What Are You Hungry For? (23 page)

When you monitor the messages your mind is giving you, you are practicing self-awareness. Body awareness is also included, as it must be if your goal is to connect mind and body. Just as when you tune in to your body to receive its messages, self-awareness tunes in to your inner world. Once you get into the habit, it becomes second nature. At any moment of the day, you can ask yourself:

Am I joyful or suffering?

Do I feel love or fear?

Am I being compassionate or selfish?

Am I at peace or do I feel a lack of peace?

People’s lives would be transformed if they asked themselves these basic questions—so why don’t they? The answer isn’t a secret. The habit of tuning in to the world of emotions poses obstacles for all of us. If I had you with me in person, right this minute, and said, “Check inside and tell me how you feel,” experience tells me that all kinds of things might happen:

You might resist and refuse to look inside.

You might be too afraid of what you will see in yourself.

You might get a false message, based on what you think you should feel.

You might feel two things at once, not being sure which one is really true.

You might become emotional because of a flood of unexpected feelings or memories.

Psychologists put labels on the obstacles that keep us from being comfortable with what our minds want to tell us: denial, repression, neurosis, obsession, anxiety—the list is quite long. But if you practice self-awareness, you can penetrate the mental fog, even if it seems thick. To take just one mental pair, let’s say you check in to see if you are experiencing love or fear. These are simple words, yet behind them lies a world of inner experience. If
love
simply meant romance and
fear
simply meant feeling terrified, most people wouldn’t gain much when they tuned in. So let’s apply more self-awareness and look at what love can be:

Knowing that there is mutual caring: you are both loved and loving

Enjoying what you’re doing

Appreciating where you are

Feeling good about who you are

Having a loving, stable relationship

Feeling that your life is vibrant and stimulating

Experiencing a deep connection with a higher kind of love

If you pause for a moment and focus your awareness, you will know if you are experiencing these things, which make love more expansive and deeper. It’s not just about feeling romantic. People
who can give positive responses to each of these things worked to get there. They wrote a life story that included love, that found the courage to look into the opposite of love, which is fear, and then made choices that led out of fear.

Fear is also more than simply feeling afraid or terrified. Fear is about the following:

Feeling insecure

Not trusting what is happening

Being afraid that you will never truly connect with others

Seeing yourself as unworthy

Putting yourself in the position of a victim

Seeing no good choices, feeling helpless and powerless

Having people who can dominate and control you

Seeing others as “them,” your enemies or adversaries

Being apprehensive about the future

Love solves fear. That’s why you can make choices that lead you out of fear into love. If the mind were set up a different way, love wouldn’t be the answer. Fear would be like a yellow stain on a linen napkin that you bleach out, leaving a blank. Fear is more than a stain. It’s a state of mind that blocks well-being. So well-being, including love, increases as you choose to move out of fear.

Since this is a mind-body book, we’ve been talking about feedback loops, and just as hunger is part of a feedback loop with satiety, love is on a feedback loop with fear. The same things apply. If the feedback loop is working correctly, you feel love naturally and you act on the impulse you feel. If the feedback loop is distorted—meaning that something has gone wrong with the input or output—the entire situation changes. Consider how simple the mechanism really should be. You want to be loved, so you turn to someone who can love you, and you ask for what you want. Babies and young children have no
problem reaching out for a mother’s love. They want to be comforted, embraced, reassured, and told that Mommy loves them.

As adults, we find it easy to make this feedback loop a problem. We don’t ask for love. Or we do, but we ask the wrong person, who isn’t in a position to give us what we want. We divert love into surrogates like making money or acquiring more possessions. In a word, the deep validation that love brings somehow escapes us, and the more we do without it, the more fearful we become that love will never be there. We will wind up unloved and unlovable.

If you can identify with less-than-satisfying love, finding a solution can’t help but be important. Even if you feel numb, bored, left out, lonely, or anything else that blocks love, the answer is always self-awareness, because what is holding you back is a mental feedback loop. I realize that people tend to externalize love. There’s the fantasy that everything will be perfect once you find “the one.” But the solution to finding “the one” is to
be
the one. You must look at the feedback loop inside you and change fear to love. When that happens, the outer situation will change automatically. Even if “the one” doesn’t magically appear tomorrow, by returning to a normal, healthy state of love inside yourself, you won’t feel so anxious about your fantasy of the perfect soul mate. Any decrease of anxiety is a step toward love.

Well-being is the same as happiness, and if polls are to be believed, at least 70 percent of Americans, and often considerably more, report that they are happy. But that’s largely a rote response, the thing you are expected to say. When probed in more depth, fewer than a third of Americans are actually thriving, which combines inner and outer satisfactions. The other two-thirds are just getting by or feel
that their situation is declining. Although economic downturns play a role, the main reason that people are unhappy is that they haven’t found a way to be happy. Human happiness is a goal everyone agrees on, but how to reach it remains a mystery. Let’s look at the findings that are most reliable, taken from psychological research in recent years.

The Ingredients of Happiness:
What Does the Research Say?

So far as psychologists can tell, making yourself happy depends on some basic, general conditions:

1. You don’t settle for unhappiness as a given. Around half of general happiness depends on personal choice, not genes or circumstances.

2. You have material security. Poverty contributes greatly to unhappiness, so it’s important to be financially comfortable. Beyond a certain point, however, having more money doesn’t increase your happiness. The rich are not uniformly happy, and they are often unhappier than someone with a middle-class income.

3. You try to be happy today, in the here and now. If there’s a formula for a happy life, it consists of making each day happy. Fulfillment postponed is fulfillment denied.

4. You stay connected. The happiest people actively spend 1 or 2 hours a day in contact with those they love. They talk on the phone, send e-mails, and text. They don’t take their sense of connection for granted.

5. You aren’t in physical pain. It’s been found that chronic pain is a condition that is difficult, if not impossible, to overcome psychologically. The same is true for depression, which counts as one of the major enemies of happiness because there is no positive way to adapt to it.

6. Each person seems to have a baseline for happiness, a kind of emotional set point. A happy or sad event pushes you away from your set point, but that’s rarely permanent. Within six months, almost everyone returns to their set point, feeling about as happy as they did before the sudden upturn or downturn intervened.

This is a fairly meager list, but the field of positive psychology, which studies happiness instead of mental disorders, is still new, and its findings haven’t led to a consensus. Yet some key studies seem to agree that most people are bad predictors of what will make them happy. They look to being married, having a child, or getting rich and famous. When the desired thing arrives, however, reality doesn’t match expectations. New mothers report that raising a small child is among the greatest stresses in their lives, for example.

Another less-than-positive finding is that permanent happiness may be an illusion. What we should aim for, some psychologists advise, is a state of steady contentment. Moments of happiness come and go. They are unpredictable, and since we are such bad predictors of what will make us happy, it’s best not to construct a plan for happiness that won’t succeed in the end. We stumble on happiness like stumbling on furniture in the dark, and living with its unpredictability is only realistic.

I find this attitude gloomy and shortsighted. It contradicts the world’s wisdom traditions, both Eastern and Western. When Jesus taught that the kingdom of heaven is within, he was pointing out a path to happiness of the highest order. Heaven is a state of joy, and the reason that we stumble upon any experience of happiness, even short of joy, is that we haven’t found the right inner path. In the Vedic tradition of India, consciousness itself is imbued with bliss, or
ananda.
We naturally connect to bliss because it exists in our own awareness. If we don’t feel blissful, something has blocked the way, and all blockages are in ourselves. Again, an inner path must be found.

To some extent, psychologists are forced to be shortsighted if they themselves haven’t found the way to well-being. Understanding
the mechanics of human psychology isn’t the same as living it. To live in a state of well-being means that you are walking the path of self-awareness. Intellectual understanding helps along the way, of course, but the truth is that what most people need is guidance, not facts. They need to be shown how to evolve and grow, how to overcome inner obstacles, and at the most basic level, how to discover what they really want.

As you turn unconscious eating into awareness eating, the next stage—awareness living—isn’t far away. Happiness can be woven into every aspect of life once you make new choices. Being able to control how happy or unhappy you are is within your reach, but you need to expand your awareness along the way. Many people try to make themselves happier by choosing more pleasure and less pain. This would seem to be a workable strategy, but it isn’t. Let me explain why not at some length.

You have hormones directly connected to the experience of pleasure. In the last chapter I mentioned endorphins, the brain’s natural painkillers. Three more hormones can be added to help explain what makes us feel good:

Serotonin

Dopamine

Oxytocin

These are among the most exciting hormones in the public mind because they tell us about basic processes in the brain, holding the key to the world of moods and emotions as viewed by many neuroscientists.
Two of the hormones, serotonin and dopamine, also belong to the class of neurotransmitters, which allow two nerve cells to communicate across the gap that separates them, the synapse. These specialized molecules in effect translate thoughts and moods into chemical form, allowing them to communicate—through a complex network of interactions—to the rest of the body. When I say that trillions of cells are eavesdropping on your mind, that largely happens through many kinds of “messenger molecules,” as they were originally dubbed.

On the one hand, the link to mental states is strong. This would make us optimistic that by fiddling around with some brain chemicals, happiness is at hand. Serotonin has been tagged as a major player in a person’s sense of well-being, while imbalances are associated with depression. (The most popular antidepressants were long thought to help regulate serotonin in the brain, hence their name: selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors [SSRIs]. The basic idea was that in the brains of depressed people, too much serotonin was being reabsorbed, causing a depleted emotional level, and taking an anti-depressant corrected the imbalance.)