podcast

We don't need to be condemned to being perpetually on the treadmill of negative emotion. We can choose to focus on our attention on the things that are not natural. Our brain will naturally go to negative threatening stimuli. Our brain will naturally only enjoy positive things for a short time and then become accustomed to them. But if instead of being passive about about this tendency, we can be active about choosing to put our focus and our attention in the direction that will actually give us the return of positive emotions that we seek.

Hi everybody. Welcome to the podcast today. Those of you who remember my introductory episode, remember a little about a little bit about my own story of anxiety. I described how I was someone who was experienced anxiety a great deal of the time, the majority of my time, really. And I described myself as someone who would be fixated on a problem or a threat or something that I was just wishing would be resolved in my life. And then if something happened and that problem got resolved, I wasn't able to really enjoy the fact that it was resolved because my brain would immediately switch to looking for the next threat on the horizon to be anxious about. And so I was perpetually on this treadmill of negative emotion. This is not just a problem with me. This is an ancient problem. In fact, Shakespeare even wrote about it. He wrote, " Happy thou art not. For what thou hast not, still thou strivest to get. And what thou hast, forgetest." This is from his play Measure For Measure. The Duke of Vienna, who's disguised as a friar, he's talking to this prisoner named Claudio, and he's trying to comfort him. Claudio is awaiting to be executed and the Duke of Vienna is trying to help him to see it's not such a big deal that you're going to die because life is pretty miserable anyway, because we're all, we're all on this treadmill that we we can't be happy because we forget about the things that we have, and we're always striving for the things that we don't have. So this is something that has been studied a lot by psychologists, and they call it the hedonic treadmill, hedonic adaptation. And it's this phenomenon that we tend to get used to, really quickly, positive events in our lives. We get used to positive and negative events, but we get used to positive events especially quickly in our lives.
So a classic example is a study that was done on people who won the lottery. And they were happy, really happy for a while, but anywhere from one month to 18 months later, all of these participants were no happier than people who had not won the LA lottery. That their happiness faded from one to 18 months after they won the lottery. It faded back to the level that they were previous to winning the lottery. And what a shame, right, that we can't get benefit out of the good things that happen to us. We're just constantly worried about what we don't have, what's threatening, what we wish that we had in our lives. But unfortunately, this is kind of general. We have what psychologists call a negativity bias in our psychology, meaning that we are just more likely to attend to negative events than positive ones, that we have weaker emotional reactions to positive events than we do to negative events, and we spend more time thinking about how to explain the why behind negative events than we do behind positive events. We've talked about some studies in the past that show this, but for example, if nine people tell you nice job and one person criticizes you, your mind is gonna replay over and over again that one negative comment, and you are more likely to remember it, and you're more likely to be influenced by it than by the the positive comments. And we've talked before about how the same is true with headlines. People are more drawn to headlines that talk about what's going wrong than headlines that talk about what's going right. And this is because our brains are trained to focus on what's negative in the environment. Why might that be? Well, positive circumstances just tell us that it's good for us to keep engaging with our environment, but negative information warns people that there's a danger or unpleasantness in the environment that they need to respond to. For ex, for example, they might need to attack or they might need to flee or they might need to conserve resources. And survival is really de was really dependent on people being aware and paying attention to these negative stimuli so that they could respond to them. It was more important to be aware and respond to the negative stimuli than it was apparently to take advantage of opportunities presented by positive stimuli. And so we evolved to have this negativity bias in our brains, which is too bad.
So what's the solution? Should we just give up on life, like the count was counseling the prisoner Claudio in Shakespeare's play? Well, the good news is no, we don't have to be stuck on this treadmill of negative emotion forever. So we've been talking for the past couple weeks about a book called The How of Happiness by Sonya Lyubomirski, who's a researcher. We're going to be talking about a different work of hers, a different publication of hers, this is actually a chapter in an academic volume. And the chapter's called Hedonic Adaptation to Positive and Negative Experiences, where she really examines this phenomenon. She examines it through her research. She examines it through the research of many other psychologists. And her response to this issue is that you can combat this tendency that we all have. And it really has to do with the things that our brain pays attention to. Because if you have stopped paying attention to something, then basically you've adapted to it. It's not important. It's now in the background it, you're focusing on other things that are important, right? So it's really about where your attention is. And she points out through the research that she is quoting through her, through the research that she has personally done, that you can control what your brain is aware of and what your brain pays attention to if you engage with it actively rather than passively. If we're passive about it, then our brains will forget the happy things in our lives just like the Shakespeare quote. It'll be as easy as water running down the hill. It's just the natural way that our brains are gonna be behave. But if we are active instead and we start walking uphill, then our brains will pay attention to the thing that we invest in, to the thing that we give effort to. So the bad news is that it's gonna take work. The good news is that you don't have to be perpetually unhappy and anxious.
So there's three different ways that she talks about how you can actively engage with the positive circumstances, changes, in your life, in a way that can allow you to get emotional benefit from them. One is to just consciously and effort effortfully be aware of the qualities of these good things that are present in your life. Here's an example. There's a study done on people who owned luxury sedans and versus people who owned just little compact two door cars, and whether or not the people that owned the luxury cars were happier on car trips than the people who owned the little dinky two-door, two-door cars. And what they found was that there was no difference in their happiness levels unless the people with the luxury cars were thinking about the attributes of their cars while they were driving. So those who had those attributes on their mind while they were on the road trip were happier in the luxury sedan than the people in the dinky cars. But that was the condition they had to be consciously thinking about the attributes, the good attributes that they had, listing them. So that's where a gratitude practice comes in. That's where savoring comes in. These are ways of consciously listing and bringing to mind the good attributes of positive things in your life and being able to enjoy them. And it does make a difference into whether or not you can actually enjoy the good things in your life. So buying a new house, for example, is not gonna make you very happy. Unless you are consciously being aware of all of the good things in your new house regularly. Then you can actually get the benefit out of having this new house. So that's the first thing, is to pay attention to the qualities of positive things in your life, or in other words, gratitude, right?
The second way to actively engage with these good things in your life is to find ways to see it as not a static, unchangeable, permanent thing, but to be able to see it as something which is dynamic. Our brains pay attention to things that are moving. Our pre. Our brains tend to ignore things that are static. So if you can start to find ways to see the good things in your life as dynamic unexpected, surprising, impermanent, then all of a sudden, your brain will find it a lot easier to pay attention to those things. I mentioned a couple weeks ago about how when my kids were little, I didn't savor being with them the way that I wish that I had. But if I had been more conscious of the fact that this time was not static and unending, but that it was vanishing quickly, that every day was one of a very limited number with them as little people, then I would've seen it as dynamic, constantly changing, surprising impermanent, and I would, my brain would've paid attention to it more. And I would've been able to enjoy more of those moments that were there to enjoy in a way, in a unique way during that time. We've talked in past episodes of very, about various techniques of being able to do this, to see the good things in your life as dynamic or surprising or impermanent, like thinking about close calls in your life and how amazing it is that you are alive, like thinking about how things could be worse in your life, but they're not. We've talked about being, imagining how this good thing in your life could, could have not happened, but it did. And being aware, being aware of your own mortality and how that makes everyday precious and, and dynamic surprising and impermanent. So these are just different techniques or tricks for helping your brain to switch from viewing these good things in your life as static wallpaper in your life to moving dynamic, surprising, precious passing things that you need to pay attention to. And once your brain does pay attention to them, then you are able to extract happiness out of them. So that's the second way to be able to switch from passive to active, to actively engage with the good things in your life and be able to extract more positive emotions out of them.
The third way is to en make concrete goals in relation to them. So here's an example. There are studies that look at people who get married, and some of them find that the people are happier for about two years, and then after this two year point, their happiness just returns to the level that it was before they got married. So seems that these people adapted to their state of marriage, it became normal. They forget about it and it doesn't make them happy anymore. But there are other studies that find that the people who get married do have a boost of happiness that stays. It doesn't go away after two years. And what's the difference between these different groups of people? Well, those who have their happiness level stay, one of the things that they're doing is that they are, they have finding ways to improve and cherish their marriage and intentionally work toward keeping their relationships fresh and vibrant and meaningful and loving. In other words, they have specific goals in relation to this relationship, so that it's not just a static relationship that they're passively receiving from, but they're actively finding ways to nourish it and improve it and cherish it, and invest in it. And what we invest in, what we what we put effort into, what we intentionally, intentionally engage in our brains pay attention to. And those are the things that we're able to feel. When our brain notices something good, then we're able to feel the good emotions that come from that.
So all of these three different ways, listing the qualities of the good things in your life, or in other words, practicing gratitude in relation to them, seeing the good things in your life as dynamic or surprising or impermanent, and three, making concrete goals in relation to them, all three of these things are ways for us to move from passive to active. And when we do these things, we succeed in making these positive things in our lives more dynamic, more varied, more novel, more surprising, and that is what makes our brains pay attention to them. They are no longer uninteresting and unimportant. Instead, they occupy the forefront of our attention.
William James, who is kind of the father of American psychology, said that "my experience is what I agree to attend to." So we don't need to give up on life if we're stuck on the treadmill of negative emotion. We just need to actively work on what it is that our brains are paying attention to, and when we pay attention to the positive circumstances and changes in our lives, then we get positive emotions out of them for longer. They don't fade and become blase and unimportant.
So as far as my own experience, because I consciously engaged in many of these activities, working on adopting a gratitude practice, learning to savor, learning to be amazed at the fact that I'm alive, being more aware of my mortality, being more conscious about what is important to me, finding my values and my purpose so that I'm con constantly able to engage and generate goals that are meaningful in relation to the good things in my life, my relationships, my circumstances, et cetera. As I have done this, I have been able to move from a person who is pretty perpetually on that treadmill and always feeling anxious about this, that, or the other, and never able to really enjoy when problems get resolved, to a person who is able to really savor and enjoy so many different positive things in my life that were already present before, I just couldn't notice them. I was always forgetting about them. It's not that the circumstances in my life have dramatically changed, but my way of perceiving them and attending to them has changed and that has what has really made the difference in my own experience. We don't need to give up on life. We don't need to be condemned to being perpetually on the treadmill of negative emotion. We can choose instead to be effortful about what we attend to. We can choose to focus on our attention on the things that are not natural. Our brain will naturally go to negative threatening stimuli. Our brain will naturally only enjoy positive things for a short time and then become accustomed to them. But if instead of being passive about about this tendency, we can be active about choosing to put our focus and our attention in the direction that will actually give us the return of positive emotions that we seek. So that's what I have for you today. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again next week.