Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm.
—Euripides
The window of my office looks out on Vancouver General Hospital, where the main tower rises over the city. It has a stepped profile, providing terraces on several of the upper floors. When the tower was built, the top floor was originally planned to be for the administration. The president of the hospital would look out over the campus from sixteen floors up.
The hospital staff rebelled. They knew what they wanted on the top floor, and they won. Palliative Care. Today, this is where patients go when the time for active treatment is over. It’s easy to imagine that it would be a desperately sad and pain-filled place. For the most part, though, it isn’t. There are kitchens and lounges, an extensive rooftop garden, and an air of relaxed calm. The primary agenda is comfort, contemplation, and preparation for the closing moments of a life.
The tower sits on the upper edge of a slope that leads down to the waters of an inlet. It is the tallest structure in that area. From Palliative Care, patients and their visitors get one of the longest, widest, most unobstructed views in the city.
This is appropriate. It is a place to take the long view.
I’ve spent a lot of time there. With family, with a friend whose brain tumor resisted all treatment, and with patients.
It’s true what they say. No one wishes that they’d spent more time at the office. Nor that they’d accumulated more toys. Nor that the lawn was weed-free.
Typically they look back with a mixture of satisfaction and bewilderment. Satisfaction: time spent with friends and family. Contributions made. Experiences lived.
And bewilderment: “What was I doing? Why did I think those things were so important that I spent most of my life on them?” Overwork. Television. Striving for promotions. Obsessing over the news. Worrying what others might think. Putting off life, putting off life, putting off life.
Until now. Here. Where there is only one task. To be here. Be present. Until they can’t be here anymore.
It is as though you have spent your life trying to discern something that sits mysteriously behind a curtain, and when you arrive at the top floor, they lift the curtain and show you what was there all along. You don’t have to wait for whatever comes after your last breath to find out the meaning of the story. You find out there, in that bed. It was people. It was friendship. It was connection. It was becoming who you really are. It was the experience, the full experience, of life itself.
Generally the inhabitants of the top floor have journeyed beyond distant desires. But there is a wistfulness, a wish that they could go back in time and try the whole thing again, with the curtain raised this time. They can’t, but they could teach.
It’s a shame, in a way, that the ward is way up there. Maybe it should be in the hospital’s lobby, where people could stop by and be reminded. Maybe it should be at an intersection, in a big-box store, on a subway platform. They would look out calmly from their beds and gaze at us. Remember. Remember. You’ll be here sooner than you think.
Sit in a therapist’s chair for a while. Thirty years, perhaps. Keep a notepad by your side, and list the ways that life can go suddenly, unexpectedly, uncontrollably wrong. It will be a long list and, just when you think you have heard every conceivable form of tragedy and misfortune, someone sits down and gives you four more. Life is difficult and unpredictable. Much of our personal unhappiness will arise from events over which we have little control. This list is what, in the introduction to this little book, we decided to call “Column A.”
It is tempting to believe that even our day-to-day unhappiness is of this sort. Things happen, and we react. There’s nothing we can do. But if we look carefully, we see that there is also a Column B. These are the downward influences that are at least partially under our own control; the product of our own choices and actions. Hostilities expressed. Flawed impulses obeyed. Addictions fed. Avoidance indulged.
Add Column B to Column A, and you have the weight that we carry on our shoulders. We’d like to believe that it is entirely Column A that weighs us down, and at times, it is. But for most of us, most of the time, Column B contributes just as much. Especially when we add the influence of our thinking: the things we ruminate over, the people we take for granted, the stories about our misfortune that we create in our minds.
We will never shrug off all of that weight. But we can realize that at least some of it is optional.
All right. Here’s the wink at last.
You and I both know that you don’t really aspire to the goals set out in this book. You’ve explored the valleys enough. You’re looking for the mountaintops instead. So what have we been doing here?
We spend our lives stumbling through the underbrush, trying to find the path to fulfillment, contentment, or, yes, happiness. Most of the time, we know we’re not on the trail, but it’s devilishly hard to see with any clarity. Now and then, it can be useful to turn around and look in the other direction. By doing so, we can notice the general angle of the route, and we can see how much of the time we have been walking downward instead of up.
In our post-hospitalization depression groups, clients were asked to contemplate what they would do if they wanted to feel worse. This was not a goal any of them truly held. They were desperate to feel better. Just like us, much of the time. They were routinely surprised that the menu of strategies to darken their lives often summed up their daily schedule. It’s tempting to strike one’s forehead or curse perverse human nature at this realization—or to suspect that evil forces within secretly want us to be miserable.
They don’t. The suite of emotions with which we are equipped try to steer us away from the painful and toward the pleasurable. As far as psychology has been able to determine, we have no instinct toward self-destruction or misery—regardless of what Freud, depression statistics, or the grim nightly news might have to say about it.
So why do we find ourselves behaving so often in a manner that any sane observer could tell us will make us feel worse? There are many factors at play. Let’s just consider four of them.
Much of the problem lies in the fact that many acts (eating a bowl of chocolate-covered coffee beans, snapping at one’s spouse, neglecting to return to work after lunch) have both positive and negative elements that shift over time. We cannot choose a course of action simply because “it makes me feel good.” The same act makes us feel both good and bad at different moments.
Avoiding the walk over a high bridge satisfies the phobic’s desire not to feel anxiety, but doing so repeatedly tends to reinforce and magnify the fear. Having another drink enhances the experience of the raucous bar but detracts from the pleasure of the following day. The chocolate-covered beans are nice on the tongue, but eating too many of them induces unpleasant anxiety.
Emotional pain, then, often arises when we choose the immediate pleasure over the long-term (and longer-lasting) discomfort that will result. We give ourselves a little boost followed by a deeper dip, then recover by giving ourselves another little boost, and we take another step downward. We pluck roses all along the road into misery, never realizing where we are headed.
We often think of sadness as an end state—the result of painful experiences or of our own poor judgment. But emotion itself feeds back and influences thought and behavior. When we are feeling low, our motivational matrix shifts dramatically. Our horizon shortens, tempting us to act based on short-term outcomes more than we usually would. “I don’t care! I just need to survive the morning.”
But the options that seem attractive can morph as well. Ordinarily, a densely packed and unfailingly social restaurant might draw us in. When we are sad or depressed, however, we will feel drawn to our own home, where we can simply thaw out some leftovers and be left in peace. Normally the prospect of a run by the ocean might seem idyllic. When we are overtaken with ennui, such a pursuit may only seem pointless and tiring. The resulting choices—inactivity, isolation, procrastination—often serve only to magnify the intensity of the negative state.
This phenomenon can be so pronounced that I offer it as a general principle to client suffering from misery. When you are feeling down, the majority of temptations you experience will lead you even lower.
It is as though our emotions mutiny and jump ship, switching their allegiance to our worst enemy: despair. By following the siren song of their exhortations (“Call in sick and close the curtains, you’ll feel better!”), we will only erode our mood further.
Instead, when our mood darkens we need to treat our instincts with suspicion. Usually we will experience relief only when we learn to act against our temptations, often engaging in what psychologist Marsha Linehan (developer of dialectical behavior therapy) calls Opposite Action. We feel tempted to withdraw, and so we approach instead. We feel exhausted, but we use this as our cue to get more exercise. Itching to defend ourselves by attacking others, we instead cultivate compassion. Agitated and antsy, we take ten minutes to sit quietly and meditate.
We notice the impulse, know that it leads downward, and turn right rather than left.
As discussed earlier in this book, psychologist Daniel Gilbert has summarized the literature indicating that humans are remarkably poor at predicting how future actions will affect mood. Basing much or most of our behavior on these predictions, we all too frequently find ourselves worse off than when we began. We sacrifice time with loved ones to pursue ever-larger heaps of money; we liquidate our savings to buy unsatisfying toys; we gamble our marriage on the momentary excitements of an affair.
But what other option do we have? Our predictive abilities may be poor, but surely we have to base our decisions on something. If not on our clouded vision of the future, then on what?
Perhaps the past has much to teach us. Relatively few of our decisions are about entirely novel realms of activity. We can look back over our shoulder at how things have gone for us in similar situations previously. Although a three-week golfing vacation sounds lovely to our overworked self, we can remember past occasions when, after three days of golf, we were bored to tears. When tempted by the aroma of coffee in the evening, we can recall past sleepless hyper-caffeinated nights. While experiencing the longing for a new vehicle, we can remind ourselves how short-lived the high of purchasing the last one was. Admiring the lusty twinkle in the eye of the bike gang member, we can remind ourselves of how previous experiences with such men have turned out.
Experience, as they say, can be a great teacher. But only if it is invited into the room and asked what it knows. It dresses dowdily, however, and often seems a bit too sober and dull. Not nearly as sexy or exciting as the scantily clad future, which beckons to us with such promise. Learning from experience—one of the prime pillars of wisdom—means turning away from our illusions and taking a clear-eyed look at the past.
While we are contemplating how to arrange a happy and contented future for ourselves, we sit surrounded by our culture. The culture makes suggestions and threatens us with expulsion if we do not obey. Indeed, one way of defining a culture is by its set of ideas about how to live or have a good life. We have no shortage of advice on the matter. It can be instructive to spend an entire day listening intently for the messages the culture gives us about how to be happier—and then to analyze each one to see whether it is accurate.
One of the main problems we face is that, although many of our culture’s messages are framed as ways to enhance our lives, very few of them are actually designed with that outcome in mind. Messages are formulated and delivered with other intentions. Chief among these is the aim of selling products of various kinds. If you buy this dish soap, you will be as cheerful as the househusband in the advertisement. If you watch this television news program (and its commercials) you will be better informed about the world. If you vote for this candidate, a virtual paradise on Earth will be founded, and corruption will forevermore be a thing of the past.
Messages from other sources tempt us with insider knowledge that will make us part of a select group. Adopt these beliefs, and your place in the afterlife will be assured. Learn about various conspiracies, and the veils of illusion will fall from your eyes. Simultaneously, the conversion of another acolyte will serve to reassure your informants that they themselves are on the right track and not, after all, deluded.
Messages from our own social tribes, while typically well intentioned, may simultaneously have the agenda of shaping our behavior to suit other needs—whether or not this is intended or realized by those delivering them. If we go into law, we may satisfy our father’s long-held but never-realized ambition to be a lawyer. If we lose weight, we may help our cousin put to rest her suspicion that her own obsession with appearance is unhealthy. If we conform socially, physically, and professionally, we can reassure our peers that they have made the right decisions—and compromises—in their own lives.
The result is that the messages we hear almost always have a dual intent. The surface message is usually “Here’s how to be happier,” but the hidden and hard-to-discern intent skews the message. Unless we are able to divine and evaluate the alternative motives, the message itself may take us in the wrong direction.
For all of these reasons, we frequently find ourselves walking the trail from misery to fulfillment, but in the wrong direction. We can attribute this to our self-destructiveness, or to the death instinct, or to secondary gain, or simply to being stupid. But these explanations are generally untrue and serve only to obscure the real forces that lead us astray.
Far better than insulting ourselves or forcing ourselves to feel guilty or foolish is to adopt a posture of detached interest. Rather than panicking, we can simply sit back and notice, calmly, that we are once again in a position of deep emotional discomfort. It has visited us before, this feeling. The very fact that we recognize it tells us that we survived it the last time it stopped by. This means we are most likely to survive it this time as well. No need to fear it. Just as we might notice that our keys are missing and calmly retrace our steps since we last saw them, we can think back and see whether any of our own actions or ways of thinking may have helped bring us to this unwelcome destination.
One of the best strategies for cultivating this ability is to do just what you have been doing as you have been reading this book. Imagine that, for some perverse reason, you wanted to feel worse, not better. What would you do? What have you done in the past? How effective has that been at lowering your mood?
One of my earliest therapy supervisors succinctly told me the point of insight-oriented psychotherapy. Psychological defenses against reality work well only if they operate outside conscious awareness. Once you become aware of them and can see them operating, they lose much of their effectiveness. If you know that you are denying reality, it becomes more difficult to do so.
The same can be said of the mental distortions identified by cognitive therapists: they work best when we aren’t paying attention. Once we know that we routinely engage in black-and-white thinking, the shades of grey slip into view. If we know we are catastrophizing, the milder and less melodramatic reality becomes apparent.
Similarly, we can develop an awareness of our own faulty wiring that gets activated when we search for comfort and fulfillment. By understanding our favored paths downward—and where they lead—we can catch ourselves before we set out. Failing this, we can notice when we are marching in the wrong direction. Rather than responding with confusion (Wait—why isn’t this working?), we can sit back with amused recognition and gently turn ourselves around. Ahh, right. You’ve been here before, old friend. Let’s go the other way.
The path upward is almost always more challenging to take than the descending route. The ladders are not so easy as the snakes. But the ladders lead to the sunlight and a lovely, expansive view.
How can you make use of the material in this book? One method is to rate your own performance in recent years on the various misery-inducing strategies described in the preceding chapters. You might use a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 would mean “I never do this” and 10 would mean “I seem to do this constantly.” Notice the items for which you give yourself more than 1 point. These are ways that you may inadvertently be serving your misery more than your best and happiest self.
Ask yourself what the upward path might look like. How could you get yourself onto it? For example, perhaps when life deals you a series of blows, you typically find yourself gorging on junk food—which serves only to make you feel ill and bloated. The temptation has been there in the past and will probably return next time as well. Rather than simply hoping that this doesn’t happen, what could you do to intervene when it does?
You can also monitor your external stresses—the elements of life that are beyond your control—and make a point of taking note when they come at you too hard or too quickly. Knowing your attraction to junk food at such times, you could increase your vigilance for impulse purchases at the grocery store, making more of a point of keeping to your shopping list. You could buy snack food that will do you less harm or that you do not find quite so tempting. You could also give yourself permission to go out for fast food now and then—but perhaps not quite as often as your impulses might dictate.
In many cases, this will involve putting the brakes on the downhill slide. But you can also push yourself to turn around and move toward a happier state instead. You could make a point of taking time to cook healthy meals. You could ensure that you have a set of recipes, clearly bookmarked and accessible, that you know how to make. You could treat yourself to dinners out at restaurants that you know serve healthy food. And you could make yourself walk to them.
If, when feeling down, you notice that you compare yourself unfavorably against others more than usual (see lesson 23, “Measure Up and Measure Down”), use this knowledge. Knowing that you will be tempted to avoid social occasions, you could swim against the tide and push yourself to attend them instead. Maintain an awareness of the impulse to find high outliers (the best looking, the most successful, the funniest, the most knowledgeable) alongside whom you can make yourself feel deficient. Notice your mind searching them out. No need to chastise yourself for it. Take note of the characteristics (height? athletic ability? income?) that are most magnetic and potent.
Then, very deliberately, measure yourself against the entire group, not just that outlier. And give yourself permission to score in the bottom 10 percent on at least some variables without fleeing. To the degree you are able, turn the coin of envy over to its flip side: admiration. Forgive yourself for finding this difficult. Then do it again. These muscles, long unused, will protest at first but can strengthen with practice.
For each of your most prominent downward temptations, develop a plan to arrest the slide and turn in the opposite direction. Do not attempt to put these plans into effect all at once. Spreading your efforts across too many fronts is itself a trap. Work on no more than two or three tendencies at a time. When they become a bit easier (no one ever fully masters or erases them), take on new ones.
When you know there are temptations that are simply too powerful to resist, simply acknowledge the choice point that you are sliding past.
Do so in an accepting manner. It is a choice. You have the right to make the choice you have made, and you have only so much strength to push for change. But by becoming increasingly aware of the fork in the road, you lay the groundwork for someday taking the other path. You can also feel less helpless in the face of your own negative emotions. Well, I knew that watching television all night wasn’t a solution, and it wasn’t. I know that even more now.
We will not eliminate negative emotion from our lives. Some pain is caused by our own actions or ways of thinking. Much is not.
A young intern I once supervised had led a fortunate life. She had never failed at anything significant. She had never attended a funeral. She had never been dumped. When she saw depressed people she found their despair hard to grasp. What was their problem? Life just didn’t seem to be so difficult.
I took a page from therapists of the past and asked her what she most wanted for herself—what she would ask for if given a single selfish wish. She hesitated, but she agreed with my suggestion that she might ask for a long, long life with no significant illness. “A great wish,” I said. “But notice what happens if it’s granted. You will outlive everyone you ever loved. Your parents, siblings, your spouse, your children. Every home will fall into disrepair and decay. Having gained a long life, you will lose or bury everything that means anything to you. And that’s what happens if you get your wish! If you don’t, then everyone says goodbye to you instead, and you lose them anyway.”
This, needless to say, she found a bit of a downer. But she could see that there is, behind all the joy and fun of life, an essential element of sadness and impermanence. Life is inherently difficult. Though it had not, as yet, been so for her, it would be eventually. None of us escapes that reality. We will feel sadness, grief, loss, fear, and every other challenging emotion.
But we will also live our lives in such a way as to make them more difficult and less fulfilling than they really need to be. This small book is designed to help identify some of the ways that we might do so. By becoming conscious of them, we may find it just a little bit easier to take the other road. Perhaps, as a result, the barriers that prevent us from fully developing our contributions to the world will become a little less daunting. I hope that you have found it useful.
Or maybe you were serious. You hopped this bus tour of hell genuinely hoping we would take you there. If so, good news: our tour has concluded. We have arrived. Please check your seats and take your belongings with you as you leave the bus. Stay as long as you like.
No need to put your coat on. It’s warm out there.