Psych-Out

Henry Miller photo

“I have no money, no resouces, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Happiness. Even as we chase it, we look upon it with suspicion. In the movie Annie Hall, Alvy (Woody Allen) runs across what looks like a happy couple.

Alvy: You look like a really happy couple? Are you?
Woman: Yeah.
Alvy: Yeah? So, how do you count for it?
Woman: I am very shallow and empty, and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.
Man: And I’m exactly the same way.

Happiness is not the domain of idiots, but that of the man/woman willing to throw him or herself into the mix of life’s uncertainties. Yoshida Kenko wrote, “The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.” If you get what Kenko is saying, then you may be able to grasp what it takes to be happy.

Happiness scrapes against our species’ natural inclination toward dissatisfaction. More food. More money. Sounds good, yet the gratification we feel from more and more only becomes less and less. On the other hand, if you let your guard down and things get bad enough, you can be taken out of the game completely.

from Garden of Earthly Delights (Hell), Hieronymus Bosch

It’s a sad fact of life — bad outcomes outnumber good ones. Loss gathers far more of our attention, than success. Our perceptual and emotional circuitry tends more toward fixating on our problems than celebrating our victories. Our inherent penchant for dissatisfaction is even encoded in our language. There are far more words for negative emotions than for positive ones.

If survival is deep inside our genetic programming, then being able to anticipate danger (even if wrong) is the best strategy. Enjoy those figs by the newly found watering hole too long, that saber-tooth tiger might jump out and make that fig your last. Remember, our genes only “care” for our well-being only so much as we can do the things we need to do to survive, mate, and pass those genes on. Feeling good about it all after the fact is incidental.

The good news? We are the only species who can tell our genes to go jump in the lake. But happiness takes work. It takes imagination and inner mettle to hold to it. At times, it is grainy and hard-edged, at others graceful and flowing.

Happiness is neither simple nor shallow. It requires a wide lens to navigate the complex, sometimes dismal horizon. The truly happy person owns his choices, without blame, while throwing himself at life in full view of this world’s nastiness, stupidity, and sorrow. She meets her fair share of grief, sadness, and trauma along the way. His ache is no less.

Henry Miller & friend

But one thing that seems to separate out the truly happy from the rest of us is the capacity to see something else beyond the immediate struggle. Within has been cultivated the deep abiding belief that with enough resilience, creativity, and capacity to endure, there is a way through. Happiness requires a refusal to resign oneself in face of whatever dark clouds break the horizon.

“The aim of life is to live, and live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.” Yes, Mr. Miller. Yes.

Henry Miller. Does this sound like happiest man alive? Perhaps, yes.

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Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. The Evolving Self: a Psychology for the Third Millennium. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

Foster, Rick & Hicks, Greg. How We Choose to be Happy. New York: Perigee Books, 1999.

Wiederman, Michael. “Why It’s So Hard to be Happy,” Scientific American Mind Vol. 18, No. 1 (2007): 36-43.

When was the last time you felt that zing in your step? Sitting in front of a TV devouring a bag of chips? Or, when challenging your strength, endurance, eye-hand coordination, or capacity to build or create. It’s in our wiring to run, to lift, to hike, to climb, and work with our hands. Motion thrills us. We can become drenched in a glow of pleasure and satisfaction when we solve complex problems with our bodies.

From our earliest beginnings, we have scavenged, foraged, hunted, and migrated. We’ve populated every climate and terrain — a feat no other species can claim. For tens of thousands of years we beat unfathomable odds — defeating ice, torential rains, droughts, predators, mountain ranges, and raging waterways. How? By flaking stones, hollowing tree trunks, throwing spears, cutting branches, gathering fruits, mending hides, tying knots, and building fires.

We were groomed by natural selection and the forces of nature not only to survive, but to thrive in lands of scarcity, unpredictability, and danger. 2 million years of it. We’ve populated lands as varied as the savanna’s of Africa, the deserts of Arabia, the rain forests of Indochina, the frozen arctic ice scapes of Siberia and Alaska, the vast open plains of the Americas.

Today, however, we can spend months with our only physical challenge being a couple dozen daily walks to and from our refrigerators, cars, and computer screens. We can migrate from Detroit to Hong Kong in a comfortable 72 degrees, never to sweat, freeze, or feel a single raindrop moisten our skin. No one wants to turn back the time and return to the hardship and strife of our ancestors. Yet, has something been lost to us living in a world so stripped of physical challenge?

Neuroscientist Kelly Lambert has theorized that what we’ve gained in convenience we may have lost in activities that boost psychological resilience. Our brain’s reward circuitry exhibits far more activity when we expend effort to obtain a reward, than when there’s no expenditure of effort at all. Both physical and mental effort strengthens our brain’s reward-pleasure circuitry. Although we crave leisure, we are truly happier when engaging complex challenges.

Our brain’s pleasure/reward circuitry is dependent upon a neurotransmitter called dopamine and its corresponding dopamine receptors. When we exert ourselves in anticipation of that sought-after reward, happy dopamine pours into the system. This neuro-activity is what brings about that feeling of self-satisfaction. When we live a life that requires less and less physical effort, our dopaminergic system shrinks. Our reward circuitry fires less often and with less zing, perhaps making us more prone to depression, anxiety, and day-to-day numbness

You want to give your life a boost? Seek out activities that challenge and engage both your mind and body. Rock climb. Canoe. Garden. Take up pottery, tennis, woodworking, or slight-of-hand magic. Buy a motorcycle and let the wind blow across your face. Baby, we were born to run.

Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run

A lion smells a zebra. A songbird hears a sweet-to-his-ears response in some distant tree. You eye your neighbor’s new car. It’s that moment before the chase when the brain’s pleasure centers become awash in it’s favorite neurotransmitter – dopamine.

Our greatest pleasure seems to come in that moment before chasing that meal, mate, or brand new car. That’s when the burst of our natural pleasure chemical peaks. The reward itself? From the standpoint of dopamine, it’s little more than an afterthought.

Capture is sweet. Anticipation is sweeter, still. It’s a time-honored evolutionary strategy wired deep inside our nervous systems. When our pleasures were scarce, and the dangers were many, it was a strategy that helped us do the things we needed to do to survive. The state of anticipation revs up that much needed internal imperative to seek, to chase, to get up and make it happen – lions, tigers, and bears be damned! It’s what we call motivation.

The psychological term for this moment is the “appetitive stage.” It’s the time when expectation is tweaked and our appetite is whetted. When that burst of dopamine is released, pleasure surges so we actually get up and do the work to obtain what it is we need. The big cat perks its ears, lifts its nose to the wind. He’s gearing up to make his move.

Anticipation starts in our senses. A sight. A sound. A smell. It gets its boost at the cingulate gyrus. This ridge of cerebral cortex receives information from the eyes, ears, and nose. It then sends a message to the basal ganglia, which guides movement, and to the brainstem that stimulates our states of arousal. For we humans, this neuro-electro-chemical chain reaction can also start from a mere thought, fantasy, or idea. If the information is the right kind, we get an urge.

The nucleus accumbens is a closely connected brain area critical to our experience of pleasure and reward. It’s proximity to the brain’s motor system (the striatum) and the limbic system make it a critical intersect between emotion and action. We feel want. We anticipate reward. Pleasure starts to surge. Weight is given to whatever object we’re geared to seek, and thence it tugs and pulls at our attention. This nifty little system determines what’s worth pursuing. It’s a system that keeps us seeking. Keeps us working for that reward. (1)

You want to really light up pleasure’s Christmas tree? Add uncertainty to whether or not you’ll snag that zebra, mate, or brand new car. It’s why intermittent reinforcement is the most powerful of motivators. Will I get it, or will I not? Does he love me, or does he not? If you think you have a good chance, but you’re not sure, anticipation tops out in an exquisite burst of pleasure. Odds are it will be hard to stop yourself from doing something to get that answer, or seek that reward.

Beware that tweak of disappointment after the reward is seized. It may not be because the object desired is less desirable, but the contrasting withdrawal of dopamine between anticipation and capture. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Carly Simon, Anticipation

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(1) There’s increasing evidence that many addicts, especially cocaine addicts, develop a deficit in their pleasure-reward system. Some drugs wreak havoc on the dopamine receptors in the nucleaus accumbens. Often, such addicts experience low levels of motivation and very little of the internal reward buzz that keeps most of us engaged in those smaller, yet necessary, life moments.

“Dear Ms. Calle, I have recently been released from a long term relationship… I would like to spend the remainder of my mourning grieving in your bed…”(1)

Upon receiving this request, artist Sophie Calle packed up her bed and shipped it across the Atlantic with a note wishing the then stranger, Josh Greene, a quick recovery.

How do we mend a broken heart?  (See my previous blog.) Heartbreak has forever defied the counsel of philosophers and physicians.  (2)  Virgil wrote, “It is an easy passage down to hell. But to come back, once there, you cannot well.” Homer’s warrior Euryalus bid “I can as soon leave love, as the Sun leave his course.” The agony can be excruciating. It can lead us to contemplate jumping from the highest of bridges(3) or, at other times, seeking comfort in the bed of a stranger.

Are we left to wandering Eternity in everlasting sorrow?

“The crutch of Time can do more than the steely club of Hercules,” wrote Balthasar Gracian, the 17th c. Jesuit scholar.(4) Robert Burton, in his 16th c. work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, suggested exercise, diet, keeping busy, traveling, and the counsel of good friends — no different from what any good therapist would recommend today. (He also suggested fasting, sweating, bathing, and avoiding wine. Not bad ideas in themselves.)

These remedies aren’t a cure. They may only distract and soothe enough to help father Time work his magic. What if Romeo or Juliet had taken a few trips abroad, watched their diets, and took up jogging?

The best advice I read came from “Faith H” in response to a blog from a heart broken woman. “Spoil yourself, indulge, grab at all the good small things that come your way. Get away, somewhere different, preferably with a good friend who will listen to whatever mind numbing drivel you want to talk about HIM or whatever. Someone who will eat popcorn and drink bad wine and watch a few silly movies with you… Start making new memories. It never goes away completely but plans, girl, make big plans.” Robert Burton be proud.

As for Sophie Calle? After being dumped herself, and by e-mail no less, she distributed the text to 107 women professionals, photographed them reading it, and invited them to analyze the break-up e-mail according to their job. The ex’s grammar was torn apart by a copy editor, his lines used as target practice by a markswoman, second-guessed by a chess player, analyzed by a psychiatrist, and performed by an actress. “After a month I felt better…The project replaced the man.” She entitled the piece, Take Care of Yourself.

sophie

Another piece, Exquisite Pain, came at the end of another love affair. “Upon returning to France, I chose to recount my suffering rather than my trip.” She told everyone she met her story and then asked them to tell her their own stories of some event worthy of their suffering. Sophie wrote out their stories with accompanying photographs. In three months, she proclaimed herself cured due to the endless recounting of her story alongside its relativity to the excruciating suffering that others told to her.(5)

As for Sophie Calle’s bed? After several months, Josh Greene sent it back, his mourning over.(6) Perhaps the best way to ease that broken heart?

Turn it into art. Sophie’s counsel? “The worse the heartbreak, the better the art.”

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1) Calle, Sophie. Sophie Calle: M’as-Tu Vue. New York: Prestel, 2003.
2) Thomas Sydenham wrote in 1680: “Among the remedies which it has pleased Almighty God to give to man to relieve his sufferings, none is so universal and so efficacious as opium.” It seems that Sydenham may have been right. If interested see Lewis, Thomas, M.D., Amini, Fari, M.D.; Lannon, Richard, M.D. A General Theory of Love. New York: Vintage, 2001. pgs.94-96
3) There have been over 1200 suicides off the Golden Gate Bridge since it opened in 1937.
4) See Gracian, Baltasar. The Art of Worldly Wisdom. Trans. Christopher Maurer. New York: Doubleday, 1992. If you have the budget for only one self-help book to carry for you the rest of your life, this gem is the one!
5) She exhibited the piece almost 20 years later at the Pompidou Centre exhibition in 2003. See Guardian article.
6) Calle, Sophie. Sophie Calle: M’as-Tu Vue. New York: Prestel, 2003. The rest of the letter finishes: “Your bed has offered me comfort in so many ways, it will be difficult to replace Thank you again for your compassion. Warmest regards, Josh.”

…and my love stays bitterly glowing,
spasms of it will not sleep,
and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade
but there is no one to cover me –
not even God.
(from Divorce, Anne Sexton)

Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker writes that heartbreak is “an internal doomsday machine, pointless once it goes off, useful only as a deterrent.”(1) If you doubt that heartbreak breaks down the body, than you’ve never suffered its sting.

A mate’s comings and goings, his glances, her voice, what she does, what he doesn’t, directly influence our bodies. A mate’s life habits create a physiological familiarity that literally grafts itself into our regulatory thermostat. If disrupted, our bodies, as well as our emotions, are literally thrown “out of whack.”

Thomas Lewis calls it “limbic regulation.”(2) Our limbic system regulates our emotional response to the social world and affects every other system in our body – hormonal, behavioral, cognitive, and perceptual. When that soul mate shows up, he or she alters not only how we think and feel about ourselves and the world, but our hormone regulation, our heart function, sleep rhythms, and even our immune system.

Our body is an open loop. It’s dependent upon, as well as reactive to, what happens outside our skin. Consider a baby. That crying, pooping, gurgling ball of joy is maximally open-looped. Without moms and dads cooing, caressing, and burping, his vital rhythms collapse. He will grow deficient, if not die. We need people around not just for comfort. Our bodies need the regulation that other warm bodies bring. Research has established that life expectancy can be directly related to whether or not we have people in our lives, and to what extent.(3)

When the bad news comes — he’s leaving, she needs space – our first response is protest.(4) We urge, coax, bargain, and plead. Our heart rate and body temperature go up. Stress hormones are released. Our body compels us into desperate “search, seek, and hold on” mode. (Who in the initial throes of heartbreak hasn’t felt like Jennifer Holliday below!)

Jennifer Holliday - And I am Telling You

The purpose of all this frenetic activity is to bring back that person and thus, regain our physiological, as well as emotional, well-being. “Protest is the alarm that follows a breach in these life-sustaining adjustments. Protest is the behavioral response to the physiological changes.”(4) Those who protest are those most likely to recover their love and thus their bodily equilibrium. We’ll find him or her, we’ll urge him back, all is not lost!

And if the protest fails? That doomsday machine goes off. The disruption becomes widespread. There’s nothing we can do, nor want to do, but curl up, bury ourselves beneath our sheets, refuse human contact. We speak less. We eat less. Our heart rate, appetite, and body temperature decrease. Oxygen consumption, REM sleep, and cellular immunity break down. Indeed, our hearts and bodies break.

If you’ve been there you know that there is no magic pill, nor words of wisdom that comfort. There is no cover.

Isn’t there anything we can do? See my upcoming blog ”Sophie Calle’s Bed.” Take another little piece of my heart now, baby.

Janis Joplin, Take a Piece of my Heart
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1) Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: W.W. Norton & C., Inc, 1997. p. 421
2) Lewis, Thomas, M.D., Amini, Fari, M.D.; Lannon, Richard, M.D. A General Theory of Love. New York: Vintage, 2001.
3) See Sapolsky, Robert M. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. New York: Owl Books, 2004. “The impact of social relationships on life expectancy appears to be at least as large as that of variable such as cigarette smoking, hypertension, obesity, and level of physical activity. For the same illness, people with the fewest social connections have approximately two-and-a-half times as much chance of dying as those with the most connections…” p.164
4) Lewis, Thomas,

How do most people die when lost in the wilds? They die of shame. (1) These are the thoughts spoken by Charles Morse (Anthony Hopkins) in the movie The Edge. He and Robert Green (Alec Baldwin) are lost in the Alaskan wilderness – on their tracks, a man-eating bear. (For scene from the movie, see video below.)

Charles: Yeah, see, they die of shame. “What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?” And so they sit there and they…die…because they didn’t do the one thing that would save their lives.

Robert: And what is that, Charles?

Charles: Thinking.

Silvan Tomkins writes, “… shame strikes deepest into the heart of man…. shame is felt as inner torment, a sickness of the soul…the humiliated one feels himself naked, defeated, alienated, lacking in dignity and worth.”(2) Shame interferes with our capacity to think. Shame keeps us from acting decisively on our own behalf.

Shame is embedded in what can seem an uncontrollable physiological response, possibly akin to gestures of submission we see throughout the animal world. Lowered gaze. Cowering. Playing dead. Hiding. Making one’s body smaller and less threatening. (3) For human’s, shaming is arguably one of the oldest forms of social control.

Humans evolved in a mosaic of hostile environments. Group living was crucial to our survival. Greater numbers brought safety, but also a need for greater cooperation and social organization. We hunted in groups. We collected food in groups. Social cohesion radically changed humans from scavengers and opportunistic hunters into super-predators that could hunt almost any animal on earth.

Shaming was one way of ensuring cooperation. It could protect scarce resources from cheaters and non-cooperators by making them pay dearly through evoking feeling alone. (4) To be shamed, one has to be able to feel shame. This feeling is rooted deeply in our neurophysiology as well as in our own evolutionary history.

When shamed we are struck by an urge to withdraw toward life’s margins. We go into hiding. Today, we’re less likely to be shunned to the outskirts of a village or tribe. Instead, we hide into ourselves. We don’t speak. We don’t show up. We hide our faces inside masks and disguises.

Often, we are ashamed of shame itself. We deny carrying such a feeling. Shame? Me? Still, denial or not, it chases us into dozens of daily little deaths. We fail to go to the doctor – our symptoms shame us. We fail to go to the gym – our bodies shame us. We fail to raise our hand and ask that question – our lack of knowing that one thing shames us. We avoid that crucial discussion with partner or spouse. We fail to take that next step. We give in; stop trying. Shame stops thought. It diverts action. It absorbs us into an unsettling vortex. When shamed we don’t ask, “what do I need to do now?” or “what does this situation require of me?”, but instead, “where do I hide?”

Shame is an emotion always in hiding from itself.

We all get lost in the wilds of our own lives — however small or large those wilds be. Refuse to slink off because of some little whisper of shame. Face the bear that stalks you. Step up. Step out. Think. Then, go get it.

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1) Survival expert John Wiseman wrote, “When facing a disaster it is easy to let yourself go, to collapse and be consumed in self-pity,” he writes. “But it is no use giving up or burying your head in the sand and hoping that this is a bad dream that will soon pass.”
2) Nathanson, D. ed. The Many Faces of Shame. New York: The Guildford Press, 1987.
3) When a male lion is defeated by an intruding male lion, he is forced out of the territory. In essence, he must “leave his pride.”
4) Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: W.W. Norton & C., Inc, 1997. (p. 404)