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January 4 - January 8, 2019
When we are miserable, we are usually tempted to do precisely what, at other times, we know will make it worse. The result can be that we appear to be bringing on our own discomfort.
But what feels right when you’re miserable is what feeds the misery, not what feeds you.”
We can choose what to eat, how to spend our time, how much exercise to get, and what to make priorities in our lives. All of these will influence—within the limits fate imposes upon us—how happy or miserable we become.
Even the factors outside our control may not impose limits that are as rigid as they appear. Some who have gone through horrific tribulations or who labor under what we might imagine to be intolerable circumstances are, despite it all, fairly happy.
As the data on life satisfaction, depression, and suicide all attest, no amount of wealth or good fortune can entirely prevent misery. Our species has a talent for it.
As Daniel Gilbert so admirably described in his 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness, human beings are remarkably poor at guessing what will make them happy in the future. Given that many of our decisions about present action are based on hypothesized future happiness, this means that we, as a species, constantly strike out confidently in precisely the wrong direction.
If we are satisfied with our lives, we will not a feel a burning desire to purchase anything, and then the economy may collapse.
We exist in a fog of messaging designed explicitly to influence our behavior. Not surprisingly, our behavior often shifts in precisely the manner intended. If you can be made to feel sufficiently inferior due to your yellowed teeth, perhaps you will rush to the pharmacy to purchase whitening strips. The lack of any research whatsoever correlating tooth shade with life satisfaction is never mentioned. Having been told one hundred times a day how to be happy, we spend much of our lives buying the necessary accoutrements and feeling disappointed not to discover life satisfaction inside the
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In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis (author of the Narnia books) describes a bus tour of heaven departing daily from the lower reaches of hell. Once there, the tourists are free to step off the bus and stay rather than returning, though few ultimately choose to do so.
It is the road to happiness that is individual, weed-strewn, and overgrown from disuse.
Your sleep schedule. Your level of exercise. Your diet. Your amount of social contact. We’ll give them your job, your boss, your home, your family, your financial situation—everything.
If William is so displeased by his present mood, why does he not simply change his behavior? The answer lies in the interconnections between mood and impulse. As the mood darkens, the natural tendency is to withdraw and self-protect, conserving energy as we retreat into the depths of the cave to recover. William is doing what feels natural to him—so much so that it seems impossible for him to do anything else.
To increase your level of misery, reduce your level of exercise.
Are sedentary people more miserable, or do the miserable exercise less? The correct answer, it appears, is both. This makes the avoidance of exercise particularly potent. Do less exercise and your mood will decline, resulting in a greater tendency to be inactive.
One of the most terrible truths there are.
The mood-raising effect of exercise is approximately as powerful as medication or psychotherapy. Those wishing greater unhappiness in their lives, then, must avoid physical fitness at all costs.
just thirty minutes of exercise three times per week is sufficient to disrupt unhappiness in most people.
Simply adding a single can of soda to your diet (or an equivalent amount of fruit juice) will give you about ten teaspoons of sugar per day—twice the World Health Organization’s recommended daily intake.
In addition, certain dietary deficiencies have been linked (though, in most cases, not conclusively) to reduced energy and mood: Many of the B vitamins, particularly B6 (pyridoxine), B9 (folic acid), and B12 (cobalamin). Vitamin D (though it must be added that most of the body’s D is produced by sun exposure). Omega-3 fatty acids. The research isn’t firm on the matter, but it suggests a link between deficiency and lower mood. Iron. Deficiencies are most likely to appear in women, vegetarians, and athletes.
Consequently, you have an unintentional ally in your quest to lower your mood: the advertising industry. Simply place a notepad by your television, jot down all the products advertised, and use this as your weekly shopping list. Buy these, and you will be imbalanced, mentally and physically, within weeks. Further, you will be well on your way to a lifetime of impairments. Eat what they tell you.
By reducing our hours of restorative sleep, we will reduce our concentration, dull our mood, and become easily overwhelmed by life’s demands. We will be more irritable, less productive, less creative, and more prone to bad decision making.
Don’t have the willpower for this? No problem. Disrupt your sleep more naturally. First, design your bedroom to promote sleeplessness: Buy a cheaper and less comfortable mattress than you can afford. Keep the room too warm. Ensure that intermittent noises from phones, e-mail alerts, and pets happen throughout the night. Have as many flashing LEDs on the walls and ceiling as you can manage. (Ask any hotel designer for advice on this one.)
Sooo true about hotels and their flashing LEDs!
Look at the clock and calculate how many hours remain before you have to get up. Tell yourself that tomorrow you will desperately need to be rested, and that time is slipping away. Ignore the fact that you have survived past sleepless nights and that trying to force yourself to sleep is the best way to stay awake. Jettison any sense of equanimity and replace it with stressed-out urgency. This should allow you to lie there wide-eyed and alert until dawn.
The thirty- to forty-five-minute “power nap” tends to be restorative for most people, so instead you will want the two-hour (or longer) “misery nap” that occupies much of the afternoon. This will leave you feeling groggy and unproductive, and it will make it even easier for you to lie in bed sleepless later that evening.
What about 60-90 minute naps I have most often? Are they healthy or unhealthy?
The citizens of most Western countries spend significantly more time watching their screens than interacting with their partners, friends, or children.
viewing can become habitual, nibbling away at your life until you believe wholeheartedly that you do not have time for any of the things that might lift your mood: learning, reading, exercising, contributing to your community, seeing friends and family, cooking, or cultivating your interests and hobbies.
How should you spend your time online? Surely you do not need advice on this front, but here are some options: Read the news in endless and irrelevant detail. Tell yourself you are enriching your life by learning about Belgian political sex scandals. Update social media with important information about your life—what you had for lunch, the flu symptoms you had yesterday—and share the adorable cat video someone posted earlier. Surf randomly from page to page, chasing forgotten tidbits of information, like the names of cast members from Eight is Enough or the date that Dynel was first patented.
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To walk the path of misery, it turns out that walking isn’t required at all. One must merely sit, spellbound, before a flickering screen that feels so important, so encompassing, that you simply do not have space in your life for anything else.
It is widely believed that money cannot buy happiness, but lack of money can definitely purchase misery.
Work was subservient to the demands of life. In the confusion of modern culture, we have succeeded in turning this idea on its head. It is now the function of the person to serve the work and to do so with as small an expectation of reward as possible. The economy is not an instrument for the enhancement of human welfare. Human welfare is an instrument for the enhancement of the economy.
Many find fulfillment by striving mightily to excel in their roles—seeing in the completion of a condominium project the creation of homes, in the sale of insurance policies the prevention of financial disaster, in the provision of health care the enhancement of lives. But in these cases, people view the work as their own goal, rather than seeing themselves merely as tools for completing the goals of others. To enhance misery, you should instead see yourself as a mere hammer in the hands of the real builder—your boss, the business owner, or the faceless shareholders. Or as the nail being
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First, you must not ask yourself why it is so important to learn about tragedies (coups, distant earthquakes, celebrity firings, election results) the moment they occur. The fact that such reports provide you no useful information will only undermine your commitment to viewing. Instead, retain a firm belief in the importance and relevance of “breaking news” and being up to the minute. Second, you must not ask about the actual information content of the stories presented. They must be seen as worthy in their own right, not because they actually tell you anything. Repetition should be tolerated
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SMART rules, which dictate that effective immediate goals should be: Specific. You know how you will accomplish the task. “Take the number 19 bus to the Aquatic Center.” Measurable. You will know whether or not you have succeeded. “Get in pool and swim one lap.” Action-oriented. Your goal is to do something, not to think or feel a particular way. “Swim the lap—even if I hate it and think my bathing cap looks stupid.” Realistic. You already know you can do it, even if you don’t feel particularly well. “I could swim twenty laps not long ago; I’m absolutely certain I can swim at least one.”
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Instead, make all of your immediate goals VAPID: Vague. You should be unclear how you are going to complete the goal. If you want to cross-country ski, you should forget all about looking into lessons, thinking about how to get there, or ensuring you have the right clothing. Amorphous. The finish line for your immediate goal should be indistinct, so your depressive self can disqualify any progress you have made. Setting a goal to “work on the back garden,” for example, allows you to criticize yourself for not finishing everything, thus eliminating any of the satisfaction you might otherwise
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Continued in the next highlight.
Irrelevant. Tell yourself that if you achieve your ultimate goal of overcoming social anxiety, you will once again be able to visit your bank. You should therefore lock yourself at home studying investment strategy as a “necessary” prerequisite. Delayed. Avoid setting a specific time for the completion of your goal. Instead, resolve to get to work the moment you “feel like it.” Because it is vanishingly unlikely that you will ever feel like re-caulking the bathroom tile, you can ensure that it will never be done.
Continuation of the previous highlight.
One of the most potent strategies thus far studied is also an arrestingly simple one. Lying in bed, before going to sleep, you would call to mind three things about the day that you enjoyed or appreciated. These events can be worldly—perhaps, for example, a peace treaty appeared in the news or a friend received a promotion. But most of the events should be personal: a tasty bagel eaten at breakfast, a compliment received from a friend, a bookshelf newly dusted, a drive through morning rush hour that was easier than usual. Even on an otherwise terrible day, there are usually at least some
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To get people to remain focused a bit longer on the exercise, Seligman advises them to write the events down in a bedside notebook and to contemplate how they came about—in effect, to make attributions for the events. They might credit the bagel to the skill of the baker, the compliment to a friend’s kindness, the clean bookshelf to their own efforts, the light traffic to people taking a long weekend. Some of these attributions might be internal, others external. The point is to occupy the mind with these positive events for at least a few minutes.
The Three Things exercise pushes the filter the other way, forcing one to pay attention, however briefly, to the more welcome elements of life. Once people are accustomed to the nighttime exercise, they can, without prompting, begin doing the same thing throughout the day, in effect noticing and storing up material for their bedtime ritual. I should remember getting this check in the mail; I can use it as one of my three things tonight.
The better your life is, the more miserable you can make yourself by the contemplation of losing it all.
Your emotions are governed not by the circumstances of your life, but by the circumstances to which you pay attention.
Cheerful, unworried people (those whose mental state resembles that of a golden retriever) tend to split their expectations in two: a minimum level of performance about which they would feel content an aspirational level, which they may not seriously expect to reach and to which they do not feel extremely attached They reveal these twin achievement lines when they talk about their expectations. “I’m just hoping not to fall out of the boat and drown. But it would be fun to find out I’m great at this.” “It would be nice to ace this exam, but I’ll be happy just to pass it.”
It's good to have something in common with goldren retrievers :)
Pitching their minimum expectations low, they are almost always relaxed and sanguine about their outcomes.
No matter how good a weight lifter you are, there will always be a tonnage that is beyond you.
People who adopt reasonable standards generally achieve as much or more than perfectionists, because they get a motivational boost from success, enabling them to devote more energy to their efforts. Perfectionism imposes a fear of trying out new things out of a knowledge that you will not excel on your first try. This results in a restricted life.
Perfectionism can cause you to spend a lot of time erasing minor flaws that no one else can see, inadvertently annoying people with your slowness and preventing you from shifting to other challenges.
But... at least there are no typos in the report! Doesn't it matter? :(
The truth is, people with good self-esteem are not constantly evaluating themselves. It’s the ones without it who do this. Our culture teaches us that having self-esteem is an active process of building ourselves up. It isn’t. Cats, three-year-olds, and adults with good self-esteem aren’t doing much of anything—they’re just focused on the task at hand. The active process is to have low self-esteem, to be constantly tearing ourselves down. When we wake up in the morning, before our mind starts going, our self-esteem is fine. We only begin feeling inadequate when we start rehearsing the negative
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For most of human history, we appear to have lived in tribes of seventy-five to 150 people. Those who could not handle the complexity of the relationships would go off on their own. Lions need to eat, after all.
In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam has documented the decline of social groups such as the Rotary Club, churches, and, yes, bowling leagues in Western societies—this at a time of coincident rises in the rates of depression.
switch on the computer, and kid yourself that you have substituted in-the-flesh social contact with the pixelated kind. It is one of the most effective routes to unhappiness that exists.
Hi there, my pixelated kind!
We all play roles in the world, and none of us reveals everything. But the more you adopt a disguise, the more you deny yourself; and the more you pretend to be something other than what you are, the more unhappy you are likely to become. In some ways, this can be more painful than simple isolation. Rather than sitting alone at home with a bare cupboard, you find yourself hungrily eyeing a heavily laden smorgasbord locked behind glass.
By marking out an insurmountable division between acceptable and unacceptable individuals, you can create the cozily claustrophobic sensation of being “we few, we lucky few” against the marauding inhuman hordes outside your social network—a feeling mimicked by films about the housebound survivors of zombie plagues.
I tried to do exactly this while in high school. Luckily, my friends were too clever to join me in this venture.
