Translator: Chiara Del Brutto Reviewer: Tanya Cushman
I've devoted most of my academic and research career
to understanding mental health and wellness.
But as a fellow human being,
I also know that being a psychologist offers absolutely no protection
from the basic truth that it's hard being human.
In fact, the single most remarkable fact about human experience
is how hard it is for us to be happy -
and I mean genuinely happy.
And I know the numbers,
knowing that we are in the midst of an opioid epidemic,
we're in the midst of an obesity epidemic,
and we have a growing epidemic of depression and anxiety.
And I know the number showing
that happiness has been on the decline in the United States over the last decade.
And I know that in our modern world,
we have more resources now available to us than at any time point in human history.
And so you'd think we'd be happier.
But the data suggest otherwise.
I believe that there's something about our basic apparatus,
our very nature as human beings,
that makes genuine happiness hard to come by
and living life hard to do.
And I'm a case in point.
If you knew this guy back in 2009,
you would have thought he had everything going for him
and every possible reason to be happy.
I was hitting my stride in my career,
and my office walls were covered with plaques and awards.
I was married, with three healthy kids, a home in the suburbs,
and I even had two dogs in tow.
I had my health, wide-ranging interests and plenty of family support.
So looking back, I had every possible reason to be happy.
Now, I'm not exactly sure of the day,
but some point in 2009, I woke up one morning with this thought,
"I hate my life. I hate my life. I hate my life.
I hate my life,"
echoing through my brain.
And at first, I tried to dismiss it; I even tried to ignore it.
As a psychologist,
I knew that not all thoughts should be trusted or believed,
and I had the tools to disarm this menacing thought.
But nothing seemed to work.
And I remember saying to myself,
"Healer, heal thyself."
But I couldn't even do that.
Now I checked in.
I knew I wasn't depressed; I knew I wasn't suicidal.
Well, maybe I'm going through a midlife crisis.
After all, I fell within the 40-something age bracket.
But the thought of hating your life
is not part of any midlife crisis that I certainly knew about.
And so I did what came naturally, to me:
I isolated myself in any way I possibly could,
and I was literally running from my life in the hope of running into happiness.
And then the unexplained heart arrhythmias happened
even though I had a clean bill of health.
And at first, I thought, "Well, this is strange."
But in hindsight, I believe my heart was trying to tell me something.
But back then, I had no idea what that might be.
I really didn't want to know;
I wasn't in a place to look
because I was afraid of what I might find and what it might all mean.
All of this led me into what I can only call
a "dark night of the soul."
Now, mystic seekers and gurus from various traditions
often speak of this dark night as a transformative moment,
but for me, it felt like stepping into a mucky, stinky swamp,
and I certainly didn't want to go there.
Who would?
I had enough muck in my heart and in my head,
thank you very much.
But I was tired of running,
and with all the courage I could muster,
I stopped running; I turned around and took an honest look at my life.
But this is hard for us to do, and I'm here to talk about why that is so.
And I'd like to start off with the brain.
It has many functions,
but one of its main jobs, for all of us,
is to produce thoughts in the form of words and images,
fleeting, without form or substance.
But in the modern world, we lose track of this.
We take our thoughts so seriously;
we take them literally;
we buy into them - hook, line and sinker - and swallow them
even though they're not helpful to us.
We mistake our beliefs and our thoughts for reality,
and we literally get trapped
in what I would call "fusion with our thoughts."
We do this even when they're unhelpful.
So looking back at my life,
I knew I was buying into and fused with a whole train of thoughts.
And as I stepped back,
I discovered that some of them
were inside of the "I hate my life" message
that was pounding in my head.
Like the thoughts were something like this:
"John, you need to do what's expected of you
because otherwise people will disapprove.
You better follow the rules
because what you care about really doesn't matter.
And honestly, John, you really don't matter all that much
without those awards and plaques hanging on your wall."
And it was this set of thoughts
along with fear
that kept me literally stuck and far from the life I wished to lead.
Now, it wasn't always this way.
If we could imagine our early hominoid ancestors,
and we could divide this room in half -
so everybody from the middle over here,
your group has no capacity for language and cognition,
no ability to speak with meaning and respond with understanding,
no signs, gestures, drawings - zippo.
You all, on the other side of the room,
you have the capacity
to speak with meaning and listen with understanding.
You can use words, symbols, gestures, paintings and drawings.
Now, those on the left, some of you in the front, I'll pick on you,
you all head west.
Some of you came back,
and you see the predators, you hear the screams,
and the carnage is your friends become lunch.
That night, around the fire, you with your other cave mates
fight over the scraps of food you may have,
and some of you might even wander over to that empty part of the cave
where your friends once slept
and take their hides, their tools and their mates.
Next day, some of you go west.
A few of you see it, they don't come back.
In short, your group gets smaller and smaller and smaller.
You on the right,
the fortunate ones in the front row -
there's nothing bad about that, but I'm going to pick on you -
you head west.
A few of you see them go, and you hear the screams,
you see the carnage,
and you watch as your friends become dinner.
Now, back at the campfire, you sit around.
What are you going to talk about?
You're going to be talking about what happened going west,
the dangers of going west,
about the predators.
Some of you might even talk about off in the east,
this wonderful bounty you found.
There's berries, and there's other things that we could use and resources.
Maybe we should go there tomorrow.
The point is, language and cognition,
that thinking machine between your ears,
evolved as a useful tool.
It's purpose was to keep us safe and alive.
That's it.
But in the modern world,
we don't see our thoughts as useful or not, or as tools.
We treat them as who we are.
We literally identify with them,
and then we tell stories about ourselves around them,
even when they're self-limiting.
And we all have stories.
"I am worthless," is a story.
"I'm not enough," is a story.
"I'm stupid," "I'm wrong," "I'm fat."
They're all stories
with predictable beginnings and predictable endings.
And we listen to these stories even when they don't serve us well.
But it wasn't always this way.
If you go back in time,
most of us - in fact, all of us -
came into this world more or less the same way.
There was a you there with two eyes looking out in the world,
but you had no words, no experiences,
no way to speak about that world.
All you knew is that you're here, you're here now.
But very quickly that changes as we collect experiences.
And in a way, we're like this vessel.
Life is continually adding experiences to that vessel,
that you that's always been there.
And even modern neuroscience teaches us
that the nervous system is additive, not subtractive.
That means what goes in, stays in, short of brain insult or injury.
So let's try a little example, an experiment, just to see.
Little Miss Muffet sat on a ...
(Audience) Tuffet.
Now, when's the last time you used the word "tuffet"?
Like, "Hey honey, pull up a tuffet, and let's hang out for a while."
But it's in there, right?
And some of you might be thinking, "I have no idea what he's talking about,"
and that's because in your history,
you don't have that nursery rhyme in there.
But I can guarantee you, it's in there now.
And some of you might even be telling stories around this,
like, "Oh man, I am stupid for not knowing the word tuffet."
And the deal is this,
is that the only constant in your life and mine has been that vessel.
What's changed are the experiences that have been added to it.
And our mind takes those experiences and concocts stories around this,
and then we buy into them
even though they don't serve use well and they're self-limiting.
For me, my story was "I'm not enough."
When those experiences that we collect are painful, we'll do the next thing.
We will struggle with them, try to get away, push them out.
In short, we avoid.
And I'm here to tell you
that there's no healthy way to avoid your thoughts or feelings.
But we do it because we've learned
that control works so well in the outside world
that naturally,
it ought to work well inside our skin.
But the same rules don't apply.
We know this:
there's no on and off switch for thoughts and emotions.
Thoughts and emotions happen; they're not choices.
And if there's one mantra that sums up the literature,
it would be this:
If you don't want it, you've got it.
And many of us, though, try to run from ourselves,
and that creates a whole host of other problems.
And it is supported by a culture, especially in the West,
that I call "the culture of feel-goodism."
The message inside this culture is this:
It's normal to be happy; pain isn't normal.
In fact, it's a problem.
So if you're in pain - emotional, psychological or physical -
you better find a way to fix it.
And bam! The trapdoor is shut as soon as that happens
because now you're set up
to be at war with what you think and what you feel.
And all of that effort and attention
takes us out of the present moment where our lives are lived.
Actually, this is something
that was confirmed by a pair of Harvard psychologists.
They went out,
and they studied our happiness in relation to where our mind was,
and what they found was that not being present
is absolutely disastrous for your happiness and your life.
In fact, they found that 50% of the time, our minds are not here and now,
they're off wandering in thought about the past or the future.
And we get stuck in the past.
So imagine driving your car, and I told you,
"You must keep your eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror at all times."
What would happen?
You would likely crash.
And that's what happens
when we fuse with thoughts about past wounds,
regrets,
difficult memories long ago -
we crash, and we crash again.
But we also can fuse with thoughts about the future.
You and I can imagine a future that hasn't happened.
We can imagine tomorrow or even 10 years from now.
But what we miss is
that the thought about the future is not the future;
it's actually a thought.
And what the Harvard researchers showed,
the more that we mind wander, our happiness tanks.
By contrast,
the more we're present in the now, our happiness increases.
So think about that the next time you're doing something yucky
like cleaning the bathroom toilet.
Watch where your mind is.
Now, If we let all these processes go unchecked,
we may one day wake up with no sense of what we care about,
no direction,
no compass bearing in our life.
And that can also be disastrous,
especially when life offers us forks in the road.
Because it will.
And our tendency as human beings is to avoid pain and to seek pleasure,
and our tendency here is to take the easy path
even though the path, say, to the right, might be more life-affirming.
And we do it because we get a honeymoon from the pain.
But if we keep taking easy street,
eventually we may wake up one day with the worst type of pain of them all,
which is the pain of an unlived life,
and we end up feeling literally stuck.
This is the system.
This is the system we're up against.
Six basic processes
that research shows account for a good deal of human suffering.
We fuse with unhelpful thoughts, literally buying into them.
We become attached to the stories that are in our history,
everything we've collected.
We then avoid and struggle
with the stuff we don't like very much that's in our vessel.
And then we lose contact with the present moment,
we become directionless, we lose our bearings,
and then one day, we might find ourselves stuck
and far from the kind of life that we really care about.
So what can we do about this?
Well, perspective is everything.
We all have a lot of experience with that in the world around us.
Well, you can do the same with your thoughts and emotions.
And the cool thing about that is,
if you can watch them and look at them, you can't be them.
So with fusion, there is no perspective;
the thoughts are in your face.
When we defuse, we get a perspective;
we step back and look at our thoughts.
And a powerful way to do this, this diffusion,
is simply to put your thoughts on paper.
You can always tell if you have a thought if you can write it down.
And when you do that,
you will see that all thoughts are made of the same stuff.
"I hate my life," is just as much of a thought as "I'm a banana."
When you write it down, it's words, letters and ink.
And the real question we all should be asking ourselves
when we look at those words, the letters and the ink,
"Are those thoughts helpful or not
and leading us into the life we wish to lead?"
Crazy, I know, but that's a thought too.
The second thing here is instead of asking yourselves
if they can bind you to the stories we have about who we are,
let's take the "who" out of it
and come back to these other two words:
a simple "I am."
The I am, that vessel, that you,
that was there before the trauma got dropped in,
before the sweet moments got dropped in,
before the mundane,
there was a you there: I am.
And from this perspective, we can choose how we relate to the stuff in our vessel.
The science shows
that instead of being at war with this stuff, which is not helpful,
we can learn to bring kindness and compassion
to whatever it is that we carry.
Just like you might hold a tiny kitten or little puppy or even a newborn infant,
you hold it with tenderness and care.
We can do the same things for the stuff that we carry,
and that can have a profound effect on our happiness.
Instead of turning away from our lives,
we can actually open up and allow what's happening anyway.
Because it is; it's part of your history.
Now, I have a - you've probably seen this before - these like little toys
are actually one of the only empirically supported party favors
that I've seen in the annals of psychology.
And with this little toy - if you've even seen this -
what we do is we push in.
I found myself literally stuck in a trap,
and I tried to get out the way I got in,
and it was suffocating, and it was tight and squeezing
until I realized to stop running,
and I decided to lean in.
When I leaned into my life,
I found that I had wiggle room that I didn't have before,
and I actually could get unstuck.
So this little party toy teaches us
that instead of running, we need to learn to lean in.
Instead of being lost in the future or the past,
we can train ourselves to come back to the present, right now.
And the practice is very simple.
You can do it with the breath anytime, anywhere.
And the science shows it's enormously beneficial for our lives,
and the pair of Harvard researchers shows
that with the more you're present, the more your happiness will increase.
And being present is important for another reason,
because that's where you can act to make changes in your life -
is now, now, now.
And this will help when you feel directionless and lost.
If you don't have a sense of values, learning to defuse -
stop struggling, stop buying into the stories,
be present -
will help you get a sense of what you care about.
So knowing your values, your compass bearings, why you're here.
And that's important
when we decide to make decisions and we face those forks in the world.
What I mean here is not morality; it's what you care about.
What you care about is where the magic happens,
not staying in our little box in our comfort zone.
And the last piece, instead of being stuck,
we can move to being unstuck,
and the way we do that is with our behavior,
with our mouth, hands and feet.
And this is something we have 100% control over.
Thank you.
(Applause)