Not Being An Anxiety Loser

https://medium.com/hi-my-name-is-jon/how-to-be-an-entrepreneur-with-crushing-anxiety-de1ee128958f

Excellent article, I'm not going to do much summary, just READ IT if you are bothered by anxiety. A teaser paragraph ... "it" is anxiety.

The trick isn’t to “manage” it, it’s to find ways to work within and without it that can let us actually get shit done! This is one method that has been hugely effective for me ... 

The "one method" is OBSERVATION ... "Oh, there is my old buddy anxiety. I know him very well ... let me view anxiety as a passing cloud. See how fluffy it is? No need to hurry the anxiety cloud, I can live with this cloud."

Observation is a giant part of Mindfulness from DBT. Here is the NAMI DBT site if you want to look into this more.

Happiness Is A Serious Problem, Dennis Prager

http://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Serious-Problem-Dennis-Prager-ebook/dp/B0014Y09OI

An alternate title for this excellent book would be "Wisdom About Happiness".  I'm not wired to be a particularly happy person, nor am I wired to be a thin person -- so I do the best I can to play the hand I have been dealt. While neither diet books nor happiness books are likely to make me thin or happy, they help me understand my wiring and predilections so that I can possibly be a bit wiser, and compensate where possible.

Nearly anything written by Prager seems to at least border on excellent and this book is no exception. It walks through a lot of the many  misconceptions on happiness. I'll put a few more quotes in than I usually would, since this book is chocked full of short, well-written and to the point statements.

Everything worthwhile in life is attained through hard work. Happiness is not an exception. 

But not working AT happiness -- and especially not at YOUR happiness. As you look back on life, you will almost certainly realize that you were most happy when you were enmeshed in some "cause" or "project". In my case, the big development projects at IBM and raising kids were the largest examples. Hopefully being a Peer Support Specialist and writing  will continue to develop into others.

But the purpose of life is not to avoid pain. That is the purpose of an animal’s life.

Many of our problems and even false desires about happiness are due to forgetting that man is not an animal. If we were, the rich, successful, beautiful, etc would actually BE the most happy -- but we see examples all the time in which this is not the case. Animals don't know human happiness -- they know relaxation, satiation, pleasure, etc -- all of which humans feel as well. A simple definition of hell for humans is mistaking the pursuit of animal pleasures with happiness -- addiction, obsession, disaster are terms associated with these, certainly not happiness!

whatever brings the most happiness can also bring the greatest unhappiness.

Ask a parent who has lost a child, or just has a child that has returned the love and care of the parent with disrespect and derision. Ask the loving spouse whose life partner has died or left them. We know this to be true -- one whole chapter, chapter 25 is titled "Everything has a price -- Know what it is!". How much wiser (and happier!) the world would be if just a tiny extra percentage of our fellow man understood this simple truth!

The problem in our time is that maturity is not high on the list of goals we offer the next generation. We stress happiness, success, and intelligence but not maturity. And that is too bad, both for society, which suffers when too many of its members are immature, and for the individual who wants to be happy. For happiness is not available to the immature. And one of the prominent characteristics of immaturity is seeing oneself primarily as a victim.

"Maturity", defined as "wisdom, self control, perspective, having a philosophy of life (or even having a clue what philosophy is!)".  When "maturity" is defined to mean some combination of the terms I listed (and I believe that to be his intent), then the quote above is true.To the mature/wise/self controlled/true to their purpose in life person, a good measure of happiness is likely.

The "sage" can be "happy" in the sense that they have access to and make use of many of the "secrets" of this book, but when they live in a culture that often glorifies sensation, immaturity, mixing ends with means, substitution of animal senses for human wisdom / maturity / development, they are going to feel regret for the rest of humanity.

Yes, there is a “secret to happiness”—and it is gratitude. All happy people are grateful, and ungrateful people cannot be happy. We tend to think that it is being unhappy that leads people to complain, but it is truer to say that it is complaining that leads to people becoming unhappy. Become grateful and you will become a much happier person.

The problem with the "secret" to happiness is expectations. We don't feel happiness when expectations are met, we feel happiness when they are exceeded, and our human nature is to expect A LOT! Our culture, media and education system is all about telling us of our "rights" and how much we ALL "deserve" this and that. We are each so VERY special and deserving!! Our expectations are sky high -- for products, events, teams, friends, spouses -- EVERYTHING! Thus it is very hard for our expectations to be exceeded so we can be happy.

Grateful? To who or what? The order of the day is entitlement -- and nobody is ever grateful for what they are entitled to! So modern western man is saddled with the greatest unhappiness in world history -- gravely wounded soldiers in terrible wars have been grateful to be alive, modern man is often distraught and grossly unhappy if their Facebook "Friends" fail to put a "like" on their new rainbow profile picture!

There is a lot more in the book -- Prager does a characteristically insightful and compassionate discussion of medications and being wired toward depression.

If we are, in fact, “built” this way, we no longer have to blame ourselves or loved ones for our unhappiness. There is something worse than depression—blaming it on yourself or a loved one.

For those of us with such wiring, this is possibly the most important day to day advice -- because the depressive wiring comes with self-blame as a "feature".

I highly recommend the book even if you are a very happy person. It is an excellent broad-brush skim of some of the more important, and time proven wisdom for a meaningful life.

Happiness Hypothesis, By Johnathan Haidt

http://www.amazon.com/The-Happiness-Hypothesis-Finding-Ancient/dp/0465028020

It is one of my favorite books relative to both ancient wisdom and what science is finding about the way our brains may operate at a general level. 

The subtitle of the book is "Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom" and the author is Jonathan Haidt. I LOVED the recommendation from the father of the Positive Psychology Movement (Martin Seligman) who stated; "For the reader who seeks to understand happiness, my advice is: Begin with Haidt." ;-) (it actually isn't pronounced "hate", it is pronounced "height" ... but still funny)

I love the metaphor that he uses and the picture on the cover, a shadowy view of a rider on a swimming elephant. Haidt had gone for a trail ride in the mountains as a youth, and as the horse neared a particularly steep cliff, Jonathan panicked thinking he didn't have the horse under control and didn't know what to do. For a brief few seconds he debated jumping off as he realized what he thought was his peril. Of course, the old trail horse had done this trail thousands of times and had no interest in going off the cliff. She calmly negotiated the turn and life went on.

The analogy is to show the the relationship between our consciousness (rider), a fairly recent add to our wetware package. The vast majority of our mental apparatus has been honed by millions of years of successful selection (or divine intervention). Our chances of controlling "the elephant" (subconscious) by force are zero. Our only hope is to learn how to lovingly train the elephant to operate more as a team with our consciousness. The theme of the book is how this has been relatively understood for millennia and there is much wisdom on how to do this which can now be validated and improved upon by modern science.

Shakespeare said: "There is nothing either good or bad but, but thinking makes it so". Buddha said: "Our life is a creation of the mind". Unfortunately, science shows us that we are biased to think the wrong things. We tend to focus on threats that aren't there and useless worry (among other things). Three techniques are proposed for dealing with this problem: Meditation, Cognitive Therapy, and "Prozac" (SSRIs Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor drugs).  I would now add Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) to that list for sure! 

All of these work to varying degrees and all can work together. One objective is for the conscious mind and the "elephant" to learn to work as a team rather than fighting -- all three methods help calm a nervous, morose, or unreliable "elephant" (subconscious).

There is a chapter on reciprocity, which is basically "the golden rule". It turns out it really does seem to be written on our souls, and there is no better way to get people to do something for you than to do something for them. One of the big problems with human society is that of the "free rider" -- someone that doesn't follow reciprocity. Sanctions, gossip, and possibly a lot of our brain size is involved in operating as a cooperative group but minimizing "free riders".

I liked the explanation of "naive realism". "Each of us thinks we see the world as it really is. We further believe that the facts as we see them are there for all to see, therefore others should agree with us." We see everyone else as impacted by ideology and self interest -- but WE are unbiased!  This is one reason why it is often a challenge to get along with others. 

The "elephant - rider" model alone is well worth understanding. In any case, the book is EXCELLENT! It is one of my top recommendations, and no doubt will be a future book review at The Lighthouse! 

Man's Search For Meaning, Frankl

Dr Victor Frankl, trained as a psychiatrist before suffering years of life in the brutal concentration camps of Nazi Germany where he lost his young wife, parents and of course millions of others (including many more of his friends and associates), has a level of authority that is hard to ignore.

Beyond his experience in the horror of the camps, he founded a school of psychotherapy called "Logotherapy", derived from the Greek "logos" or "meaning". It is considered the 3rd school of Viennese psychotherapy, contrasted with Freud's "will to pleasure", and the Adler/Nietzsche "will to power", it talks of a "will to meaning" in the existential manner similar to Kierkegaard.

Logotherapy speaks of "existential frustration", where the term "existential" has 3 related meanings:

1. Existence itself in the way that humans experience it.
2. The MEANING of existence
3. The PERSONAL SEARCH for that meaning

Where Freud, and largely the American Founders thought that "happiness" or "pleasure" is what is to be pursued, Frankl believes that life provides each of us a task that is specific and unique for each person. Every human has value because each has a unique task that will likely fall under one or more of three headings:
1). The completing of a "work" -- art, innovation, a family, ideas, business, etc ...
2). Experiencing or encountering someone or some thing -- the love of your life, care for the poor, the elderly, the sick ... or maybe just "baseball", or "riding motorcycle"
3). Suffering -- facing inevitable suffering and turning it to triumph. Very much looked down on today where we tend to make people "ashamed for being unhappy". Note if the suffering CAN be removed, then that is what should be done, but if it is a terminal painful condition, or someone close to you is lost -- or if you are in a concentration camp, then human suffering CAN have dignity.

A well known quote from Nietzsche comes up a couple times in the book "He who has a why can bear with almost any how." The message of the book is that it is meaning that is primary (the why). Happiness is a RESULT not the immediate objective, and in fact, the pursuit of happiness as a primary goal is often destructive as it fails to realize that RESPONSIBILITY ... inescapable responsibility to answer the question that life asks us, is the natural human state and it REQUIRES tension ... effort, risk, loss, pain.

The idea that happiness is a worthy "pursuit" and some would even say "a right" is a sham, because of what Frankl calls "the tragic triad" that is part of each of our lives:

Pain, Guilt, and Death. 

Part of each of our "question" is how do we say YES!  to life in the face of pain, guilt, and death. His basic answer is "A human being is not one in pursuit of happiness, but rather in search of a reason to become happy".

I'm going to include his "imperative", even though it is one that does not speak to me as well as much of the book does:

 "Live life as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time, as you are about to act now". 

To try to give readers a chance to follow this better than possibly I do, I will quote a bit more:

" In fact, the opportunities to act properly, the potentialities to fulfill a meaning, are affected by the irreversibility of our lives. But also the potentialities alone are so affected. For as soon as we have used an opportunity and have actualized a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past wherein it as been safely delivered and deposited. In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured. To be sure, people tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness, but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past which they have brought into the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity." 

My belief is that the reason this does not speak to me to the same extent is that I did not suffer in a concentration camp, nor lose a young wife that I loved, all my family and most of my friends to the Holocaust. To Frankl, his life prior to, and even the experience of the horror of the camps is so much a part of his soul that he has had to integrate that as "treasure", somewhat in order to live, but possibly more so in order to honor and keep alive the memories of those he knew and loved that were lost so early in his life.

The book is not directly a "religious book", although to believe that "life" asks each a meaningful question, there is only a short step from "life" to "God". If one has Christian Faith, much in the book is quite easily to translate to that context.

Needless to say, I highly recommend the book, ESPECIALLY for those suffering ... and in human life, eventually, that includes all of us.

Welcome To Lighthouse Blog

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Book reviews that have a connection to life, health, community, psychological health, psychology, brain science -- and sometimes just FUN are postworthy.

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