«The Antidote» - NEGATIVE PATH to HAPPINESS - [ PART II ]

... following part I

(6) Confront your fears by realizing them: they are not as bad as you think.

Everybody has fears. And one way of dealing with them is to make them real.

The humiliation exercise

According to Albert Ellis, a psychologist and proponent of Stoicism, by actually experiencing the unpleasantness of our fears, we see how much we’ve exaggerated them. For example, Ellis had many clients who expressed their fear of public humiliation – and his suggestion to them was that they deliberately embarrass themselves in public.

More specifically, he recommended such clients to perform the so-called “subway-station exercise,” in which the clients were instructed to ride the subway and say the names of the stations they were about to arrive at. Ultimately, publicly embarrassing themselves was never nearly as bad as they had imagined. Sure, it was mildly unpleasant, but hardly comparable to the anxiety surrounding the fear itself – which demonstrates the irrational way in which we approach even mildly unpleasant experiences.

Sounds crazy enough ? Or dumb ? You know why it's working, actually ?

Because these moments of humility act like a vaccine. You're not being really humiliated, you just feel uncomfortable. And you learn how to react and how to confront this awkward position.

And so, by confronting the worst-case scenario head-on, it lost a lot of its anxiety-inducing power.

What's the best part of negative visualization ?

While the “happiness” achieved through positive thinking can be short-lived and fragile, this sort of “negative visualization” generates a far deeper and longer-lasting calm.

Applying the results of this exercise to other contexts, it’s likely that things will turn out better than we’d originally feared.

For example, losing our jobs wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world; we could easily remedy the situation by finding a new job, starting our own business, or taking a vacation.

Actually this is used with great success in Cognitive Behavioral Psychology

The method of confronting our fears is well-recognized in the field of cognitive behavioral psychology. By facing the fears and uncertainties in our lives, we can sever the connection between negative ideas and the recurring feeling of dread, because it really wasn’t so dreadful after all.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy aims to help people become aware of when they make negative interpretations, and of behavioral patterns which reinforce the distorted thinking. Cognitive therapy helps people to develop alternative ways of thinking and behaving which aims to reduce their psychological distress.

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(7) Some philosophies, religions and cultures find happiness by accepting the negative things in life.

The desire for happiness is not universal. Many cultures have viewed negativity as a positive thing at different points in history.

A) The Stoics were one of the most famous groups to embrace negativity in order to achieve happiness. They did this by imagining the worst-case scenarios so that when something terrible happened to them, it would (almost) always be less severe than their expectations.

Funny description for Stoics

Someone who does not give a shit about the stupid things in this world that most people care so much about. Stoics do have emotions, but only for the things in this world that really matter. They are the most real people alive.

Group of kids are sitting on a porch.
Stoic walks by.
Kid - "Hey man, you're a fuckin faggot and you suck cock!"
Stoic - "Good for you."
Keeps going.

B) Buddhists are another group of people who believe in taking a “backwards” route to happiness. Rather than avoiding negative situations and feelings at all costs, they detach from their situations and feelings, and observe the state they’re in. Buddhist teachings emphasize that a sense of peace and tranquility can be achieved through meditation, i.e., a state of absolute relaxation in which one does not indulge in talking or thinking consciously for some time, and instead merely observes one’s thoughts.

For example, a series of experiments conducted in 2009 by a young psychologist named Fadel Zeidan at the University of North Carolina showed that people who practiced meditation/non-attachment did not feel electric shocks administered to them, even at high levels.

All these groups and cultures can agree that being truly happy is contingent upon our experiencing negative emotions – or at least not running away from them. All this also forces us to ask ourselves what “happiness” really means.

(8) Stoicism advocates tranquility and embracing worries as they arise.

Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius once said,

“Things do not touch the soul […] our perturbations come only from the opinion which is within.”

The Stoics sought to face their circumstances with tranquility and a calm indifference, not with strong emotions. One way to do this, they argued, was by examining negative experiences and emotions.

If we apply Stoic philosophy to negative circumstances, such as losing our job or our home, we would recognize that these events are not negative in and of themselves, but that our belief about the events is negative. The events are just events.

Wait....What ? Losing a job or your home are not dramatic events?

Without a home and an income, we might perish from starvation or exposure, which could only be seen negatively, right? Wrong. The same relentless logic applies: the prospect of starvation or exposure is in and of itself not distressing, the beliefs that we hold about death are.

Negative visualization

Stoics also used something called the premeditation of evils (i.e., negative visualization) to deal with worries head on, a psychological tactic that William B. Irvine argues is “the single most valuable technique in the Stoics’ toolkit.”

The idea is that as soon as we start thinking about losing something we value, it takes center stage in our minds, and we can once more derive pleasure from it instead of taking it for granted. Ancient Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus warned of growing attached to people or objects, because everything is breakable and everyone is mortal. He saw them as things that have been given to us for the present, not forever.

Finally, Stoics saw reassurance as a double-edged sword. Even if it works wonders sometimes, it can also exacerbate anxiety: if you reassure your friend that the worst-case scenario he fears probably won’t occur, you inadvertently reinforce his belief that it would be catastrophic if it did. You are effectively tightening the coil of his anxiety, not loosening it.

(9) Buddhism teaches us to detach ourselves from our thoughts and observe them as if they were mere weather.

No matter how many times we’ve been told to live in the moment, it’s in our nature to get attached to things, and so we suffer when things change.

When we get attached to any given situation, person or thing, we set ourselves up to get hurt, because nothing is permanent.

For example, if we get too attached to good looks in our youth – rather than enjoying them while they last – we’ll suffer more when they fade. If we latch on to a luxurious lifestyle, we could end up in an unhappy and fearful struggle to keep it up for the rest of our lives. If we attach too strongly to life, death will seem all the more frightening.

In response to this dilemma, contemporary Buddhists try to see their mental activity as weather. If the human mind is the sky, our feelings and moods are the clouds, the sun, the rain and the snow that come and go with time. The idea behind it is that the sky doesn’t cling to specific weather conditions or try to eradicate the bad ones, the sky just is.

Let’s say you have to finish an important assignment, but you’re procrastinating. You tell yourself that you just don’t feel like doing it. But, if you detach yourself from your thoughts, it shouldn’t matter whether you feel like doing it or not. Who says you have to wait until you feel like it?

The problem isn’t that you don’t feel motivated – it’s that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can see your procrastination as passing weather, you’ll see that your reluctance to work doesn’t need to be eradicated or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. Sometimes the weather’s good and sometimes it’s bad, and the only thing we can do is accept both and move on.

FINAL POINTS

How can we use the negatives in life to make us happier?

1. Embracing death and suffering can be a source of comfort and relief.
2. Uncertainty is the only certainty in life, which is why it helps to develop a negative capability.
3. Confront your fears by realizing them: they are not as bad as you think.
4. Some philosophies, religions and cultures find happiness by accepting the negative things in life.
5. Stoicism advocates tranquility and embracing worries as they arise.
6. Buddhism teaches us to detach ourselves from our thoughts and observe them as if they were mere weather.

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The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Stoicism

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#psychology #bookclub #happiness