More Thoughts on Happiness: Part 4

4. Employ reason and self-awareness to reduce destructive emotions

The moral of the last section of these ramblings about happiness could be summed up as "There are no enemies, just friends who are trying to kill you." Well, not quite, but our classification of people and events as inherently threatening is the cause of much emotional unpleasantness, as is the converse insistence that other people and events are vital for our well-being. The fact is that most of us live in an environment where nothing we meet on a daily basis is likely to cause our immediate demise (except for motor vehicles, which for some reason don't bother people much) and all the things necessary for our survival are close at hand. (If you're reading this post from a war zone, ignore the last sentence.) For most of us, at least, there is some truth in Epicurus' words, "What is good is easy to obtain. What is bad is easily avoided." Yet we persist in getting all worked up about trivial threats, slights and frustrations as though our survival were at stake. And by "we", I include me. I've been meditating, reading philosophy and doing various mind-body disciplines for four decades, and I still get the urge to punch people in the face because they make snide comments about my geek skills, or feel my stomach lurch with fear because I've lost my sunglasses. (This really happened, but I say in my defence that they were Armani glasses.) The bright side is that these ridiculously exaggerated emotions normally only last a few seconds.

Now it may even be possible to eliminate these fleeting passions. But remembering what I said earlier about the 80/20 rule, that's in the 20% of the results that take 80% of the work, if not the final 1% that takes 99%. We're talking thirty years full-time meditation in a Himalayan fastness, probably. When some friends of Seneca, the renowned Stoic philosopher, statesman and disgustingly rich person, told him for a joke that one of his ships had sunk, he turned pale, but then recovered his poise and delivered a lecture about how such momentary reactions (propatheia) were outside the control of reason, and that our task was not to eliminate them completely but to ensure that we do not,through erroneous thinking, let them develop into something worse (pathê). What we can learn from this, aside from the inadvisability of pissing around with a famous orator, is that while we may not always be able to prevent destructive emotions, we can often stop them dead, or at least diminish their force considerably.

As usual, there are a variety of techniques for achieving this; in fact, Seneca himself probably invented some of them. I recommend Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, which despite the long and unappealing name, is a collection of elegant techniques for reducing destructive emotions through rational thought and a bit of good old-fashioned behaviour modification. Borrowing promiscuously from stoicism, general semantics and behaviour therapy, it posits that emotions can be classed as rational or irrational according to whether the thinking that generates them is rational or irrational; e.g., annoyance is a rational response to someone playing loud music, based on thoughts like "It would be much better if he turned the music down," while anger is an irrational emotion based on something like "It's intolerable that anyone should disturb me, and anyone who plays music that loud is totally evil and should rot in Hell!" These thoughts in turn arise from irrational beliefs, such as "Nothing bad should ever happen to me" or "People who do bad things are bad people." By challenging the irrational beliefs, you get rid of the irrational emotion. While I might quibble with some of the semantics of REBT, as a method it is very effective, and doesn't always need a therapist; most of the techniques can be self-applied. (Legal disclaimer: if you are a raving nutter, please ignore the last sentence and see a doctor.)

Contrary to the popular view of emotions as primal instincts outside the control of reason, we may thus employ rational thought to banish destructive emotions. But this only works if we are aware of the processes involved first. As Stoics such as Seneca pointed out, if you wait until you're angry to deal with anger, you've missed the boat. This is why we need to cultivate self-awareness as well as reason. One method for helping this is what I call emotional fasting.

Last year, during the holy month of Ramadan, when all (well, some) around me were abstaining from food and drink from dawn till dusk, I decided to go on an emotional fast. (I tried the physical fast once as an experiment, and actually passed out.) What prompted me to try this was the fact that many Muslims fast piously (and often ostentatiously) during Ramadan but are ratty the whole day as a result. This (I am told by people who know more about Islam than me) defeats the whole point of the exercise: fasting is merely one of the religious obligations you have to observe in Ramadan, and not being a dickhead probably takes precedence. So I decided that for the month, instead of giving up food and drink during the daylight hours, I would try to give up anger. And since I'm into gamification, I decided to gamify it by giving myself points. (I didn't actually do anything with points or even bother to add them up most of the time, but if you want to do this kind of thing properly, you should give yourself some kind of a prize when you get enough points or donate to the George Bush Presidential Library when you lose too many.) If I caught myself thinking in a way that might lead to my getting angry down the line, I got a point; if I stopped an actual angry thought in its tracks, I got 2 points. If I actually got seriously angry, I lost a zillion points. Did this mean I went a month without getting angry? Not quite. Did it significantly reduce anger? Yes. What's more, it gave me an amazing insight into the way my mind works. In particular, I become aware of how often I held conversations in my head. It turned out that one reason for grumpy moods was that my mind insisted on going over conversations I'd had, or might have, with people I don't like.

The following Ramadan, I did the same thing with fear, which also did not work perfectly but provided interesting and useful results. Again, 80/20 rule: I doubt if I can become completely fearless and am not even sure if I should be, but a little awareness can get rid of a lot of unpleasantness.