Why We Are Miserable
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Morning greetings, community.
I am pretty jazzed up about today’s newsletter. The reason is that I’m also deeply sad and mad about what is happening in our world.
Our addictions seem endless: drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, sugar, processed food, video games, social media, iPhones, working… and it’s seriously hurting us. It’s most significantly impacting our youngest generation raised on technology, chemicals, and instant gratification.
The way our modern society is living has rewired our brains…and it’s not for the better.
Anna Lemke, author of Dopamine Nation explains it in a few steps. I’ll share them below but I strongly recommend you read this book or just listen to this podcast, this one or this one, and share with everyone you know. Our kids, our nation, and our futures need us to get off this destructive see-saw. We need to find our equilibrium again.
We are, in effect, homo sapiens and we need to reclaim our internal homeostasis if we want to survive.
TOOLS
Elie Wiesel, prolific writer and Holocaust survivor famously said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference”.
The shame we hold - and you can dig into what shame you may carry here, here, or here - often leads us to the avoidance of pain. Instead of doing something with that shame, we bury it, hide it, and avoid it. Hating ourselves is too active. Hating ourselves means we have to acknowledge our imperfect, messy parts. It means we have to look at the damage.
The indifference caused by shame is much more detrimental. Indifference leads to isolation, cowardliness, stubbornness, and building up walls and walls of defensive and protectionism measures. Rather than being prosocial in our shame, we shut down and cut ourselves off from any sense of accountability to do better.
If we take this avoidance of pain bigger and recognize how we as humans in the U.S. have gotten really good at living abundantly and with access to nearly anything at our fingertips, we can also see the problem as a cycle.
We engage in shameful behavior. Objective shameful behavior: over consumption of objects/media/food/substances, numbing out of our lives, comparison, self-indulgence, bullying/trolling others… it goes on. If we use the Webster dictionary of shame, it’s pretty ubiquitous for most of us to have had this experience: a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.
Foolish behavior. Making a mistake. Messing up. Saying the wrong thing. Losing our cool. Acting before thinking. While Brené Brown has a more intense definition of shame that can be off-putting, I see her definition as what happens when we have enough experiences of “wrong or foolish behavior” as defined by ourselves or someone else that is shapes our self-perception. Then we internalize our shame so that we see ourselves as unloveable and unworthy.
From that lens, it feels impossible to rise out of shame and do something purposeful with it. And yet, in order to change our experience to pain, we must acknowledge our shame. There is no other way. But, instead of doing that most necessary (and hard!) thing, we continue to avoid pain. In our avoidance, we seek our pleasure. Pleasure can be for the cheap, low-hanging fruit of the world, like the aforementioned vices: video games, processed food, pornography, drugs, alcohol, working, social media, cheap sex, sugar, Netflix…
And then, because we have such ease of access to all these pleasurable things that allow us to avoid discomfort (like our emotions, thoughts, and feelings!), we consume more and more. Our human brains haven’t caught up to this revolution of access and therefore in our over-consumption, we need more and more pleasure to feel any joy from the pleasure. It’s so easy, no wonder we’re all victims of it.
We’ll do almost anything to distract ourselves from ourselves. Yet all this trying to insulate ourselves from pain seems only to have made our pain worse.” ― Anna Lembke, MD
And this is when our life gets off-kilter. We avoid doing the hard things and cannot get ourselves to sit in the painful things (like boredom! chores! homework!) so we just build a new lifestyle around our pleasurable pursuits.
We say that this is self-care and balance. We say we must work from home in our PJs so we can scroll instead of writing papers. We wake up early to play video games and say it’s bonding time with our children. We do not ever, ever put down our phone in case we miss a text or email because gosh that incoming message is so much more entertaining than playing with children.
Instant gratification. Access. Pleasure. Abundance… happiness? No.
“The reason we’re all so miserable may be because we’re working so hard to avoid being miserable.” ― Anna Lembke, MD
GRATITUDE
I remember Elizabeth Gilbert once said in her book Big Magic that 90% of life is lived in ordinary experiences. Boring, I think she said. 90% of life is deemed “boring”. That leaves 10% for the awe-inspiring. 10% that perhaps we’re voicing gratitude for, the big experiences. And yet even that context that life is boring is reason enough to avoid it.
Life needs a rebrand.
We need to see life as beautiful in its monotony, simplicity, and ordinary. We need to experience the pleasure of delayed gratification, waiting, and long frustration, so that we can enjoy the purity of relief and reward.
“I urge you to find a way to immerse yourself fully in the life that you’ve been given. To stop running from whatever you’re trying to escape, and instead to stop, and turn, and face whatever it is.” ― Anna Lembke, MD
So, how do we do that? How do we reset our reward pathway so we do not become dopamine zombies just chasing the next high? How do we reset our tolerance so that we can actually feel joy in the ordinary?
INNOVATION
I love this quote from the book:
“We as mental-health care providers have become so caught up in the practice of empathy that we’ve lost sight of the fact that empathy without accountability is a shortsighted attempt to relieve suffering.” ― Anna Lembke, MD
I see this often in our field and even amongst loved ones. We must be so empathetic, understanding, and gentle. Someone’s suffering is their truth and we must validate it.
And we do. But then as a professional and as someone who cares, all of us can be empowered to hold the person (and ourselves!) accountable. It’s hard work, absolutely, and as a society adverse to hard things, it might feel like we’re being too harsh on someone.
Enabling through extended empathy is not the answer.
Anna Lembke writes out a nice acronym to help us know the steps to overcome our over-consumption and allow us the brain power to find more pleasure in the day-to-day:
D: Data - collect and understand the data of the consumption. How often, when, where. Get to know the behavior patterns.
O: Objective for use - what does the consumptive behavior do for you? How does it help you? How does it serve you? What does it allow you to feel or not feel?
P: Problems of using - what are the consequences of this behavior?
A: Abstinence. Can you stop this behavior, cold turkey, for 1 month? 1 month scientifically is the time it takes to reset your reward pathways in your brain. Use a K-Safe for especially tough times.
M: Mindfulness. When the craving, impulse, or the pain you wish to avoid arises, take an observational approach to what’s happening in your mind.
I: Insight. From stopping the behavior, what was revealed to you? What did you learn about your behavior? What clarity have you gained?
N: Next Steps. How do you take this abstinence further or identify ways to reintroduce the “drug of choice” within moderation?
E: Experimentation. It’s a process of trial and error and navigating your life without consumptive behavior. Who do you need support from? How do you want to set up your life to assist this new way of being?
FEELS
So where does this leave us? I want to circle back to empathy.
We do live in a terribly difficult era. For US citizens, this is the first time in our lifetime that we are experiencing enormous division, fear, and democratic and environmental instability. The lack of clear truth and the distrust of our systems leads us to be in a mindset of scarcity.
While our mindsets remain in scarcity and fear, we run towards the easy and controllable things that can make us feel safe and soothed.
And so, like most things, it starts with each of us in our own immediate circles:
We first stop numbing and avoiding through over-consumption of dopamine spiking, imbalancing behaviors, and substances.
We own our vulnerabilities, fears, and shames. We name our inner states so we do not have to seek such intense external relief.
In naming our experiences, we bring about shared compassion, understanding, and a prosocial response to these trying times.
We see the human and the hardship in one another. We connect to one another.
In that connection, we find joy, gratitude, and peacefulness. We rise up together, believe in each other, and have faith restored.
And we live this life. This wild, precious, precarious life in the good, bad, painful, and joyful. We choose to experience it rather than numb from it.
I think we can do it. But first, we have to wake up.
