Book Review-The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want

Life.  Liberty.  And the pursuit of happiness.  Our founding fathers placed it third, but Aristotle and most others would have placed it first.  Happiness is a central consideration in life, yet we’re notoriously bad at finding it.  The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want was written to try to fix that.  Research-backed practices are the path towards happiness – or at least one of them.

Stumbling

Before delving into Sonya Lyubomirsky’s work, it’s important to recognize that we’ve been struggling with the problem of cultivating happiness for centuries.  I first wrote my review of Stumbling on Happiness in 2007.  Since then, more than a dozen books have sought to cover happiness, including: Happiness, Hardwiring Happiness, The Dalai Lama’s Big Book of Happiness, and The Happiness Hypothesis.  The simple fact is that many people have tried to find the path to happiness that would reduce the misery of the masses.  However, none of them seem to have solved the core problem.  From approaches of philosophy, religion, and psychology – they failed to unlock the path for most of us.

The proof is in the fact that we’re some of the most medicated people in the history of the planet – and leading those medications are those designed to combat depression.  Depression (in some ways, the opposite of happiness) is at epidemic proportions despite all the work that we’ve done to try to understand how to address it – and to cultivate happiness.

Reconstructing a Moment

For some, we feel as if we’ve found happiness, and we’ve lost it.  Much like the movie Medicine Man, we feel like it’s possible to find happiness – if we can just recreate the circumstances.  What we must realize is that it’s not about finding happiness, it’s about creating it.  Research says that the things we believe will bring us happiness rarely do in a persistent way.  From increases in pay to awards, they may elevate us to happiness for a moment, but rarely will they hold us in a new heightened level of happiness.  They’re like a mirage that seems real in the moment – but that ultimately fade as we arrive.

Rather than trying to find happiness, we’re forced to find ways to construct it.  We construct it through the mental habits that we develop.  We find and maintain happiness not because of our external circumstances but sometimes despite them.

Happiness is a State of Mind

What makes two people in nearly identical circumstances diverge so widely in their degree of happiness?  While laying bricks in the hot sun, what is it that makes the worker on the left whistle a tune, and the one on the right grumbles and moans the whole time?  The answer isn’t their material circumstances; invariably, the answer is their perspective on their circumstances.

During the Great Depression, many people flocked to the public works projects as a part of the New Deal.  The work was hard – and competition for even these physically demanding jobs was fierce.  In the Depression, having any work was a blessing – even if it was hard.  Contrast that with today, with historic low unemployment rates, and people whose conditions are materially better than those on the public works projects who are grumbling about their job, their lot in life, or the fact that their employer is oppressive.  Better work with a worse attitude – because the expectations and perspectives were different.

The most important thing to know about happiness is that it doesn’t – and can’t – come from external things in a sustainable way.  Sure, a raise, a vacation, or an award can shift your happiness for a moment, but to get to a sustainable change, we’ll have to change our attitude about the circumstances we have.  Our attitude towards our circumstances is substantially more important than the “reality” of them.

Creeping Normalcy

When our happiness is changed by a change in circumstances, we acclimatize to the changes and return to our previous state of happiness.  Want to know how much money it takes to be happy?  It’s about 20% more than you currently make.  If you get that 20% raise, you’ll be okay for a while before returning to the belief that 20% more will finally make you happy.  The problem is that this is a mirage.  The closer you get to it, the further it moves away.

That isn’t to minimize the situation of those who are struggling in abject poverty.  However, that’s not the case for most of us reading the book or reading this blog.  Our basic needs aren’t substantially at threat.  There are many safety systems that help to ensure that we’ll have food or a place to rest.  (Again, not minimizing that these systems aren’t perfect and sometimes fail.)  Once a family is making $75,000 per year, the degree to which the 20% extra improves happiness drops substantially.

When I was growing up, I had a friend whose family literally didn’t have a phone in their home.  A government program eventually made it possible for them to get a phone.  However, the point is that something that nearly everyone today would perceive as a necessity wasn’t something that they had.  Today, we walk around with smart phones and expect that we will have them.  Our standards both at an individual and societal level creeps up.

Sensemaking via Writing

It was a friendly gathering at a breakfast restaurant.  I shared that I read a book each week and had for roughly 10 years with another avid reader.  His nearly immediate question was how I kept all the ideas straight in my head.  I explained that it was this process – writing book reviews – that made it possible.  It’s a sense-making and connecting process that allows me to connect ideas from one work to another and in the process helps me remember where something was discussed.

That being said, I must say that there’s tons that I have trouble remembering and finding the source for.  I frequently refer to these posts and to the notes from which they’re based.  I search books in Kindle (and in OCRed PDFs when the Kindle book isn’t available).  I work at connecting and keeping this information in the same way that those who are insistent on their happiness must work at the techniques that lead to happiness.

James Pennebaker’s work, which is referred to from The How of Happiness, makes it clear that this story writing and sense-making is critical to people’s ability to recover from trauma – and to be happier.  Rick Hanson goes further in his book, Hardwiring Happiness, where he focuses on some of the same techniques but by savoring positive images and making them more present in your life today – thus increasing happiness.

Envious or Happy – Pick One

One of the quips that I use in our presentations is that social media isn’t “real.”  After a pause, I explain that it’s a highlight reel.  Most people post the things they’re doing that are interesting and exciting.  They don’t often share their failures and the struggles of life.  While it happens, it doesn’t happen often.  As a result, social media leaves us believing that everyone else’s world doesn’t have times of struggle and sadness.  (See also Alone Together for this effect.)  Our fascination with cooking shows, reality television, and even home renovation shows exacerbates this.  All of them skip the boring parts.  The waiting isn’t worth watching, so it’s figuratively left on the cutting room floor.

The problem is that this can lead to a sense of envy of others that we barely know.  A friend shares their amazing photos from Hawaii or Iceland, and suddenly we want to go.  We’re envious for a moment – or longer – as we begin to evaluate whether we’ll be able to go or whether we’ll have to skip it this year or even this decade.  We envy their experiences even if we’ve had some amazing experiences this year ourselves.

The problem with this is not that we can’t have these experiences.  The problem is that we envy others, and envy blocks happiness.  It prevents us from accepting what we have and moving forward with ways that we can enjoy what we have.

Happiness Activities

The book shares 12 activities that have research support.  These are the things that, if you do them, you’ll be able to change your degree of happiness.

1. Expressing Gratitude
2. Cultivating Optimism
3. Avoiding Overthinking and Social Comparison
4. Practicing Acts of Kindness
5. Nurturing Social Relationships
6. Developing Strategies for Coping
7. Learning to Forgive
8. Increasing Flow Experiences
9. Savoring Life’s Joys
10. Committing to Your Goals
11. Practicing Religion and Spirituality
12. Taking Care of Your Body: Meditation, Physical Activity, & Acting Like a Happy Person

Fixed and Variable

It’s important to acknowledge that some degree of our happiness is inborn – it’s genetics.  However, there’s a substantial percentage, perhaps 40%, which is under our control (or influence).  This is the same sort of split we see whenever genetics are discussed in the human condition.  (See The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike for more.)

There are some people who will have lost the cortical lottery and will struggle with happiness their entire lives.  However, most people have the capacity for happiness which is well under their control – if they’re willing to work at it.  It’s those people – most of us – who could use to learn more about The How of Happiness.

Book Review-Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang

How is it that one boy becomes a Boy Scout Eagle Scout and the other finds their way into a criminal gang?  This is the fundamental question that Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang seeks to answer.  Parents of children wonder these questions before their children grow up and after their children have sorted their ways into different paths.  Other, more contemporary works, like those of Judith Rich Harris in No Two Alike and The Nurture Assumption, have described their view on the sorting process.  It was Ronald Marris’ Social Forces in Urban Suicide that caused me to pick up the book (published in 1955) to see what we might have lost in our understanding of how people end up dedicating their life to a disruptive counter-culture – and how others do not.

Delinquency Definition

Delinquency is, at its core, counter cultural.  It eschews the standards of “social convention.”  (See Choosing Civility, The Righteous Mind, and Trust: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order for more about social conventions and their influence.)  Cohen in Delinquent Boys describes the subculture as “non-utilitarian, malicious, and negativistic.”  That is, the behaviors seem to have no utility, are seen by the traditional culture as malicious, and generally have a negative view.

In so much as delinquency is counter-cultural and malicious it is seen by most as amoral.  (See The Righteous Mind and Moral Disengagement for more on morality.)  However, it would be more accurate to say that it operates on a different set of moral values.

The Desire for Status

Delinquents have not or cannot find status in the traditional culture.  They don’t fall into a category or class that has the kind of recognition and status that they desire.  They’re not the jocks.  They’re not the nerds.  They’re not the kind of kids that go to college.  Their frustrated attempts to find a way to achieve status leads them to a group where their willingness to be malicious is enough to earn them that status.  (See Who Am I? and The Normal Personality for more about 16 different motivators, including status.)

In this context, rules aren’t just to be ignored or even evaded.  Rules are to be flouted.  It’s the fact that they’re willing to openly defy rules that creates their status in the eyes of others.  Being just ornery is ordinary; they’ve got to do something to stand out from their delinquent friends.

Here and Now

Another characteristic of delinquents is their prepotency of short-run hedonism.  That is, they are focused on their current desires for pleasures with little interest in long-term consequences.  (See The Time Paradox for more on different ways of viewing time.)  This can easily be caused by a lack of belief that they’ll be able to reap the rewards of any long-term planning.  For those who have had too many adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), it may be difficult for them to see the stability necessary for long-term rewards.  (See How Children Succeed for more on ACEs.)

Delinquent Psychology

Let’s cut to the chase.  What are they thinking?  That’s what everyone wants to know.  There isn’t a single answer but instead there are a few generalizations that we can make.

First, their sense of self-esteem is unstable.  That is, they’re always struggling for status and approval.  Because of this, when their self-esteem is threatened, their ego’s defenses are automatically engaged.  (See Change or Die for more about The Ego and Its Defenses.)  A typical reaction is anger.  Anger, in Eastern traditions, is disappointment directed.  Disappointment is a judgement of something that missed the prediction or the standard.  (You can find more about this in my post, Conflict: Anger.)

However, anger isn’t the only outward sign of the struggle to maintain the façade of a positive self-esteem.  I explained in my post How to Be Yourself how projecting one image is difficult to maintain, like holding a gallon of milk out to your side.  Coupled with an inability to admit vulnerability, this creates a situation where the “boy” continuously struggles to be or do something that isn’t naturally possible.

While Delinquent Boys put on the airs of being immune to the kinds of hurts that others readily acknowledge, the truth is that they are often cut more deeply by them.  They believe that showing reaction to these hurts means they’re weak, and their culture won’t accept that.  We know that, for physical healing to occur, we need to provide the right conditions.  In many cases, that means either avoiding use or specifically targeting use of the injured part of our body.  We apply casts and define exercise regimens.  However, in the case of the hurts that occur in the Delinquent Boys, they can’t acknowledge the hurts or shape the way they move forward and grow.  (See Antifragile for more about how to recover better from hurts.)

Red vs. Blue

It is a common game.  Red teams are the aggressors, and blue teams are the defenders.  Whether the game is one of cyberwarfare or not, the teams are set up in direct conflict, and Richard Hackman’s work says that the red teams – whether they are less experienced or not – are more likely to be successful.  In Collaborative Intelligence, he explains both the situational and team dynamics that influence the success of each group.  Red teams are effective in part because they define themselves with an objective, where blue teams can only define themselves by not failing.  It turns out that defining yourself with what you’re not isn’t effective.

Delinquent boys are defining themselves with the idea that they’re not something.  They’re not the norm.  They’re not the establishment.  They’re not the suburban preppy kids.  They’re not going to be the hardworking folks that others step all over.  They’re different.  This has some utilitarian value.  It means that, if they fail, it’s trivial for their ego to deflect by saying whatever they failed at wasn’t important anyway.  However, because they can’t define themselves with a single thing, it’s hard to be successful at anything.

What does a motorcycle manufacturer with a poor track record in just about every aspect that one would want in a motorcycle company do to salvage its business?  Associate its brand with a culture of rebels.  Our desire to address under-addressed aspects of our personality is a powerful force.  Accountants and businessmen wanted to express their inner rebel, and Harley Davidson was there to help them do just that.  Instead of fixing reliability, they fixed their image in everyone’s mind that to own a Harley Davidson was to signal to the rest of the world that you’re a rebel.

The problem is that while “rebel” can be a part of your personality, it fails as a core part of a personality.  Being contrary to just be contrary doesn’t work in the long run.  You can’t anchor your identity to the idea of having no anchors.  So, Delinquent Boys are left adrift without anything to hold on to.

Counting “Nots”

A counselor once told me that you could tell when someone wasn’t saying anything real by counting the number of “nots” in their conversation.  Broadening this slightly to include other forms of negation, I realized that when someone says they want something, but they keep explaining it by providing negative examples, they either don’t clearly understand what it is they want – or they’re actively trying to prevent the person who they’re talking to from getting there.  This subtle form of manipulation is shame-inducing.

The person who is receiving the negative-laden explanation has no model to work from and therefore must continue trying random (or semi-random) approaches to address the need – only to be told that this, too, isn’t right.  The result is often demoralization and the feeling that you’ll never get things right.  In fact, in some cases this may be the point.

This is just one example of how trying to define in the negative doesn’t work – whether it’s intentional manipulation or simply because of attempts to define oneself by what we are not.

Unique – But Not Too Unique (Optimal Distinctiveness Theory)

We have inherent need to be accepted by others.  It’s wired into our evolution.  Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind, explains that we survived to become the dominant biomass on the planet not from strength but from our ability to be social.  We know that when we’re standing on our own – rather than as a part of a group – we’re at substantially greater risk.  In historic times, being expelled from a community was likely a death sentence.  Individually, we’re weak.  Together, we’re strong, and that leads to our strong desire to be accepted by others.  However, that’s not the only force deep in our psyche that struggles to bubble up into our feelings, beliefs, and behaviors.

The other engine that drives us is our need for uniqueness.  We believe that we must be different – and ideally better—than others.  We don’t want to feel like we could be replaced by someone else.  That’s why it stings to hear that a former employer or a former lover has replaced you too quickly.  It’s the loss of our feelings of uniqueness.  However, uniqueness requires difference – and too much difference means that we can’t be accepted.

We know that people accept others that are like themselves.  If you become too different, and distinguishable from them, you threaten the ability to be accepted.  The result is that we try to find the narrow path between acceptance and uniqueness.  This has been called “optimal distinctiveness.”

The key problem with optimal distinctiveness is that it necessitates that the problem is a wicked problem.  No two people will define the need for and the appropriate degree of individualization the same way.  (See Dialogue Mapping for more.)  Ultimately, there is no solution to how to be optimally unique and at the same time conforming.  It’s one of the key challenges of life for all of us.

School Shootings

It was Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado.  It ignited a series of school shooting massacres.  It was also not the first time the perpetrators had made themselves known as delinquents.  Eric Harris’ blog had detailed his interest in harming others and some of his escapades with Dylan Klebold.  Both pled guilty to felony theft and were sent to a juvenile diversion program.  That was 16 months before the massacre.

Numerous others have followed in Eric and Dylan’s infamous footsteps, and more than we know have tried and were thwarted.  No Easy Answers walks through the Columbine Massacre and seeks to help us understand how bullying and a desire to feel strong created a situation that left Eric and Dylan believing their only option was to become powerful through a massacre.

Shifting the Blame

Delinquents have gotten quite fully into what Leadership and Self-Deception and The Anatomy of Peace would describe as a box.  Inside the box, people’s vulnerability drives them to behaviors that are inconsistent with their beliefs and harmful to others.  Eric and Dylan weren’t from bad families.  On the outside, their values would seem to be that of any other child.  However, it turns out that they found ways to do the unspeakable.  They managed to disengage their morality.  (See Moral Disengagement for more.)

Following the Columbine Massacre, both Eric and Dylan were vilified, a reasonable response to people having lost their children or friends as a result of the rage.  What they didn’t effectively do is ask what conditions were in place which allowed these boys to become this way.  Certainly, there is the role of the parents, the community, and the school.  However, what about the environment is key such that so many copycats have followed them?  Perhaps it’s their feelings of shame at the hands of unchecked bullies.  Perhaps it’s something else.

We know that people resist accepting the blame for the situations that they create.  Delinquent Boys are no exception.  Without granting innocence or shifting the blame, how can we look back into their past to see what conditions preceded their delinquency?  Maybe you can find the answer in a nearly 70-year-old book about Delinquent Boys.

Book Review-No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine High School

It has been identified as the sentinel event.  The book No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine High School is an exposition and review of the events leading up to the Columbine Massacre as well as the aftermath of the event.  I started reading the book not because of the latest school shooting but instead because it offered potential clues to explaining unexplainable behaviors.  In the more than 20 years that have followed the event, much has been written and considered – perhaps among the tragedy, there might be some value.

No Easy Answers

In the wake of the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, some were calling for finding resolutions to the school shooting epidemic.  Depending upon their particular political beliefs, the focus of the call to action was on mental health, gun control, or better school safety.  What troubled me quite quickly was the look for an easy answer.

At Columbine, it would be easy to dismiss Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as deranged psychopaths, products of a hostile environment and poor upbringing.  However, having been to the Denver, Colorado suburb of Littleton that surrounds Columbine, the environment is anything but hostile.  By all accounts, both Eric and Dylan’s parents weren’t cruel or neglectful.  In fact, their parents would easily be considered above par in terms of creating home environments and engaging with their children.  Clearly, Eric and Dylan’s actions betray psychopathy – but how did this happen?

It’s not the case that they were just two “bad apples.”  Instead, we’ve got to look more carefully at the environment, the situation, the signs, and the gaps that allowed them to slip through.  As I explain in Fractal Along the Edges, things aren’t what they first appear.

The Environment

Judith Rich Harris, in The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike, walks through the mechanisms that can cause two children born to the same parents and in the same environment to differ in the trajectories of their lives.  To blame the parents ignores the external factors over which the parents have no control.  To blame the parents either burdens them with having produced genetically damaged offspring – which isn’t truth – or to distort their home lives to fit a freakish version of the truth.

But if we absolve the parents of responsibility – which I’m not completely advocating – who is left?  What in the environment might contribute to the awful tragedy?

Bullying

The news is littered with the tragedy of students who take their own life because of the bullying that they receive – both physical and emotional.  Often, the bullying that these lost souls experienced went unreported.  Somewhere, they’d learned that they’d be blamed for the bullying.  They’d be told they’re weak, and they needed to just “suck it up.”  The authorities weren’t going to do anything about it anyway.  They’d only make things worse.  Whether these perceptions are true or only fears given inappropriate legitimacy, they exist in the minds of many of those who found themselves at the hands of bullies.

The same forces that drive some to give up and take their own life can drive the desire for revenge and rampage.  (See The Suicidal Mind for more on the connection.)  The forces that make someone feel weak and unprotected cause them to find their way towards strength and self-protection.

At the heart of bullying lies two concepts.  First is that someone is better than another.  That is, their position in the society grants them special privileges.  The second is that “might makes right.”

Social Hierarchy

The animal kingdom is practically built on social hierarchy.  We find that some animals are perceived as leaders, and they are therefore granted special privileges.  The interesting question is what leads us to the coveted top of the hierarchy and what are the rewards that come with this social status.  In the animal kingdom, this is mostly strength and ability to fight.  However, as humans, we’re not the strongest, nor do we have the fiercest set of natural attacks, as Jonathan Haidt points out in The Righteous Mind.  What we do have is the ability to work together and our intelligence.  However, when you’re fighting your way to the top of the social hierarchy, how does this work?

In high schools like Columbine, the social hierarchy is driven in part by the kind of athletics you participate in.  The better your position and performance in a respected sport, the better your reputation, both with the other students and with the staff.  Football quarterbacks and starting centers get the highest spots in the hierarchy, where the captains of the chess and the debate team are less highly regarded.

This isn’t all bad, as Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers explains that stress can accompany not knowing your place in the social hierarchy.  However, it also explains that when those on the top of the hierarchy aren’t happy, they tend to take out their frustrations on those who are lower in the hierarchy than they are.

Might Makes Right

Historically, at the micro-level, physical prowess provided a mechanism for extracting pleasure from the infliction of shame and pain on the unfortunate souls who happen to be within range of the wrath.  The goal of this superficially is pleasure.  However, if Jonathan Haidt is right, this goes against one of the most powerful foundations of our morality: care vs. harm.  He explains in The Righteous Mind that there are six foundations of morality, including care/harm and authority/subversion, and we each value the foundations differently.

It’s challenging, because it’s necessary to practice Moral Disengagement in order to feel safe.  The capricious nature of the harm caused to others is intended to instill sufficient fear that people don’t – or rarely – directly challenge you.  It’s much easier to portray the illusion of strength when others are afraid to challenge you – constantly battling others can drain even the strongest.

I should be careful to say that I’m not condoning the behavior of attacking those lower on the social hierarchy – far from it.  I am saying that this is the normal order of things in the animal kingdom and unfortunately in “polite society” – it’s just the approaches changed.  In Reinventing Organizations, Fredrick LaLoux explains the evolution of organizations, from those only a half-step removed from physically beating people into submission to the more enlightened environments designed to encourage everyone.

Historically, history was written by the victors.  They were in power and controlled the narrative around what happened.  Thus, those who had the power shaped the way they were seen in the eyes of the populace.  While the world has now changed, as movements like Arab Spring have shown, we still must accept that much in our history books is near fiction.

Cynicism

When we speak about burnout, we explain that it has three defining characteristics: exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy.  (See Extinguish Burnout for free resources on burnout.)  What’s important here is that cynicism is an outcome.  It’s the outcome of feeling like you can no longer make a difference.  It’s a sort of resignation that all you can do is complain.

Some people reach this conclusion through a feeling of powerlessness.  They believe that they’re not strong enough to do anything.  These are the same sorts of people that become the best in their fields.  Anders Ericsson explains in Peak that people become motivated to get better, do the work, and focus on getting better.  In The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin explains his rise to the top of both the chess and martial arts worlds – including his psychological struggles.  Being the best is hard.  For some, giving up is never an answer; for too many others, it seems like the only option.

Direct competition isn’t the only way that people are confronted with reasons why they’re powerless.  In America’s Generations, Chuck Underwood explains how Generation X grew up with a growing awareness of how the world systems that we should trust were broken and corrupted.  From the Oval Office to the board room, the system was rigged against us – and there was nothing we could do about it.  It’s no wonder Generation X is one of the most cynical.

When you mix a deep sense that the system is rigged against you, constant bullying and belittling, a pressure from others to change the world, and the power that can be found in the form of guns and explosions, you’ve got the recipe for a massacre.

Guns

In the United States, we believe in the right to bear arms.  We believe that we can enhance our power by wielding a gun.  It’s the way that we see our heroes in movies overcome their enemies, and it’s an accepted part of our lives as well.  Many of those who enter the debate hold a strong opinion about guns.  Either they believe that the government is slowly out to erode or minimize these rights to have guns, or they believe that guns are the root of all evil and should be banned from existence.

The sparring goes back and forth between statistics that show more lax gun laws result in more gun-related deaths.  The opposition counters that this is only true when suicide isn’t factored out.  They recognize that suicide is the most common death due to guns, not murder.  They also counter that many guns are obtained illegally – as those used in the Columbine massacre were.  Albert Bandura shares his point of view in Moral Disengagement, where he comes down on the side of more gun control and less violence on TV.

Entertaining Violence

Another of the easy targets for the cause of violence was the entertainment industry: movies, music, and monstrous games.  Eric had been fascinated with the movie, Natural Born Killers, music by Insane Clown Posse, and created levels for the computer game, Doom.  Surely one of the was to blame for the massacre.  It’s a short distance from seeing violence and performing violence, right?  Not exactly.  Bandura is famous for his Bobo doll experiment, which proved that children could learn social norms by watching others.

However, the work of Erik Erikson in Childhood and Society explains that children should have developed the ability to discern fantasy from the real world well before Eric and Dylan were exposed to violence in the media.  No Easy Answers explains how the Klebold family intentionally shielded their children from violence, including the uneasiness about the children purchasing the game Mortal Kombat.  (For more about why Bandura’s perspective may not be right, check out The Blank Slate.)

The Reality of Television

While television was blamed as a part of the concern for the entertainment industry’s part, what was overlooked was the actual factual news that was being reported.  It’s one thing to look at movies and television shows and see actors portraying violence.  It’s another to realize that your president had oral sex in the Oval Office with an intern and got away with it.  It’s more than the fantasy violence that contributes to the situation.  It’s the real events that we see are allowing people to escape justice.  In America’s Generations, Chuck Underwood explains how there are milestones that shape each generation.  Generation X was shaped by mistrust of people, politicians, and the power of corporations.

We didn’t have reality television to the extent that it’s prevalent today, but television was still a mirror of our culture.  Where the television didn’t intrude was into the homes of those families where children were abused, and that, too, we discovered.  We saw that people who should protect children weren’t – they were the villains in the story, not the heroes – and it confused everything.

Bottled Emotion

When it comes to emotions, the illusion that we can ignore them is fading.  We’re beginning to realize that we can’t bottle emotions up.  We can’t turn them off.  We’re as much emotional beings as we are rational beings – if not more.  Jonathan Haidt explains in his Elephant-Rider-Path model that reason is a tiny human on top of a massive elephant.  (See The Happiness Hypothesis and Switch.)  Lisa Feldman Barrett in How Emotions Are Made explains some of the hidden processes that we go through to form emotions – and the power they hold on us after they’re formed.

The challenge was that Eric and Dylan were bottling those emotions – painful emotions – up.  As a result, they were emotional pressure vessels that were just waiting to explode.  When Eric’s grip on the difference between fantasy and reality waned just a little, it was all that was necessary to ignite the explosion.

Doing the Right Thing

What’s the right answer?  Certainly, not allowing others to be victimized and bullied is a good start.  However, at the heart of the matter is a complex interaction between dozens of forces, only some of which are visible.  This leads us back to the reality that there are No Easy Answers.  We may never know the real “truth” about Columbine.

Book Review-Capture: Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Suffering

One of the common challenges with those who are embroiled in mental suffering is that they feel stuck.  It’s almost as if their suffering has caught them in a net, and they can’t find their way out.  Capture: Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Suffering is focused on that idea – that people are caught by their mental suffering.  No matter which path they’ve been walking, somewhere along the line, they’ve stepped into a trap – and they’re struggling to free themselves from it.  Some are able to get free with support from medications and therapies, but some seem to be perpetually stuck.

Addiction

While on the surface mental suffering may not look much like addiction, as you look deeper, the similarities begin to surface.  In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg explains a cycle that he claims helps us define habits.  (His reading of the science is a bit weak, but, conceptually, the idea of a cycle is a good starting point.)  If you consider that addiction is simply the progression of a coping strategy becoming more controlling of a person, it’s easy to see how this is a reinforcing cycle.

Slowing that down a bit, you can look at The Globalization of Addiction and Dreamland about how difficult drug addictions function and how they’re driven by these progressive loops.  In particular, there’s a reinforcing shame cycle.  (See I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t) for more on shame and its effects.)  To understand the power of reinforcing loops, we can look to Donella Meadow’s excellent Thinking in Systems.  In short, when we have reinforcing loops without powerful balancing loops, any system can get out of control.

In the case of addictions, those reinforcing loops are initiated by the chemical and neurological changes.  Whether the addiction itself is chemically based or is simply the result of our internal neurochemical changes, the result is a system composed of powerful reinforcing loops with underpowered balancing loops.  One can argue that losing marriages, friends, finances, jobs, and most of the things that make life worth living would be powerful balancing loops, but often by the time that these kick in, the person is well under the control of the addiction.

Applying the same model to mental suffering, we know that many conditions – particularly suicide – are characterized by a cognitive constriction that prevents the ability to see a wider range of options.  (See The Suicidal Mind for suicide and cognitive constriction.)  In Drive, Daniel Pink explains that even mild forms of stress decrease performance through functional fixedness.  Specifically, research showed that even under mild pressure people wouldn’t recognize alternative uses for a container that tacks were placed in.

It turns out that it’s easy to constrict our thinking and difficult to expand it.  In Creative Confidence, the Kelley brothers explain that we’re all born creative, and it’s crushed out of many of us by the educational and commercial employment processes.  In The Fearless Organization, Amy Edmondson is focused on the creation of psychological safety as an antidote to the constriction.  Richard Lazarus, in Emotion and Adaption, explains how our fear is based on the probability of an event and the impact of the event – and that our ability to cope mitigates our sense of fear.  Fear is clearly an enemy to being able to think broadly.

One of the challenges we face with mental suffering is that most people bring it upon themselves by reinforcing negative thinking, which constricts thinking to negative thoughts, and this loop ultimately continues until it’s difficult to see or accept positive things in our lives.  This is the same kind of cycle that drives addiction.  The difference here is that there’s no external object to which an addiction is attached.  Instead, the addiction is to the negative thoughts that continue to loop and consume those who experience mental suffering.

The Illusion of Control

Always lurking in the shadows, shaping our feelings and our actions, is the desire for control.  We crave predictability and love the predictability that comes with the illusion of control.  In Compelled to Control, J. Keith Miller explains that we all want to control (others) but that none of us wants to be controlled.  One of the great revelations in The Hope Circuit is that Marty Seligman’s great discovery of learned helplessness wasn’t learned helplessness at all.  In fact, Steven Maier (one of Seligman’s colleagues) discovered that it was a failure to learn control – or influence – that kept animals from trying to escape mild shocks – even when escape was possible.

C. Rick Snyder in The Psychology of Hope explains that hope is a cognitive process based on waypower (knowing how) and willpower (desire). Inherent in the waypower aspect is the belief that if we do the right things, we can control the outcomes. While, at some level, we are aware that this isn’t the case, we suspend disbelief to engender hope and accept that while we believe we have control of the situation, we really only have varying levels of influence.

Judith Rich Harris explains in No Two Alike and The Nurture Assumption that even with our own children, we don’t have positive control of how they’ll turn out – as any parent of a teenager has undoubtedly discovered on their own.  The desire for control is an illusion – but it’s an illusion that we need to keep intact.

Influence Not Control

There’s a dim awareness that we don’t have control.  Where control implies 100% influence, we’re often arguing with ourselves about the degree of influence that we have.  In How We Know What Isn’t So, Thomas Gilovich explains that we often overestimate our capabilities.  Change or Die explains that our ego is well armed with defenses.  We will often keep believing in things because the alternative is unpalatable.  Incognito and The Tell-Tale Brain explain that we’ll use a variety of defenses as necessary to continue to keep our beliefs about ourselves even when the data clearly indicates that our perceptions are wrong.  Whether it’s denying that we have any physical limitations despite the rather obvious facts that contradict that belief or an amputee’s belief in phantom limbs, we have an amazing capacity to ignore the truth.

If we begin to accept for a moment that we’re not in control but rather have limited influence, we must contend with the fact that we’re no longer “in control” no matter how much of an illusion that might have been.

Loss of Illusion

Obviously, when we lose the illusion of control, we lose hope, and that can lead us to burnout and depression.  (See ExtinguishBurnout.com for burnout resources.)  On the one hand, we need to accept that control is an illusion to free us from the burden of belief that everything is ultimately our fault; on the other hand, we must simultaneously retain the belief that we do have some degree of influence and that degree of influence may be enough.

We get caught in the belief of permanence in our current situation and our belief that we should have prevented it – but didn’t or couldn’t.  The result is a feeling of being trapped, greater stress, and, ultimately, our worlds narrowing into the perceived hopelessness.  (See Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers for more about the impact of stress.)

Responsibility

We cannot be ultimately responsible for things that we cannot control.  That is, we cannot accept all the blame if we only influenced the outcomes – but insufficiently.  Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) examines an under-acceptance of responsibility on the part of leadership.  While certainly this is a valid and important concern, we should be equally concerned when we attempt to take more responsibility than we are due for things that are largely outside of our control.  (See Happier for more.)

Those who suffer often take more responsibility than they should.  They shame themselves for not doing more when there was no way to know that more was called for – or ways that one could do more.  The burden of unnecessary and inappropriate responsibility buries us under weights of depression and disappointment that may be too much to escape.

If Only

When something bad, tragic, or unthinkable happens, we naturally question, “If only I had… would things be different?”  The problem with this line of thinking is that, at some level, the answer is always yes – you could have done something different.  The deeper philosophical challenge is how could you have known that more was necessary?  You begin to ask questions like: how would I change every response in ways that lead away from the result every time?  Often, these answers lead to hypervigilance and a breakdown.

We can’t undo the past no matter how much we may desire to do so.  Instead, we must find ways to take reasonable steps to prevent future occurrences while accepting whatever tragedy has already befallen us.  “If only” is dangerous, because it invites us into the loop where we recognize that we’re not capable of completely avoiding the future pains and intensifying the degree to which we second-guess ourselves.

None of Us Are Immune

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the tendency for people to get captured is the reality that none of us are immune.  We’re all bombarded by sensory input every day and ultimately the wrong set of inputs at the wrong time given the wrong attention can launch us into a loop – capture – that’s hard to escape.  Nassim Taleb in Antifragile explains how we can build resilience but how that all resilience has limits.  After we’ve been impacted by something we need time to recover – and ideally build up resistance – if the next wave comes too quickly or intensely, we can be overwhelmed – and caught up in a negative cycle of mental suffering.

The fact that all of us are susceptible doesn’t change our desire or need to make things better.  We’ve got to accept the fact that we can be captured and work to develop the kind of skills that make our descent into the spiral less likely and easier to recover from.

The Other Side

While Capture has the unfortunate consequence of burdening us, it’s not always a negative cycle that we find ourselves in.  Sometimes, the same mechanisms that drive depression can be turned around on themselves and leveraged to the most amazing experiences.  The experiences that we find the most engaging in life are experiences of flow, which are remarkably similar – even if much harder to enter.  (See Flow, Finding Flow, and The Rise of Superman for more on flow.)

In the end, the greatest hope we may find is not that we eliminate the drivers that lead to mental suffering.  Perhaps the answer lies in harnessing these powers for the development of greater happiness and joy.  Maybe it’s time to Capture happiness.