What You Can Change . . . And What You Can't*: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement (9 page)

If the natural father (whom the child had not seen since he was, at most, six months old) was a criminal, but the adopted father was not, 22 percent of the sons were criminals. Crime rate is doubled by having “criminal genes.” If both natural and adopted fathers were criminals, the sons’ crime rate was 36.2 percent—more than triple the rate of the sons of upstanding fathers.

This means that there is a biological predisposition to commit crime (and to get caught). If it is present and you are reared by a criminal father, you are at very high risk. Merely having a criminal father rear you, without the biological predisposition, does not increase your risk.
²²

So crime, astonishingly, is heritable. Similar adoptive studies strongly confirm the findings of the twin studies: Most of human personality has a strong genetic component.

The other major finding of the adoption studies is that two children raised in the same family are almost as different from each other as any two random kids—on almost every measure of personality and intelligence—once you take genes into account. There is no similarity between two children adopted into the same family; everyone who has raised two adopted kids knows this, but others who have only ideology to guide them greatly overestimate the importance of the family environment. This revolutionary finding—which suggests that many of our labors in childrearing are simply irrelevant—will be discussed later.

But for every one of these heritable traits, the degree of heritability is much less than 1.00. Generally, it hovers a bit below .50. This means that our personality is not utterly determined by our genes—far from it—but it also means that much of what we are
is
contributed to by our genes.

Conclusion and evaluation
. So the final principle of biological psychiatry is firmly in place: A massive body of research in the last ten years has shown that personality is heritable. Add this to the principles that mental illness is physical illness and that drugs change our emotions and mood, and you arrive at a powerful view of human nature.

Biological psychiatry, as a philosophy of mental illness, must be taken seriously. But I have three caveats—one for each principle.

First: That mental illness is physical illness has been demonstrated for only one mental illness—general paresis. The claims for schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, and manic-depression are plausible but unproven—no biochemical causes have yet been located. The claims for depression, anxiety, sexual problems, overweight, and post-traumatic stress disorder are merely part of an ideological agenda, with very modest evidence to back them up.

Second: The claim that mood and emotion are just brain chemistry and that to change you merely need the right drug must be viewed with skepticism. The basic drug discoveries to date warrant only modest enthusiasm. There are indeed drugs that alter mood for some—but not all—people. All of these drugs are cosmetic, however, and all of them produce unwanted side effects, some of which are awful.

Third: The claim that personality is inherited has strong evidence behind it. But, at most, personality is only partly genetic. The degree of heritability hovers below .50 for all personality traits (except for IQ, which may be around .75). Even by the most extreme estimates, at least half of personality is not inherited. This means that, at most, half of personality is fixed.
²³
The other half of personality comes from what you do and from what happens to you—and this opens the door for therapy and self-improvement.

Which half you can change and which you cannot is what the rest of this book is about.

PART TWO

Changing Your
Emotional Life: Anxiety,
Depression, and Anger

The mind is a city like London,

Smoky and populous: it is a capital

Like Rome, ruined and eternal,

Marked by the monuments which no one

Now remembers. For the mind, like Rome, contains

Catacombs, aqueducts, amphitheatres, palaces,

Churches and equestrian statues, fallen, broken or soiled.

The mind possesses and is possessed by all the ruins

Of every haunted, hunted generation’s celebration.

Delmore Schwartz, “The Mind Is an Ancient
and Famous Capital,” 1959

4

Everyday Anxiety

E
VERY DAY WE EXPERIENCE
, at least momentarily, three emotions we don’t like: anxiety, depression, and anger. These are the three faces of
dysphoria
—bad feeling. These same three common emotions, when out of control, cause most “mental illness.” When we experience one, we want to get rid of it. Indeed, that is their very point. In this chapter, I will discuss what you can and cannot change about anxiety. In later chapters in this part, I will discuss depression and anger. But before exploring the exorcising of these emotions, we should first ask what they are doing in your life in the first place.

There are two kinds of “wisdom to distinguish the one from the other” at issue here. One is what you can and cannot change about dysphoria—a central topic of this book. The other, however, comes first.

When should you
not try changing?
When should you listen to the message of your negative emotions, as uncomfortable as it may be, and change your external life rather than your emotional life?

Bad weather inside
. People, by and large, are astonishingly attracted to the catastrophic interpretation of things. Not just “neurotics,” not just depressives, not just phobics, not just explosive personalities, but most of us, much of the time.

Goethe said that in his entire life he had only a couple of completely happy days. I am astonished that when my own life is going smoothly—work, love, and play all in place, which is not very often—I begin to fret about anything I can find that is wrong. What, the microwave is on the blink? This disaster is followed by repeated, angry calls to the appliance service; worrying at four a.m.; busy signals, cursing, and blaming. I experience just about as much total dysphoria over this triviality as I do when the big things, all of them, go badly. I call this common irrationality
conservation of dysphoria
.

Why is dysphoria so common? Why is it conserved? Why do anxiety, anger, and sadness pervade so much of our lives—concurrent with so much success, wealth, and absence of biological need in the lives of privileged Americans? The Russian psychologist Blyuma Zeigarnik discovered early in this century that we remember unsolved problems, frustrations, failures, and rejections much better than we remember our successes and completions.

Why do we hurt on the inside so much of the time? Here is an evolutionary approach: The last geological epoch save one was the Miocene—tropical savannas, fruit on the trees, good weather, a Garden of Eden. Peace of mind, satisfaction, and optimism—all of which mirrored the good weather outside—being adaptive were selected and flourished during this twenty-million-year-long paradise. The last hundred thousand years, the Pleistocene epoch, however, have seen bad weather: ice, flood, drought, famine, heat, more ice, hurricanes, more ice; one catastrophe after another. Who survives this ordeal? What kind of emotional life is selected by climatic disaster? Perhaps one that broods, worries, is “future-oriented” (this euphemism disguises the fact that future-orientation is not lotus-eating contemplation of the future, but a state fraught with anxiety). A person with this mentality always considered the catastrophic interpretations and could always see the cloud that the silver lining hides behind; he even woke up at four in the morning to make sure he hadn’t overlooked some subtle, awful portent. His brain endured because, by and large during the Pleistocene, he was right—disaster
was
just around the corner. This prudent neurotic passed his genes on. His blithe-spirited Miocene-brained brothers and sisters were washed away in a flash flood, froze under the apple tree, or were trampled by mastodons.

Here is a radical proposal:
Homo dysphorus
, our species, evolved during the Pleistocene from
Homo sapiens
, our predecessor. It is fascinating that the “big” brain (1,200-to 1,500-cubic-centimeter cranial capacity) first appeared about six hundred thousand years ago. But
Homo sapiens
sat on the savanna, wrote no books, planted no corn, spoke little, and built no cathedrals. Not until recent times, ten thousand or so years ago, did progress—agriculture, civilization, the accumulation of knowledge—first dawn. Why the long delay?

Maybe a big brain, sapience, is not enough. Dysphoria, bad weather on the inside, is needed to galvanize mere intelligence into action. Discontent, worry, depression, a pessimistic view of the future (but, as we will see, one with the underlying Miocene belief that a happy ending awaits), are necessary for agriculture, for culture, for civilization.

Each emotion of the dysphoric triad bears—no,
is
—a message—insistent, uncomfortable, hurting—goading us to change our lives. With our daily dysphoria, we are in touch with the very state that makes civilization possible, that transforms berry-gathering into agriculture, cave painting into
Guernica
, eclipse-gaping into astronomy, and, alas, ax handles into Stealth bombers. Each emotion has specific content and goads for specific action.

• Anxiety warns us that danger lurks. It fuels planning and replanning, searching for alternative ways out, rehearsing action.
  

• Depression marks the loss of something very dear to us. Depression urges us to divest, “decathect,” fall out of love, mourn, and ultimately resign ourselves to its absence.
  

• Anger, highly opinionated, warns that something evil is trespassing against us. It tells us to get rid of the object, to strike out against it.
  

In light of this speculation, how should we regard our own everyday dysphorias?

Your mental tongue
. Attend to your tongue—right now. What is it doing? Mine is swishing around near my lower right molars. It has just found a minute fragment of last night’s popcorn (debris from
Terminator
2). Like a dog at a bone, it is worrying the firmly wedged flake. Now that I am attending to the popcorn flake, it is hard to go back to writing.

Attend to your hand, the one not holding this book—right now. What’s it up to? My left hand is boring in on an itch it just discovered under my left earlobe.

Your tongue and your hands have, for the most part, a life of their own. You can bring them under voluntary control by consciously calling them out of their “default” mode to carry out your commands: “Pick up the phone,” or “Stop picking that pimple.” But most of the time they are on their own. They are seeking out small imperfections. They scan your entire mouth and skin surface, probing for anything going wrong. They are marvelous, nonstop grooming devices. They, not the more fashionable immune system, are your first line of defense against invaders. You thought your electric toothbrush was neat. It is Stone Age compared to the preventative maintenance, cleaning, waste detection, and debris removal that your tongue is so often carrying out on your teeth and gums.

Anxiety is your mental tongue. Its default mode is to search for what may be about to go wrong. It continually, and without your conscious consent, scans your life—yes, even when you are asleep, in dreams and nightmares. It reviews your work, your love, your play—until it finds an imperfection. When it finds one, it worries it. It tries to pull it out from its hiding place, where it is wedged inconspicuously under some rock. It will not let go. If the imperfection is threatening enough, anxiety calls your attention to it by making you uncomfortable. If you do not act, it yells more insistently—disturbing your sleep and your appetites.

Do you find your tongue’s swishy officiousness irritating now that I have called your attention to it? Do you now find twirling your hair as you read vexatious? There are behavioral techniques for reducing these activities, and there is even a drug that dampens such “tics.”
¹

Similarly, there are things you can do to reduce daily, mild anxiety. You can numb it with alcohol, Valium, or marijuana. You can take the edge off it with meditation or progressive relaxation. You can beat it down by becoming more conscious of the automatic thoughts of danger that often trigger anxiety, and then disputing them effectively.

But do not overlook what your anxiety is trying to do for you. In return for the pain it brings, it prevents larger ordeals by making you aware of their possibility and goading you into planning for and forestalling them. It may even help you avoid them altogether. Think of your anxiety as the “low oil” light, flashing on the dashboard of your car. Disconnect it, and you will be less distracted and more comfortable for a while. But this may cost you a burned-up engine.
²
Our dysphoria should, some of the time, be tolerated, attended to, even cherished.

Guidelines for
when
to try to change anxiety
. Enough praise for everyday anxiety—much of anxiety is wasted and needs relieving. Few scientists have researched the question of when we should try to change our anxiety level rather than attend to its message. But I can give you my own guidelines. What distinguishes most of the advice in the rest of this book from that in self-help books generally is that mine consists of my integration of vats of serious research leavened with a dollop of clinical wisdom. My advice in this case, in contrast, has more fallible backing some clinical lore and some common sense.