The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible (13 page)

              We should not underestimate the potency of mental food.  If you are reading this now, this means that you learned the fundamentals of a language – man's most complex invention – simply by catching the syllables wafting in the air from your parents to you.  If you have a skill at work or play a musical instrument, this is because you received the proper mental food at some point in your life.  Your brain then turned this food into learning, which it later used to turn into action.  The mental food you have ingested has largely determined who you are today.

              In college and medical school, I was training as a scientist and, as such, tended to dismiss talk about the power of the unconscious mind, subliminal messages and other such pseudoscientific-sounding things.  I had a robust belief in the power of my conscious mind to filter things out and selectively let in only what I
chose
to let in.  As such, things like violent movies and pessimistic people were not going to affect me, because I wouldn't let them.  Or so I thought.

              As I delved deeper in the scientific literature, I found that the influence of the information we allow casually to enter our psyche is real and substantial.  Many psychological experiments demonstrate this very elegantly. 

              Psychologist John Bargh did an experiment in which subjects were asked to make sentences out of a list of jumbled words as quickly as possible, ostensibly being tested for speed and accuracy.  In fact, there were two tests: one which contained words such as 'grey', 'bingo', 'wrinkle', 'old', and 'Florida', and another which contained no such words.  What the experimenters were really measuring was not performance on the quiz, but the time it took for the subjects to leave the testing room and to get to the front door of the building after completing the quiz. 

              What they found was both startling and enlightening: those who had words in their quizzes connoting old age got to the front door about 30% slower than those who didn't.  This means that for a brief interval following the quiz sprinkled with those words,
they behaved as if they had gotten older
. 

              Eating disorders owe much of their prevalence to mass media, especially television.  Dr Anne Becker, director of the Harvard Eating Disorders Center, studied adolescent women in a remote area of Fiji.  She found that just three years after the introduction of television, 69% of the girls were on a diet or had some kind of eating disorder.  Prior to that, no one even
knew
what a diet was.  83% said that television influenced the way they felt about their bodies. 

              If that result does not surprise you, consider this study conducted by psychologist Ellen Langer of Harvard.  She gathered a group of elderly patients.  She put them in a nursing-home like environment, but with a twist: she gave them clothing to wear from when they were in their twenties.  She also piped in radio programs, played TV shows from that time and left around copies of
Life
magazine all from that time and even stocked the refrigerator with long-discontinued foods with labels from that era.

              Guess what happened to the patients?  When Dr Langer did physical exams on them after the experiment, they had tighter skin, better eyesight, less joint pain, increased muscle strength and even higher bone density than before compared to the control group.

              This is no joke here: things as fundamental as
bone density and eyesight
actually improved – just by being in an environment that constantly reminded them to be younger.  So deliberately create the environment for yourself that's conducive to your growth and well-being, and eliminate the mental food that undercuts it.

              The good news is that we do exert a fair amount of control over the mental food we allow into our psyche.  You can control whether or not you watch TV, listen to the radio, go to a movie, pick up a book or read a magazine.  Once you choose to expose yourself to these media, you can pick what kind you listen to, read or watch. 

              Long-term fulfillment and happiness have their roots in a calm mind.  Inner peace is a habit that needs to be cultivated – no one is born with it.  There are enough forces in the world attempting to jostle your mind; they do not need your help in creating further turmoil. 

Cultivate a peaceful mindset

              If you are reading this book now, chances are you have an abiding interest in achieving a lasting, deep inner peace.  If so, you may wish to consider taking a look at your mental diet.  Most media is supported by advertising.  Advertising is designed to make you buy stuff, and it accomplishes this by making you feel inadequate.  The message, implicit or explicit, is that without the object of desire in the advertisement, your life is incomplete: you
need
this.

              The truth is different:
you have everything that you need
.  Everything.  If you're reading this right now, you are probably clothed and well-fed, with a roof over your head, caring family and friends, and enough free time and resources to be reading in the first place.  You also have a working heart, kidneys, intestines, muscles, bone and a magnificent brain – literally trillions of cells working in concert to make every second of your existence possible, even when you are sound asleep.  Sure, you may not have a custom designer wardrobe, a personal cook, or a villa in Tuscany, but those are not things that you
need
.  You have everything that you need, and miraculously so. 

              Going back to the beliefs that we discussed, if the world is truly a reflection of you and your dominant thoughts, then knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have everything that you need puts you in a mindset of self-sufficiency and abundance. This in turn makes the world respond to you with abundance.  The converse of this would be to approach the world with the attitude "If only I had..." or "I don't have enough of...", which is the sure formula for the world saying right back to you, "You're absolutely right – your life is inadequate," thereby inviting more of that imagined inadequacy into your life.  You get more of what you focus on.

              It may be a good idea to excise the following items from your mental diet permanently.  Some of these suggestions may seem a little radical.  However,
extraordinary results require extraordinary measures.
  Even a single issue of a magazine can hammer an insidious message into your unconscious mind hundreds of times, making the message virtually irresistible. 

              Moreover, I
promise
you will not miss these items once you get rid of them.  In fact, we hardly ever miss things that aren't there at all – we only miss things that have an intermittent presence in your life.  It's good to think of them as training wheels or crutches – once you can function without them, you're actually far better off without them, since they tend to get in the way.  Here are some crutches you can get rid of:

Magazines, especially women's fashion magazines.
  Fashion magazines are particularly insidious because under the guise of helping you out, they actually do a lot more damage than good.  There are many reasons for this.

              First, the women portrayed in these magazines are usually models, who have a body composition very different from the average woman.  Average height for a female model is 5'8" (172cm), and weight 105-120 lbs (47-54 kg).  If you happen to have that body type, you are lucky enough to live in an era where the fashion for female beauty happens to coincide with your particular form.  Otherwise, less than 5% of women are that tall, and for their height, models are on average 23% underweight.  In fact, the average North American woman is 5'4" tall (163cm) and weighs 140 lbs (63.5kg). 

              Although the pictures don't state explicitly that "this is what you're supposed to look like", looking at hundreds of pictures of women with these unusual physiques will leave an unmistakable impression on your mind.  For the sake of experiment, I just went through the fall fashion issue of a prominent women's fashion magazine.  In its 506 pages, I counted 478 pictures of female models.  How would you feel if someone hinted at you 478 times that you don't look good?

              Moreover, if you have met a model in person, you may have noticed another curious fact: they look different from their digitally-altered photos.  As such, the ideal perpetuated by these publications is often not only unattainable, but
nonexistent
!  Even models themselves don't look like models.  As someone who has lived in Los Angeles for many years and has met many such models in person, I can attest to the truth of that statement.  As Naomi Wolf once stated eloquently, "We as women are
trained
to see ourselves as cheap imitations of fashion photographs, rather than seeing fashion photographs as cheap imitations of women."  Time to de-train your brain.

              Second, the advertisements in these publications often promote fashion items.  Like the weather, fashion changes by definition, and you are expected to keep up with it by buying the items depicted in the ads.  The implication is that your adequacy depends upon your purchase of these items.  Yet the target moves constantly, the items becoming obsolete soon after you buy them.  In fact, that's how the fashion industry thrives – making perfectly functional stuff obsolete so you have to buy new stuff.  Elegance and style are great ideas; however, they are different from being
fashionable
, and you could easily spend all your time and energy chasing down that elusive ideal, which, like the horizon, you will never catch.  To paraphrase Williamson,
you
support the fashion industry, but it does not tend to support you back. 

              Moreover, some items that are fashionable actually make you unattractive to men.  Just remember that when you’re following fashion, you're dressing to impress other women, not men. Most straight guys are completely oblivious to such trends and the effort is lost upon them.  As long as your outfit emphasizes your best features and makes you look alluring, he's satisfied.

              Coco Chanel, the venerable fashion icon once said memorably, "Elegance is not buying a new dress."  In the end, fashion is often about conforming and doing so quickly.  However, you are
not
a conformist.  You are an
original
– a one-of-a-kind, unprecedented event in the history of the world.  I'm not just saying this to make you feel good – it's an absolute fact.  And a large part of your beauty and attractiveness come from your uniqueness as a woman.  Be the exception, for that is what makes you exceptional.  

Television shows.
  TV shows are advertisements for advertisements.  Once again, the advertisements are like a pesky relative: they tell you sweetly but emphatically, over and over, that you are inadequate.  Luckily, you can get rid of the ads much more easily than the relative: simply refuse to watch them. 

              The average American watches over 4 hours of TV a day.  At 15 minutes of ads per hour and 30 seconds per ad, that's about 120 times a day somebody telling you that you need to buy stuff to be adequate.  Now don't get me wrong – there have been some excellent shows on television from time to time, and plenty of what's on TV is educational.  But there's more 'good' TV programming in a week these days than waking hours in three years of your life.  Even in the best-case scenario, watching a minute of TV is a minute spent watching a facsimile of life versus living it.  This is the difference between reading about weddings and having one for yourself, the difference between a picture of a strawberry and an actual, red, juicy, delicious fruit you can touch, smell and taste – the difference between the map and the territory.

              One could argue that the real substance of life is companionship and connection to other people, and a few times a woman I wanted to spend time with refused or postponed my company because of a television show.  Although the behavior is not unusual, passing me over for a TV show is not a good way to make me feel special.  If you make it clear to a man that you prefer a TV show to his company, he's likely to accept that at face value and move on.

News media.
  The ancient Romans had a saying:
sub sole nihil novum
– nothing new under the sun.  Whatever a newspaper and radio show can report to you – floods, earthquakes, bombs, wars, treaties, marriages, depressions, celebrations – has happened before.  There's nothing
new
about news. 

              And whose news is it anyway?  The media know that bad news tends to sell better than good news – "If it bleeds, it leads" – due to our evolutionarily-designed tendency to want to know about risk so we can avoid it.  As such, papers and news shows tend to be a concentrated slug of the collected misfortunes of the world.  To maintain a powerfully positive outlook on the world in the face of this hail of negativity is a challenge indeed – akin to staying dry in a rainstorm without an umbrella.  Since you tend to get what you focus on, you may wish to consider letting into your psyche only that which is enlightening and uplifting to your spirit – the kind of information that you would
want
to focus on.

              This is not a call to provincialism and small-mindedness, and many people need to keep up with the news as part of their work.  In fact, there are publications (I'm fond of
The Economist
) that keep you abreast of the planet in a cogent way that is informative without being sensationalistic or containing ads saying you're inadequate.  Awareness is a good thing.  However, recognize that a majority of news media are profit-driven and thus do not have your mental well-being in mind.  As such, they are more likely to add turmoil and anguish to your life rather than equanimity.  Therefore, if it is equanimity you seek, you are better off seeking it elsewhere.  Let the news go – you simply don't need it.