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CHAPTER 1
The Dance of Love and Fear
This poor rich man — he looked so pale and drained. He was living a life that held no happiness, and he needed my help.
He had everything the world could offer — money, freedom, friends, and family — but I could see that he did not have the one thing he needed most: simple happiness.
This man was one of the wealthiest people in the American Southwest, rich in the resources that should bring happiness. At this moment, he could have been anywhere on earth, with anyone he wanted. The world of glamour, pleasure, and power was his. And yet here he was.
On the surface, he was a poster boy for the American dream, barely old enough to be a baby boomer, gliding through the good life. To most people, even the look in his eyes probably bespoke nothing darker than worldliness or weariness. However, I have spent all of my career and most of my life looking beneath the surface of human behavior, and what I saw in his eyes was haunting and familiar. I've seen that look too many times.
Fortunately, I have learned how to help people overcome what's behind that dark and empty expression. I have learned how to help them find happiness — to alchemize it out of fear, depression, boredom, and even grief. More commonly, I have helped people to locate the elusive quality of happiness in lives that should already have been good.
Your life probably looks pretty good to most people. These days, that's true for many of us. We've all worked so hard and attained so much. But do you often feel as if you've lost something?
That was certainly true of this man. Because he was enrolled in the 7-Day Life Enhancement Program that I direct at Canyon Ranch — one of the country's most prominent health facilities — I wouldn't have much time to spend with him. It doesn't take much time, though, to teach people how to be happy — to teach them the things that happy people already know.
And it won't take you long to learn what happy people know and to learn how to feel happy for the rest of the day. It will take longer, however, for you to work these lessons into the heart of your life, until happiness becomes a habit and unhappiness feels foreign.
This might be difficult for you, but what task could be more vital?
If you don't think happiness is critically important, perhaps it's because you have a narrow definition of it, as many people do, thinking that it just means being in a good mood most of the time, or experiencing the emotion of joy. But happiness is neither a mood nor an emotion. Mood is a biochemical condition, and emotions are just transitory feelings. Happiness is a way of life — an overriding outlook composed of qualities such as optimism, courage, love, and fulfillment. It's not just tiptoeing through the tulips of la-la land, and it's not something that changes every time your situation changes. It is nothing less than cherishing every day.
The wealthy man who had come to see me had lost his love for life. If you haven't met many wealthy people, you might think he was an aberration. You might think, "Give me that money, and I'll show you how to be happy!" The fact is that wealthy people — despite Madison Avenue's fairy tales about them — are unhappy just as commonly as people without much money. That's one important thing that happy people know: Money doesn't bring happiness.
You've heard that before, right? So you're probably thinking, "Yeah, that must be true" (and are secretly thinking, "But it doesn't apply to me!").
It does apply to you, though, as the new, emerging science of happiness proves. The myth that money brings happiness is one of the happiness traps that I will tell you about in this book, along with the happiness tools that will free you from these traps. Learning about these traps and tools will change your life.
If, on the other hand, you go on believing the conventional wisdom about happiness, you might never be any more fulfilled than you are at this moment, no matter how good your life gets. The traps can hold you down forever.
If you are stuck in one or more of the happiness traps, at least you're not alone. Happiness, as I'll show with research and with my own extensive clinical findings, is a relatively rare quality. Most people think that happiness is common among others — especially those with happy-face veneers — and that it is imminently available for themselves, just over the horizon, tomorrow's payoff for today's pain. In reality, happiness is not at all common in modern American society, and is even scarcer now than it was in earlier, less affluent times. In terms of happiness, America is going downhill, and has been for more than 20 years, even as our affluence has blossomed. Such a sad paradox: The more we've attained, the emptier we've become.
The man who had come to see me — let's call him Christopher Conner — was extraordinary in his affluence, exceptionally strong-willed, and charismatic in manner, but he had a lot in common with the average person.
What he mostly had in common — what we all have in common — is that we are brothers and sisters of the same imperfect evolution, the same flawed flesh. We all have a neurological fear system embedded deep within our brains, a neural network that once helped us survive as a species, but now limits our lives. This biological circuitry of fear is the greatest enemy of happiness.
This fear system is our repository for past trauma, current tribulation, fear of the future, and archaic instinctual terrors.
The forces of evolution, by their very nature, endowed this fear system with tremendous power, because in the brutal early epochs of mankind, it alone kept us alive. It gained us the hair-trigger capacity to spring into action at the first hint of threat. The automatic fear response became faster than the process of rational thought, faster than experiencing the feeling of love, faster than any other human action. And thus we survived. But in doing so, we became hardwired for hard times.
This is our legacy, like it or not.
Unfortunately, in modern life, what is good for survival is often bad for happiness and even for long-term health. What once saved us now slowly kills us.
Of course, it would be foolish to fault nature for placing survival first, because the obvious alternative is extinction. But where do we go from here? To lives of meaning and joy? Or do we settle for mere biological survival?
For most of us in modern society, survival has become a gentle affair: Go to work, pay the bills, day is done. We no longer need a pool of primal fear to propel us away from a mastodon via a fast blast of adrenaline, or to keep us awake in the dark of night, listening for threatening sounds. However, even though we usually no longer need the neurological wiring that led us out of the Stone Age, we still have it. (Evolution is excruciatingly slow: Consider the fact that humans still have tailbones.)
Luckily, we have been blessed with an almost magical source of compensation: the human neocortex. The neocortex is the primary area of intellect in the brain, located in the cerebrum. It is creative, intuitive, intellectual, and spiritual. And it is the physical site of happiness.
With our wonderfully redemptive neocortical abilities, we can override the limitations of evolution and free ourselves from the fears that thwart happiness.
Fears will keep coming up — always, always. But we can rise above them. This is our evolutionary gift — our way out of the darkness of the past, into light.
"My head's murdering me," Mr. Conner moaned as he slumped into a seat. "The market's really tanking today."
He probably expected me to sympathize, or, in the vernacular of my profession, to validate his feelings. I don't believe in the wholesale validation of feelings. Feelings can be just as screwed up as behavior. I knew that no matter what happened in the market on this day or any other, Christopher Conner would have more than enough to live a lavish lifestyle until the day he died. Nothing was murdering him on this beautiful morning — except for the fears that he was inflicting upon himself.
He'd seen several other psychologists, but they'd done little more than catalogue his feelings and corroborate his misery. This uncritical validation of feelings — which leads to the glorification of the victim role — is one of the many mistakes commonly perpetrated in the field of clinical psychology.
Clinical psychology — the treatment in a clinical setting of people with mental disorders — was begun with great fanfare as an adjunct to modern medicine in the late 1800s. It was patterned after the conventional medical model of fighting pathology. Clinical psychology was based on the assumption that most people are mentally healthy — and happy — but some people contract mental pathologies that conform to neat diagnostic compartments, and require standardized treatments. This approach sounds scientific and is generally quite lucrative.
The only problem is that it doesn't work very well. It fails approximately two-thirds of the time. Yet, despite the frequent failure of the anti-pathology approach, this system is endorsed by many of its practitioners — quite cynically, I believe — as psychology's only valid avenue.
One of the greatest deficiencies of this "cynical psychology" approach is that it was not designed to help people find happiness. It assumed that if mental illness were cured, happiness would naturally follow, as the normal human condition. But this just doesn't happen for the vast majority of people. Their fear systems get in the way.
Furthermore, I believe that even when people do not have diagnosable psychological illnesses, they still cannot be considered psychologically healthy unless they are happy. The absence of disease is not the same as health, just as the absence of poverty is not the same as wealth.
My perspective on psychology is similar to the views of physicians who practice integrative medicine. These doctors try to help their patients move beyond the mere absence of disease to the realm of robust health, in which they feel energetic, vital, and strong. In the same vein, I try to help people move beyond the mere absence of psychological disturbance to the realm of happiness, in which they feel optimistic, loving, and spiritually connected.
I believe that the quest to achieve happiness will characterize the psychology of the 21st century. It is the kind of endeavor that can change a whole culture.
I have seen this quest's power. I have seen it change lives. I thought it could change the life of Mr. Conner. And I think it can change yours.
The Failure of Success
Christopher Conner wanted to start our session by telling me about his parents. He thought it was important. His mother, he said, had grown up on a subsistence-level farm during the Depression, drinking well water from a bucket, using an outhouse, and eating only what she and her family could grow. His thick-skinned dad had survived the tenements of Brooklyn, fought in trenches against the Nazis, and worked in a noisy and dirty factory for 40 years. Their lives had apparently been hard and dark. They'd sacrificed terribly to send him to college — and had never let him forget it. As an adult, he'd suffered himself, fighting his own business-world "trench warfare" and constantly postponing his own pleasure. He'd pushed himself so hard that he'd spent his health to gain his wealth, and now his heart was a ticking time bomb. And yet, after all this, he still felt empty. Recently he'd given his son a Corvette for graduation — a 'Vette! — "And my son says, 'Dad, what I really wanted was a Ferrari.' And my wife backs him up! True story!" He made a face, and it was a little scary — hard-edged and angular — the expression of someone accustomed to getting his way. "Some of my friends with money, we call our kids the Royal Order of the Lucky Sperm Club. They were born on third base and think they hit a triple. Could you be happy if ..." I gently cut him off. I didn't want to talk about the privation of his parents or the failings of his family. I wanted to talk about him.
I told him that I didn't think it was his work, or his upbringing, or any of his day-to-day problems that were making him miserable. I told him about the deep neurological network of fear that we all have locked inside. I said that even if he made a billion dollars this year and reconciled all his feelings about his parents, his wife, and his kids, he'd still feel about the same, and always would — until he tackled the errant and archaic hardwiring of his own brain. He needed to learn, as do we all, how to help his neocortical brain functions — his higher thought and spirit — dominate the lower brain functions that are focused solely upon survival.
At first, he denied that he was fearful. I expected that, especially from a hard charger like him. We're taught that fear is for little girls and losers. After he thought about it, though, he admitted, "I do tend to worry a lot." Then he quickly added, "But it's that worry that keeps me on top."
I've heard that claim a thousand times, but I've never swallowed it. Most successful people don't get ahead because of worry. They do it with brains and vision.
Even so, it's hard to talk anxiety lovers out of the glory of suffering. To them, it's the Red Badge of Worry. They even worry about not worrying.
"What's your biggest concern?" I asked Mr. Conner.
"Keeping what I've got. The only thing harder than making money is hanging on to it."
"I've heard other people say that." Countless times. I still don't believe it. It's just another way for successful people to justify their ongoing fear — the anxiety that money was supposed to kill.
No matter how much money people have, almost all of us want just a little bit more. But it never makes us happier. This is the failure of success.
"Do you get angry very often?" I asked.
"You can't run a conglomerate without kicking butts," he said with the same flashy, confident smile that I'd once seen when he was on the cover of Forbes magazine. "You can't even run a family." Just the way he said it sold it — what a strong personality! I could see how he'd cobbled a string of troubled TV and phone companies into a powerful communications conglomerate.
"You a perfectionist?"
"Try to be."
"Optimist or pessimist?"
"If you prepare for the worst, it doesn't happen."
"Much anxiety?"
"That comes with the territory."
"I'm guessing you feel fairly isolated."
"It's lonely at the top." Again, that million dollar smile. But I was beginning to think there was nothing behind it but fear.
"I'm also guessing you tend to get depressed."
"Lately I do."
Mr. Conner wasn't aware of it, but he was describing the many faces of fear. More often than not, fear doesn't emerge as nail-biting, cold-feet terror, but surfaces instead as anger, perfectionism, pessimism, low-level anxiety, depression, and feelings of isolation. In these many disguises, fear can permeate life, leaving room for little else. It morphs from one pseudoemotion to another, rarely declaring itself, poisoning each moment it touches.
"Other than work," I asked Mr. Conner, "how's the rest of your life?"
He gave me a blank look. "Fine." Then he described a home life that would horrify most people: alienated kids, a wife who bitterly resented his obsession with work, and never any time for just kicking back and feeling good. Work was everything, and everything else was nothing. I call this unidimensional living, and it's a killer.
I asked him if he ever thought about turning over more work to his associates.
"I can't," he brooded. "A lot of the decisions I make are life-or-death. Not the kinds of things I can delegate."
When he said "life-or-death," something in me clicked.
"I have a prescription for you," I said. "I want you to volunteer tomorrow at a pediatric cancer ward. I'll set it up."
"Like hell you will."
"Do you want to feel better?"
"I don't feel that bad."
"Why should you feel bad at all?"
He sat silently, unsettled — a strong man afraid to find a new kind of strength. I could almost hear him thinking, "Damn! I thought this guy's cure for stress would be more golf!"
The Lesser Life
Millions of Americans have become so used to not being happy that they barely even notice it. For them, it's like living next to a railroad track — after a while, you don't even hear the trains.
Even so, no matter how numb you may become, life goes on. Days become years, until life is still there but the living is gone.
Here is the kind of day — the kind of life — that countless people over the past 30 years have described to me.
"I only wake up when I have to. There's never enough time to sleep. The kids try to be good in the morning, but they're always needing something or squabbling. Then there's traffic, watching out for the road rage weirdos, hoping I won't be late for work. Lots of the time I am, and then the boss gives me a dirty look, which puts a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. That's okay, because I need to be a little keyed up to stay on top of things.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "What Happy People Know"
by .
Copyright © 2003 Dan Baker, Ph.D., and Cameron Stauth.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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