I think therefore I feel

In my last posting, we explored some key emotions that one may encounter linked to the past – nostalgia, contentment, pride, fulfilment and satisfaction. Frankly though it’s a fortunate person who can say, hand on heart, that they only experience positive feelings about their past. More typically things are a tad fruitier than that with a smidgen of bitterness, a soupçon of anger, a frisson of shame and a dash of revenge thrown in. It’s what makes the world go round. Or does it?

The trouble is that if you can’t let go of a damaging past event, if you tend to harbour grudges, and if you focus on the negatives and overlook all aspects of your life that are fulfilling and life-enhancing, you are pretty much setting yourself up for a miserable existence. Instead of the world merrily spinning around, you’re stuck in Groundhog Day.

So what can one do about this? Cognitive Behavourists would say that all emotions about the past are completely driven by our thinking and the way we interpret events. As we reflect on our memories we continue to interpret old situations from the past, and our conclusions, opinions and judgements drive our emotions.

So if you believe that an old friend vindictively betrayed you last year by breaking a confidence you will continue to feel hurt, angry and hostile towards them. If you have decided that your manager has deliberately sabotaged your prospects of promotion by stealing all of your ideas and passing them off as their own, you will feel livid, frustrated and shafted every time you look at them. And if you conclude that the local supermarket delivery people are deliberately picking short shelf-life items for your order, you will feel indignant, cheated and robbed when your credit card bill arrives. Thus emotions are entirely dependent on our interpretation of events, and we tend to treat our emotions as facts. Unfortunately what happens then is that our emotions drive our behaviour and taint our ongoing thinking and feeling. It’s one of those vicious cycles.

Over the next few postings, we will explore some different ways to tackle negative views of the past – if I try to do it all here this one will run to many pages and I’m sure your attention span won’t stretch that far – mine certainly won’t and I’m writing it!

Our tip for today then is to challenge our interpretations of past events. You know, there just might be another explanation for what happened? Think about it…

Maybe the short shelf-life items were all that the supermarket had at the time, otherwise of course they would have put longer shelf-life ones in your order. Anyway you can always hand the items back to the driver and get a refund – they are not forcing you to take the stuff! It’s up to you what you do with the squishy satsumas, and it’s entirely down to you as to how you interpret the situation and therefore how you end up feeling. Raging fury at the thieving b@!*tards or mild irritation because you need to go to the shops tomorrow after all. The choice is yours!

Maybe your boss does steal a few of your ideas – it’s not unusual let’s face it – but is that really the only reason why you haven’t been promoted? What about all those missed project deadlines and the badly overspent budget this year? What about the sales conference in January where you had a few too many tequilas and took the Finance Director to task in the bar. Not feeling so self-righteous now eh?

And maybe just maybe your friend did not intend to betray you and is absolutely distraught at losing your friendship. Perhaps the person they were talking to pretended they knew more than they did on the topic, and came up with some uncannily accurate guesswork along the way while the wine was flowing. It happens… so pick up the phone and make amends.

So this is all good food for thought. Or on the other hand perhaps we shouldn’t be thinking about it at all as thinking seems to get us into so much trouble in the first place! But I reckon it just might be worthwhile every now and again challenging the mindset that you have the monopoly on the truth. For as we have seen, there might just be another explanation for a past event, and if so you may be making yourself very miserable for no good reason.

Vvveering towards Happiness

Finally we can start to explore the last element of our Happiness Formula, and hopefully this will be one that we can really nurture and encourage to flourish. Because it’s occured to me, and I’m sure to you too, that so far we haven’t got a huge amount of ammunition to throw at the delinquent devils of despair, depression and downright disillusionment. Which nicely brings me to V.

V then refers to the voluntary variables that we can address to help us create sustainable positive change as opposed to fleeting intense pleasure. Yes yes, some of us still might prefer the latter, but in my experience it can get downright exhausting and potentially expensive hunting it down each and every day! Far better to achieve the slow burn of deep contentment.

V encompasses things that create positive emotions about the past, the present or the future. Much has been written in the academic and popular psychology press about positive emotions and it can be helpful to identify them, and also to categorize them into one of these three buckets.

Positive emotions around past events include nostalgia, contentment, pride, fulfilment and satisfaction. Moving into the present we can experience the positive emotions of calm, ecstacy, pleasure, joy and also being in flow*. Finally looking into the future we can feel the positive emotions of hope, faith, optimism and trust.

I’ve been working hard to avoid using the word ‘happiness’ as an emotion – for me it is on a par with the inadequate word ‘nice’. Frankly ‘happiness’ just doesn’t describe the essence of the emotion for me. It is bland and all-encompassing whereas we want distinction and specificity.

Of course if you are honest with yourself, you are probably experiencing any combination of emotions in these three buckets right now. For example you might be extremely proud of your three stone weight loss over the past year but now are frustrated with your current compulsion to eat vast quantities of double chocolate icecream with extra chocolate chips and fudge pieces. You may also therefore be doubting your future ability to fit into your new size 12 wardrobe and be pretty hacked off with the whole situation.

It’s also entirely possible to be bitter and twisted about your current relationship, to reminisce nostalgically and with fondness (and possibly through rose-tinted specs) about a former love, whilst also being incredibly optimistic about positive change happening soon.

Alternatively you might have suppressed a miserable past, rant and rave about how unfair everything is in your life and also have an unfeasibly large black cloud of pessimism about the future hanging over your head. Oh dear!

Clearly then it would be advantageous and desirable to cultivate and amass vast quantities of positive emotions about the past, your present and your future life. And that is what the V is all about. It’s about making choices (including Choosing Your Attitude) right now and moving your emotions in a more positive direction.

In my next posting then, we’ll start to focus on generating positive emotions about the past. I’m not a massive fan of Sigmund Freud so we’re not going to start exploring your early childhood and your weird and frankly disturbing dreams. Instead we are going to consider how to forgive and move on, to spot things that we are grateful for and to acknowledge them openly, and to keep tracks on the balance in our life so that our present has the best chance it has of being both uplifting and personally satisfying.

*More on flow later in another blog posting.

Big blue wobbly thing…

One of my fondest Blackadder quotes is from the scene where Baldrick and Thick Prince George (after whom one of my cats is named) are trying to help Blackadder rewrite the dictionary that had taken Dr Johnson 15 years to write. Baldrick proudly defines C as a ‘big blue wobbly thing that mermaids live in’.

Back to our Happiness equation (H = S + C + V), and C is next in line for an explanation; not a big blue wobbly thing then, but Circumstances. And the good news is that a change in our circumstances can increase our happiness levels. The not so good news is that the changes needed may be impractical or rather expensive.

Let’s take a look at what has been discovered over the years about how our external circumstances influence happiness.

1. Money – that old chestnut. I did read somewhere that once you are earning as much as the average Portuguese person (around €12-15k), you’ll have maxed out on your happiness potential. No amount of additional income over that amount allegedly will make you lastingly happier. So my wise Mum has been right all along then when she tells me that money won’t buy you happiness. Now of course there are people in poor nations living in abject poverty, where life is itself at threat, who will definitely be happier with some more cash. But in wealthy nations where pretty much everyone has their basic needs met through the welfare state, then increases in income have negligible effects on personal happiness. According to Seligman, even those with an average net worth of over $125m are only slightly happier than the average American.

2. Marriage - her indoors; my other/better half; trouble and strife. It costs on average around £15-25K these days to get married in the UK. That’s an awful lot of dosh isn’t it, so does it make you any happier? Well the evidence on the whole does suggest that marriage is positively related to happiness. But does marriage actually cause happiness? It’s a bit like drowning and ice-cream. When ice-cream sales go up, more people drown, therefore ice-cream causes drowning. Now that would be ridiculous, as the thought had probably crossed your mind that more people eat ice-cream in hot weather and that’s when they are also more likely to go swimming. And it follows that more people swimming = more drownings. So back to marriage causing increased happiness… maybe it’s just that people who are already happy are more likely to get married and stay married?

3. Social Life. Again drawing on Seligman’s research, very happy people differ from averagely happy and unhappy people in that they have busy and fulfilling social lives. Very happy people spend the least time alone and the most time socialising. Now is this just bad science or is there really a causal link? Yes a rich social life (combined with a happy marriage) might just make you happier, but it could be that happy people are just better liked so they have more friends and are more likely to attract a partner? Hmmm…

4. Age. Older and wiser – maybe; but older and happier? Well apparently life satisfaction does go up slightly with age due to not having the enormous emotional peaks and troughs that e.g. teenagers have to contend with.

5. Health. Well this seems obvious doesn’t it? If you ask your average person to share what their top three wishes would be, then having good health for life is likely to feature somewhere. But apparently our happiness levels here are totally dependent on how we perceive our health to be, rather than our actual health. Humans are remarkably good at adapting to adverse events and we’ll make out we’re a lot healthier than we really are. Remember the Black Knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail who, having suffered the bloody loss of both arms insisted that ‘it’s just a flesh wound’! Our happiness levels do decline however with severe and prolonged illness, but not as much as you would think.

6. Religion. Again there has been much research on the effect of having a faith and the impact on levels of happiness, and it certainly looks like having a faith gives you something to look forward to (heaven, seeing loved ones again, nirvana etc.) and instils a sense of hope (life after death, reincarnation etc.). The atheist just has to work harder at finding meaning in life and relieving existential angst.

7. Other things worth a mention but which don’t really impact happiness levels are getting a good education and qualifications (may help you earn more money but unfortunately won’t really increase happiness levels), having a high IQ (may help you pass exams, get better paid jobs, progress your career etc. but has no effect on happiness levels), sunny climate (may help with SAD but that’s about it), race (no effect) and gender (no difference overall but bizarrely women are meant to be both happier and sadder than men).

So in summary then, what could you change about your C to increase your H? Well you should try and live in the western world, maybe get married (but make sure it’s to the right person), spend time nurturing friendships and get out more. And, if you’re so inclined, worship a god.

Conversely earning, inheriting or winning more cash really doesn’t make you happier, there’s no point feeling guilty about missing that morning run, don’t worry about your looming exam results, and don’t bother moving to Corfu (although we did have a lovely holiday there last week).

Next time we’ll look at our final variable V, after which you’ll know exactly what to tweak in order to maximise your H! In the meantime, stay happy!

Freecycling my way to Happiness…

Over the past two weeks I’ve been off-loading unwanted items via my local Freecycle group, and so far it has brought nothing but a huge smile to my face.

The most touching experience involved my old Dunlop Maxply Forte wooden tennis racket, dating back to the late 70s/early 80s. At the time I and my cola-fuelled school-chums travelled to the Wimbledon Championships each year to watch our favourite players. Indeed, John McEnroe played with a Maxply Forte, and not only that but he had the same double-handed grip that I had, an important detail that had hugely influenced the original purchase.

Many years have since passed and the scratched and battered racket has been languishing in our loft, set to remain there for the foreseeable future… until the Freecycle concept caught my eye.

Freecycle was set up by Deron Beal on May 1st 2003 in Tucson, Arizona. Deron sent out an email to about forty friends urging them to recycle between themselves rather than throw things away. Thus Freecycling was born and now operates in over 85 countries – allegedly the operation keeps more than 500 tons of rubbish out of landfills every day. The website suggests that Freecycling helps instil a sense of generosity of spirit as it strengthens local community ties and promotes environmental sustainability and reuse.

Sounds like an opportunity to increase my happiness levels I thought… and I was not disappointed. The tennis racket has now been collected, intended as a birthday present for Bethany, a teenage tennis fanatic who, like me when I was her age, goes to Wimbledon every year and gathers mementos. She has a wall in her bedroom with all her memorabilia on, and she’d asked for an old wooden tennis racket to add to the display. So sometime in early April, she will open up a parcel containing my old racket and I’m pretty sure she will be delighted to receive it.

On reflection, I can’t adequately describe the strength of positive feeling as I handed over the racket and Bethany’s Mum walked down our drive with it on her shoulder. I felt wonderful! I felt excited for her as she took it home and found a place to hide it away until the birthday dawned. I felt truly contented that I had given something away that was needed and wanted – an amazing feeling that lingered for days and can still bring a broad grin to my face.

Sarah’s Positive Tips
#3 Give something away.

Giving leads to receiving. Those who give, who are generous, and who share their wealth know something greater; giving itself is real riches. By giving of your time, of your love, of your friendships or of your money you receive more inner satisfaction, happiness and peace. Chinese Proverb.