Way To Go, Godot!

In February, Alex Shalman had the great idea to explore what people mean when they say they want to be happy. The result was a list of five simple questions that formed the basis for bunch of really great interviews which you can read over at The Happiness Project page. What’s great about these interviews is not only finding out what motivates a number of very interesting and motivated individuals, but also the fact that in each one you can probably find some aspect of your own personal motivations. Reading through the interviews, I felt as though I were making contact with the positive natures of dozens of my own hidden personas.

Now I’d like to contribute to The Happiness Project by answering these questions myself, and by encouraging you to do the same.

1. How do you define happiness?

For me, happiness is the feeling of being full and satisfied, of not missing anything. Often I have everything I need, but am not happy because for some reason I am caught up in something I have needed, or something I will need. When I am happy, life is simple and activity is rewarding. When I am unhappy, the very same life can feel excessively complicated, and the very same activities can feel forced and meaningless.

As I talk about it now, I realize that happiness seems to almost be an independent variable. Certainly the events in my life affect my ability to be happy for better or for worse, but it is my reaction to those events which ultimately determines how I feel in this moment.

2. On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your happiness now, versus when you were a child?

As we look back on our early lives, the memories that we find there change based on our current beliefs. If, for example, you have an internal belief that your adult life will never match the bliss of childhood, you will not only remember only the happy times, but will even put a positive spin on events that you could otherwise remember in a negative light. As you improve your outlook on the present, you will gain access to a more realistic view of your early life.

I remember being a problematic and unhappy child, always convinced that life would improve as I grew older and gained greater command over myself and my social environment. It seems I was right! Every year since my 23rd birthday has been the best year of my life. I’m about to put a button on my 28th year, and I have absolute confidence that 29 will be better still. Life begins at 30, and 40 is the new 20

Still, when I probe more carefully into the reality of my childhood situation, I can find reasons to doubt the accuracy of my memory. When I look closely, I can see that I was often less problematic than I like to give myself credit for. In many situations, my actions were very effective at drawing attention and emotional energy away from the problems of my family members, thereby offering them the only type of relief that I could have given them. I remember feeling unhappy, but to what extent am I simply overlooking the times when I felt happy in order to satisfy my current semi-conscious need to have earned the happiness that I currently enjoy, or to have escaped from some terrible circumstance?

Regardless, I’ll take a happy present over a happy past any day of the week. In the future, I think I’ll learn to access more of my happiest early memories, and to spin my early life in a much more positive way than I have done in early adulthood. I think my happiness level is up to about an 8 now; I like having something to work toward.

3. What do you do on a daily basis that brings you happiness? (and how consistent is the feeling of happiness throughout your day)

As a doctoral student, life is stressful and challenging. I tend to be busy with work, classes, papers, residency, case reports, applications, qualifying exams, and all manner of similar craziness about 90% of my waking life. The remaining time I try to spend with my wonderful fiancée, which leaves very little personal time and even less time to spend with friends.

The crazy thing is, I’m learning to enjoy the commotion. I’m learning to reflect on the go, to squeeze meditation and blogging into my morning commute, to really savor the hour at the end of each day when I sit down and reconnect with my loved one over a glass of wine and a cigarette. I’m learning to have a sense of humor about my externalized coping strategies. Little by little, I’m learning to decide to enjoy this. All of it. And to appreciate the people around me just for being here to share this madness with me.

4. What things take away from your happiness? What can be done to lessen their impact or remove them from your life?

What takes away from my happiness is when I forget. As Bill Hicks said so well, it’s just a ride; it’s just a choice that we can make right now, between love and fear. The more I remember, the better life gets.

5. What do you plan on doing in the future that will bring you even more happiness?

Over the last year, my clinical training and personal explorations have brought me a really long way toward understanding people who I previously could not make any sense out of. As a result, my relationships are improving, my everyday interactions are improving, it is easier and more natural for me to find help when I need it, and to understand when other people need help. And with each step toward a higher level of empathy for other people, I find that I also discover a greater level of empathy for myself.

So often we fail to understand ourselves, instead blaming or shaming ourselves for our imagined shortcomings or projecting our fears and frustrations onto the people around us. I believe more and more that everyone does exactly what they have to do to get by, given the internal and external resources available to them. My plan for personal development and increased happiness is to keep learning to understand people, to keep learning to understand myself, and to keep nurturing the love that is struggling to grow inside of me.

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In my recent article on hypnosis, I mentioned fairly casually that we don’t live in the present moment. We live in memories and dreams.

This is an idea that will not be unfamiliar to those with a mystic bent, but the rest of you may suspect that there is some craziness going on here. In fact, there is! But it is a craziness that is supported by a lot of very good neurological and psychological research.

Psychologists have been talking about a phenomenon called transference for over a hundred years now. Transference is what happens when you react to someone in a way that isn’t justified by the situation itself, but rather points back to an earlier experience that you had with someone else. You have transferred the feelings from the person in your past onto the person in your present.

The reason this has been such a big topic in psychology is because it becomes a major factor in psychotherapy: in order to understand what’s happening with your patient, you have to unravel the mysteries of their transferences both outside and inside of the consulting room. Where this gets difficult is that the therapist is in no way immune from this effect. The therapist experiences what is called countertransference. Essentially, the whole time that the therapist is trying to figure out what kinds of misplaced emotions and perceptions the patient has brought into the room, they must also figure out which of those feelings belong to their own past, rather than to the patient’s.

Photo by Naccarato

The last thirty years of neuroscience have been gradually building up to an understanding of the way that we represent people and situations within our actual brains. This has involved a lot of deep thinking about the nature of experience, and also a large number of cut-up rat brains. Researchers have traced the paths of neurological signals as they activate emotional responses, as they stimulate the formation of new memories, and as they trigger the retrieval of old memories.

In fact, we never experience the actual reality that we believe we are interacting with. We experience a kind of touched up version of the world around us, running on a slight time-delay, and filtered through the patterns of all of our prior experiences. In other words, we experience the present only in relation to previous versions of the same moment that have been neurologically coded into response pathways. To put it in more psychological terms, we experience a version of reality that largely conforms to our existing worldview. We take the endless quantity of information around us, and fit it into a pattern that makes sense.

Photo by photographer padawan

Of course, all of this is done completely automatically. The part of you that you identify with and think of as your self—the consciousness—constitutes only a very small portion of the total neurological (and psychological) functioning. What’s more, the consciousness is consistently late to the party: it only receives the finished perceptions from the rest of the brain after they have been fully processed. And that includes not only perceptions of what is going on outside of you, but inside as well. Even actions. When you feel like you are making a conscious decision to perform a certain movement of your body, for example, neurologically the decision was made before you had the conscious idea for it. The parts of your brain that govern the movement itself go to work before the parts that make the conscious decision to move.

The you that’s doing all of this is larger than “you” could possibly imagine, and you can only find out what it’s up to by examining your actions after-the-fact. We do not live in the world, we live in a series of memories and dreams about the world. These experiences are produced for us by a vast unconscious mind that is unconcerned with our claims to conscious decision-making.

Hypnosis is a sort of spooky and misunderstood phenomenon. Most of what people generally know about hypnosis comes from movies and stage performers, not real clinical hypnotists.

You may not even realize that clinical hypnosis is a very well-established and scientifically validated medical practice. It’s used by psychotherapists, physicians, nurses, dentists, and anesthesiologists to produce a profound sense of serenity in patients who might otherwise be really freaking out. As it turns out, hypnosis is an incredibly versatile and powerful psychological technique, so it would be in your best interests to know a little bit about it and to be open to the idea.

With that in mind, I’ll dispel some of the major myths about hypnosis and tell you some far-out realities about it as well:

Photo by NessieNoodle

1. Hypnosis has no relationship to gullibility

A lot of people believe that only gullible people can be hypnotized. This is actually a pretty natural assumption, since the hypnotic experience does involve a heightened state of suggestibility. There have even been studies done to measure “gullibility” and “suggestibility” as a personality factor, and to try and correlate those factors with hypnotic susceptibility. In fact, none of those studies has ever established such a correlation.

There seems to be simply no relationship at all between how gullible you are and how susceptible you are to hypnosis. You might be a really hard-nosed critical thinker and be highly hypnotizable, or you could be a real sucker and actually have very low hypnotic ability. There’s simply no relationship at all.

2. There is some correlation to intelligence and creativity

Hypnotic ability is actually somewhat related to IQ. Highly hypnotizable people tend to be just a little more intelligent and a little more creative than the rest of the world. Sound familiar?

3. It’s partly genetic

That’s right, to some extent you actually inherit the ability to be hypnotized! Pretty much anyone can be hypnotized to some extent, however, so the major difference is basically just how good at it you are.

There are also a variety of ways that you can actually improve your hypnotic ability, too. Anything that generally improves your mind-body relationship will also tend to improve your hypnotic ability. So things like mindfulness meditation, biofeedback, and artistic, musical, or theatrical training all tend to enhance your ability to experience hypnotic phenomena.

4. You can’t get stuck in a hypnotic trance

We all want to have an Office Space experience and breeze through a few weeks of our lives on autopilot. Some people are probably a little apprehensive, though, about losing control and getting stuck in some catatonic state. Rest assured, this is not possible. If someone left you in a hypnotic trance, the worst that could happen would probably be jerking awake and feeling a little startled. More likely, you would probably just fall asleep, and eventually wake up feeling happy and refreshed

5. You probably do it every day

The hypnotic experience is not at all unusual! Have you ever rocked a baby? It’s such a simple thing to do—but just by introducing a nice gentle rhythm into the baby’s experience, you change its whole frame of mind. You hypnotize babies.

Even my cat hypnotizes me! It lays on my chest and matches its purring to my heartbeat, gradually leading me down into slower and slower rhythms so I won’t get up and spoil its nap. Any time a group of people are in a room together, the tendency is for all of them to fall into a similar breathing pattern. Basically everything we do involves varying levels of trance phenomena.

If you’ve ever been driving in your car and suddenly realized you had arrived without really being able to remember the trip, it’s pretty safe to say that you were experiencing a trance state very much like hypnosis. Another great example is when the credits start to roll and you suddenly realize you’re in a movie theatre! You’ve been enjoying a very nice hypnotic trance.

6. People have surgery with no anesthesia, and have a good time!

Probably not everyone is hypnotically gifted enough to maintain a state of complete comfort through a surgery without any drugs, but it’s not nearly as uncommon as you’d think! See for yourself:

7. Hypnosis can turn off inflammation like a switch

Burns, bites, allergies? Your mind has the ability to completely change your body’s response to any of these.

Under hypnosis, burned skin can be told not to swell up or to detach from the underlying flesh. This means that if you know how, you can actually talk your body out of blistering. You can even talk your body into blistering. I’m not sure why you’d want to, but I’ve seen it done! Allergic reactions can literally be convinced not to happen.

8. Hypnosis might be able to alter your genes

There’s a very famous old case from 1952 that was studied by the British Royal Society of Medicine, where a boy had a congenital skin disorder that gave him crusty, fish-like scales all over his body. The disease is called congenital ichtyosiform erythrodermia of brocq, and it means that your skin’s oil glands don’t develop, so your skin cells won’t flake off as they die. The boy was unwittingly treated with hypnosis by a doctor who thought he simply had a bad case of warts, since hypnosis is very effective for warts. Actually, it turned out that you can do that!

Nobody knows for sure exactly what changed in the boy’s physiology. In order for this condition to be cured, you’d have to modify the way the boy’s genes are expressed. Modern gene therapy isn’t even close yet, but in the early 50s this guy healed a kid’s genetic skin condition using nothing but the power of the boy’s own mind. Crazier still, there’s actually a lot of more modern scientific evidence that hypnosis can affect the way that genes are expressed. What a ride.

At this point in my clinical training, I have spent nearly a year on what is called the psychodiagnostic practicum. What that means is that my main job for the last year, as a psych extern at the Diamond Headache Clinic inpatient unit, has been to figure out what psychological factors are playing a role in our patients’ headache pain.

This is a tricky thing to try and do, for a number of reasons:

Photo by Mrs. Maze

• It’s tricky to figure out what’s going on with anybody, psychologically. People are pretty complicated; when things go wrong, they rarely go wrong for just one reason. Typically any psychological problem will have some genetic components, and some environmental components, and some relational components, and some intrapsychic components. You don’t really get the luxury of pointing to one thing in someone’s past and saying you’ve found the answer.
• These people tend to be especially complicated. There’s some research to suggest that chronic pain patients are more likely to meet criteria for personality disorders than other types of patients. In my experiences, I’ve found that even those who don’t meet criteria for those diagnoses usually have pretty deep-seated ways of interacting with the world that unintentionally serve to maintain their pain status.
• Headache patients, in particular, are usually pretty resistant to psychological asssessment. This is mostly because they have gotten used to being told that the very real pain that they experience on a daily basis is “all in their head.” Usually they hear this from physicians who are simply frustrated that none of their tests come back positive and nothing they do seems to change anything. The same goes for any other type of chronic pain patient, and probably many people with IBS as well.

So what I do currently is I go into each patient’s hospital room and spend about 30-60 minutes finding out how they feel, what their life is like, what it was like growing up, what kinds of relationships they have, and what kinds of stress they experience. From this, I try to draw connections between all of the different factors, in order to figure out what kinds of psychological treatments might be effective in reducing their headache pain. If a case is particularly complicated, and if we have the time, I will administer the patient an intensive 8-hour battery of psychological tests which help me to pin-point exactly what kinds of cognitive and personality issues they face.

Photo by Miss Loisy

It’s actually quite beautiful: my entire job is to find out how people are put together and what makes them tick. What I’m especially looking for, when I conduct a psychological interview, are the parts that the patients themselves cannot possibly allow themselves to know. And when I say this, I want you to know that I am not only talking about chronic pain patients. We all have parts of ourselves and our lives that we cannot know, that we must defend against at all costs. I’ll go into more detail about these unconscious defensive processes in an upcoming post.

For now, I’d like to announce a new clinical practicum! After I finish up at Diamond Headache in June, I’ll begin a new one-year psychotherapy externship at Chicago Lakeshore Hospital’s Valeo Program, which is Chicago’s only inpatient and intensive outpatient therapy for GLBT individuals. About 50% of my patients there will be HIV positive, and about 50% of them will suffer from substance abuse disorders in addition to their other psychological troubles, which will run the gamut from anxiety and depression, to eating disorders, to identity disturbances, to personality disorders. I’ll be taking on anywhere from 4 to 8 individual patients per week, and doing 2 or 3 therapy groups each week as well.

The Valeo program is a very competitive training site, and I was selected from more than 60 applicants! Way to go, Godot!

Photo by Mark Sebastian

A million authors have written a million articles about amping up your creativity for a minute or two at a time. This article is different, because I intend to help you develop a full strategy for boosting your creativity whenever you need it and as much as you need.

The first thing to get a grasp of is exactly what creativity is. Creativity is novelty. When someone does something unexpected, we refer to that as a creative choice.

The only way to make unexpected decisions is to see some of the unexpected options which are open to you. This is what people tend to find the most difficult, because there is ultimately no way to really expect the unexpected. You have to find a way to open your eyes to something that has been in front of you all along. And that is creativity. Creativity is perspective.

So here’s how to open your eyes:

1. Clear your mind.

Photo by Tanya Dropbear

Often this is actually all that is needed. We get so wrapped up in looking at a problem from a particular perspective that all we need is a little bit of distance in order to perceive the solution.

You should, of course, try to clear your mind using a method that is congruent with the problem at hand. If you’re a mathematician who has been quietly contemplating a problem for three years, a bath could do the trick. If you’re an ad-man in need of a manic flight of last-minute ideas, on the other hand, a moment of contemplation may not be for you this time around—try going out for a run. If you’re somewhere in between, a good walk can work wonders; walking has a hypnotic rhythm that can focus your mind and allow unconscious processes to exert a greater influence.

2. Exercise and get plenty of sleep.

Yes, I know. Blah blah blah. But, there is growing evidence that regular exercise and sleep are both powerfully related to your mental health and cognitive functioning. Specifically, exercise prevents depression and improves mental focus, and sleep seems to be your brain’s primary way of consolidating your memories and perceptions. Since all of these will directly affect the depth of perspective that you have to work with, they will both enhance your creativity.

3. Undo burnout.

If you work all the time like I do, it’s easy to get burned out. Give yourself some contrast. Schedule a day when you will not leave the bed. Read, watch movies, order out, drink champagne. Ideally, you’ll have company for this one.

4. Commune with nature.

Photo by Todd Baker

If you’re spending all of your time inside, surrounded by the same stale old decorations and furniture, the same straight lines and white walls, then it’s no wonder you’re in a slump.

The things we see outside of us, especially the things we see over and over again, are literally recreated inside our brains. Not just our minds, but our actual physical brains. The moral of the story? You need to expose yourself to nature. The outside world has trees and birds and all manner of unpredictable things. You need some more dirt and bugs in your life. Make a mud pie and seriously consider eating it.

5. Record your dreams.

Your dreams are your very own natural wellspring of creativity—Freud called them the royal road to the unconscious.

Whether or not you are able to remember, you actually dream every single night, and you do so throughout the night. Periods of dream sleep tend to cycle in about every 90 minutes, and get longer as the night goes on. So an extra hour of sleep in the morning can yield a substantial increase in total dream activity.

Keep a journal by your bedside and resolve to wake up and immediately start writing down your experiences while they’re fresh in your mind. It may be a little difficult at first, but short, vague entries will soon become long, detailed ones. Then go back and re-read your dreams and try to understand what they might be trying to tell you—try to adopt the dream’s perspective. Doing this will definitely get you more in touch with your creativity. For help learning how to interpret dreams, why not submit a dream here?

6. Try out a new medium.

Photo by laffy4k

What are you actually trying to do creatively? Write? Market? Design? Draw? It’s easy to get stuck in a pattern of doing the same things the same way. Break out of that old pattern by switching to a medium you’re less familiar with.

Try watercolors or clay, poetry or bongo drums. Really struggle with it; have fun; go crazy. If you can’t seem to let yourself go, make yourself a promise that you can throw away the results in one week. Don’t worry about skill, just let it flow. Then think about whether the way you’ve approached this new problem might be able to tell you anything about the way you approach the old problem.

7. Brainstorm drunkenly.

If you actually have to get drunk to do this then so be it, but you can probably do without.

If you’re in a creative rut, you’re probably just a little gunked up. You need to squirt out whatever you’ve got at random in order to get through all the crap, so don’t worry about whether you’re getting results. Just sit down and write down absolutely everything that comes to mind, no matter how irrelevant it might seem. Later you can go back and separate the wheat from the chaff, and if you look carefully you may even find some hidden gems. It may even be that your idea of what is “good” is more rigid than you’d like to believe, so recruit some trusted help in sifting through your ramblings.

8. Activate your imagination.

Creativity is really just the ability to adopt a novel perspective, so you need to stretch your eyeballs out a little bit. Allow yourself some time to daydream, and really get into it. Make a special costume or uniform that you can wear when you know you need to go really off-the-wall. Build a fort out of sheets and chairs.

In order to stay reliably creative, you’re going to have to be reliably flexible, and that means actively breaking your own routines. Try to see how many different routes home you can find, or how many different ways you can think of to greet your co-workers in the morning. Try like hell to avoid ever living the same moment more than twice.

Also, and I hate to tell you this, but if you want to be a creative genius, you’re going to have to end up behaving a little strangely sometimes. Embrace the strange.

9. Really stretch.

Photo by Lil Erna

Try to embrace an entire worldview that is completely opposed to your own. If you’re an atheist, go to church and allow yourself to really believe every word—let yourself feel in awe of the profound implications. If you’re a die-hard conservative, go to a rally and genuinely try to save something. If you’re an intellectual, go to the most brain-dead movie you can find and hoot and holler at the screen. Act as if you were someone else from an entirely different background, and perspective will come.

To recap, creativity is the ability to adopt a novel perspective. This means that all you have to do to be consistently creative is to allow yourself to consistently see things you wouldn’t have otherwise seen. So mix it up a little. Go places you wouldn’t go, think things you wouldn’t think, and behave in ways you wouldn’t behave. Develop a healthy scientific curiosity about it all—I wonder what would happen if I did this? What if I started from a different set of assumptions?

Keep your body healthy, your mind sharp, and cultivate this sense of wonder, and you will always be the most creative kid on your block!