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. 

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. 

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.  

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.