Pursuit of Happy

When you tell people you’re interested in Positive Psychology, they usually ask what that is. When you tell them it’s the psychology of what makes us happy and how we can actively become happier, they look at you funny. Some people think those of us concerned with our own happiness are selfish. It’s like those robber barons on Wall Street that put thousands of people out of work to balloon their own bank accounts: if you’re trying to make your life better, you must not be interested in helping others. Which is a load of garbage, and I’ll tell you why.

Because when you get down, you die.

When you lose confidence, you stop moving. When you stop moving, you stop existing. Eventually, you curl up in a ball and the world begins to flow over you, crushing you flat under its giant, dispassionate boots. And once you’re flat enough, you die.

Let’s say you put a great deal of effort into getting a promotion. It would mean a whole new world of responsibility and financial benefits. You would enjoy it. You would be good at it. There’s no downside here.

Then somebody else gets the job. How do you react? Do you let it beat you down? Do you see it as the once perfect shot you had at happiness, now gone forever? Do you curl up under your desk in a fetal position? Or even worse, do you keep showing up for work day after day, slowing losing energy, confidence and productivity until eventually they take you out behind the building and put you out of their misery?

When you get down, you die.

I’ve said it before and I’m pleased to discover it’s still true: optimism is a bullet-proof vest for life. Learn to cultivate it, especially if your natural stores are pretty low. You may not accomplish everything you set out to do, but you will accomplish things. Great things.

This is a pretty down post so far, so I’ll leave you with the other side of the argument, the optimistic side…

When you get up, you start to live.

When my kids have a cold, my wife is very diligent about making sure they get their medicine when they’re supposed to. My kids naturally resist: even though children’s meds don’t taste very bad anymore, they’ve decided they don’t like them. However, when my wife has a cold, she’s very erratic about taking her own meds, for the same reason as my kids are. Why is that?

Like Trumps Need

Why is it that she’s so much better about taking care of our kids’ health than she is her own? Is it because she doesn’t care about her own health as much as theirs? Well, she’s a mom, so maybe that’s part of it. But I think the main reason is the different mindsets she has when dispensing medicine and when taking it.

When it’s the kids who need the meds, the question that goes through her head is : do they need it? But when it’s her own meds, that question gets drowned out by a question we’ve made a habit of asking about every choice in our lives: do I like it?

Most self-help books will tell you the way to happiness is to increase the number of things you enjoy doing and decrease the number you don’t. This makes perfect sense, and I try to do that as much as possible.

But what about those unpleasant tasks you know are necessary? The ones that you know will help down the road (your symptoms will go away) but are unpleasant now (blicky medicine taste)?

Get Outside Yourself

The key to taking care of these things without making yourself feel like a martyr or a victim of circumstance is to shift your attention outside yourself. You need to stop asking the question do I like it? The only way to do that (because it’s impossible to just “stop thinking” something, you can only replace it with a better thought) is to focus on aspects of the unpleasant task itself:

• What are the benefits of being done with this?
• How can I do this most efficiently?
• What’s the first step?
• How long will this actually take, anyway?

These sorts of questions focus your attention on the doing of the task and help you avoid thinking about how you’re feeling about the task. How can I make this as painless as possible? (which sounds similar to the ones above) doesn’t accomplish the same goal, because it keeps you focused on your present enjoyment. Making a task “more pleasant” usually makes it take longer, too.

Thinking about the first step has the effect of committing yourself to actually doing the thing, which puts the question of whether you’ll do it behind you, where it belongs. It puts you in action mode.

Examining how long it will take is usually relaxing, because one aspect of unpleasant tasks is that we usually overestimate how long they will take, mainly because time tends to crawl (at the dentist’s office, while cleaning your room/garage, etc). Doing an honest assessment of your estimated time of completion can be encouraging. After all, even the nastiest medicine only takes a few seconds to gulp down, and then you’re on with your life. Sacrificing the next few hours to coughing and runny nose seems silly in order to avoid a few seconds of utter nastiness.

Focusing on the benefits of being done seems to violate Get Outside Yourself rule, but what’s it’s doing is focusing on your happiness in the future and getting yourself out of the present. This makes you goal-oriented instead of process-oriented, and for unpleasant tasks, this is the way to be.

DRiVE It Home

The section on DRiVE (Distance, Replace, Visualize, Emotionalize) from my post on How to Be Happy in 10 Seconds Flat gives a more powerful process for doing this, when the above alone isn’t enough:

• Distance yourself from do I like it? by recognizing the thought as something separate from you. You can choose to think whatever you want.
• Replace it with one of the more productive thoughts from above.
• Visualize the results of the action as if it had already happened.
• Emotionalize that vision by experiencing the feelings you will experience when it’s done.

Summary

Once you’ve decided an activity is unpleasant, your goal is to drown out will I like it? with more productive questions geared toward getting it done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Get your thoughts away from yourself and onto the task and it will be done (and you’ll be reaping the benefits) in no time. When you find yourself still having trouble, DRiVE it home with more powerful happiness techniques.

Today I gave my fifth speech at Toastmasters. It was on the subject of happiness: how to get it and how not to get it.

The webcomic I refer to is this one. (warning: profanity) I also discuss Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow

Like anybody else, I love big, showy successes. You put the coin in the slot, pull the lever and every light in creation starts flashing as a bazillion coins come pouring out of the pay slot. You decide to bet everything on the Nile being a longer river than the Amazon and you win the million dollars (at least until recently).

But trying to improve your life with big, showy plans is a recipe for failure. The archetype of this is the New Year’s Resolution, which only 12 people in the last 25 years have managed to make stick past Valentine’s Day. Why? We pledge to quit smoking forever, do 20 minutes a day on the treadmill/stairclimber/NordicTrack/whatever, give up chocolate, empty our inboxes and keep them that way…

In short, we make ridiculous demands on ourselves. So big, in fact, that when we quit it’s easy to convince ourselves the task was impossible in the first place, despite the fact that people accomplish these goals by the hundreds of thousands every year. (Well, maybe not the inbox one)

Let’s try a higher-percentage play. Robert Maurer wrote a great little book called One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way that focuses on why little changes are not only easier to stick with, they’re more likely to accomplish your big goals, too.

Kaizen is the Japanese word for many small improvements that add up to a big difference. The Japanese auto industry owes much of its success to applying this concept to its assembly lines, but we can accomplish much by doing the same to our fears and foibles.

The book is full of offbeat “small” tips on fixing big problems. One of my favorites is the “just floss one tooth” approach to improved dental hygiene. It takes about 2 seconds to floss one tooth: it’s such a tiny thing to ask there’s no rational reason to say “oh, I could never do that.” The second week (or month, if you get winded easily) you do 2 teeth, and so on. At some point, you’ll figure “the heck with it, I’m here, I have the stupid floss out, I might as well do the rest of them.” And you’re off to the races.

Here are the key thoughts behind this method:

• 80% of doing anything new is just getting started. Once you have your running shoes on and are standing on the front porch, you’ve done the hard part. Once you have the floss in your hand, you’re golden.
• The part you’re requiring yourself to do is so small, it’s totally non-threatening. Throw one item of clothing in the hamper every time you walk through your room. Just one. Anything else is gravy. But you’re opening your mind to the possibility that you really can do this.
• You have permission to take this ridiculously-long time to work your way up to the real task, but at some point you’ll just “forget to stop” and find yourself doing the whole thing without any extra effort.

Ask a small question: what tiny change can I make in my life that will get me closer to the person I want to be? Take a small action: walk to the mailbox to get the mail instead of stopping the car next to it on your way in. Think a small thought: I’m not always shy… I’m quite a chatterbox at the PTA meetings. Give yourself a small reward: put a gold star on the calendar every day you say hello to someone you don’t know.

And before long (I promise) you’ll just forget to stop getting better.

People look at marathoners or artists or tightrope walkers and say “I could never do that. I’m just not that kind of person.” We say this as if we’ve been this exact person our whole life and intend to be him/her until the day we die (many years from now, thank you). This is ludicrous: we change from day to day and moment to moment. The person you were when you started reading this post is gone, as is the person I was when I started writing it.

What we’re really telling ourselves is “I’m not the sort of person who can just decide what they’re going to be. I let life dictate who I am.” Ouch.

You can, though. You’ve just been biting off more than you can chew. Resist the urge to do everything in one fell swoop, because those big bites are the ones that choke you every time.

Here’s a revelatory thought: we are who we’ve been recently. Once you’ve been following a new habit for a month or so, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find that it has become part of you without any real effort on your part to make it so.

When you start, a habit is like this thing you’re trying to stick onto yourself with slow-drying glue. If you stop actively holding it against you, it will fall away. But once your definition of “me” has changed to include the behavior, the glue has taken hold and it goes with you everywhere, like your ears or your goofy sense of humor.

As a bonus, it ceases to require extra effort. You unconsciously integrate it into your energy budget along with taking a shower and walking across the parking lot to your car.

After running every other day for a month, I discovered I had become “a runner” in my own head without even noticing. I no longer have to “decide” to run when the alarm goes off in the morning, it’s just what I do. I even started doing “things runners do” without making a conscious effort: I entered a 5K (3.1 mile) race and began to eat healthier because doing otherwise didn’t mesh with my new self-image.

An important point: I don’t run far or fast. Many runners would probably look down their noses at me if I posted my stats. That doesn’t matter: the man I am in my head does, because he’s the guy who decides what I do and what it means. As long as it changes your life, it’s good enough, even if you’ll never make the Olympic team.

30 days from now you can be the person life tells you to be, or you can be the person you decide to be. It’s up to you.

There are two kinds of happiness. Not many people know this (in fact, I guess I’m the only one because I just decided it was so), but it’s true.

My two previous posts about savoring and how to be happy in 10 seconds flat were about what I’m calling “tactical” happiness: short-term, specific happiness centered around a single experience or thought.

The other kind is “strategic” happiness: the choices you make over the course of time that creates an underlying satisfaction in your life. Making good life decisions like the right job, the right spouse, the right number (zero is a perfectly valid number) of children, etc.

You need both kinds to build an enduring happiness. In a chess game, you can think tactically (how to use your knights, how to protect your pieces, how to make a good trade, etc.) and eventually you’ll find yourself in the 3rd hour of a game you have no idea how to win, chasing down a pawn that wasn’t doing you any harm. Or you can think strategically, how to position your pieces for maximum effectiveness and ferocity, except that while you were ignoring your opponent she took one of your bishops, both of your knights and your queen and is updating her blog while you ponder your imminent demise. This is the same basic reason armies have both artillery and infantry: long-range plus short-range is a potent combination.

I’ve been reading one of Ben Stein’s books: How Successful People Win and he focuses exclusively on strategic happiness. He only uses the word happiness in passing, focusing instead on the typically baby boomer term of success, but happiness is the whole point of success, so we’ll stay on subject.

So what sorts of things lead to strategic happiness? I listed a few biggies above: job, marriage, and parenthood. One of Stein’s main credos is that we should act first, then feel something. He believes it’s ridiculous to try to build your self-esteem in order to accomplish something in life. Accomplishing something in life is where self-esteem comes from.

I’m not as black-and-white on this subject as he is, but it is a valid point. Our society (especially the younger segment) is so impatient, we want to feel like success stories before we’ve done anything. While this is patently ridiculous, when you are depressed and barely able to move, any sort of energy source will do. If that means a little well-placed tactical happiness, I am fully in favor of it.

When your car is stuck in the mud, recruit some big, strapping lads to push you out, then go back to using the engine like you’re supposed to. If you try and get the lads to push you all the way to the supermarket, they’ll abandon you on the side of the road, but for that moment of highest need, they’re the perfect substitute for four-wheel drive.

Strategic happiness comes down to a single idea: get your life together and you’ll enjoy it a lot more. If your money and your to-do list are in order, it’s a lot easier to be happy. So check out those two links and start thinking long-term.

Here’s something to ponder until next time: If you’re unhappy, have low self-esteem or feel like a failure, something in how you live your life has caused that. Fix the cause and the feeling will go away. Fixing only the feeling is sticking your finger in the dike: it’s only a momentary solution.

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Happiness exists in two distinct forms in the universe:

1. Events, things and people which cause happiness
2. Feelings of happiness that exist solely within a living heart

All we need to do is find lots of the first type and it will lead to lots of the second type. Right?

Here’s something you won’t hear very often: the first category is completely imaginary. There are no events or things or people which cause happiness in the the same sense that gravity causes apples to fall to earth or electricity causes light bulbs to glow.

Imagine someone walks up to you on the street and hands you a coupon for a complimentary steak dinner in the best restaurant in town: wine service included. Most people would identify this as an authentic happiness event. But if you’re a militant vegetarian and recovering alcoholic, you might be tempted to punch the person in the mouth. In this situation, the punching might be what causes the happy feelings (at least in the heart of the puncher).

Clearly, that’s a fringe case. Statistically-speaking, giving away free high-end meals is a way to spread happiness in the world. But the important thing to note here is that happiness is based on what you make of events, not just the event itself. No one and nothing can make you happy.

Note that I didn’t say the first type didn’t exist: I said it was imaginary. This is one of the keys to a really robust sort of happiness, the kind that weathers many storms and sticks around for your whole life. The key to creating the first kind of happiness and then feeling the second is your imagination.

There are two skills we’ll have to develop to make this happen:

1. Finding the positive in an event
2. Savoring it

Let’s take an event that at face value has no redeeming aspects and see how we can transform it using our two skills. You come home from work and your spouse rips into you about forgetting to take out the garbage before you left that morning. Now it will sit in the garage for a week, rotting in the summer heat, until garbage day rolls around again. This is not the first time you’ve forgotten, this is not the first time they’ve reminded you. Dinner is strained, the evening is silent, you go to bed at different times without a good-night kiss.

What emotions do you expect to feel? Resentment. Defensiveness. Hatred? Depends on how the conversation goes and what else is going on between you.

Of course, if it were really the end of the world, you might have come home to a note that said your spouse is taking the dog and leaving you because you are completely unreliable in the home sanitation arena. So we can take some solace in the fact that they stuck around long enough to berate you.

The fact that it remains your job, even in the face of your total incompetence, is a sign that he/she still has some measure of faith that you’ll get your act together and start being the sort of life-partner they know they deserve.

The fact that you are lucky enough to have a spouse that actually tells you what’s annoying them instead of just storming around in a silent rage, giving you no opportunity to fix things is a major plus, because there’s nothing worse than being in the doghouse and not knowing why.

Mighty thin stuff to work with, but it’s something. So here’s our list:

1. He/she still loves you enough to stick around. There is still a beating heart in your relationship.
2. He/she still has faith in you. Even if it’s undeserved.
3. You know where you stand when the chips are down.

There’s a lot of bad in there, too. Being screamed at is tough to push through. You probably made a few pathetic excuses and said some things you regret. Sleeping single in a double bed always stinks, too. But obsessing about those things does not make you happy, they lead to depression, apathy, alcoholism and divorce. Anything that toxic is something you need to keep out of your head.

Instead, let’s obsess about the few positive things we managed to find, but since obsession is such a negative-sounding word, let’s say we’re going to savor them.

Savoring the good things in your life is one of the two “mother-skills” of true, lasting happiness. (The other one is stretching, which we’ll talk about another time) It’s a mother-skill because getting good at it allows you to become good at a whole variety of other skills you’ll need to stay a happy person: generosity, gratitude, compassion and contentment first among them.

So how do we savor? With our imaginations.

Think back to the first time you ever fell in love. OK, the first time after the onset of puberty, so you really got the whole picture. Did you wander around in a happy fog? Daydream extensively and with great detail on scenarios and possibilities? Did the mere thought of contact with that special person conjure up physical reactions that involved all five of your senses?

If so, you already know how to savor. You remember past moments, touches, conversations… You role-play future events you wish passionately to experience… You do all of this with such intensity and attention to detail that your body and mind react almost as if they were really occurring. You experience the very emotions the real events would cause in you.

Savoring as a skill means practicing this until you can do it intentionally when you need to, on whatever notion you have to work with.

Where a lot of people fall down with this whole “positive thinking” thing is that they don’t savor the good stuff. They say, “well, at least she didn’t leave me” and then go on with their day, wondering why they don’t feel any better. Fill yourself up with the positive. Feel it flowing through you. Choose things that really matter to you, things that fire your engine up. Then rev it for all it’s worth. A half-hearted effort is worse than no effort at all, because when you fail you say, “see, I told you that stuff doesn’t work!”

So find the good in the situation, then savor everything about it. Because once you can do these two things on demand, a whole world of opportunities opens up before you. It’s like money in the bank.

Oh, yeah. Next week? Take the trash out.

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You’re in the dumps. Or you’re angry. Or you’re depressed. Or you’re lonely. Join the club. Even the most upbeat people in the world have bad moments. But the smart ones never let themselves have a bad year, bad month, bad week, even a bad day. They know there is too much good floating around in the world to stay down for that long. Besides, nobody is very productive when they’re in a crappy mood, so it’s a downward spiral.

Don’t worry if you’re not one of the shiny happy people yet; you can have everything they have in 10 seconds flat with only a bit of insight, a little planning and a smidge more practice.

Why, Oh Why?

First, let’s think about why you’re not happy. We’re only going to burn a few words on this, and once we identify the pitfalls, we won’t have to think about it at all.

Reasons to not be happy? There are a million, at least, but they all boil down to one thing: your attitude about something that happens to you. Really sensitive people can be brought down by things that only happen near them. Did your parents/spouse/boss/buddy say something to you? Did something break? Did something you were depending on not happen? Are you doubting yourself? Is someone you respect doubting you?

We’ll break the problem into two parts:

1. You view the thing as negative and wish it hadn’t happened, or wouldn’t happen.
2. You obsess about it.

Eliminate either of these things and your mood will instantly improve, I guarantee it.

First, let’s tackle the first aspect by learning our ABC’s.

Learned Optimism

Once you find yourself in a rotten mood, Positive Psychology guru Martin Seligman believes there is a five step process to change your attitude:

1. Adversity - something stresses you negatively (you fight with your spouse, yell at your kids, get cut off in traffic)
2. Belief - the stressor creates a belief that makes you feel bad (”What an insensitive jerk!”, “They’re such little monsters!”, “That guy ought to lose his license!”)
3. Consequences - how you act due to feeling bad (grouch around the rest of the afternoon, hit the bar and start drinking, cut off the next person who dares get in your way)
4. Disputation - disputing the belief that put you in this mood… we’ll get to the details in a second.
5. Energize - feeling better not only relieves you from feeling bad, but it gives you more energy than you had when you were in a “just OK” mood.

Let’s get into the nitty-gritty about step 4: Disputing the belief. There are 4 good techniques you can apply, depending on the situation and what is most convincing to you.

1. Evidence - we often over-generalize when something happens, telling ourself it happens “all the time”. Evidence means thinking about other similar occasions when the bad thing didn’t happen. If you fought with your spouse, remember a recent time you laughed together (or even just spoke civilly). If you got cut off, think about yesterday’s commute when nobody drove like a maniac. Realizing that it’s an isolated incident instead of a recurring pattern in your life is like dumping water on a lit fuse. By this time tomorrow you won’t even remember the event: why not forget about it now and start feeling better 24 hours earlier?
2. Alternatives - most events are pretty neutral: we give them energy by jumping to conclusions on why they happened. Fight with your spouse? They must be the most unreasonable person on the planet. Road rage? That driver must be a convicted felon released by a broken criminal justice system. Wow, you figured all that out by a 2-second driving incident?
   What else could have caused it? Whenever somebody blasts by me at reckless speed, I’ve trained myself to say, “That guy is on his way to the hospital because his wife is about to have their first baby, and he’s such a great dad he can’t stand the thought of missing it.” Yeah, it’s ridiculous, but how can you hate a guy like that? “Name him after me, buddy!” If your wife snaps at you the moment you walk through the door, maybe the kids have been absolute monsters all day and she needs a moment’s peace or she’s going to collapse. Nothing to do with you at all. You don’t have to prove these things true: just considering them possible is a step in the right direction.
3. Implications - another way of overgeneralizing is to assume that since it happened once, it will now happen all the time. Yelling at your kids might make you decide you’re a “bad” person and your kids will grow up to hate you. If your best friend yelled at you for no apparent reason, would you assume they’d gone over to the “dark side”? No, you’d figure they were at their wit’s end and would probably be in a better mood tomorrow. Give yourself the same benefit of the doubt.
4. Change - sometimes what you believe about an event is accurate and fair. Rare, but it happens. If so, try and think of something you can do to change it. “Next time, I’ll take a deep breath before I snap back at her.” Taking control of the situation is calming. Besides, the only way to prevent the exact same thing happening again is to change your reaction to it.

That’s about it. For many specific techniques, insights into why this stuff works, and why being optimistic is one of the most important skills you can develop, read Seligman’s Learned Optimism.

OK, what happens when none of that is working? When the badness is just staring at you like the schoolyard bully, crossing its arms and laughing at your pathetic rationalizations?

Distance, Replace, Visualize, and Emotionalize (DRiVE)

I’m sure at some point, somebody told you “Ignoring your problems won’t make them go away.” True enough. But remember, the fourth technique of disputing is change. If you can change your life to make a problem go away, do it. It’s the healthiest, most far-sighted action you can take. But some things you can’t change: other people’s behavior, accidents, laws of physics.

The Buddha said that our biggest problem is wishing we had no problems. Nobody ever gets to that point: not Bill Gates, not the Glitterati of Hollywood, not even the Buddha. If you’re waiting until you solve all your problems to be happy, you’re waiting for a train that’s never coming in.

So what do we do in the face of those things that we can’t change, can’t avoid, and can’t embrace? We make a conscious effort to not make them worse by obsessing about them.

Breaking an obsessive pattern has four steps, which I call DRiVE:

1. Distance yourself - Bad situations are often a feedback loop: you say something, then I say something, then you say something worse… I find excusing myself for a moment and hiding in a bathroom stall works wonders to break this circuit. You could also go get a cup of coffee, pop out to the parking lot to “get something from the car” or whatever else fits into the context. Not having to see, listen and feel the problems for a few minutes defuses its energy.
2. Replace with a positive thought - We choose the thoughts in our heads; there’s no law about what you have to be thinking, regardless of the situation. Distracting ourselves with a pleasant thought gives us mental distance, the way hiding in the bathroom gives us physical distance. To make sure you’ve got a “happy thought” to whip out on a moment’s notice, keep a list in your wallet or purse for easy access, with a rough-dozen to choose from. They can be great memories: the first time your child spoke, when your spouse agreed to marry you, the best day you ever had at summer camp. They can be future events you’re excited about: a sunny vacation, new car, romantic interlude with your soulmate. Dreams are excellent, too: winning the lottery, racing Indy cars, flying in outer space. Anything that gets you excited is fair game.
3. Visualize in the present tense - Close your eyes and project a movie in your head with as many delectable details as you can conjure up. What color is that bikini? Is that Godiva chocolate in that candy dish? Is that Dave Matthews on the other microphone? The more real you can make it, the more your body (and your mind is definitely part of your body) will react as if it’s real.
4. Emotionalize - In the end, what we’re trying to do is immerse ourselves in the positive so deeply that it produces the emotions we’d rather be feeling. Think about what emotions you’d be feeling if it were really happening, and look for those emotions inside yourself. They’ll come out with only a little coaxing. Arousal, triumph, peace, bliss… Got an emotion you want to experience? There’s a visualization you can do to create it.

Recap

You feel bad because you’ve experienced an event you interpret as negative and are obsessing about it. Change either aspect and you’ll begin to feel better.

To change the interpretation, apply Learned Optimism:

1. dispute it by looking at contradicting evidence
2. look for alternative motivations
3. examine the implications to see which are really just smoke
4. find something you can change about the situation to alter or even prevent future occurrences

If it’s something you can’t re-interpret or prevent in the future, DRiVE the thought away with a better one:

1. Get some distance from the situation to keep the anger/fear/sadness from feeding back like a broken microphone.
2. Replace the negative thought with one from a list of things that always make you feel good.
3. Visualize that positive thought in as much detail as you can: really convince yourself it’s happening.
4. Emotionalize the thought, feeling the positive emotions you’d feel if it were real.

It may take some time to run through this process the first dozen times you try it, but with only a little practice, you can learn how to be happy in 10 seconds flat.

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