Firework Feelings and Children At Play

For me, one of things that sometimes gets in the way of being happy is the everyday barrage of unpleasant thoughts, often about relatively minor things I have to do, things that might go wrong, things I’ve screwed up in the past, and so forth.

In the past I’ve tried various techniques to lessen the unpleasant feelings associated with these thoughts, with varying degrees of success, but this is still an issue I have.  This morning on the subway on my way to work, I tried something a little bit different.  I tried imagining that my feelings were like fireworks, and that I was a spectator, watching the show.  Instead of getting caught up in the content of the feeling (such as “just great, I have to send those insurance forms in and I don’t know where the receipts are and it’s probably too late and I hate doing it”), I tried to focus on the feeling itself, as in “ooh, there’s one now, that’s an interesting one”.

This isn’t really anything that new, as many thinkers in the past (roughly in the Buddhist style) have suggested becoming an observer of your thoughts and feelings so that they don’t overwhelm you. Continue reading →

What Causes Feelings: A Question For Psychology?

A central interesting question about people is “what causes us to have certain feelings?”  For example, what kinds of situations cause anger?  Anxiety?  Happiness?  While we all have some rough ideas about these (such as “anger is caused by someone being a jerk”, “anxiety is caused by danger”, or “happiness is caused by getting something you want”), when it comes to more comprehensive answers, (to my knowledge) we just don’t know.

For example, what causes the most happiness?  Being respected by people in your social circle?  Having a family?  Not having to worry about money?  A great sex life?  Adventure?  While it’s true that we all have opinions on this, what do we know from a scientific perspective?  Do we have any more than just people’s one-off thoughts on this? Continue reading →

Hacking Feelings

In my previous post I discussed my thoughts on how feelings come about — that they’re based on “pretty good” cues from the environment in times past — pretty good, but not perfect.  I also mentioned that in my view feelings are everything, in the sense that anything that matters only matters by affecting our feelings.

Some evolutionary background

From an evolutionary perspective, our “purpose” is to propagate our genes (for a fantastic account of this, read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins).  This might look something like this:

Continue reading →

Some Thoughts On “Feelings”

People talk about “feelings” all the time, and yet there are so many words and ideas associated with feelings that it can be hard to know just what someone is referring to when they mention feelings.  People talk about “trusting their instincts”, “going with their gut”, being on an “emotional roller coaster”, or having a “sense” about what someone will do.  As I talk about feelings a lot on this blog, I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on what I mean by “feelings”.

By a “feeling” I mean any sense of something which is immediately present to you, without the need for any thoughts about why you’re having that sense.  Thoughts may be present along with feelings, or after feelings, but you can have a feeling without having any thoughts.  The classic emotions are feelings in this sense — happiness, sadness, anxiety, lust, and so forth.  I also include more direct bodily sensations such as the pleasure of a delicious meal or the pain of pricking a finger. Continue reading →

Great Relationships: More Than Just Being Nice?

We would all like to have great relationships — relationships that are fun and deeply satisfying.  Relationships that make us feel great.  But what is it exactly about a relationship that makes us feel great?  One simple answer might be that what makes a great relationship is one where people are “nice to each other”.  This may be part of the story, but I’m guessing it’s not the whole thing — I suspect there’s more to a great relationship than just “being nice”.

For example, we probably all know people who are “nice” but boring.  We might even have common interests with someone and yet we just don’t enjoy being around them.  There are many people we hang out with and do things with, and with some people we simply have a better time than with others.  We might even enjoy our friends who tell us what they really think of us (even when it’s negative) more than other friends who are are more “considerate of our feelings” who try to only say positive things about us.  Then again, we might not.  At any rate, what makes a relationship enjoyable seems to be more than just “being nice”.  But what does make a relationship highly enjoyable?  I don’t think this is an easy question, but I’d like to explore this question further.

Seeking Good Things vs. Avoiding Bad Things

In the situations of your everyday life, what are you thinking about most of the time?  Do you think more about the good things that could happen in a situation and how to obtain them, or are you thinking more about how to avoid all of the bad things that could happen?

Of course, to be successful you need to do some of both, but some psychological theories suggest that people vary in how much they focus on “seeking” vs. “avoiding” behaviors.  This would mean that some people are more “reward seeking” while others are more “punishment avoiding”.

I think by default I tend to focus more on “avoiding”, and I think this sometimes results in too much anxiety and in behaviors that are too conservative.  I think balance is the key, but for me it has helped to try to put more focus on seeking the good things, and less focus on avoiding the bad things. Continue reading →

A Funny Line From “Paul Blart”

I just watched “Paul Blart: Mall Cop”.  Overall the movie was about what I expected:  kind of dumb, but in a good, enjoyable way.  The movie wasn’t super funny in general, but there were a few great moments.  One of them for me was when Blart has borrowed the cellphone of his friend’s teenage daughter, whose boyfriend keeps calling the phone.  Once the boyfriend calls and says, “Peanut Blart and jelly!!  So good to hear your voice!”  Along with its delivery, I thought this was hilarious.

But why was this funny?  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes something funny, since I’d like to be funnier myself.  I have a few disorganized thoughts on this, but I’d love to hear anyone else’s thoughts on what makes this funny.

Five Ways To Feel Great

There are many thoughts about happiness, and many techniques that attempt to achieve it.  From my perspective, these boil down to about five high-level strategies for feeling great, outlined below.  Of course, I’m not necessarily advocating any of these.

  1. Have a set of beliefs in which the “big picture” of life is great. If you believe that the world and life as a whole are great or will be great in the end, this can lead to feeling great, right now.  For example, if you believe that you will go to heaven when you die, or that everything that happens is part of a larger plan to teach you important lessons about life, or that there is perfection in every circumstance no matter how bad it may seem on the surface — these beliefs can lead to happiness, even if the immediate circumstances are less than ideal in a traditional sense.
  2. Become skillful at focusing your attention, and focus it mostly on things other than past regrets or future problems. The idea is that if you can focus your attention away from things that cause distress, you won’t feel the distress associated with those things.  For example, you might focus on the present moment, or on your own breath.  The idea of “meditation” is closely related to this.  Some proponents would carry this a step further and say that a great feeling of happiness may arises when negative emotions are reduced in this way. Continue reading →

At 35 – What’s Important Now

I’m 35, and I’ve been thinking about the things that are important in my life right now.  “What’s important” is of course different for everyone, but here is what’s most important to me now in my own life:

  1. Getting good at interacting with people, and really enjoying my relationships with others. I want my “hobby” to be getting good at relationships — learning how to have the most fun with others, enjoy my relationships more fully, make others feel great.  I want to learn how to be funnier, share more of my own world while validating others, and engage in adventures and just plain fun with people in my life.
  2. Trying to discover a way to feel extremely happy every day, almost no matter what happens. This needs to be in an authentic way, and not just pretending everything is great when you feel terrible.  I believe this is possible, although I have yet to experience it for myself.  I’ve met a few people who seem to have this, and it seems they’ve achieved it through belief systems which posit some overarching great state of affairs that doesn’t depend on their present circumstances, including Christians who believe in a loving God and an afterlife, and Buddhists who believe that everything is in some sense perfect just the way it is.  My problem is that my personal beliefs don’t seem to lend themselves to such an outlook easily (so far at least).  The other technique that seems to have potential is through mental training, such as meditation or so-called “attentional training”.
  3. Finding a way to have money without spending vast amounts of time doing things I find unrewarding. Many of the things that cost a lot are probably in actuality pretty low on the “results in good feelings” scale.  So money isn’t the way to great happiness.  Nevertheless, 99% of the time money is necessary to live, and having a little more of it will enable you to do more of the things that do lead to happiness.  The trick is to have money without spending so much time in unrewarding activities. Continue reading →

Authentic Conversation – Does It Matter?

People often share things authentically – what they’re really thinking, feeling, and planning.  But we also can and do speak in ways that are not quite completely accurate representations of what’s going on inside our heads.  For example, we sometimes:

  • Modify our expressed thoughts and feelings to make them “socially appropriate”
  • Repeat things we’ve heard others say, without really thinking about them
  • Tell stories we don’t actually think are interesting, just to have something to say
  • Tell outright lies

It seems like it would be adaptively useful to know what others are thinking and feeling as accurately as possible, to accurately predict their behavior.  It would therefore be helpful to be able to distinguish between all of these things — to be able to get some sense of whether someone is expressing a heartfelt thought or emotion, or repeating things they’ve heard, or trying to be socially appropriate, or even blatantly lying.

Since making these distinctions is so important, it seems very likely that mechanisms for doing just that have evolved.  I suspect that we have largely unconscious mechanisms which evaluate what people are saying in this way, and which result in “feelings” that we get when talking to someone.  In other words, distinguishing whether someone is just “being social” and expressing thoughts and feelings that are “socially appropriate”, or expressing more genuine thoughts and feelings, may be important.  And I’m betting we have mechanisms specifically dedicated to figuring this out.