(1) The self-help industry is crooked. It won’t make you happier.
First of all: Why does it work ?
Because our culture’s obsession with achieving happiness. But let's face it.
A) They are trivial
If you get rid of the flashy slogans, you'll realize that the messages they contain are ****completely banal.****
You already did this.
For example,
- The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, one of the bestselling self-help books of all time, essentially instructs readers
to decide what matters most to them in life and do it.- How to Win Friends and Influence People, advises readers to be pleasant rather than obnoxious, and to use people’s first names a lot.
B) They’re downright false.
A lot of self-help books on the importance of setting goals quote the so-called Yale Study of Goals.
In this study, students from Yale’s graduating class of 1953 were asked whether they had concrete, written-down goals for their lives. Only 3% of them said they had. Two decades later, when members of the class were located and asked how their lives had turned out, lo and behold, the 3% who had written down their goals had amassed greater financial wealth than the other 97% combined.
WOW ! AMAZING !
This study would be great evidence that writing down goals could secure future success – if it weren’t a fake. Indeed, it was later revealed that the Yale Study of Goals never took place at all.
C) Level of Happiness = Level of Wealth ? That's what they often imply.
And yet, one of the best-known general findings of the “science of happiness” is that most of the advantages of modern life haven’t lifted our collective mood. Above a certain basic level of income, making more and more money doesn’t make us happier and happier.
But, wait ! International studies have shown that some of the world’s poorest countries are the happiest. In one survey, Nigeria, where 92% of the population lives on less than two dollars a day, came in first place.
(2) Ironically, the happier we want to be, the unhappier we usually are.
Most of us would like everything in life to be just right. But perhaps our urge to have everything perfect is a big part of what’s wrong.
The ironic process theory states that when you try to suppress certain thoughts or behaviors, they (ironically) end up becoming more prevalent.
Affirmations, those self-congratulatory phrases designed to make readers feel happier through repetition, can also be counterproductive. This is because, given that it’s usually people with low self esteem who seek affirmation, when they say an affirmative phrase like “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better” to themselves over and over, it clashes with their poor self-image.
That's the problem ! The cognitive dissonances that we create. Then they automatically reject the affirmation because it threatens the coherence of their sense of self, a strong driver within us. This could worsen their low self-esteem, as people struggle to reassert their existing self-images against the incoming messages.
In fact, several experiments have found that people with low self-esteem who were asked to write down “I’m a lovable person” repeatedly became less happy in the process. They didn’t feel particularly lovable to begin with, and trying to convince themselves otherwise merely reaffirmed their negativity. In short, “positive thinking” made them feel worse.
The flaw of positive thinking is summed up best by one character in an Edith Wharton story:
“There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running around after happiness.”
(3) Failure is an inevitable part of life – ACCEPT IT.
Ever notice how self-help books only tell stories with happy endings? Stories about people who took risks and made millions or who worked hard and achieved the impossible? Somehow we never read autobiographies by people who boldly went out and pursued their dreams – and then flat-out failed.
This is because despite what self-help gurus and proponents say, we all fail at some stage in our lives.
Funny thing:
Some gurus even go so far as to advocate removing words like “impossible” from the dictionary. For instance, Dr. Schuller, who wrote over thirty-five self-help books, willed his audience at a “Get Motivated” seminar in San Antonio to remove the word “failure” from the dictionary, fanatically emphasizing the “power” of positive thinking. However, just a few days after the seminar, Schuller filed for bankruptcy, and thus debunked his own idea.
In fact, even what we consider a well-earned success might really just be down to plain dumb luck, and in reality would have ended up a disastrous failure without it.
One study sheds light on this phenomenon.
After investigating the accuracy of media commentators who made economic forecasts, researchers came to a surprising conclusion: the ones who made the most extreme and sensationalist predictions were just as likely to be wrong as they were right. In other words, they weren’t any better than the other commentators, they just made riskier forecasts. And, interestingly, the media only praised the predictions that turned out to be accurate, rarely following up the ones that didn’t.
The study illustrates that denying failure doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Everybody fails. And pretending the opposite is true is like pretending to be immortal. The sooner we all come to terms with our inclination to failure and our mortality, the healthier and happier our lives will be.
(4) Embracing death and suffering can be a source of comfort and relief.
Today, most of us try to avoid thinking about the things in life that bring about negative emotions – like death. But actually, we have no control over our emotions.
a) According to Brené Brown, a scholar in the field of vulnerability, we cannot “selectively numb” emotions, i.e., decide to put negative emotions, like vulnerability, grief, shame, fear and disappointment, in a box and throw it out the window.
b) Writer and monk Thomas Merton states in his memoirs that the more we try to avoid suffering, the more we end up suffering. In other words, when we focus our energies on not feeling something, the more we end up feeling it.
However, there are some cultures with rituals and customs designed to makes us think about our own mortality and help us accept death.
Such traditions date back to ancient Rome, perhaps even earlier. The ancient Romans’ contemplation of mortality stemmed from the joy of being alive, much like savoring life as if it were a delicious meal. One legend has it that the generals of that era who were victorious in battle would instruct a slave to follow them as they paraded through the streets repeating the words “memento mori” – or “Remember, you are mortal” in the generals’ ears. In doing so, the generals would be safe from hubris.
(5) Uncertainty is the only certainty in life, which is why it helps to develop a "negative capability".
Negative capability ?
Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason...
Life is inherently uncertain. Nobody can say whether they’ll win the lottery or get run over by a car tomorrow: the threat of negative things happening is a part of life.
But our recognition of uncertainty doesn’t seem to prevent us from obsessively avoiding it. We spend far too much of our lives seeking “closure” of past events and want too many clear-cut answers and facts, even when there are none to be had.
If our problem is too much positivity, we need to develop a negative capability, or the willingness to take a step back and adopt an accepting stance toward our inner lives, no matter what our emotional state is.
We need more of what psychologist Paul Pearsall calls “openture” (this is his neologism to describe the opposite of closure). He maintains that we should embrace imperfections and the fact that we can’t dot every “i” and cross every “t” in life, and just keep on pushing forward. Rather than trying to correct all our negative thoughts, we should just let them be.
There are many philosophical approaches that embody a negative capability.
a) Take the Stoics: for them, the foundation of tranquility was the realization that, even if we can’t control the events of our lives, we can control our own feelings of distress during those events.
b) Then there are the Buddhists, who observe the “inner weather” of their thoughts and emotions before acting, because their emotionally laden thoughts might otherwise be too quick to dictate their actions.
Incorporating negative capability into your everyday life doesn’t mean you have to practice ancient philosophical or religious traditions. All you have to do is use it as a skill in moving forward with a project where you don’t have clearly defined goals, when you dare to reflect upon your failures, when you stop trying to eliminate feelings of insecurity, or when you put aside “motivational” techniques in favor of actually getting things done.
.... end of PART I ...
The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking
Negative capability