How to Be Happy in Spite of Yourself

by Robert Dawson

Overview

Much has been said about happinessabout what it is and how to get it. Little has been said about how to stay happy. We all share the experience that happiness is hard to achieve and even harder to hold on to. We are not often happy, and when we are we dont stay happy for long. In contrast, we are often unhappy, and when we are it seems to be enduring. Why?

In How to Be Happy in Spite of Yourself, author Dr. Robert Dawson offers a look at happiness and explains why instinct needs us to be unhappy. It answers the following questions: What is wrong with me or with others?
Is something broken that needs to be fixed?
Is it possible for me to be happy more of the time?
Can I get better at snapping out of being unhappy?

Dawson details the three-step habit we need to develop to moderate the negative effect of the human survival instinct on the quality of our life. When we realize our instinct is undermining our happiness and see it for what it isa normal and necessary automatic reaction to lifes challengeswe are on the way to being happy in spite of it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504309790
Publisher:	Balboa Press AU
Publication date:	09/13/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Dr. Robert Dawson graduated with an honor’s degree in psychology from the Australian National University, a master’s degree in clinical psychology, and a PhD from the University of Melbourne researching the comparative effectiveness of cognitive and behavior therapies. He is a member of the specialist Clinical College of the Australian Psychological Society and has worked as a clinical psychologist for more than forty years. Dawson lives on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

NEGATIVITY BY NECESSITY

In the beginning, almost everything necessary for our survival was scarce. Obtaining food, water, and shelter required most of our time and effort, and we had to compete for it. Our species survived the beginning and is now the dominant life form on earth, even though we aren't the biggest, fastest, most ferocious animal around.

We lack the size, physical strength, sharp teeth, tough skin, and speed of many other animal species. What we lack in these physical attributes, we make up for with a complex brain. Anthropologists call us Homo sapiens (Latin for "wise man"). According to the neuroscientists, there are billions of neurons (brain cells) between our ears. We were never the strongest species, but we proved to be the smartest. We use our "big brains" to observe and learn, adapt, plan, strategize, and improvise. Our intelligence allowed us to discover fire, make weapons, traps, and tools, and to develop hunting and other survival strategies.

The survival of our species has depended on three fundamentals:

• Fear.

• Speed.

• Safety.

More specifically, we need reaction speed for when things go wrong; the security to minimize the frequency of things going wrong; and fear that safety can't last. Our big brain has allowed us to be the last surviving species of the human genus line. It has taken us out of the Stone Age and is propelling us toward the stars. To achieve this, our brain sacrifices quality of life for the greater goal of life itself, for survival.

While the size of our brain is moving us forward, its complexity has the potential to get us killed along the way. A weakness of our big brain is the potential it has for lots of thinking and for significant delays to occur between the beginning of deliberate thought and the actions that follow. In survival circumstances, conscious thinking slows down reaction time. When faced with situations where the speed of our response is of life-or-death importance, the time it takes to think can get us killed.

In survival situations, we must act, act immediately, and act quickly. No time to think. Just do it!

To handle these emergencies, to save split seconds and hence improve our chances for survival, we have a mechanism of automatic response. This automatic response occurs before conscious thought has even begun. When speed is everything, human actions occur as reflexes to a situation. Our brain has developed the ability to know when there is no time to consciously think about what to do and what might happen when we do, and how that might affect what happens tomorrow. This ability to react quickly without any input from conscious thought is part of our survival instinct.

You glimpse something coming at your face. You don't know what the thing is, you don't know what caused the thing to be heading your way, and you don't know why. You might not even be aware that your hand is up blocking or catching. Analysis and deliberation occur after your reflex action, after you have caught or blocked the missile. There was no time for all that before your hand went up. You first had to survive the object.

Our brain automatically knows when to "reflex." When it does, the action comes before conscious thought — reaction speed is all important. We have a big brain, but in some circumstances, we only use a tiny portion of it to survive.

At a fundamental level, safety for humans is related to the size of the group. We have learned that there is safety in numbers. At an unconscious level, our survival instinct makes us pursue connections with others (including with animals). The more connections we have, the bigger our group. The larger the group, the safer we are.

At a conscious level of thought, the way we feel about connections can be confusing and illogical. For example, "Why should it bother me that just one person doesn't like me?" Rationally it makes no sense that any single person not liking you is a threat to your existence, and therefore you shouldn't care. However, at an instinctive level, being bothered by this makes total sense, because the number in the group of people who like or are neutral toward you has just been reduced by one.

"Be prepared" is a motto for survival. We can't know what the future brings, but we had better have our guard up and be ready. Our survival instinct operates on the principle that "if you snooze, you lose." Instinct does not want you to celebrate your success or feel good about your effort for too long. Enjoyable feelings improve the quality of your life but make you more vulnerable to the possibility of it suddenly ending. From your instinct's perspective, fear is needed to put you on edge and maximize your readiness for survival.

Human instinct compares the current experience with prior experiences that it knows to be threatening and reacts accordingly. The closer the match, the stronger the reaction. There is no off switch. Instinct operates 24/7 outside of our awareness. It can only be affected by how well the brain is functioning. It can't be turned off, but anything that affects the operation of the brain can influence the operation of our instinct — for example, pain, drugs, tiredness, illness.

At birth, we have a small range of survival experience hard-wired into our brain. Initially, only comparisons with this experience — such as hunger, pain, warmth, tiredness, or noise — will trigger survival reactions. Excesses in any of these senses are threatening to our instinct and consequently will trigger a survival reaction: crying.

From birth onwards, the learning that occurs through life experience continuously expands the collection of experiences in the brain that our instinct decides are attractive or threatening. The longer we live, the more adaptive our survival instinct becomes, as the range of experience perceived to be important continuously grows. Life-or-death experiences, as perceived by our instinct, are registered more frequently and in more and more aspects of our day-to-day lives. As we age, our instinctive defensiveness and focus on survival become more dominant as we have more experience with life and learn about more and more things that can hurt us.

In spite of the automatic influence of instinct on our feelings and behavior, we can make satisfaction and happiness last if we take deliberate action. If we don't consciously intervene, the increasing influence of our survival instinct as we age will progressively shorten experienced moments of happiness and satisfaction and lower the quality of our overall life experience.

Instinct puts survival ahead of satisfaction and happiness.

Instinct continuously taps into our senses — sight, sound, smell, frustration, tension, pain, and so on. It's like someone listening in to your phone conversation without you being aware of it. It is constantly looking for the signs and sources of danger. It takes over when new sensory information matches stored information that is important for survival.

Survival triggers are of two general types:

1. First, there is sensory information that is hard-wired into the human genetic blueprint (DNA). Examples of these triggers for a newborn baby include loud noise, bright light, heights, hunger, pain, smell.

2. Second, there are triggers that have been learned from the experience of thousands of generations to precede a survival situation. A good example of a survival trigger is attention (being noticed). If others do not notice you, you have no chance of support. The importance of recognition makes information on Facebook a survival trigger.

Instinct uses physical arousal to motivate behavior.

When instinct registers a match between a current situation and a stored survival trigger, it dumps natural stimulants into our brain chemistry. These natural stimulants intensify our sensitivity to all our physical sensations, and we consequently take more notice of them.

Regardless of whether these physical sensations are experienced as unpleasant (e.g., fear) or pleasant (e.g., attraction), increasing sensitivity to them progressively prevents us from paying attention to anything else.

The increasing sensitivity caused by our physical arousal grabs our attention, eventually blocks all conscious thought, and forces us into action to seek relief from our heightened arousal.

In the human species, strong physical arousal (strong emotion) has the power to dominate attention and control human behavior.

Look around you. Read the media. Watch the news. How often do you see smart and talented people doing dumb and awful things? How often do you see people repeatedly doing this?

Under the influence of intense physical sensations, we can and do treat each other very badly.

Research on brain structure and chemistry indicates that the sensory matching process of instinct occurs in an area of the brain that roughly lies level with the bridge of your nose and in the region right between your ears.

In this region of the brain called the limbic system, the information from our senses comes together before being sent on for analysis in the area of the brain above our eyes — the frontal cortex.

Only when information from our senses reaches and is analyzed in the frontal cortex are we able to understand what is going on. For example, a series of sounds interpreted in the frontal cortex may be recognized as words or a familiar song. A string of marks on a page could be recognized as a bunch of words that make up a sentence.

However, before the sounds or marks arrive in the frontal lobe, instinct has analyzed them in the limbic system and looked for matches with survival triggers. If a match occurs, an instinctive reaction of increased arousal occurs and accompanies the sounds and marks on their journey to the frontal cortex. This additional information means that when we interpret the meaning and make assumptions about what we are experiencing, instinct and heightened arousal prejudice the outcome.

Instinctive reactions bias the analysis of our day-to-day experiences.

When the limbic system decides we are facing a survival situation, it triggers physical arousal. Our freedom of will or freedom of choice that we assume we ultimately have and hold ourselves and others responsible for is biased at best and at worst can be completely suppressed. Before we even realize we have choices, what those choices might be, and what the consequences might be, our limbic system has matched incoming sensations with pre-existing survival triggers, has initiated defensive action, and has generated arousal that biases our understanding and our responses.

Our reactions are biased before we even consciously know what is happening.

Since it is the intensity of physical arousal that instinct uses to control us, pre-existing levels of arousal make it easier for instinct to affect us in any new situations. That is, existing frustration (high arousal) is likely to cause a person to overreact to a new frustration, even if the frustration about the new situation is minimal. This overreaction is what is happening when we see people responding strongly to trivial situations.

For example, conditions of chronic pain, tiredness, anger, and anxiety cause high frustration. Hence, people suffering these conditions are more likely to overreact suddenly, defensively, and illogically to a new frustrating situation. If we consider this sudden overreaction as an instinctive response to the sum of pre-existing frustration plus current frustration, the apparent overreaction can make sense.

Instinct is continuously scanning for survival triggers. It, therefore, has a mostly negative bias. It is always on the lookout for what is going wrong and what could go wrong. Even in very favorable situations, instinct is constantly monitoring the situation and your performance for anything that could spoil the moment. We have no real day-to-day awareness of our instinct at work other than the fluctuation of our feelings. There is also no way of deliberately shielding ourselves from its influence (other than with mind-altering drugs). Instinct has no on or off switch.

Improving the quality of life requires an awareness of the ongoing workings of your survival instinct. It requires deliberate effort to expose it when it is negatively impacting you in situations that are not life-threatening. Once you are aware, you can use and improve strategies to inject more of your conscious mind into your life experience. You can clear away the fog of your instinct.

The evolution and the survival of our species revolves around the experience of safety in numbers. Instinct has learned that if you are not in a group, you are vulnerable, without support. However, the extent of support that you get from any group depends on the power of the group and your relative importance in the group. If you are in a group but the group hardly notices, you don't qualify for much group support. You will be vulnerable when a threat comes around. Your survival instinct operates on the principle that to be safe, you have to be noticed — to have some relative importance and approval. Survival needs recognition in its many different forms, including approval, relative importance, respect, and validation.

Day-to-day changes in your relative importance in the group determine the activity level of your instinct and the extent to which it impacts your feelings and behavior. Yesterday your instinct estimated your recognition in the group to be high, and you felt pretty good. Today your instinct views your recognition in the group as having weakened, and your mood is not as good as yesterday. Tomorrow your instinct anticipates your acceptance in the group slipping even further; you are getting anxious in advance. When instinct wants action from you to satisfy its need for recognition, it agitates you with bad feelings. It does this with comparisonitis and catastrophizing.

Summary.

• Instinct is concerned with survival, not with quality of life.

• Instinct uses emotions to influence our thoughts and behavior.

• Most of the time we are being influenced by our instinct without realizing it.

• If you don't notice and intervene in this influence, then whatever you are, have, or have accomplished will never be good enough.

• We can consciously intervene and dampen the impact of instinct on our happiness.

• Understanding the importance instinct gives to recognition, approval, and relative importance provides us with the tools to be happy more of the time.

CHAPTER 2

COMPARISONITIS

Comparisonitis is the compulsion to compare oneself to others to determine one's relative importance. From your instinct's perspective, being unimportant in a group or on the edge of a group is the equivalent of being in a life-threatening situation. Your vulnerability to threat increases as your relative importance in the group changes in any negative way. Instinct is continually making these comparisons without us being aware; comparisonitis is unconscious.

When the result of comparisonitis points to diminishing relative importance, instinct uses catastrophizing to create emotional agitation. Catastrophizing likewise occurs at an unconscious level but can also happen at a conscious level. Catastrophizing inserts uninvited thoughts into our consciousness and makes mountains out of molehills. Catastrophizing magnifies a situation into being far worse than it is. It stresses how awful, terrible, and unbearable the situation is. Catastrophizing occurs about the past, the present, and the future.

In a life-and-death situation, you have to be seen to be helped. Not being noticed or supported can be lethal. If instinct rates your situation as life-and-death, it prioritizes speed over logic. It dumps adrenalin into the blood stream to accelerate reaction speed and muscle power enabling extreme behavior aimed at getting attention, approval, or increasing relative importance. In the heat of the moment, instinct doesn't care about collateral or subsequent damage. Survival is its only priority, and there is no concern for analyzing the possible consequences of what is done to get attention, approval, or relative importance.

If the situation is not life-and-death, a drop in relative importance is not lethal. In such a situation, the unconscious process of using strong physiological reactions to prioritize speed over common sense is unnecessary, excessive, and fatiguing. Repetitive comparisons wear you out mentally, and catastrophizing wears you out emotionally. Together, they undermine your energy to perform and achieve.

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "How to Be Happy in Spite of Yourself"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Dr. Robert Dawson.
Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Dedication, v,
Acknowledgements, vii,
Introduction, xi,
Chapter 1 Negativity by Necessity, 1,
Chapter 2 Comparisonitis, 13,
Chapter 3 Catastrophizing, 22,
Chapter 4 Frustration, 29,
Chapter 5 Satisfaction, 44,
Chapter 6 Emotion, 61,
Chapter 7 Lifting the Fog of Instinct, 68,
Chapter 8 Relationships, 87,
Chapter 9 Parenting, 118,
Chapter 10 Work and Competition, 138,
Chapter 11 Bureaucracy, 157,
Chapter 12 Retirement, Aging, and Chronic Pain, 176,
Chapter 13 The Holy Grail, 196,