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Don’t look outside yourself for happiness.
This is perhaps the most important rule of all, and if you really get this rule, all the rest of them will fall into place. What I’m talking about here is called an internal locus of control in psychiatry. I don’t know why psychiatrists can’t just call things what they are, so I’ll translate “internal locus of control”. It basically means you take responsibility for the things you do and the things you don’t do.
Each of us has a certain way of responding to life and what life does to us. We either think, “Oh man! I can’t believe that happened to me.” Or, “What can I do differently to keep that from happening again”.
The person who can’t believe what happened to them is a victim. They live life waiting to see what will happen next. When something bad happens, it was supposed to happen that way. When something good happens, it was just luck.
The person who wonders what he could have done differently is a person who works from an internal locus of control. He doesn’t see life as something that happens to him, he sees life as something he creates. When something bad happens, he sees it as a learning tool, a way not to do something the next time. When something good happens, he sees it as the inevitable result of hard work.
This applies to emotions as well. So many people out there are looking for happiness to happen to them while a select few are out there making their own happiness. If you require the perfect meal, the perfect house, the perfect job, or the perfect mate to make you happy, then you are a victim. You are subject to things outside of your control to make you happy; therefore, happiness will be capricious at best. But if you truly believe that happiness comes from personal choice, something you decide and defend against the onslaught of life, then you can be truly happy. I’m talking about the kind of happiness that won’t fall apart easily because it’s not dependent on things you can’t control.
To be honest, there will always be things out of your control that will affect your life and the lives of those you love. But here’s the thing: You can’t do anything about that stuff, so why let it control you? I think Stephen King said it best in his short story “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”. Mr. King wrote: “It always comes down to just two choices. Get busy living or get busy dying.” The victim is dying; he can only react to his circumstances and try to survive. The person who operates with an internal locus of control is living. He does everything he can to create the life he wants, and lets the rest go.
The choice is, and will always be, yours.
Godspeed.
Don’t complain.
Lou Holtz, a famous NCAA football coach, is reported to have said: “Don’t complain. Ninety percent of the people you complain to don’t care about your problems and the other ten percent are glad you have them.”
I think Lou was right on. When we complain, what we’re basically doing is taking our problems and throwing them out there for someone else to bat around. When you do this, most people will feel obliged to do one of two things: solve the problem or provide solace to help you deal with the problem. It’s just human nature; it will happen. So when you complain, you are, in a very real way, burdening someone else. Why do you think psychiatrists and psychologists get paid to do what they do? It’s because no one else wants to. Solving problems and providing empathy to those with problems is difficult and exhausting if you do it for too long. As a psychiatrist, I’ve always had to work a fairly low number of hours a day, not because psychiatry is physically demanding (you just sit there), but because of the emotional toll it creates. I was just as tired after a particularly bad day in psychiatry as I was after a particularly hard day playing football. That’s how demanding it can be.
I’m not saying you should never burden other people with your problems. There is a time and a place for everything. If you feel overwhelmed by your problems, always share these feelings with friends, family, or health professionals. Tell people who ask and genuinely want to know your concerns your problems. Don’t tell someone who casually asks how you’re doing. And remember, if most of your conversations with someone revolve around your problems, then that’s a one-way relationship, and odds are, you’re wearing the other person out.
In general, if you complain a lot, people will not want to be around you. Ironically, the complainer is the person who very likely needs friends and social support more than anyone.
I’m not advocating that you pretend that everything is always wonderful, but just remember, every time you unload your problems on someone else, you are placing a very real burden on them.
Don’t use the word “should”.
Of all the words in our wonderful language, I like this one the least. What a loaded word. When you use the word “should”, what someone hears is: “I know more than you do about this subject, and you would be smart to listen to me.” Now seriously, even if the above is true, is this something you ever want to hear. “Should” is one of those words that implies superiority and no one wants to feel inferior. It’s really that simple.
There are times and places where you may need to use “should”, and it’s always going to be in a situation where you are truly the power figure. Bosses and parents come to mind here. But even in situations where you are in power, there are other phrases that might work better: “You might consider this”, or “Here are some other ways of doing that”.
The worst abuse of the word “should”, however, comes at our own expense. “I should work out more.” “I should eat better.” “I should be nicer to other people.” Why not just say, “I will work out more.” “I will eat better.” “I will be nicer to other people.”
The word “should” somehow creates a degree of separation between us and what needs to be done. If you’re going to do something, do it. If you’re going to correct someone, correct them. “Should” manages to be perfunctory and judgmental all at the same time. Please, avoid this word. Your friends and family will thank you for it.
Avoid being critical.
This is a disease of adults, generally. It’s rare that you find a kid that can pick things apart and tell you what is wrong about everything. Why? They simply haven’t learned to do this yet, and I think this is why kids are generally happier.
The need to be critical seems to come to us in a few ways. We either learn it through work or through our parents. Sometimes we learn it from our peers as a way to separate ourselves from other people. The latter is a kind of ego building program we use to help us feel superior by comparison.
Don’t fall into this trap. If you learn to be critical all the time in every situation, you’ll find that it’s very difficult to ever be happy. You will create a psychological prison. The bars of this prison will be your standards for what is “good”. The only key will be your ability to let go.
When you are critical of everything, a couple of things will happen. First and foremost, you’ll have problems making and keeping friends. Even if you aren’t critical of your friends, you are still spouting out negativity, and most people can get all the negativity they need just by watching the local headline news. Besides, if you’re critical enough, your friends will think you’ll turn that critical focus on them as soon as they are out of your company.
The worst thing that happens when you are critical is you set yourself apart from what is “good”. You’ll start to say things like this: “I would have had a great time if they hadn’t overcooked the burgers.” You actually create a buffer between you and being happy. Here’s the thing: Happiness is ephemeral. No one can really tell you where or when it will strike. It can pop up at the oddest times and the most bizarre places. It may not happen when you think it should, and it will rarely happen because a certain set of conditions that exist in your mind have been satisfied. Happiness is not like a chemistry project where you add in a bunch of ingredients (good service, good food, well behaved kids, etc.) and get a great big smiley face.
I like to remind people who are hypercritical that they can use that same critical function to get in a better frame of mind. All they have to do is change their focus to figure out what is good about something. Imagine this, if you will. A person spends his whole day focusing on what is good. Like a detective, you learn to search out the good in everything. Why? Because if all you ever focus on is the negative, the world isn’t going to seem like a very good place (Hey, I never said this was rocket science). But if you can focus on what is good, you’ll find that, more and more, the elusive entity known as happiness will start to visit more often, as will your friends.
The arena where this rule is most important is how it applies to other people. There is rarely a good reason to be critical of another human being for one reason: You can never know everything about another person, so you are in no position to judge them. You’re probably wondering how a psychiatrist can say you can’t know everything about another person. Well, I mean just that. I’ve seen people in therapy for years and still learned new things about them regularly. The only way that you can truly know another person is to know all their hopes and dreams, all their traumas and losses, and all their pains, physical and emotional. Do you see what I’m getting at here? The only way you can ever truly know another person is to be that person, and we can never criticize that which we don’t truly understand.
The ability to be critical is not evil. It definitely serves a purpose. But in the world today, it seems that being critical has become like a social sport. Unfortunately, it’s a sport that always hurts at least one party, and frequently hurts everyone involved.
Don’t forget to have fun.
Believe it or not, I’ve had to write prescriptions for people to have fun. I literally had to give them permission through the power of a doctor’s order to remember to have a good time at least once a week.
Why?
Work, kids, life itself can get us into a rut. It happens all the time. Before we know it, days, weeks, months, even years go by and we haven’t done anything we really enjoy. We should always remember to do those things we like because that joy we find is infectious: it spreads from us to everyone around us making the world a better place. Would you want to be around someone who is glum and serious all the time?
You don’t need permission to have fun. It doesn’t have to be a special occasion to have a good time. There seems to be a puritan ethic in America that almost looks down on having fun. It’s almost like people distrust the idea of fun and just stay away from it altogether. I suppose the thought is this somehow makes them better people. It does not.
Joy and happiness are as important to our physical and mental health as any number of exercise regimens or pills. In fact, I think you should have a fun regimen. Once a day for thirty minutes a day, you should exercise your enjoyment muscles and flex your happiness. And don’t let other people tell you what should or should not be fun. As long as your fun doesn’t cause harm to other people, have at it. Your fun regimen will be a very individual thing. Some people need more fun, some less. Some people have goofy fun, some intellectual fun. But never neglect fun time. It is very difficult to be down if you always have something to look forward to.
Remember, always find something in life that you enjoy, and share your happiness with others. It will make the world a better place.
Don’t chase money.
This is a rather tough rule to follow. On one level it seems counter-intuitive, but it isn’t. Like I’ve already discussed, money and happiness are not related. If you truly believe that, you won’t chase money. What I’m talking about specifically is people making career decisions based on what will make them the most money.
Why would you ever have a job you didn’t like all that much just because it makes you more money, especially when you already know the money won’t make you any happier. But there is the rub. Deep down, people can never seem to convince themselves that money doesn’t make them happier. And here is another irony: The job you like the most is much more likely to be lucrative in the long run because of your passion. If you like it more, you’ll be better at it. You’ll be more positive. Good things will happen for you.
If you dislike your job or see it as a compromise situation, you’ll always wonder what could have been. Another thing, you work typically between forty to sixty hours a week. Now think about that. If you’re doing something you don’t really like for forty to sixty hours a week, that means you are not very happy for a major portion of your waking time every week you work for most of your life. You’ve sacrificed your happiness for something—money—that won’t give that happiness back. Do you see any logic to this? I don’t, but it is a common pitfall.
Do what you love. Don’t choose your career for money or prestige or any reason other than it floats your boat. Your career is a huge chunk of your life, and if you aren’t happy in what you do, you’ll be struggling to be happy in all other areas of your life.
Don’t ever quit.
I know, the most basic thing in the world. But can you guess how many times I’ve seen problems because people just give up? The thing about human beings is this: I don’t really think there are any limits. Just when you think you are at the end of your rope, that you can’t hold on a second longer, that you can’t force yourself to move another inch, write another word, or endure another argument, low and behold, you can. Limits exist for the most part precisely because we believe that we have limits. If, in our own minds, we could convince ourselves that there is no limit to what we can do, then the world is open to us.
The one thing that separates the ordinary man from the great man is persistence, whatever the chosen field. It has been said that love is the greatest power in the universe, but I have to throw my two cents in for persistence. Here’s why. Persistence is the action that love takes most often in this world. Let me say that again. Persistence is the action form of love. Think of it this way, could you ever persist with something that you didn’t care about deeply? Conversely, do you really love something if you can’t persist at it through the really hard times? I doubt it.
These two things, love and persistence, are flip sides of the same coin, kind of like freedom and responsibility were earlier. If you really dig into the truth of this, it can answer a lot of questions. Let’s look at relationships. If you think you are really in love with someone, but you’re ready to bail out on them in a year, then guess what: you weren’t really in love. Saint Paul said it best: Love endures all things. If there has ever been a better definition for persistence, I’ve not seen it.
Now all this begs the question, can you persist at something you do not love through the use of some bullish willpower that will not allow you to quit, no matter what? Let’s throw out any situation where you’re compelled to endure a difficult situation like prison and I think the answer is no. There are people who will stay in a toxic situation, however, not because of love or persistence, but because of some other emotional baggage that keeps them afraid to leave, but this again is not true voluntary persistence. What I’m talking about is the persistence that arises by choice day in and day out over the years.
Sometimes in life, people become confused. It happens to all of us, believe me. Many times I’ve had patients come to me who were thirty, even forty years old, still trying to figure out what they wanted to be when they grew up. We can use love and persistence to find the answer to this question. What is it you love to do? I ask them. Sometimes people can’t answer this so I change the question. What is that you do in your free time? What is something you always come back to, no matter what? The answers to those questions will tell you where your heart lies.
Another thing I’ve seen with love and persistence is this: when you feel like one is faltering, you have to shore up the other. Let’s say you’re working your way through the phases of relationship like we talked about earlier. You’ll get to a point where love has gone out the window. What do you do now? Cry and moan and say, “Woe is me?”
No.
You persist. You keep plugging away, maybe further than you ever thought you could go. Try to remember why you loved the person at first. Ironically, it’s usually those exact same traits that you hate about them now. But here’s the thing, if you persist, you’ll start to love those things again.
If you find that you are ready to give up, that your persistence has persisted all that it wants to persist, then you need to go back and look at the root of that persistence. There was a passion there that drove you as long as it did. It’s up to you to rekindle that passion from time to time in order to stay the course.
I am so convinced that persistence is one of the great keys to life that I will say this: If you never give up until the day you die, you will surely meet with success. It may not be the success you planned, but the reward for never allowing yourself to be beaten will be extraordinary because very few people can do this.
Find your passions and pursue them relentlessly. In the end, the journey itself will become its own reward.
Don’t run from fear.
This is one of the truisms that I’ve struggled with personally. I’ve also seen it manifested in my patients so many times as to be patently obvious, but alas, humanity can be weak. I can be weak. What I’m talking about is avoiding something you are afraid of rather than addressing it head on. What happens when you avoid a fear is that it grows in power, getting bigger and bigger until it is a dinosaur-sized fear that is extraordinarily intimidating. Now had we attacked this fear earlier, when we first realized it was there, it would have only been a hatchling. But a dinosaur, that’s a different thing altogether.
And here is another point, and I swear this is one of the most profound things I have learned in psychiatry. Life is always trying to teach us what we need to learn. If we don’t learn the lesson the first time around, life is going to bring that lesson back to us, but this time it’s going to be a harder lesson. If we keep avoiding this particular lesson, life is going to beat us over the head with it.
So here’s the thing: You can’t run. I’ll use myself as an example. I’ve always been shy and my particular fear is public speaking. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to overcome this fear, but for the most part, I’ve backed away quietly, hoping not to be noticed. Now I’m at a point in my life where every career path I’m interested in requires at least some degree of public speaking. I’m faced with shortcutting my dreams or fighting my dinosaur. Since I refuse to give up on my dreams, I have a date to rumble with a tyrannosaurus.
Remember, any fear you have, big or small, is life trying to teach you something. If you run from that fear, life is going to bring it back to you meaner and nastier than ever. Face your fears early, and face them often, and by a relatively young age, you’ll be far ahead of the crowd.
Don’t be rigid.
It seems that some people pick a point in their lives where they say, “I’ve learned enough. I’m never gonna learn another thing.”
Why does this happen? I can only guess, but I think it probably has to do with feeling like you are under attack. If you live in a situation where your opinion does not matter or is openly attacked and ridiculed, you tend to draw a line in the sand. It’s like if you were a country and one piece of land became contested. You fight and fight for it, and finally win it, but it turns out you didn’t really need it after all. Things changed that took away the need for that land, but you still have it. You can’t just get rid of it. You fought too hard to get it, then defend it. So you’re stuck with it.
I think another reason people become rigid is because it is truly a difficult process to learn new things. Very often, the new things we learn contradict the old so that we have to rethink what we thought we already knew. Someone once said: “The more I learn, the less I know.”
If you fall into the trap of becoming rigid, you have closed your mind. It’s as if you are saying you know all you want to know. This is dangerous because it takes away one of our greatest abilities—the ability to adapt. Life itself is ever changing. You’re changing, your friends are changing, work, kids, etc, ad infinitum. You have to be able to adapt, and to do this you have to have an open mind. You have to be mentally flexible enough to be able to discard what no longer works. The irony here is that often you will come back to an idea you previously discarded, but you will come back to it in a whole new light—enlightened, if you will. I like to think of this notion like a spiral upwards. We know something as a kid. Later, we learn things that make us reject it as a teenager. We learn even more things that make us re-adopt the same idea when we are in middle age or even old age. But I promise you this, the idea, whatever it may be, is a better, more fully realized idea for having been discarded and rediscovered.
No single idea is so precious that it can’t be subject to examination and rethinking. If the idea holds truth, you will inevitably come back to it, but with more realization than you had in the past.
Don’t work too hard . . . or too little.
Did I mention before that moderation is important?
Work is a unique thing in the human world. Many people will say they don’t like it or they hate it. It is seen as a necessary evil, a way to make ends meet. If you ask someone what they would do if they won the lottery, a great number of people would say they would quit their job. How about that? All these people doing something they don’t want to do for half of their waking day most of their lives. Why isn’t everyone depressed or angry or ready to jump off a building? Here’s the funny thing about work: we need to do it. It is fundamental. In fact, people are happiest when they achieve a state where they are challenged by a task, but they aren’t overstressed by it. When I first went into psychiatry, this was called eustress. This was opposed to distress. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it “flow” in a book by the same name. You don’t want to be overstressed, nor do you want to be understressed. Your brain is made to function in the middle.
Retirement can be an enormous stress to the elderly unless they have a plan to stay mentally busy (and physically, if possible). My grandfather used to say it best. When he was older and no longer able to tend his garden, he used to routinely say, “I feel so unnecessary”. This was devastating to him, a man who worked extraordinarily hard his entire life. He was taken out of his state of eustress by not having enough to do.
If you work too hard and make that all your life is about, you will find distress at the other end of the spectrum. I don’t feel I need to explain this stress as much. We all know it. We’ve all come home feeling like we just swam across the English Channel in lead Speedo’s. This can be disastrous as well. There have been numerous studies that show how chronic stress gradually tears down physical and mental health.
Work is an important part of who we are. Strive to keep yourself engaged, but not overstressed. And finally, don’t ever retire. I know, I know, you’re thinking they won’t let me work when I’m eighty. That’s true. What I mean is don’t retire in the sense that you cease to learn new things or function in a way that is helpful to your community. Inside us there is a basic need to grow and contribute, even when we are old and decrepit. Don’t ever neglect that.
Don’t make parenting harder than it already is.
This is an example of something easier to say than do, but here goes. There are really only two rules to being a decent parent: choose your battles wisely and when you make a stand, make it forever. Okay, there it is. Now run off and teach parenting classes.
I wish it were that easy.
Notice I didn’t say these are the rules for being a great parent; I said decent parent. I think too many of us get caught up in the notion that we have to be the greatest parents who ever walked the planet. The first thing I learned when training in child psychiatry was that you just have to be a good enough parent. The rest is up to the child. And always remember this, a big portion of how a child behaves (I’d say between fifty and seventy percent) is genetically determined. Remember when your mother said, “I can’t wait ‘til you have kids?” Well, she knew what she was talking about.
Okay, back to the rules. The first rule is to choose your battles wisely. I’ve seen this rule messed up in both directions. First, you have the over-controlling parent who tries to manage every single behavior of their child. As you might imagine, the child simply quits listening after a while. The word “no”, when used to excess, simply carries no meaning. When you add in some form of corporal punishment to the word “no”, it may hold the child in check a little longer, but the end result is still the same. If you try to control a child too much, you lose all control. Maybe not in the short run, but somewhere, somehow, that child will rebel. And the rebellion is usually directly proportional to the degree of control exerted.
There is a reason for this, and it’s the same reason people don’t like to take medicines (a problem I am infinitely familiar with). People don’t like to take medicine because in a very real way they are giving up control over their body. Take the example of high cholesterol. Many people will kill themselves with diet and exercise to try to cure this problem, but the rub of it is high cholesterol is about eighty percent genetic. But it’s the issue of control that makes them avoid the medicine. People want to feel like they have some control of their life, and if you dominate a child as a parent, the need to rebel will become a powerful drive for your child. A child has to feel like they have some power.
The opposite reaction to the first part of this rule is when people don’t try to control their child at all. They basically run free, unchecked. Obviously, this won’t work. A parent has to substitute their judgment for a child because a child’s judgment is not very good. In fact, the parts of our brain that help us with judgment continue to mature until we’re about twenty-five years old, so a little parental input even into the mid-twenties is probably reasonable. Another reason a parent has to impose rules on a child is simply for safety. If a child is left unchecked, they will make poor decisions, and they will get hurt, physically or emotionally. When this happens, the world starts to seem like a dangerous place. In many ways, a child, and even a teenager, wants to feel contained, although they may not be aware of this on a conscious level. I’ve seen many adults who were furious at their parents for not controlling them a little better when they were young.
The second part of the rule is when you make a stand, make it forever. When you do decide you are going to put your foot down, you cannot change your mind. I don’t care if the child pitches a fit, screams, rolls on the floor, holds their breath, or threatens you, you don’t back down. Ever. Children are clever. If you back down, they will see that they have power over you, and like I said earlier, children like to have power. They will try to push your buttons emotionally (crying, pitching a fit, embarrassing you in restaurants) or physically (hitting, tearing things up) to try to get their way. When a child gets their way one time because of poor behavior, guess what, a little light goes off in their head that says I can get what I want if I just have a big enough fit.
Think about this. If you played the slot machines and never won, would you keep playing? No. There is no reward. But if you play and every once in a while the machine lights up and money comes flying out, you’re liable to play for a long time. This principle in psychology is call intermittent positive reinforcement. If you allow you’re child to crack your defenses on occasion, you have become a slot machine. They will play you without end. One last thing, if you realize the importance of this rule, then the importance of choosing your battles wisely is magnified. If you know you have to stand behind a decision permanently, you’ll be much more careful about the decisions you make about your children.
Remember, parenting, like so many other things, requires a philosophy of moderation. You have to control a child enough that they feel safe and structured, and you have to allow them enough freedom to explore and even make some mistakes. Is this easy? To answer this question, think about this: People have been parenting now for about twenty thousand years, and books still pop up every day about how to do it right.
Don’t believe anyone can read your mind.
Communication–such a simple word, such an extraordinarily difficult concept. It so happens that if you fail in this rule, you’ll be in company with every other person who exists or has ever existed. So why bother if perfect communication is unattainable? Because poor communication leads to a vast array of problems, the most common of which will be your own unhappiness. I’m not talking about miscommunication secondary to language or accent differences, I’m talking about two people who understand each other perfectly, but can’t convey what they feel and what they need.
So where does it all start? Why do human beings in general have problems with communication? I think the main reason is because it’s just plain hard. As a writer, I am trying to communicate with you, but you are in a different place and a different time than I am. As I sit here, it’s a nice, sunny day in the Southeast, school has just let out and I hear the occasional groan of busses passing by the house. This scene in my head is perfectly clear for me right now. But for you, wherever and whenever you are, it will be different. You may not see the day as brightly as I do, you may imagine a different kind of school bus.
Another confounding variable is that science tells us that no two people really see the world exactly the same way. If you are depressed, the world actually seems more gray and, well, more depressing. If you are extraordinarily happy, the world seems bright and colorful and wonderful. When you add in the differences in each of us caused by the differing conditions of our sensory modalities (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell), you see that the relay of information is always going to be a challenge–but not impossible.
There are two areas we especially need to learn good communication if we are to stand a chance at happiness: our needs and our wants. Our needs obviously take priority here, and most of us are pretty good about communicating our basic needs like food, clothing, and shelter. What I’d like to talk about are our more subtle needs. These are the psychological needs that each of us have. These needs might be odd or eccentric, but we should be able to talk about them nonetheless. They are “needs” after all. For example, let’s say you require a good deal of solitude. You know this about yourself. It’s true now; it always has been true. If you find yourself in a situation where you are around people all day long every day of the week, guess what? You’ll start to get grumpy. The grumpiness will graduate to irritability, maybe even hostility. All because you never spoke up and said, “Hey, I need an hour to myself every day.”
You’re probably thinking, sure, I could ask for that, but what I’ll get in return is: “Yeah, well we all wish we could get an hour to ourselves. Life is tough.” Okay, truth be told, this might happen, but the point is, you have to ask or it will never happen. You have to respect your own psychological needs, and you have to convey those needs in a way that others can understand. Make your communication specific to your audience. If you live with a psychologist, you might say you need your personal time because you were raised as a latchkey kid and without that time, you tend towards depression and irritability. But you wouldn’t tell your kids that. You’d tell them that you needed time to rest, and that would be sufficient.
The second part of communication is to be able to talk about your desires. You would probably be amazed at how many people I’ve counseled who come in and say, “My wife just doesn’t understand me.” Or, “My husband has no clue who I am.”
Why not? The problem most often is that people decide a good partner should be able to read minds. I’m not kidding. They think the partner should be able to know, from a glance or a tone of voice, nearly everything that has happened to that person and what they will need to get better. I sometimes wonder if this is a direct result of the “one true love” myth I talked about earlier. Wherever it came from, I can tell you this: There is no person that can read your mind and automatically know all your desires or needs. I don’t even think a psychic would make this claim.
If you want something in life, you have to ask for it. You have to decide what that thing is, and you have to put energy into making it happen. This step, putting energy into making it happen, is a major downfall for all sorts of plans, but I’m telling you it’s as basic a principle to well-being as there is. You have to expend energy to be happy. In this case it means asking for what you want.
Remember this, true communication is difficult, but if you know yourself well enough to know your wants and your needs, and you put energy into conveying that information to those you want to know about it, you will find that most of your needs will be met, and many of your desires.
Relationships take work.
This point is a corollary to the last blog. To understand this point, I’m going to have to explain something I was taught in my psychiatry residency called the stages of relationship. I can’t take credit for developing these stages, and my research revealed several people with similar ideas. Credit is due to Marty Tashman, Susan Campbell, and Jackie Black for their work in this area.
The stages go like this: stage one is “romance”. We all know what this is. It’s in nearly every Disney movie ever made. All is wonderful. Your mate is in tune to all your needs and you’re nearly euphoric with love.
Stage two is called “disillusionment”. This is where your partner starts to lose some of their luster. They don’t do everything like they should; in fact, they’re downright annoying sometimes. Most casual relationships will die here.
The next stage is called “misery”. Oh, my God! You are chained to a direct descendant of Genghis Khan or Lizzie Borden. Your partner is one of the foulest people to ever crawl the planet. How in the world could you have ever been seduced into this relationship? The thought of one more day with this person is repugnant.
Ah, yes. The misery stage is aptly named. Nothing seems bearable. This is the stage that drops the bomb on most marriages (although many don’t get past disillusionment).
The next stage is called “maturing”. Finally, we get to what it takes to make a relationship work. Each partner has to mature, that is, they have to make changes within themselves that they can live with that make the relationship better. This is very hard. If you remember back to my blog about ego, you’ll know why. Every time you have to change something about yourself, ego screams NO! Then it cries, then it pitches a fit, then it screams some more. Ego always tries to make itself bigger, not smaller. But smaller it must be if you are to have a true marriage. This also applies to relationships with friends and family.
If you have persevered, if you have shaved off the big ego, if you have stayed with it through periods of darkness and despair, then you can emerge at the fifth and final stage of relationship. It’s called “relative happiness”. The key word here is “relative”. Yes, you will be happy. But it won’t be the kind of happiness you expected way back in stage one romance. It will be grown up happiness based on real life and real people, not illusions and self-indulgent fantasy.
You might be asking yourself if it’s worth it to go through all that to get to relative happiness. Well, based on my personal experience and the experiences of thousands of others who I’ve seen in all those different stages of relationship, I can say without a doubt it’s worth it. And it’s worth it for two reasons. The first is obvious: relative happiness. You’re happy with your partner in life, your friend, your parent, whoever, and you don’t have to tread that road again. Once you get to stage five, there’s no going back, baby. But here is another reason it’s worth it to make to stage five: you will be a better person for it. You will have carved away those parts of your ego that weren’t really necessary and found a balance between your needs and someone else’s. You will have learned a lot about yourself including what you can and cannot tolerate. And finally, you will see in real life the confirmation that all hard work is finally rewarded, and that the reward, though often unexpected, is almost always better than we imagined.
Don’t believe there is one true love or there are a million fish in the sea.
It is only with great trepidation that I broach this subject. I know there will be people who disagree with me on this, but hear my argument. When it comes to love and commitment, I see two mistakes made over and over. The first is the belief that there is only one right person out there. I’ve read that the notion of ideal love started during medieval times when monogamy was virtually unheard of. The myth, if you will, of perfect love evolved out of dire necessity—no one was faithful to anyone and it was a mess.
Like all myths, there is some truth to the sentiment of one true love. However, it’s when people believe this completely that they get hurt. Why? Because your belief that this is the only person in the entire world that can meet your needs has you hemmed in. What if this person starts to take you for granted? What if they become abusive, first verbally then physically? If you believe that they are the only one for you, then you will put up with that nonsense way longer than you should. Sadly enough, many people put up with it forever, clinging to the fairy tale all the while.
The converse of this myth is also misleading: There are a million fish in the sea. Anybody who has been single for more than a month knows this isn’t true (not even remotely true from my memory). Given all the foibles and eccentricities of people, how could it be possible that there would be a large number of possible mates lurking around every corner?
So if we look at these two statements together, what we’re left with is this: It is very hard to find someone you’re compatible with, but it’s not impossible. Don’t stay with someone just because you think there won’t be anyone to take their place; there always will be if you look hard enough.
I’ve listed this rule here because it is closely akin to not jumping off the mountain. What this rule is about is paying your dues early. There seems to be a pattern in life that the people who work very hard early are compensated much greater than are those who do the equivalent amount of work, but do it later in life. I’ll have to use an example to illustrate. Let’s call on Jill.
Okay. Jill has been a very good student her whole life. After a fantastic college career, she decides to go right into graduate school. By the time she is twenty-eight, she is a fairly well respected architect, and is making enough money that she only has to work about thirty hours a week. This works out great because it gives her time to stay home with her kids. She couldn’t be happier.
Joe, on the other hand, never really thought school was that important. “Why do I need to learn how to divide fractions?” he would complain. When high school was over, he was more than happy to take a minimum wage job and live off the good graces of his parents. But after a few years, his parents need some help with money and they decide to charge rent. Joe decides this is bogus and finds a tiny apartment. He works harder and has a little bit of money. He gets married and has a family. He and his wife both have to work full time to make ends meet, so the kids have to go to day care close to sixty hours a week. Five years later, one of Joe’s kids is having serious problems in school, and another is fighting all the time….
Well, you can see the point. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with the path Joe took, but if he paid his dues earlier, it would have made his life much easier. You see, life is back-loaded. What I mean by that is life usually starts out about as easy as it’s going to get. You have mom and dad to take care of things for you. As you get older, there are more responsibilities added to until one day you look around and realize you are swamped. Even if you wanted to go back to school, there just isn’t enough time. If you work hard early in life, you will be ahead of the game when the more serious responsibilities start to add up. Another thing to consider is that you will have more physical energy when you’re young to tackle hard work. It seems to me that if you pay your dues early on, the price is much less than if you wait. If you pay your dues late, life can extract an awesome toll.
Another classic saying I heard somewhere along the way. What I’m talking about here is the easy way out. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people who have worked and worked and worked to take the easy way out when they could have just worked hard the normal way and achieved far better results. Let me say it as plain as I can: There is never an easy way out. And here’s the secret that nobody will tell you: even if there was, you will be less happy in the long run if you take it.
Focus on the journey, not the goal. The same thought is uttered throughout pretty much every religious and philosophical text that has ever been written. So why try so desperately to hurry to some perceived goal when it is the process of achieving that is most rewarding for us psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. We are made to work toward something.
Let’s look for a minute at some of the different shortcuts that are out there. I think the biggest shortcuts are drugs and alcohol. Now I realize that drugs and alcohol can become a part of a disease process, and I’m not talking about that per se. I’m talking about using drugs and alcohol as a shortcut that could possibly lead to the disease process down the road.
If you talk to people with drug or alcohol problems, you’ll find that many of them got started using these substances to treat some other problem they had. It goes something like this: Joe is very shy around girls, but desperately wants to talk to them. Joe tries but is rebuked time and again because he can barely string together a thought. Joe has a few drinks with his friends one night and finds out that it’s a little easier to talk to girls. In fact, he’s now downright fearless. Has Joe really solved his problem?
No. Not even close. What he’s done is created a crutch. Every time he’s in a social situation, his first thought will be to have a few drinks. The same could be true of any number of drugs, not just alcohol. In this case, Joe has jumped off the mountain to get to the bottom.
What Joe should have done was to first identify his real problem. What I described above is called social phobia in the psychiatric community, but it’s basically just extreme shyness. When Joe knows what his problem is, he can turn to friends, family, books, or professionals to find out how to treat the problem. Believe me, there is always a better way to treat a problem than by using illicit drugs or alcohol. (I know some of you are throwing up your hands, saying “this guy is a doctor, he prescribes drugs all the time. To that, my answer is this: using illicit drugs or alcohol to treat a psychiatric condition is about like using a nuclear weapon to get rid of the ants in your backyard.)
The short cut mentality doesn’t just apply to drugs or alcohol. It comes up in the face of any situation that will require serious effort to overcome. Another example would be cheating on tests. It would take serious effort to study and take the test on your own, especially when you can get a copy of the old test and just transcribe the right answers. You make a great grade and all is well, right? Nope. Here we are at process again. The point of studying for a test is so that you learn the material, and in a grander scheme, so you can learn how to think. When you cheat on a test, you cheat on the process of learning, and therefore, you don’t learn. Now imagine if you were always able to get away with cheating. You’d graduate from high school, head to college on a scholarship, then maybe decide to be an accountant. You get a great job and sit down your first day at work and BOOM!, you don’t know a thing. You desperately look for the Cliff’s Notes for accounting or maybe even a Dummies Guide, but you’re out of luck. Now what?
It may seem I belabor this point, but I see people make this mistake all the time. Again, there is no easy way through life. In fact, the very first thing the Buddhists teach is that life is suffering and that this has to be accepted before you can move on. Perhaps another way to think of this is, there will always be hard work to do in life, be it overcoming shyness, working sixty hours a week, taking care of your kids, or dealing with overbearing parents. And you may not be able to solve every problem, even with extraordinary effort. But I can tell you this for certain; you will be a better person for having made that effort. Then when another problem comes along, it will be that much easier to handle.
I am amazed at how often this little thorn pops up. Bias: it’s one word that basically means the prejudice of a person or entity toward a particular subject. I actually like the word “prejudice” better because the word itself explains what I’m talking about: pre-judgment. The point here is that everyone will have certain opinions, including corporations, government, etc., that are based on what they have seen as truth. These opinions arise directly from the experiences they’ve had.
Humans seem to gain knowledge in levels. The first kind of knowledge is academic—someone teaches it to you or you read it in a book. The second kind of knowledge is called experiential, meaning knowledge gained through experience. This is the most powerful knowledge human beings have. It’s like the difference between knowing it’s painful to be physically abused because you’ve read about it in books versus knowing its painful because you were thrown around the house like a rag doll.
The problem is everyone has different experiences. Everyone’s experiential knowledge is different, at least to some degree. So if, for example, you’re reading something by a former athlete turned physician turned psychiatrist turned writer, it might sound a lot like this blog. But if your reading a self help book written by someone who survived the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp, it will sound different (read the extraordinary Victor Frankl book, Man’s Search for Meaning, and you’ll see what I mean).
In psychiatry, we are encouraged to go into psychoanalysis for the primary purpose of being able to recognize our own bias and how we might interject that into therapy with others. The goal, of course, is to keep our own psychological garbage to ourselves and not pass it on to some unwitting patient. And though the analysis definitely helps in this process, it is still very difficult not to let your own bias creep in.
You will likely hear advice from many people over the course of a lifetime. Always remember that, though the words may be well intentioned, they are passing through the filter of another person’s bias. In other words, another person’s advice or opinion will always be colored by their experiences in life.
Am I saying to reject whatever anyone else says if you don’t like the sound of it? No. I’m saying always remember where the information is coming from. And if someone has massive amounts of experience in an area, and it’s experience that comes not only from them, but from many others, then you can be pretty sure they’re going to be pretty close to the truth.
This issue hits home particularly hard with anyone who is trying to sell something. When you invest a large amount of time and energy into learning about a specific product and why it is better than everything else, it becomes very hard to see that product objectively. When you need money based on the sale of that product, your ability to talk about it objectively is almost impossible.
It never hurts to listen to pitches or opinions, but always consider bias. You can always do further research on a matter to find out the truth, but when in question, you can always fall back to the old proverb: “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”
At first glance, I know this sounds like a recruiting slogan for the armed forces, but the freedom I’m talking about here is the personal freedom we all seek starting at around age three and continuing into our old age. Time and time again, I’ve had patients present with some degree of frustration concerning personal freedom. They want to have their freedom: talk on the phone, drive the car, make a lot of money, travel, etc., but they don’t want to pay for it.
The way I’ve always explained it is to think of freedom like a coin. On one side you have that nice, shiny freedom just begging you to tear headlong into the world, collecting adventure and treasures wherever you may roam. But on the other side of that coin, maybe not so shiny or pretty to look at, is responsibility. The way society works is that freedom is the direct result of responsibility. The more you are willing to do, the more freedom you obtain. It’s really that simple. If you want to have freedom, pay your dues and it will come. If you try to take freedom before paying your dues, you’ll find that responsibility will still catch up to you, no matter how hard you run from it.
Let’s take the example of a teenager who hates his home life. Everyone always makes him do chores, he can’t use the phone because he’s on restriction, and he doesn’t even have a car. Man, oh man, the world sits squarely atop this young man’s chest. Now let’s say this young man, let’s call him Joe, decides he’s had it. He wants his freedom and he wants it yesterday, so he decides to run away. Joe lights out of the house with a few belongings and hits the open road.
For the first few hours, Joe is in heaven. No one is nagging him. He can do pretty much what he wants whenever he wants. He’s got a little money in his pocket, and anything in the world can be his, assuming it costs less than fifty bucks.
A few days come and go. Joe has taken to sleeping in back alleys and sheds to save his money, but even so, he’s dead broke in a five days. His back hurts from sleeping on concrete. Sweat and dirt have formed a fine patina on his skin because he had the bad fortune to liberate himself in the middle of the summer. He needs food and shelter soon, so he looks for a job.
He goes to some job interviews. He looks terrible. He smells. And he’s now a high school dropout. For some reason, no one wants to hire him. Finally, he gets a job cleaning out the toilets in public facilities. His boss is just plain mean, insisting that he wear his public works uniform at all times on the job. He has to work terrible hours, holidays, and weekends. But then he gets that first paycheck. Oh yeah! Things are looking up now. He finds a one-room studio apartment that eats up well over half the paycheck because he has to put down a security deposit. He doesn’t have enough money left over to get a mattress, much less any furniture. So he works harder. With overtime, he’s able to save up enough for a mattress and a nasty old couch.
One day while sitting on his couch, drinking a nice glass of tap water, he realizes he’s working way harder than he ever was at home. He’s putting up with more verbal harassment than his parents ever thought of dishing out from his sadistic boss, and he lives in much worse surroundings.
Okay, enough of Joe, but don’t think I’m being melodramatic. The story above is real life. I’ve seen it happen dozens of times in one variation or another. Many times, the price you pay for freedom can be much worse. And the rule doesn’t just apply to young people who are trying to break away from their parents. In any stage of life, you will be granted more freedom if you are willing to take on more responsibility. And the converse is true, if you don’t want to do anything, society will allow you to do that, but you’ll have almost no freedom.
But, you say, there is an exception to this rule–the trust fund child. There are some variants to this person, but it’s basically any person who comes by wealth they didn’t have to earn. This would, at first, seem to be an example of how you can have freedom without responsibility. But let’s look at the trust fund child a little closer.
Now these must be the happiest people in the world, right? They can do anything they want to do, and concerns about money rarely, if ever, cross their minds. They certainly don’t need to work, and why would they? It would just get in the way of fun time. Do you think these people are happy?
Not really. From my experience I could even say rarely, and here is the reason why. They have no challenge. For most people, life itself has a built in challenge: to survive. For more affluent nations this survival mode moves forward and the goal becomes to have a nice life and nice things, but it’s still done out of a perceived necessity. The trust fund child has no such drive. There is nothing to stop them from sleeping away the days for months on end. They can party, do drugs, go on wild adventures, anything in the world, but they will never have the need to struggle, at least somewhat, to exist. And I think this destroys them. Human beings, for whatever reason, have an innate need to work or to be needed. Freud said to work and to love were our two greats aims as humans, and though I don’t agree with Freud about everything, he was dead on here. We need a purpose. We need to find a balance between a challenging life and leisure. All challenge is no good. All leisure is no good. I’ll talk more about this later, but remember freedom always has a cost, and if you’re not willing to pay that cost, you have to be willing to live a relatively constrained life.
Keep your ego in the sacred middle.
Ego is a Latin word that simply means “I”. Ego in the modern day context is basically all the thoughts and feelings you have that constitute what “I” means to you. Your ego is a psychological construct that exists to separate you from the crowd so you know where you begin and everyone else ends. Ego definitely serves a purpose, but what I want to talk about now is when the ego gets out of hand.
When ego gets too big, your needs start to surpass the needs of others. In fact, in severe cases an egomaniac’s need can surpass the needs of millions as attested by several tyrants in the past century. The problem with inflated ego seems to be particularly common in America for many reasons outside the scope of this work, but it has almost reached the level of ego sickness. This is my term for what happens when the demands of ego are so constant and so unquenchable that everyone is out for himself. This obviously has detrimental effects to society as a whole, but on an individual level it’s a fool’s game. You see, ego isn’t real. It’s a construct–a trick the mind plays to help you feel special. Is anyone really all that great? Yes, there are men and women who seem to rise above the rest, but did they really do it on their own? Many times, they are products of the effort of dozens–if not hundreds–of others. I’m reminded of the saying, “If I seem to have risen above other men, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants.” I’m not saying there is no individuality. I think there is a unique individual inside every one of us that can only evolve through careful pursuit of those things we love. Our ego is not what we really are. It’s a set of mental projections we have created to compare ourselves with others.
If we continue to fill up our egos by ridiculing others, criticizing others, or by seeking praise and admiration, this eventually starts to wear thin. Then we need more and more ego boosts to stay propped up at the same level. In many ways, it’s like a drug. We chase ego-building things. We don’t mind if we have to put down others to build up our own ego because we simply have to. We are addicted to it, and nobody can take it away from us. In the end, an egomaniac is someone who no one else wants to be around. They are lonely and hurt that no one can see their greatness, and very often, they grow old in a state of despair.
The opposite problem is having little or no ego. Now this gets very tricky. If you read many of the great religions and philosophies, they will point toward a state of existence where ego is gone. Egolessness leads to connection with the greater whole, which is perceived as enlightenment. I think the egolessness that is referred to here is getting rid of the kind of toxic ego I discussed above. Indeed, you will never feel any connection to something greater than yourself if you worship your own ego, but ego does serve a function.
When your ego is poorly formed, or nonexistent, you have difficulty separating from the rest of the world. You allow yourself to be beaten, abused, put down, lied to, or laughed at because you aren’t worthy of making a stand. This is clearly not a reasonable place to be. Over time, someone with no ego will be disrespected and pushed aside.
Like so many things in life, ego has to be balanced. The Buddhists talk about The Middle Way, which is the use of moderation to achieve transcendence. I think this philosophy applies best to the balance of ego. You have to believe in yourself enough to be able to assert your wants and needs, or they will never be fulfilled. But if you assert your wants and needs to the point of being aggressive, then others will start to shun you. Always remember that you are only a small part of a vast ocean of humanity. You can even take it beyond humanity to see that you’re a small part of an ecosphere, a planet, and even a universe. Realization that you are part of such a miraculous collective can both strengthen your sense of self and lend humility. In short, you achieve a state that is both egoless and individually unique at the same time.
Why are we here? What does it all mean? Who is God?
Do you know the answer to these questions? I don’t. But I have ideas because I worked hard on developing a philosophy. You must have a framework to answer the big questions you encounter or your life will spiral downward into a meaningless mess. Many people find their philosophy through church or other religious affiliations, but I would say this should only be the beginning. Stretch yourself spiritually. Look into every religion. Read the thoughts of the great philosophers who have gone before us. Read the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Ghita. As Jesus said, “Seek, and ye shall find.”
I’ve had many patients come to me with the problem of meaninglessness. It comes in different forms and has somewhat different presentations, but this is the core problem. Their life has no meaning. And without a philosophy, they’re lost. They have no idea how to go right because they can’t even see where they’re going. Your philosophy is your light.
Your quest for a philosophy should be a lifelong pursuit. There aren’t many things sadder than the person who clings to a belief system that no longer works for them. You should never give up trying to learn new things about the mysteries that surround us, nor should you ever shut your mind to things you have discarded in the past. Many times people will come full circle to believe in what they were taught as kids, but in a much more profound way.
I know there are many out there who will balk at this notion. They’ll say you should believe what you’re taught and not question it. I have a great problem with this. I believe the truth will always come out, no matter what you call it or how you approach it. You can find answers to life’s questions anywhere. In fact, when a question arises, many believe if you pay attention hard enough God will give you the answers you need. The answer was always there, you just couldn’t see it until the need arose.
For those who say they don’t know how to develop a new philosophy or strengthen their old one, I say take a visit to any bookstore or library. Man has struggled to find his place in the universe since the beginning. In that struggle, many wise men and women have taken the time to put their thoughts on paper. If you can read, you can explore nearly every philosophy that man has devised through the ages.
I’ll close this section with a warning: Always be respectful of another person’s philosophy. In general, a person will cling to their philosophy like a lifeline. Only with the greatest respect should you go nosing around in someone else’s beliefs, and even then, only by invitation. Remember, it’s their responsibility to keep their light shining, not yours.
Introduction
“The most personal is the most universal.”
I heard that saying when I was a kid and I hope it holds true. The reason I’m writing this blog is simple: I want my kids to know how to avoid the mistakes I’ve made and the mistakes I’ve seen countless others make in my professional career as a psychiatrist. These rules are the most personal things I have to share with my children, and I hope they contain some universal value that others will find helpful.
The title of this blog is derived from a saying my grandfather had whenever we got lost: “Go right and you’ll never go wrong.” If we had truly counted on this bit of wisdom for direction, obviously we would’ve gone around in circles. But it’s the underlying meaning of that saying that has always intrigued me. Do the right thing, and you’ll always be okay. Like many things he said, it is simple and profound at the same time. Why shouldn’t we always just “go right”? It makes perfect sense. And which one of us wouldn’t like to say we had never gone wrong?
So why do so few people heed this advice? I think a big part of it is simple lack of understanding. We don’t know how to go right. As a psychiatrist for adults, children, and adolescents, I kept seeing the same wrongs repeated over and over again. At first it seemed like these were simple mistakes that anyone could make, but the more I was in the business, the more these things became obvious. We can’t go right all the time, but we can do better.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m no guru. When you see these things as many times as I have, you can’t help but notice them. These are the rules of the human condition. I’m just an observer, and this is what I’ve seen. Bear with me a while, and let’s see if we can find our way.