I’ve been doing occasional posts lately based on ideas in Peterson’s A Primer in Positive Psychology, and this is another. It’s based on his chapter on institutions which enable positive psychological outcomes.

Extrinsic and intrinsic religiousity

In that chapter, he mentions the key distinction drawn by Gordon Allport back in 1950 between “extrinsic religiosity” and “intrinsic religiosity”. Extrinsic religiosity is most simply defined as religion used as a means to other ends (money, power, social status, security, belonging), while intrinsic religiosity is religion as an end in itself.

A few years later, Allport and his colleagues tried measuring these two orientations (Allport & Ross, 1967). It’s often reported that they found that extrinsically religious people were most likely to be prejudiced, but what’s less well-known is their other finding: intrinsically religious people were least likely to be prejudiced.   This is still the case 45 years later.

Now, obviously in late-1960s America the people they were surveying were primarily Christians, and we can’t automatically generalize to other religions or other countries based on that evidence. What I would argue, though, is that every major religion (that is, every religion which is important enough in a society that belonging to it potentially brings external benefits) will end up having an extrinsic and an intrinsic form, just because humans are the way we are.

Let’s take Islam and Buddhism, which in the west, at least, have opposite reputations. Within Islam, the various Sufi movements have worked and still work for peace, tolerance and inclusiveness, while in Sri Lanka, for example, the name of Buddhism has been used to justify persecution and repression.

Every religion has its two sides. There are people for whom religion is a club (in both senses: a group to socialize in and something to hit people with), and people for whom it is the way by which they express, and reinforce, their highest positive values.

Two sides? Or two ends of a spectrum? I believe it’s the latter. I know for a fact (from personal contact) that there are people who have thoroughly internalized their religion in their day-to-day behaviour,  who are kind, generous and loving people, and yet will express political views that contradict their personal character because those are the views of their religious institution.

Benefits of religion

And regardless of your internalized commitment or otherwise to the basic teachings of your religion, there are advantages to belonging to a religious group. Young people who are involved with formal religion show, on average, greater emotional self-regulation, less aggression, better academic performance and less likelihood to use drugs and alcohol, and delay their sexual involvement. Adults involved in religion show similar results and also are individually happier and have greater family wellbeing. Religious people are more likely to volunteer in their community, and faith-based organizations are effective in providing social and community services.

This is not to say, of course, that nonreligious people are never like this. Many are, including some who specifically reject supernatural beliefs of any kind. But before we generalize the excesses and failings of televangelists, bigots and know-nothings who loudly proclaim their affiliation to religion, let’s consider that they may not be representative of religion as a whole.

To consider only Christianity, certainly it produced the Crusades and the Inquisition. There’s a long history of institutional Christianity accumulating, defending and abusing wealth, power and privelege. But it also produced dedicated campaigners against slavery and child labour, and for women’s suffrage, workers’ rights, racial equality, peace between nations and universal education – campaigners who were motivated by their faith. To look at only one of these two sides (either one) is to walk around with one eye closed.

Markus Bollingmo / Foter

Spirituality

But what if formal, organized religion isn’t for you, for whatever reason?

Spirituality has become a popular term for the specifically non-institutional and mostly non-dogmatic aspects of faith. Disillusionment with the externals of religion, with the organizations and the people who organize them, has led to a form of faith that takes away those aspects and keeps what is personally meaningful.

I’m someone who has continued, however tenuously, to connect to a faith tradition. Having been burned by religious institutions myself, I can fully appreciate why people leave them entirely, and I think that can be the right decision. To me, though, connection to a tradition with depth in time and breadth across a connected community still has value. It provides a centre and a grounding that can easily be missing from a personal spirituality. At its worst, “spirituality” becomes rootless, a drifting from one experience to another, and because there is nothing making people stay and do the hard work – because there’s nothing to push against – it can end up in a different kind of superficiality and become a way of avoiding growth.

Of course, any setting can provide that. I can hide from growth behind religious jargon and institutional involvement just as easily. But because one of the rules of the new spirituality is that you never criticize how someone is doing it, avoidance of growth is one of the big risks.

Questions and exercises

I’ve been saying a lot of theoretical stuff. Let’s move from the theoretical to the practical and personal.

If you’re a member of a faith tradition:

• What can you find within your tradition – what practices, what approaches, what methods if you like – to strengthen the force of the core teachings of that tradition in your day-to-day life? Do you chant, meditate, pray, perform physical movements, do something every day that connects you to the heart of your faith?
• In what ways do your faith tradition’s institutions currently accumulate, defend and abuse wealth and power? Can you do anything about that?
• What can you learn from talking respectfully and curiously to people in faith traditions other than your own, or to people who have a non-religious spirituality, or to people who explicitly have no faith but practice love and compassion towards others? In what ways are they your cousins and fellow-travelers? Could any of their practices or ways of thinking about things be helpful to you?

If you are “spiritual but not religious”:

• Is there a regular practice that you have that challenges and changes you, that you stick with even when it’s hard, that doesn’t let you take the easy way out and hang on to your issues? Can you work with someone else – perhaps even someone from a faith tradition – who will be hard on you and not let you avoid growth?
• Chances are that your spirituality is something you have a hard time putting into words. Have a go anyway, recognizing that the words are provisional and inadequate, but that you may gain clarity and insight from them regardless. Try to use your own words, not somebody else’s.
• Talk respectfully and curiously to someone who is intrinsically religious and involved in their faith tradition about what that’s like and why they value it, and to someone who is a “good person” but doesn’t hold any supernatural beliefs about why they feel and act as they do. See what you can learn from them.

If you are not a person of faith, but hold strong personal values:

• Are there any practices which might help to strengthen your ability to work out your values in your daily life? What might such practices look like?
• Read about the lives of people of faith who worked for causes you believe in: William Wilberforce, Kate Shepard, Florence Nightingale, Helen Keller, Dorothy Day. Reflect on what motivated them and how.
• Talk respectfully and curiously to people of faith and to people who hold spiritual beliefs but are not involved in formal religion. Ask yourself and them what they are gaining from their beliefs.

I welcome comments, of course, especially if you’ve done any of the above and want to report on how it went.

And I’m thinking about my life up to this point, as you do. It’s been fun.

Certainly not always, or I wouldn’t have learned as much as I have. But there have been a lot of good times.

Part of that, I think, is that I’ve had a lot of different experiences and been exposed to a lot of new things. One of the reasons that novelists often get seriously started in their 40s is that by your 40s you have a lot more to draw on, a lot more to write about.

In his book The Deeper Meaning of Liff, Douglas Adams gave us the word “pulverbatch”, meaning that list of odd jobs and experiences that a writer traditionally gives on the back flap of the book. Why was that even something he could point to and have people nod and smile in recognition? It’s because having diverse and unusual experiences makes you more creative and more interesting.

Now, I’m not a physically adventurous person. I don’t bungee jump or climb mountains. But adventure is where you find it.

I’ve been fortunate to have a series of day jobs that exposed me to interesting people, places and things. (The jobs themselves weren’t always interesting, but very few jobs are interesting all the time.)

My first career was as a freelance writer and book editor (eventually, in-house for a large publisher). I did mostly nonfiction projects, and learned about wine, travel, gardening, famous people, fishing and cooking, which are some of the most popular nonfiction topics. Except for the fishing and the famous people, I became interested in those things too, and they added to my enjoyment of life.

My next career was as a technical writer and, eventually, corporate trainer. Writing manuals and training material sounds dull, and it can be, but I got to travel to remote parts of the country, live amid beautiful mountains or natural hot springs at someone else’s expense, and visit giant hydro dams, sawmills and paper factories. I worked on revising the national manual for probation officers, and learned about the law and the people who deal with those who break it. It was fascinating.

Life As Art / Foter

I’ll always remember standing in a sawmill in a hard hat and high-visibility vest and thinking, “So this is where a master’s degree in English gets you!”

I even got to go to Malaysia to help my contracting company bid for some work there, and spent a wonderful week eating every kind of Asian food imaginable.

You get to understand a system pretty well when you spend a couple of years documenting it and training it, and in early 2000 I took a job as a systems analyst, and eventually an IT consultant. It’s taken me to more sawmills and paper mills and forests, a coal-fired power generating plant in Australia, a fertilizer factory, treatment plants for drinking water and wastewater, and most recently behind the scenes of the city where I live.

I’ve had the chance to talk with, and work alongside, the dedicated, unsung people who keep a modern society functioning in unglamorous but indispensable ways. I’ve been places that few people get to go. (And I’ve been well paid for it.)

None of that was planned. I never sat down and made a bucket list that said “Visit a hydro dam, learn about the ins and outs of keeping city parks running, and eat sushi in Kuala Lumpur”. But just by hanging loose and taking the opportunities that came to me, I got to do all those things.

It’s made for an interesting life, so far. It’s given me a depth of background for my fiction writing that you’d be hard put to achieve through any kind of curriculum. I say this as a devoted reader: I’m glad to have learned so much that isn’t in any book and never will be.

You may have noticed that I haven’t been posting here very often lately. I used to post once a week, and now it’s been six weeks or so between posts. That’s because at the moment I’m letting myself follow my interests, rather than flogging myself to produce a bunch of content that means nothing just because I feel like I have to. (Or worse still, filling up the silence with poorly-written guest posts.)

I’m in a fiction writing phase at the moment. I think it might last a while, but I try not to predict these things.

When I have something to say about personal development, this is where I’ll say it. It’s not impossible that I’ll come back and post regularly again here in due course, but for now, enjoy the archives, take a look at the resources page if you haven’t lately, and think about this:

What is there in your life that you can look back on and think, “I’m really glad I had that experience”?

Sometimes, in fact, keeping going, hanging in there during stressful times is the success. Sometimes, getting through tough times is the task in front of you, and success consists of still standing at the end.

I’ve done mostly project work for more than 20 years now, so I’m familiar with the “we just need to get through this” experience. And that’s standing me in good stead at the moment.

I’ve mentioned here before that my wife is currently having health problems. She’s had rheumatoid arthritis since the age of six, and has multiple joint replacements, and one of them got infected late last year and had to be removed. She’s now had it replaced, and is currently on five or six weeks of bed rest (that is, she can’t get out of bed) in hospital, after which they’ll probably keep her in for roughly as long again.

It’s a long, hard journey for both of us – her more than me, obviously, but me too. So I thought, while I’m still in the middle of it, I’d share with you some of what I’m doing to keep myself well and keep my spirits up so that I can continue to support her and do the other things that I’m committed to doing.

1. Eat well

I know that if I go the easy way and eat junk food at odd hours I’ll make myself ill and won’t be able to cope. So I’m going the other easy way.

My programme at the moment is that I go up to the hospital after work, spend a couple of hours with my wife, and then go home. At the weekends I spend most of the afternoons with her. There aren’t any facilities for me to heat food there or anything, so I’m living largely on sandwiches. But they’re good sandwiches.

I’ve noticed that I feel better after eating pesto, or anything with basil in. It’s probably because it’s high in iron. So what I do is, when I go shopping at the weekend, I buy the fixings for pita pockets: hummus, pesto, felafel mix, olives, cheese and of course pita bread (wholemeal). I spend about an hour cooking the felafels and assembling five days’ worth of sandwiches, and I put them in the fridge and pull one out each day.

At the hospital, if I haven’t brought food for whatever reason and I need to eat, there’s a Subway outlet. It’s fast food, but it has vegetables in it.

And with breakfast, I’ve started drinking vegetable juice (it’s not V8, but it’s a direct copy with the exact same ingredients).

Now, fresh vegetable juice is better than bought vegetable juice, and the vegetables themselves, unjuiced, are better still. Any nutritionist will tell you that. But fresh vegetable juice is not an option that’s on the table, in a time-pressed, stressed context. Bought vegetable juice is better than no vegetable juice, and those are my realistic options.

If I do get home at night in time to cook, I’m usually eating steamed frozen vegetables (a mix of broccoli, peas and beans that I buy packaged at the supermarket) and microwaved and then steamed frozen Chinese dumplings (wholemeal). Again, fresh stuff is nutritionally better than frozen, but when I don’t know how often or when I’ll be eating them, and I have limited prep time, fresh stuff is not much of an option. Frozen vegetables are better than no vegetables.

Canned vegetables are also better than no vegetables. I’ve made a very nice meal (or actually about four or five meals) by emptying two cans of lentils, a can of tomatoes with onions and garlic, a can of baby corn and some frozen chopped basil into a pot and simmering it for a quarter of an hour or so.

I feel much better for having some vitamins and minerals in my body, even if they’re less than I’d get from all fresh food that I spent hours preparing. I don’t have those hours, so quick and nutritious beats quick and non-nutritious.

I eat fruit – fresh and dried – too.

Question: What small things could you do to improve your nutrition within the time and money you already have?

2. Exercise

I don’t have a lot of spare time or motivation at the moment, and injury issues have put paid to some of the exercises I used to do. But what I have done is structure my day so that exercise just happens.

The current project I’m on for the day job is located in the city. I park in a secure carpark (since my car was stolen a few months back from an insecure one) that’s a bit under 1km from where I work, and walk downhill through a park. I do this every day, regardless of the weather, because it’s easier to keep parking in the same place.

moionet / Foter

After work, I walk up to the hospital, which is about 1.7km including a steep hill. And after spending time with my wife, I walk back to where I parked, down the third side of a triangle, just under 1km again. That’s a total of around 3.5km (2.2 miles) every weekday. At the weekends I park in the same place, so it’s a bit under 2km.

At first I was tired, and sometimes I still am, but on the whole I feel really good on it. I just bought a new pair of walking shoes that also look OK at work (Rockports, if you’re wondering), because the old shoes were starting to hurt my feet. Expensive, but worth it. I enjoy the walking (apart from the passive smoking that walking down city streets involves), and it’s doing great things for my energy and ability to keep going through the stress.

Question: How can you structure your day to include moving your body more?

3. Meditate

I’ve been meditating regularly for over a year now. It’s less impressive than it sounds. All I do is, before I get up in the morning I use a little app on my iPhone called Soto Timer to mark out a 10-minute period, during which I focus on my breath. The app makes a Tibetan bell sound at the start and end of the 10 minutes.

You’d think that would do nothing at all. But I definitely notice the difference if I miss a day, and I’ve been noticing the long-term difference from doing the regular practice.

So have other people. At work the other day, someone told me – not privately, but in a meeting – that I’d been assigned to support the more… challenging users of the system we’re implementing “because you don’t get upset easily”. People who knew me years ago would be surprised at that, I think.

Question: Will you trade 10 minutes a day of simple practice for the ability to stay calm?

4. Stay positive

There’s a lot around about positive mental attitude, and some of it is outright snake oil. If I see the word “manifest” being used I generally switch off immediately. But there’s also good research that says that what you think does influence the outcomes you get – and, of course, how much you enjoy the process of getting them.

In the midst of what isn’t a great situation, I don’t want to be Pollyanna, but I do want to look for a positive spin. I’m getting to spend a lot more time with my wife at the moment, under circumstances that strengthen the bond between us, for example. She’s alive, she’s recovering well, she’s (in general) being well looked after, and we don’t have money worries.

One of the most important things is to decide for yourself what are the most important things.

Question: In what way might the way that you think about your situation be making it harder than it needs to be?

5. Sleep well

I’m not always sleeping well at the moment, but I generally get a good sleep. The exercise, of course, helps with that. The good nutrition probably isn’t doing any harm either, or the meditation, or the positive attitude. I have plenty of stress management techniques that I can use if I need to. And I use the techniques in the Sleeper’s Checklist to make sure I get good, restorative rest.

I don’t operate well on poor sleep (I don’t think anyone does, really, but other people are better than me at pretending). I know I can’t get through this stressful time well without that resource.

Question: Can you find one thing on the Sleeper’s Checklist that you could implement to improve your sleep?

How to not give up

“But Mike,” you may be saying, if you’ve read much of my stuff, “these are the same things you always bang on about. Nutrition, exercise, meditation, getting your head on straight, sleeping well, managing your stress. That’s your answer to everything.”

Well, yes. Yes, it is. Because it works.

Look back over the questions I’ve scattered through today’s post, and find one thing you can implement today. It’ll help you keep going through the tough times.

Here’s Nadia:

About a year ago, I was experiencing ongoing periods of intense depression and anxiety. While medication certainly helped make daily life possible, the pills weren’t able to make life particularly enjoyable. There was something missing, some idea that I had not yet digested that was keeping me from overcoming this particularly dark period in my life.

Then I read Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, and I realized that there were certain things I hadn’t thought through to get me to where I wanted to be. Although reading the entire book is, in my opinion, essential, here’s exactly what Becker taught me and how it changed the way I approach life:

The fear of death (physical or symbolic) is at the heart of all fear and anger.

Becker notes in his book, “The idea of death, the fear of death, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is the mainspring of human activity—designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.”

Whether we think of death in the physical sense, or we think of the various small symbolic “deaths” that terrify us—the idea of breaking off a close relationship, losing a job, or even losing your sense of self after failure—it is our unique human awareness of things having a final end that drives our anxiety, depression, and worries.

Fully accepting death is perhaps the most important first step in fully embracing life and all it has to offer.

In response to this fear, we attempt immortality through various “hero projects”. Most hero projects are limiting.

Mike has discussed how to be a hero at length here on How to Be Amazing. Becker, too, found that pursuing one or more “hero projects,” as he called them, was central to our well-being.

The society in which we live often dictates our hero projects.

For example, acquiring wealth is a common hero project in a consumerist society like ours. Starting a family and raising children is another common hero project, though not as universal as it once was. Seeking salvation, and thus, immortality, through religion is yet another pervasive hero system.

In the end, however, Becker found that most common hero projects, even if noble in their own right, even if cherished by the culture that surrounds us, will leave us feeling empty, depressed, and angry. This idea explains the rather common phenomenon of materially successful, wealthy people who nonetheless struggle with depression.

Going inside yourself to discover your own, unique hero project is terrifying, but ultimately rewarding.

If most hero projects will ultimately leave us dissatisfied, what, then are the heroics that we should strive for to feel truly alive?

Becker uses the idea of “cosmic heroics” to explain the only viable hero system that opens us to the full possibilities of life. While Becker doesn’t specifically define this system (after all, he emphasizes time and again that any successful hero project must be individually fashioned, rather than pressed upon us by others), cosmic heroics are the striving for an ideal self that transcends the experienced self. The ideal self “…is fully in the world on its terms.”

This process, the shedding of instilled hero systems and forging one’s own hero system, requires an understanding of the awfulness of reality. It requires the courage to let go of every preconceived notion you’ve held and reexamining it.

As Becker notes, “To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.”

Ultimately, for me at least, Becker has shown that really thinking about your personal meaning of life, and acting on it, is the key to fulfillment.

On a practical level, this entails both investing your own creative energies into projects that suit your talents, while also taking seriously that which has little monetary value in our society—our relationships with others and the openness to and enjoyment of visceral, lived experience.

How to create your hero project

So how can we take Becker’s wisdom and put it into action now? Here’s what I did:

1. Write down your beliefs. Research educated opinions that oppose these beliefs. Open yourself up to new ideas.
2. Write down what you are good at. Write down what you enjoy. Choose items that overlap and create your very own hero project.
3. What are you afraid of? Think about how fear of death plays into your specific fear and slowly expose yourself. Personally, I would have panic attacks while driving, so I stopped driving altogether for over six months. After realizing that I was holding onto an unshakeable (and irrational) fear of dying in a car accident, I accepted this fear, and I tackled it head on. Accept your fears. Accept death.
4. Let’s say that your number one priority currently is your career. Make a list of neglected relationships and place these relationships at the same level as your number one priority of work. You’ll soon find that when you actually make relationships a priority, once you make it a point to put time into them, your relationships with others will be your greatest reward.

Author Bio:

This is a guest post by Nadia Jones who blogs at accredited online colleges about education, college, student, teacher, money saving, and movie related topics. You can reach her at nadia.jones5 @ gmail.com.

So how might we do that more?

I’m still slowly making my way through Peterson’s A Primer in Positive Psychology, and I’m up to the chapter on Values, where he summarizes some of his own research on the circumstances in which our beliefs are most likely to be reflected in our actions. For today’s post, I want to go through some of these and suggest how we can cultivate those circumstances in order to live more authentically and congruently.

1. Acquire your values for yourself

It’s not a huge surprise that Peterson found values we acquire through direct experience are more consistent with our behaviour than ones we got second-hand, as it were – from our parents, the religion we were raised in or our culture in general.

Second-hand values, by the nature of how we got them, can often stay in our heads rather than getting all the way out into our lives. Values we acquired for ourselves, though, inherently came out of our life circumstances rather than an abstract system of philosophy, so they’re already connected to what we do.

I’m going to give a paradoxical-sounding piece of advice here. If you have values that you know are more in your head than in your heart, that came from your upbringing, go out and try to act on them. You’ll learn something that way about what it’s like to live those values, and whether they’re congruent with who you are.

If they are congruent, you’ll have taken a step towards living out your professed beliefs. And if they’re not, you’ll discover more about what your actual values are.

To give you an example, when I was a young man I converted to evangelical Christianity through the encouragement of my two closest friends. A number of years later, one of those friends, who had, in the meantime, left his faith, told me and our other friend that he was gay.

Now, we’d known him for more than half our lives at this point, and cared about him very much. We weren’t going to reject him as a person, no matter what our pastors said about homosexuality. For me, that conversation was a step on a path to quite a different kind of faith more congruent with my experience of real people, whereas for our other friend it was a trigger for him to realise that the faith he’d been raised in and the person that he was were too far apart to stay together any more.

(I didn’t say it was a safe, easy thing to do.)

2. Incorporate your values into your image of yourself

We live out values that help to define our self-image. If it’s very important to you that you’re a kind person, it’s much more likely that you’ll act kindly than if you just think kindness is important for people in general.

One good way to work this is to take a test that clarifies what your most important values are (such as Douglas Wagoner’s values test), and then make some statements, aloud, about the top few results. “Being a _______ person is important to me” is a good format for these statements.

You could write the statements out, too, and put them up where you can see them.

3. Be self-aware about your values and behaviour

Fenanov / Foter

Reflecting on your values before acting “primes” you to act consistently with those values. If you don’t think about what you’re doing, you’re likely to act, instead, out of expected social scripts.

The exercise above should help with this, too.

4. Place yourself in circumstances where you’re expected to act out the value

Peterson notes that if there’s a strong norm about the particular behaviour you’re contemplating, that norm will exert more influence on your behaviour than your value will. For example, if you have a value of helping people but there’s a strong norm in your culture about not stepping forward or “interfering” in the affairs of a stranger, you may hesitate to come to the aid of someone you don’t know.

To me, this says that you need to find an environment filled with people who share your values, where the norms are to live out those values. As long as you live in an environment where the dominant norms prevent you behaving in ways that reflect your values, you will be incongruent and, therefore, internally conflicted and unhappy. Particularly if you’re self-aware.

5. Be specific about your values

If your values are very abstract, they’re less likely to connect to specific behaviours. This is fairly obvious. Peterson’s example is that having a general value about beauty is less likely to make you recycle than if your value is more specifically about recycling.

If you’ve been through Wagoner’s test, you’ll have whittled down more specific values to a general one that is most important to you. For example, on the first page of his test I had a clump of values about intelligence, wisdom, insightfulness, perceptiveness, clearheadedness, reason and the like, which I later boiled down to one or two words.

If you’ve done that, turn around and reverse the process. What does a value of wisdom mean to you? It’s a lot easier to imagine acting perceptively or acting insightfully than it is to imagine acting wisely, simply because the words are more specific.

How to live out your values

Living in accordance with your values is very freeing, though also courageous. It will mean going against what people around you are doing some of the time, against your own desires some of the time, and certainly against the desires and expectations of other people some of the time.

Being aware of your values, making them your own, making them part of your identity, being specific about them and looking for contexts which encourage you to act on them will help you to live congruently and with integrity.

This is one of those times, so I thought I’d do a post – using the experience I’ve had of successfully getting out of ruts in the past – about how to get yourself out of a rut. I’m being my own audience here.

The rut I’m in

I’ll start by describing where I am, because thinking about your current situation is always a good start if you plan to change it.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times here, my wife is in a long-drawn-out process involving hospital visits, surgeries and limited mobility. To support her, I’ve pulled back drastically on my other activities, but I’ve also found myself more tired than usual, especially since a bout of tonsillitis recently. So the weekend just gone, I spent most of the time playing a computer game. To be honest, on Sunday I didn’t even get out of my pajamas.

Now, in and of itself there’s nothing wrong with taking an occasional day or two to do nothing in particular. I think it’s a good thing, in fact, a tried-and-true stress management technique. But in my case, low energy is becoming a pattern.

I like to end the weekend feeling like I’ve achieved something more than playing three or four scenarios in Battle for Wesnoth. So what can I do?

Well, what’s helped in the past when I want to change a pattern?

1. Change when I get up and/or go to bed

I did this about a year ago after reading Stephen Aitchison’s How to Become an Advanced Early Riser (link is to my review). At the time, getting up earlier gave me the opportunity to exercise, and that in turn made a big difference to my energy and the quality of my sleep.

I’m still getting up early during the week, but I’m letting myself sleep in at the weekends because I’m tired.

What I think that is doing is allowing my blood sugar to drop, because I’m used to having breakfast at 5:30 or 6am and at the weekends I’m sometimes not getting it until three hours later than that. That leaves me without energy for the rest of the day.

So number one on my list of changes to try is to give myself a much shorter sleep-in at the weekend. The purist advice is to wake up at the same time every day regardless, and I think it’s good advice, but I also think half an hour or an hour of extra sleep is going to do me some good at the moment.

I’ve already started going to bed a bit earlier, and that’s helping too. (I never have managed to reduce my number of hours’ sleep, only to move it around.)

2. Exercise more

Exercise has several times been helpful at getting me out of a rut, because it raises my energy.

At the moment, I’ve structured my day so that I walk about 1km in each direction each working day (but that 1km involves a steep hill and over 170 stairs). This is maintaining a certain level of fitness, but it’s not challenging me or stretching me.

What is challenging is that I’ve been struggling for most of a year with a shoulder injury, which gets worse every time I try to get back to serious exercise. I suspect that this is partly because I’m not using good form.

So in the past couple of days, I’ve been picking up the pace on the walking, to the point that I feel the challenge. I also took a few minutes one morning to do 10 good-form situps. Just 10.

I feel more energetic already.

Halasi Zsolt /Free Photos

3. Ask for help/connect

I tend not to use the otherwise excellent pattern-breaker of asking for help, partly because it’s often more effort than just carrying on. And a lot of what is taking my energy is not actually what I’m doing, but how I feel about it.

Still, a massage is going to help my shoulder and back soreness, which is affecting my sleep, so I’ve booked one. And I’ve accepted a friend’s invitation to go and play chess with him on the weekend. He’s a much better chess player than I am, and he’ll kick me all over the board, but I haven’t been out socially for a while now, and it’s time.

4. Start something new

The last couple of years I’ve observed the Christian season of Lent. This is traditionally a time of fasting (in the literal sense of dietary restriction), but I’ve reinterpreted it as a time of pattern-changing rather than just abstinence as such.

Last year I started a very simple meditation practice, and kept it going daily throughout Lent (which lasts just over six weeks). In fact, it worked so well I’ve kept it going, and I still do it most days, though I have been skipping a bit lately.

Having a “limited trial” of a new, self-supportive activity – so that you’re not committing to doing it forever, but for a period like a month or six weeks – is a great way to establish a new, positive pattern.

I’m not planning to start anything new right now, but I mention it because it’s been a good pattern-breaker for me in the past.

5. Stop something that isn’t helping

This year for Lent I’ve stopped a particular form of harmful timewasting on the Internet, which was a pattern I wanted to change. Again, the idea of giving something up for a limited period makes it, somehow, psychologically easier – and when the limited period comes to an end, if it’s working well for you you’re likely to carry it on.

It’s also a good platform to build your next success on.

6. Change the patterns around the pattern

This is the idea behind my 12 Hacks to Reduce the Amount You Eat. The pattern itself may seem too hard to change, but there are a lot of contributory patterns that make it easier to stay in your rut. If you start making small changes to those, you can gain leverage against the big pattern.

Really, the other changes I’ve mentioned above are changing the patterns around the pattern.

7. Remind yourself why you care

Motivation is a big part of pattern-changing and getting yourself out of a rut.

And here’s one of the best ways of building motivation. First, think about the benefits of changing the pattern. Be positive. Imagine vividly. Let your mind go wild.

Then think about what your future will be like if you continue as you are. Be as pessimistic as you can. Bring yourself down to earth with a bump.

Thinking about the positives first and then doing a reality check with the negatives, according to research, is more motivational and leads to greater success than either strategy alone.

Both the positives and the negatives are motivating me to break my current pattern and get out of my rut, using the strategies I know have worked before.

Pessimists firmly believe that they are realists. But are they? And even if they are, does that make pessimism better for you than optimism?

To a pessimist, it’s abundantly clear that the world is a scary and quite possibly meaningless place. Bad things happen every day, after all.

To an optimist, though, the world is full of hope and possibility.

Good things happen every day, after all.

Optimism and pessimism, in other words, are schemas. They’re ways of looking at the world.

I’d put myself somewhere in the middle of the optimist/pessimist spectrum. It’s as if I have an optimist eye and a pessimist eye, and I can close either one and look with the other perspective. (That’s not uncommon, by the way. Psychological measures of optimism and pessimism show that they’re not simple opposites; you can be high or low on both, though it’s more likely that you’ll be high on one and low on the other.)

In my 20s and early 30s, I was a lot more pessimistic than I am now. Although they’re usually considered traits (that is, relatively stable personality features), optimism and pessimism are somewhat changeable over the course of your life, especially if you’re not at one extreme or the other.

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society.  The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute. 

- Gil Stern

Underlying pessimism is an alertness for danger that’s aimed at preserving your life and wellbeing. In other words, pessimism is based on fear of bad things happening. That’s a useful response to life in many circumstances, as long as it’s not the only one you have available to you.

Underlying optimism is an appreciation of possibilities, an opening up of the future. Optimism is not believing that everything is as good as it can get, or that nothing is wrong. From one perspective, optimism (and pessimism) aren’t really about the present or the past, but the future.

An optimist’s future holds challenges, but challenges that can be overcome.

Are pessimists right?

Most people believe they’re above average intelligence, better than average drivers, and more attractive than average. They overreport positive events, and think positive events are more likely to occur than negative events even when they’re statistically equally likely.

We’re more accurate in remembering pleasant events than unpleasant ones, and remember them as more pleasant the more time passes.

And yet, at the same time, a negative event is more likely to sieze our conscious attention.

What I’m saying is that in general we’re fairly clueless about reality. We tend to expect things to go better than they actually will, but when they don’t, we notice (because it’s counter to our expectations, or maybe just because things that are going wrong are important to pay attention to).

So someone whose expectations are a bit pessimistic, compared with the average person, is probably going to be accurate more often, as well.

Which means they win, right?

Um, no.

Being right is not the point

This may sound strange to you. It would have sounded strange (and completely wrong and stupid) to me at one time, too. But being “right” – having expectations that match what actually happens, winning arguments, having my opinions backed by the facts – isn’t actually what life is about.

DoctorWho /Free Photos

Much more valuable in the long term, and more conducive to health, happiness and good relationships, is the ability to deal effectively with what happens. And that takes optimism.

Some things that optimism isn’t

Optimism (as I’m using the word) isn’t Panglossianism: “All is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.”

It’s also not the kind of naive “positive thinking” that so many fuzzy self-help books advocate – the idea that if I refuse to admit that anything is wrong, the world will magically comply with my desires. I call this, for what I hope are obvious reasons, the Flaw of Distraction.

Nor is it the Pollyanna approach that tries to force everything that happens to be a blessing in disguise. Some events are bad and tragic and wrong, and we need to admit that before we can deal with them effectively.

The parts of optimism

When I say “optimism” I’m combining a few different things into one convenient word. One is “explanatory style”. You’re optimistic if you tend to explain bad events in general as resulting from circumstances that are:

• temporary, not part of the unchanging structure of the universe 
• local, not universal
• external to yourself, not a result of your own flaws.

The natural upshot of this explanatory style is that you will expect to be able to do better in future – you’re not helpless in the face of these events. Add to this Rick Snyder’s idea of “pathways” (the idea that it’s possible to come up with ways to achieve what you want to achieve), and you have what he calls “hope”.

And the research indicates that people who think they can deal positively and effectively with negative events are generally right.

Flexible optimism

Again, I’m not saying that always being optimistic is the best strategy for all conceivable circumstances. When you actually can’t succeed, it’s better to admit that early and not waste your resources trying.

I read some advice to writers recently which questioned a lot of the standard advice to writers, including “Keep trying”. Because if you’re a completely talentless person who, if you try to write anything more than a shopping list, will produce something truly dire and unreadable, no matter how hard you work, then you shouldn’t keep trying. You should stop, and go and do something else.

“Flexible optimism” acknowledges that sometimes I do have flaws in my abilities that mean I can’t achieve something. It also acknowledges that sometimes the reason that things went wrong is not bad luck or freak circumstances or the actions of some malign external force, but my own ignorance, stupidity or wrongheadedness. (But this, in turn, is an opportunity for optimism that I can learn to change and do better in the future.)

Relentless positivity isn’t optimism. It’s denial. And it often results in victim blaming, and other strategies to dodge responsibility.

How to be an optimist

Here’s a little exercise (adapted from Peterson’s A Primer in Positive Psychology) which you can use to increase your optimism.

1. Write down a list of common events that get you upset and send you into a downward spiral of pessimism -feeling like you have very little ability to change things, that life is negative, full of bad things happening, and you may even deserve that. Write down as many as you can think of.
2. Find a way of randomising them. Give the list to a friend and have them pick one, write them on cards you can shuffle, or use some kind of software like a flash card maker. Whatever you do, make sure that it presents you quickly with a random item from your list, so that you can practice quickly responding to an unexpected negative event.
3. Draw a card, or however you are randomising your list, and read the description aloud.
4. Identify the immediate, automatic, pessimistic thoughts that the event triggers off. All the thoughts about how you’re no good and this always happens to you and you deserve no better and you’ll lose everything you ever cared about and die miserable and alone because you’re a screwup*.
5. As quickly as you can, do one of these three things:
1. Look objectively at the evidence for the pessimistic thought, and notice how it’s not well supported.
2. Think of an alternative explanation for why things went wrong that isn’t universal, perpetual or located in your own flaws.
3. Put the thought into a perspective that makes the issue unimportant.
6. Say your response aloud.
7. Return to Step 3.

*You’re not a screwup.

Now, it’s possible that there’s some truth to some of your pessimistic thoughts. It’s possible that something you’re doing is contributing to the situation. And it’s possible that the issue really is important, and needs to be dealt with. All of those are good things to be aware of. But starting out feeling helpless and crushed isn’t going to give you a pathway to improving the situation, so it’s important to challenge your automatic thoughts and the feelings that follow them.

Give it a try, and see what happens.

One is a young, well-educated white guy. He was born to wealthy parents and makes a good income. He’s also intelligent and good-looking.

The other is an elderly black woman with little formal education. She’s on a fixed income, adequate for her needs but no more.

Which one do you think will be happier?

Well, it’s a trick question, because none of the factors I’ve mentioned – age, gender, education, social class, income, majority versus minority ethnicity, intelligence or physical attractiveness – have very much correlation with happiness one way or the other (despite what advertisers have been telling you all your life). Based on that information, you just can’t tell which one will be happier.

But on average, both of them are likely to be somewhat happy, because more people are happy than not.

Moderately likely to be happy

Now, if I told you how many friends they had, whether they were married, whether they were religious, how much leisure activity they took part in, how healthy they were, how conscientious, how extraverted, how neurotic, and how much they believed that they could control what happens to them, we’d be starting to get somewhere. All those factors have a moderate correlation with happiness.

When I say “correlation”, by the way, I just mean that people who have these factors (or don’t have them, in the case of neuroticism) are also more likely to be happy. Which is the cause, though, and which is the effect? Do happy people get married more or are married people more happy? Do happy people become religious, or are religious people more happy? I’ll talk about that more in a minute.

Strong likelihood of happiness

As I said, those factors are moderately associated with happiness. Are there any factors that are strongly associated with happiness?

Well, yes there are, and they are these:

• gratitude
• optimism
• being employed
• how often you have sex
• percentage of the time you experience positive emotions
• having an identical twin who is happy
• self-esteem

Now some of these seem fairly self-evident, almost redundant. The percentage of the time you spend experiencing positive emotions is closely related to how happy you are? Who would have thought?

Some of them, though, take us to interesting places.

Correlation and Causation

You’ll often hear scientists say that ”correlation doesn’t equal causation”. What this means is that just because you see two things often occurring together doesn’t mean that one of them causes the other, and especially doesn’t mean that you can tell which one is the cause.

I’m drawing this material, by the way, from Christopher Peterson’s A Primer in Positive Psychology, Chapter 4. Peterson has a nice illustration of correlation not equalling causation: the stork population in the Netherlands has a positive correlation with the human birth rate. Now, since storks don’t actually deliver babies, clearly the one doesn’t directly cause the other. Instead, it’s likely that a third factor, such as the weather, affects both the stork population and the human birth rate.

Ben.Millett /Free Photos

To be able to work out whether these factors that are associated with more happiness actually cause people to be happier, you have to do one of two things.

One thing you can do is experiment – change the amount of, for example, gratitude in people’s lives, and measure their happiness and see if it changes. The other thing you can do is follow the same people over a long period and measure what happens to them, and see if starting out happier made a difference to the outcomes they got, independent of as many other factors as you can think of.

What makes you happy

Genetics

First of all, happiness is partly genetic.

If you have an identical twin who is happy, you’re more likely to be happy yourself than if you have a non-identical twin who is happy.

I said more likely because it’s a statistical thing, not a hard-and-fast rule. Positive affectivity (feeling positive feelings), which is just one aspect of happiness, is somewhat heritable, more so than, for example, religiousness or conscientiousness, but less so than introversion or political liberalism/conservatism. One widely-used estimate of the genetic influence on our happiness is that it accounts for about 50% of how happy we are.

That leaves a lot of room to move.

Gratitude

Taking some time to count your blessings each day – to write down three things that went well and explain why – is a proven, simple method of measurably improving your happiness, with a moderate effect that lasts for months. When I say “a moderate effect” that may sound like “not much effect”, but actually it’s comparable to the effects of psychotherapy or medication for relieving psychological problems. And you can learn to be grateful.

Optimism

It’s not a big stretch to say that optimistic people are happier. Optimism is not just looking at the world through the proverbial rose-coloured glasses, though. Optimism is about a belief that the world can (and most likely will) improve, because the things that have gone wrong in the past were not the result of unchangeable flaws in myself or the universe, but instead were caused by particular circumstances which we can learn from and work to prevent in future. I’ll talk more about optimism in the future, but I agree with those psychologists who believe that you can learn to be more optimistic.

Self-esteem

You could think of self-esteem as a form of optimism – specifically, optimism about yourself and your abilities. It’s also a close cousin of confidence. Again, you can learn self-esteem. I’ll talk more about that later too.

What being happy gets you

Being happy is, in a way, its own reward. But it also brings other benefits.

People who are happy to start with do better in marriage, friendship, employment, income, work performance and mental and physical health. A rather lovely study done with nuns, for example, looked at the summaries that they wrote of their lives as young novices and found that those who were in the top 25% for expressing positive emotion outlived their sisters by about 10 years on average. Another lifelong study of Harvard graduates from the 1930s and 1940s found that those who had expressed more optimism in their reflections on their World War II military service were more likely to be in good health in their 40s.

You’ll notice that some of those factors are exactly the same ones that lead to more happiness in the first place. This is what is sometimes called a “virtuous cycle” or an upward spiral. Taking steps to improve your happiness improves other parts of your life, and that, in turn, makes you happier. (Though once you have enough money to meet your needs, more income doesn’t make you happier – that’s the exception in the list.)

Decide to be happy

The news is pretty good, actually, when you think about it. I mean, what if the advertisers were right, and happiness was based on your demographics? I’d have whatever amount of happiness a middle-aged, middle-class white guy with a postgraduate degree gets, and there’d be nothing I could do about it.

But in fact, you can decide to be happy. You can’t learn to be younger, but you can learn to be more optimistic. It costs money to be better-looking or more educated, but being more grateful is free. Intelligence is a lot harder to improve than self-esteem.

So what are you going to do about it?

Change your mental state

The first thing you can do about anger is shift your mental (and physiological) state.

Anger isn’t a very resourceful state, usually (unless you need to fight for your life, and maybe not even then). Rather than staying angry, creating a good resolution for the situation usually requires you to shift into a calmer state of mind where you can reason, listen and engage.

Anchoring

One way of doing that is to “store” a resourceful state for later use. If you’ve done my free Simple Stress Management Techniques course, you’ll already be familiar with the technique I teach on the deep relaxation recording: anchoring, or, as one of my clients called it, “happy hands”.

Here’s a video I made to explain the technique further.

The Welcoming Practice

Also in Simple Stress Management Techniques is an ebook on how to use the Welcoming Practice, another great emotion-calming technique.

I talk about this all the time, but in case you haven’t come across it before, here’s a video explanation.

(If you can’t access the videos for whatever reason, just sign up for Simple Stress Management Techniques, which has the techniques in written form.)

Hold your outcomes lightly

Anchoring and the Welcoming Practice are great if you’re already angry, but how about moving the problem back one step and reducing your likelihood of getting angry in the first place?

One of the reasons we get angry is that we’re invested in an outcome that we don’t control, and it doesn’t happen. Sometimes, getting angry can make it more likely that that outcome will happen – basically by getting other people to back down – but speaking for myself, I don’t want to be someone who gets his desired outcomes that way. Better, in my view, to either accept the outcome and work with it, or to change it through persuasion and negotiation.

You can achieve both of those things more easily if you hold your outcomes lightly. Plus, if you’re really not going to get the outcome no matter what you do, holding it lightly makes it easier to let go and move on.

photo credit: laszlo-photo

Change your attitude to people

Often, too, your anger is not just at the situation – it’s at the person involved.

We’ve probably all met someone – in fact, we’ve all seen someone on the news, especially around election time – who will forgive without question an action that’s taken by their own group, while condemning utterly that exact same action taken by another group. It’s basic tribalism.

It’s easy to be angry at someone we don’t empathise with, someone we don’t know, someone who’s different. We have a mental tendency to invent stories of blame about these people, where we invent stories of excuse about ourselves and our close friends and family when they do exactly the same actions.

Have you ever had a near-miss in traffic that was your fault and got other motorists honking their horns at you? I have. When it happens to me, I was distracted, and those people honking at me are rude jerks.

But when someone else (who I don’t know and whose mental processes I don’t have insight into) does exactly the same thing, they weren’t paying attention, and by honking at them I’m public-spiritedly reminding them to pay attention in future.

You see the difference between “distracted” (which isn’t my fault), and “not paying attention” (which is their fault)?

So how can we overcome this empathy gap?

I know of two ways. In the first, I acknowledge that I am like the person I’m angry with, and in the second, I draw them closer to me by deliberately and consciously wishing them well. (It’s very hard to be angry with someone while simultaneously wishing them well.)

Just like me

I owe the “just like me” technique indirectly to a phrase in Arjuna Ardagh’s The Translucent Revolution, which I haven’t read – but friends of mine have, and mentioned it to me. What you do is this:

1. Identify someone who annoys you, and why they annoy you.

2. Say aloud, “X annoys me because he/she does/is Y”.

3. Add to the end of the sentence the words, “just like me”.

By doing that, you are reclaiming and reincorporating the part of yourself that you’re hostile towards. It feels safer to be hostile towards it in someone else than in yourself, because then you’re not responsible to do anything about it. But by admitting that you are also like the person who troubles you, you’re bringing the problem home.

(My wife test-drove this technique with a very toxic and difficult colleague, and reported back that their relationship, over time, was completely transformed.)

May you be happy

Of course, sometimes the things that annoy me about other people are things that I don’t do, but secretly wish I could get away with. I resent these people and feel morally superior to them.

For those cases (although also alongside “just like me”), I use the “May you be happy” technique. I’ve used this with a number of people, and it’s always helped me to be less angry and resentful and more generous of spirit.

This little blessing comes out of the Centering Prayer tradition and was originated by William Menninger. It goes:

“May you be happy. May you be free. May you be loving. May you be loved.”

I also add the words, “May you be alive, awake, aware,” even though in doing so I risk edging into moral superiority again. You could leave those off if you wanted.

How to not be angry

I want to live in a world where people are angry less often.

I want to live in a world where I am angry less often.

I’m still on the path, but with the five techniques I’ve mentioned (anchoring, the Welcoming Practice, holding my outcomes lightly, “just like me” and “may you be happy”), I’m slowly making progress.

Please join me.

I get angry as cover for another strong emotion

A few weeks ago, on my way to visit my wife in hospital, I turned into the driveway of the parking lot I used right in front of a cyclist, who ran into my passenger door. I hadn’t seen him at all – a combination of the colours he was wearing, the background, and the fact that I wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have been. 

He was angry, naturally. I was shocked and guilty – and angry, when he was delaying my getting off the road to a safer place to stop. I had to repeatedly ask him to close the passenger door, which he’d opened to talk to me, so I could move.

Once we were inside the parking lot, I apologised, of course, and since he’d damaged his front wheel, and it was my fault, I ended up giving him some money to get it fixed. But in this case I was angry, briefly, as a cover for fright and guilt. (I dropped the anger because I was clearly in the wrong.)

Can you think of any times when you’ve become angry to cover over another strong emotion?

I get angry when I’ve been feeling helpless or inadequate

I’ve noticed that I get angry more readily if I’ve recently been in a position of feeling helpless.

At the weekend, for example, I went kayaking for the first time in a while (the weather has been very crappy). I was out of condition, and simply did not have the strength to lift my kayak back onto the car. Fortunately, a nice passer-by helped me.

The same evening I got angry with my neices. There were plenty of contributing factors, but I think the earlier feeling of inadequacy was probably one.

With so many people feeling helpless in the current economic situation, it’s no wonder there’s a lot of anger about.

Could some of the anger you feel be frustration with feeling helpless or inadequate?

I get angry when I feel threatened

One of the classic triggers for anger is threat. Look at a cat that’s been startled and has decided to fight instead of fleeing. She bristles her hair up so that she looks bigger, hisses like a snake and shows her teeth, and growls low so that she sounds, again, like a larger animal. One of our basic reactions to encountering someone scary is to become angry in an attempt to seem scarier than they are.

photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

There are a few things that get me very emphatic in self-defence. One is sleep – if I don’t get to sleep until late, I feel unwell the whole next day. I used to be much the same about eating regularly, since I had issues with blood sugar (getting fitter and improving my diet have helped with that). Since nobody else is going to look after me, and since most people are more casual about these things, I sometimes get angry (or at least sound angry) when I’m making it clear that I need to eat or sleep now, not an hour from now.

What in your life do you defend with anger when it’s threatened?

I get angry when I have to repeat myself

So far I haven’t figured out why, but if I have to tell people the same thing several times it irritates me.

Is it that I feel my ability as a communicator is in question? Is it that I find explaining things tedious? Is it because I have an end point in mind and I want people to keep up while we travel there? I don’t know yet.

What kinds of situations trigger irrational anger in you, that you don’t understand yet?

I get angry when other people do something I do

Few things are more annoying than someone who does the things that you dislike in yourself.

I’m an untidy person. So something that particularly irritates me is when someone leaves a mess.

It’s as if being angry with them gives me some kind of moral superiority that denies my own messiness.

What do you do that really irritates you when someone else does it?

I get angry when people do something I don’t allow myself to do

Even worse, perhaps, is the anger that comes from moral outrage at something that someone else does that I secretly wish I could do. Why should they get away with it if I can’t? Why should I have to be the good one?

I suspect that a lot of religiously based anger has this as one component.

What do you get riled up about that you don’t allow yourself to do?

I get angry at one damn thing after another

I don’t often get angry with my wife, because I love her dearly and we get on very well, but I did get angry with her recently.

She’s a detail-oriented person and I’m a big-picture person. We had been to a hospital appointment to do with her current health issues, and I had two goals I was focussed on in my mind. One was getting home so I could have lunch (see above re defending my mealtimes), and I don’t even remember the other, which shows how important it was.

My wife kept thinking of details that had to be taken care of, or that she wanted taken care of, that slowed this process down. I named it in my mind “death of a thousand delays”, which was overdramatic of me. In the event, I snapped at her, and then a few minutes later apologised and explained to her basically what I’ve just explained to you. She understood.

Also at work, perhaps, is the fact that I’m looking after her a lot lately and doing things that I wouldn’t normally choose to do. Because I love her, and promised to support her in sickness and in health, I don’t get angry about having to do those things, but it may be that having some annoying things that I can’t be angry about increases anger about the things I feel I can be angry about.

Sometimes I get angry in a way that’s out of proportion to what has directly triggered the anger, because it’s the last in a long series of small irritations - the proverbial last straw.

Do you get angry when a lot of little things pile up?

I get angry when I’m not at my best

When I’m hungry, tired, stressed or in pain, my fuse is shorter (like anyone else). I have to work harder not to be angry then. Sometimes I don’t succeed.

Reasons I’m angry aren’t excuses to be angry

As part of my apology to my wife, I stressed that even though I had reasons for being angry, they weren’t necessarily good reasons.

In fact, there are very few good reasons to be angry. Anger usually doesn’t help to resolve a situation better. it doesn’t make us more resourceful except in cases where our lives are actually threatened, and often not even then. It narrows our options and encourages ones that aren’t constructive, complex or likely to satisfy all parties and solve the problem on a long-term basis.

That’s why in my next post I want to talk about alternatives to anger and how to manage anger.