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

by Oliver Burkeman

At best, it would appear, happiness can only be glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, not stared at directly. (We tend to remember having been happy in the past much more frequently than we are conscious of being happy in the present.)

it pointed to an alternative approach, a ‘negative path’ to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid.

Acceptance

It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions – or, at the very least, to learn to stop running quite so hard from them. Which is a bewildering thought, and one that calls into question not just our methods for achieving happiness, but also our assumptions about what ‘happiness’ really means.

You’ll find it in the works of the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, who emphasised the benefits of always contemplating how badly things might go. It lies deep near the core of Buddhism, which counsels that true security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity – in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground, and never can.

why a new generation of business thinkers are advising companies to drop their obsession with goalsetting and embrace uncertainty instead;

Alan Watts, echoing Aldous Huxley, labelled ‘the law of reversed effort’, or the ‘backwards law’: the notion that in all sorts of contexts, from our personal lives to politics, all this trying to make everything right is a big part of what’s wrong.

Our efforts at mental suppression fail in the sexual arena, too: people instructed not to think about sex exhibit greater arousal, as measured by the electrical conductivity of their skin, than those not instructed to suppress such thoughts.

A person who has resolved to ‘think positive’ must constantly scan his or her mind for negative thoughts – there’s no other way that the mind could ever gauge its success at the operation – yet that scanning will draw attention to the presence of negative thoughts.

Suppose you decide to follow Dr Schuller’s suggestion and try to eliminate the word ‘impossible’ from your vocabulary, or more generally try to focus exclusively on successful outcomes, and stop thinking about things not working out. As we’ll see, there are all sorts of problems with this approach. But the most basic one is that you may well fail, as a result of the very act of monitoring your success.

Edith Wharton,

am conducting this ritual of deliberate self-humiliation on the instructions of a modern-day psychologist, Albert Ellis, who died in 2007.

Ellis recommended the ‘subway-station exercise’, originally prescribed to his therapy patients in New York,

The results are striking: spending time and energy thinking about how well things could go, it has emerged, actually reduces most people’s motivation to achieve them.

In experiment after experiment, people responded to positive visualisation by relaxing. They seemed, subconsciously, to have confused visualising success with having already achieved it.

‘virtuous’ life – meaning a life proper and fitting to a human – entailed living in accordance with reason. The Roman Stoics added a psychological twist: living virtuously in accordance with reason, they argued, would lead to inner tranquility –‘a state of mind’,

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.

when it comes to feeling upbeat or despondent, it’s our beliefs that really matter. Most of us, the Stoics point out, go through life under the delusion that it is certain people, situations, or events that make us sad, anxious, or angry.

Indeed, nothing outside your own mind can properly be described as negative or positive at all. What actually causes suffering are the beliefs you hold about those things.

‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,’ Shakespeare has Hamlet say, very Stoically indeed.

Or was it more accurate to say that the cause of his anger was his belief that they ought to behave differently?

Which brings us to an important milestone on the negative path to happiness – a psychological tactic that William Irvine argues is ‘the single most valuable technique in the Stoics’ toolkit’. He calls it ‘negative visualisation’. The Stoics themselves, rather more pungently, called it ‘the premeditation of evils’.

Thinking about the possibility of losing something you value shifts it from the backdrop of your life back to centre stage, where it can deliver pleasure once more.

but Epictetus is adamant: the practice will make you love her all the more, while simultaneously reducing the shock should that awful eventuality ever come to pass.

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.

Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle; negative visualisation generates a vastly more dependable calm.

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

Rather, he had been operating under the absolutist conviction that he needed their approval.

We elevate those things we want, those things we would prefer to have, into things we believe we must have; we feel we must perform well in certain circumstances or that other people must treat us well. Because we think these things must occur, it follows that it would be an absolute catastrophe if they did not.

But it is precisely in the context of such extremely undesirable scenarios, Ellis insisted, that the strategy of focusing on the worst-case scenario – and distinguishing between very bad and completely terrible events – really comes into its own. It turns infinite fears into finite ones.

I have been left with no option but to see that my fear of embarrassment was based on profoundly irrational ideas about how terrible it would be if people thought badly of me.

Robert Aitken,

At the root of all suffering, says the second of the four ‘noble truths’ that define Buddhism, is attachment. The fact that we desire some things, and dislike or hate others, is what motivates virtually every human activity.

Rather than merely enjoying pleasurable things during the moments in which they occur, and experiencing the unpleasantness of painful things, we develop the habits of clinging and aversion: we grasp at what we like, trying to hold on to it forever, and push away what we don’t like, trying to avoid it at all costs.

Both constitute at...

suffering is an optional extra, resulting from our attachments, which represent our attempt to try to deny the unavoidable tr...

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.

It was called Ending the Pursuit of Happiness, and its author, a man named Barry Magid, argued that the idea of using meditation to make your life ‘better’ or ‘happier’, in any conventional sense, was a misunderstanding.

Meditation, the way he described it, was a way to stop running. You sat still, and watched your thoughts and emotions and desires and aversions come and go, and you resisted the urge to try to flee from them, to fix them, or to cling to them.

You practised non-attachment, in other words. Whatever came up, negative or positive, you stayed present and observed it.

Steve Hagen says in his pithy guidebook Meditation: Now or Never,

There is more to non-attachment than this – and much more, it’s worth emphasising, to Buddhism than non-attachment. But it is where it all begins.

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

The problem with all these motivational tips and tricks is that they aren’t really about ‘how to get things done’ at all. They’re about how to feel in the mood for getting things done.

Rather, it highlights the way that we tend to confuse acting with feeling like acting, and how most motivational techniques are really designed to change how you feel. They’re built, in other words, on a form of attachment – on strengthening your investment in a specific kind of emotion.

By encouraging an attachment to a particular emotional state, it actually inserts an additional hurdle between you and your goal.

You can note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway.

‘Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.’

Morita was heavily influenced by Buddhism, and especially its perspective on thoughts and emotions as mental weather – as things that happen to us, and with which we can coexist in peace.

‘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.’

Our life experience teaches that it is not necessary to change our feelings in order to take action … Once we learn to accept our feelings, we find that we can take action without changing our feeling-states.’