindfulness, you can also handle a painful feeling or emotion.’19 You can, he says, embrace your suffering. According to Thich Nhat Hanh, people say, ‘Don’t just sit there, do something.’ On the contrary, he says, ‘Don’t just do something, sit there.’ Learn to be, as well as to do. The present is all we have. Learn to be present in the present moment. ‘Time is not money; time is life.’

Let me end with the Dalai Lama. Picture him waking each morning at 3.30 a.m. – wherever he is – and beginning to meditate. Each day he begins with the following prayer:20

May I be a guard for those who need protection

A guide for those on the path

May I be a lamp in the darkness

A resting place for the weary

A healing medicine for all who are sick

A vase of plenty, a tree of miracles

And for the boundless multitudes of living beings

May I bring sustenance and awakening.

So now we have the basis for a more spiritual culture – one where people deliberately cultivate in themselves a calm, joyful and loving frame of mind. This includes proper care of our inner selves and a strong desire to help others – to make a difference. Two key features are calm and caring.

Calm: We cultivate the means to calm ourselves and to accept our discontents. We appreciate the wonders of life and savour each moment.

Caring: We deeply desire the happiness of others and aim to promote it (unconditional benevolence). We truly believe that our own feelings are no more important than anyone else’s, and we try to feel what others feel.21

This is not about opting out. It is a philosophy of realistic engagement. As the Serenity Prayer says, we need the courage to change the bad things we can change, the serenity to accept the bad things we cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference.

But what are the prospects for this new, more generous culture – this New Enlightenment? Are the cross-winds too strong? As we shall see in the next chapter, cross-winds abound. But there are also strong currents in our favour.

“I’ve tried a lot of life strategies, and being completely self–serving works best for me.”