The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

by Oliver Burkeman

The startling conclusion at which they had all arrived, in different ways, was this: that the effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness – that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.

It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death.

‘the harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed’.

The white bear challenge, after all, seems like a metaphor for much of what goes wrong in life: all too often, the outcome we’re seeking to avoid is exactly the one to which we seem magnetically lured.

‘the imp of the perverse’:

What is going on here, Wegner argues, is a malfunctioning of the uniquely human capacity for metacognition, or thinking about thinking. ‘Metacognition’, Wegner explains, ‘occurs when thought takes itself as an object.’ Mainly, it’s an extremely useful skill: it is what enables us to recognise when we are being unreasonable, or sliding into depression, or being afflicted by anxiety, and then to do something about it. But when we use metacognitive thoughts directly to try to control our other, everyday, ‘object-level’ thoughts – by suppressing images of white bears, say, or replacing gloomy thoughts with happy ones – we run into trouble. ‘Metathoughts are instructions we give ourselves about our object-level thinking,’ as Wegner puts it, ‘and sometimes we just can’t follow our own instructions.’

Bereaved people who make the most effort to avoid feeling grief, research suggests, take the longest to recover from their loss.

you may well fail, as a result of the very act of monitoring your success.

This problem of self-sabotage through self-monitoring is not the only hazard of positive thinking.

For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word ‘happiness’. And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one’s circumstances. One way to do this, the Stoics argued, was by turning towards negative emotions and experiences; not shunning them, but examining them closely instead.

Where was the merit in trying to convince yourself that things would turn out for the best, when there was so much evidence that they might not?

What actually causes suffering are the beliefs you hold about those things.

Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared, and more acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can’t persuade himself to believe are good. (And such things will happen.)

The Stoics themselves, rather more pungently, called it ‘the premeditation of evils’.

The premeditation of evils is the way to replace these irrational notions with more rational judgments: spend time vividly imagining exactly how wrong things could go in reality, and you will usually find that your fears were exaggerated.

The only things we can truly control, the Stoics argue, are our judgments – what we believe – about our circumstances. But this isn’t bad news. From the Stoic perspective, as we’ve already seen, our judgments are what cause our distress – and so they’re all that we need to be able to control in order to substitute serenity for suffering.

Maybe it’s an opportunity to engage in the ‘premeditation of evils’: what’s the absolute worst that could happen as a result of this?

Now that I’m here, rather than anywhere else, here in this time and this place – what can I do?

For the Stoics, then, our judgments about the world are all that we can control, but also all that we need to control in order to be happy; tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones. And dwelling on the worst-case scenario, the ‘premeditation of evils’, is often the best way to achieve this – even to the point, Seneca suggests, of deliberately experiencing those ‘evils’, so as to grasp that they might not be as bad as you’d irrationally feared.

Non-attachment need not mean withdrawing from life, or suppressing natural impulses, or engaging in punishing self-denial. It simply means approaching the whole of life – inner thoughts and emotions, outer events and circumstances – without clinging or aversion.

To live non-attachedly is to feel impulses, think thoughts, and experience life without becoming hooked by mental narratives about how things ‘should’ be, or should never be, or should remain forever. The perfectly non-attached Buddhist would be simply, calmly present, and non-judgmentally aware.

Seeing thoughts as similar to the other five senses makes non-attachment seem much more approachable as a goal.

The perfect Stoic adapts his or her thinking so as to remain undisturbed by undesirable circumstances; the perfect Buddhist sees thinking itself as just another set of circumstances, to be non-judgmentally observed.

the mind is so conditioned to attaching to storylines that it seizes upon whatever’s available.

Taking a non-attached stance towards procrastination, by contrast, starts from a different question: Who says you need to wait until you ‘feel like’ doing something in order to start doing it?

If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you’re procrastinating on as passing weather, you’ll realise that your reluctance about working isn’t something that needs to be eradicated or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway.

‘People … think that they should always like what they do, and that their lives should be trouble-free,’ Morita wrote. ‘Consequently, their mental energy is wasted by their impossible attempts to avoid feelings of displeasure or boredom.’

Future, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured. – Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

In singling out one goal, or set of goals, and striving to meet it, you will invariably exert an effect on other, interlinked aspects of the thing you’re trying to change.

(It’s really quite tricky, when you try it, to think compulsively about right now.)

And if the most radical proponents of the ‘negative path’ are to be believed, in turning towards insecurity we may come to understand that security itself is a kind of illusion – and that we were mistaken, all along, about what it was we thought we were searching for.

‘Security is both a feeling and a reality,’ as Schneier puts it, ‘and they’re not the same.’

The more radical possibility – the one that takes us to the core of the ‘negative’ approach to happiness – is that there might be something more fundamentally problematic about the goal of security; and that real happiness might be dependent on being willing to face, and to tolerate, insecurity and vulnerability.

We seek financial security, yet above a certain threshold level, more money doesn’t translate into more happiness.

‘To be vulnerable’, argue the psychotherapists Hal and Sidra Stone, ‘is to be without defensive armour, to be authentic and present … when we are able to feel our vulnerability, we are able to experience the full range of our reactions to the world around us.’

The critics of goalsetting are effectively proposing a new attitude towards failure, too, since an improvisational, trial-and-error approach necessarily entails being frequently willing to fail.

It is worth bearing in mind, moreover, that virtually any advice about how to succeed, in life or work, is at constant risk of being undermined by survivor bias.

I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive.

For Becker, mental illness is a malfunctioning of the internal death-denial machinery. Depressed people are depressed because they try but repeatedly fail to shield themselves, as others manage to do, from the truth that they are not, in reality, cosmically significant heroes – and that pretty soon they’re going to die.

But Yalom is talking about a transformation that redefines what constitutes the ‘important stuff’. When you really face mortality, the ultimate and unavoidable worst-case scenario, everything changes. ‘All external expectations, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important,’

Start thinking this way, Yalom points out, and it becomes a virtuous circle. Living more meaningfully will reduce your anxiety about the possibility of future regret at not having lived meaningfully – which will, in turn, keep sapping death of its power to induce anxiety.

You need not engage in cemetery vigils to practise memento mori, however. You can start much smaller. The psychologist Russ Harris suggests a simple exercise: imagine you are eighty years old – assuming you’re not eighty already, that is; if you are, you’ll have to pick an older age – and then complete the sentences ‘I wish I’d spent more time on…’ and ‘I wish I’d spent less time on…’. This turns out to be a surprisingly effective way to achieve mortality awareness in short order. Things fall into place. It becomes far easier to follow Lauren Tillinghast’s advice – to figure out what, specifically, you might do in order to focus on life’s flavours, so as to improve your chances of reaching death having lived life as fully and as deeply as possible.

Sometimes the most valuable of all talents is to be able not to seek resolution; to notice the craving for completeness or certainty or comfort, and not to feel compelled to follow where it leads.