How to Be Human

by Ruby Wax

  A History of Emotions

  We’ve had emotions for around 100 million years while, in the timeline of our evolution, we’ve had language for maybe ten minutes. I’m always so intrigued with these timelines some crazy anthropologist created to give us an idea how long we’ve been in existence, based on the twenty-four-hour clock. Usually, it runs along the lines of ‘If the Big Bang happened at midnight, then at about 11.40 a.m. dinosaurs appeared. At 11.41 they were gone. At 11.56 apes showed up. At 11.58 humans made their entrance and, for the next few minutes, there was a profusion of fashion wars as styles came and went, came and went (buffalo skins, codpieces, fans, pointy wimple hats, wigs for men, the mini, Marks and Spencer’s underpants) and, at a nanosecond to midnight, Donald Trump became President of the United States and that just about finished off existence as we know it. Now, we’re just waiting for the black hole to suck us back in and start again … but, this time, with no mistakes.’

  The Point of Emotions

  Many of us don’t realize that emotions were originally created to ensure our survival; they meant well. We first pick up their scent in our bodies, created by various cocktails of chemicals that provide us with moment-to-moment feedback on what to avoid and what to approach. To avoid danger, a weasel sniffs the wind, a snail ups its antennae, an octopus extends a tentacle, while we humans use our emotions to test the waters. Those feelings tell us what’s safe and what’s unsafe, but do we always listen to them? No, we do not.

  We feel the emotion first and then, about 200 milliseconds later, it’s translated into thoughts. The reason we feel something faster than we think it is that if there is an emergency and we have to wait around to think the words ‘I should get out of here!!!’ we’d be toast. So, it’s emotions that save us during emergencies, not the thoughts, and it’s emotions that signal to us how we feel even before we think and label the feeling. When we feel a vice-like grip in our bowels, there’s something to fear, and if we go soft and gooey around the heart area, we’re probably watching a Disney film and some woodland creature with big eyes just died.

  Our thoughts can’t really express what we physically experience as emotions. Our vocabulary is limited; words are a trickle of water compared to the Niagara Falls of emotions. There are thousands of emotions but we can only verbally translate a few dozen. Our language, unless we’re a poet, is totally inadequate to express all our emotions. On the other hand, we need language to be able to talk about our feelings; if we didn’t, we’d be emotionally constipated. We need to vocalize our emotions, otherwise, one day, they will erupt out of us like Vesuvius. Suddenly, out of nowhere, one Christmas morning, you’ll try to beat your mother- in-law over the head with a plunger and you won’t even know why.

  These days, discussing our feelings, especially if they’re heartfelt, is looked upon as indulgent and queasy-making. But an emotion is not some girly, hormonally imbalanced flash in the pan, emotions are concocted by complex neurochemical systems which give us a sense of our physical selves. They are what give us a sense of our connection with the world and with one another. Other mammals feel love for their kin and the pain of separation but we humans are notches above them because we can think about these feelings and weave them into literature, art and mind-numbingly ‘blah’ songs on X Factor. The only people excused for having no emotions are the walking dead, the CEOs of some big organizations and those with specific brain disorders. Otherwise, you have no excuse. You can be blind, deaf, missing any number of limbs or toes but, when you lack emotions, in a sense, you’re no longer human.

  There’s a famous story about a guy, Phineas Gage, who was working on the railroads and accidentally drove a metal rod through his skull (God knows what he was doing when that happened). After the accident, he was fine cognitively – he could speak, think, remember things, but when he saw his family and friends he had absolutely no feelings towards them. He knew who they were but felt nothing. Everyone around him suffered but he said he was perfectly happy, which just shows that it might be worth hammering a rod into your head if you’re sick of your family.

  What are Emotions for, Especially the Bad Ones?

  When it comes to human development, nothing is an accident, so even negative emotions had some reason to emerge; otherwise, they never would have appeared in our evolutionary grab-bag. Everything we’ve got going for us, physically and mentally, was created for a purpose. Some of these emotions may be a burden now, giving us ulcers and acid reflux, but they’re what kept us alive (see evolutionary trade-offs).

  Fear

  If we hadn’t felt fear in the past, we would probably have been skinned, de-boned and eaten.

  Rage

  We needed rage to frighten off the enemy. We didn’t turn it on ourselves back then.

  Anxiety

  Anxiety ensured that we were prepared for attack. It motivates us to remember what we did in the past in similar situations to ensure our future.

  Disgust

  Disgust was a necessity to spot which foods were poisonous and warn others not to eat them by wrinkling our noses and curling back our lips.

  Shame

  In the past, the tribe was everything to us and our acceptance into it meant life or death. If we sensed that we let other members of the tribe down, we felt shame. That horrible kick in the stomach motivated us to do better and work harder. This was a healthy shame, which promoted working for the benefit of the group. The unhealthy shame that we have today, one where we feel we’re not attractive enough, or something equally banal, is different and serves no purpose to help our tribe. Please tell me how the hell being ‘pretty’ benefits the gang? Now, we feel shame because someone rejected us on Tinder or didn’t give us a thumbs-up for the photo of our lunch that we posted online.

  Our obsession with the self, rather than thinking about the success of the group, is exactly the problem with the human race today. When it became more about ‘me’ than ‘we’, we lost the ropes. I wonder who first experienced this narcissistic sense of shame? Maybe, one day in the past, a caveman looked at his etching on the cave walls and thought, Well, that sucks. Maybe there’s a fossil somewhere of a cave woman looking at her bum and wondering if it’s too big?

  Animals can feel something akin to shame when their status is threatened. They, however, don’t think of themselves as losers. They don’t give a toss what other people think, they can even pee in front of everyone in the middle of a party.

  Guilt

  The origins of guilt are a different kettle of guilty fish altogether. The difference between guilt and shame is that, with guilt, you feel it not because you feel inferior or a weirdo but because it drives you to fix the situation; to want to make amends. Shame comes with self-disgust. Again, animals don’t have these feelings, they just do their thing. This is probably why there aren’t many Jewish or Catholic geckos.

  Grief

  This is an emotional reaction to loss, and it was always so, right from our beginnings when we swung from trees. Animals feel grief but don’t brood about it; it decreases after a while and they move on. We, with our big brains, can become consumed with memories, the ‘what-if?’s and ‘why?’s. And, because we keep reigniting these memories, the grief is never allowed to run its natural course. There are rituals that have developed over time in various cultures to allow people to mourn together, which helps the individual to be able to bear the pain. When someone gets exhausted from ululating or weeping, someone else in the group can take over. In our culture, many of us don’t have these rituals, so we have to find our lonely, individual way to deal with grief and, for some reason, we’re ashamed to express sadness in public. What we all need to do is learn from those wakes they hold in Ireland for their dead. Everyone’s so drunk, they don’t even remember that someone’s died. But they’re together and still have a sense of community, God bless ’em.

  Love

  We needed love to bond with our young, our mate, our friends and our community to make sure that, every year, we’d g
et a birthday card.

  What Happens in Your Body When You Have Emotions?

  I’ll give you a refresher in case you happen not to have read my last book. (Why not?)

  When we get a scary vibe (which you’ll recognize because your hair is standing on end, you’ve broken out in goose pimples and your heart is pounding), it means you’re pumped to the max, ready to scram, kick ass or just stand there like a frozen statue. If you stay in that state, the first thing to go down will be your memory, then your immune, digestive and reproductive systems. At that point, what with the missing memories, you won’t even remember what your options are.

  This is all happening under your radar so you won’t be aware that your system is deteriorating or why your brain cells are beginning to atrophy. Trust me on this, we all have myelin sheaths that cover each of your nerve cells (neurons) to speed up their signals to each other. If those sheaths get damaged, the neurons connecting different regions of the brain get weaker and the result is you can no longer put your thoughts together and your ability to be rational goes AWOL. In effect, you’ve been dumbed down.

  If we can’t think straight or be rational, we begin to feel threatened, even if there’s nothing nearby that can harm us. We start to blame other people for making us feel paranoid, and so begins the ‘them’ and ‘us’ syndrome. We stop thinking of ‘them’ as fellow humans. Another result of neuronal atrophy is that our thinking becomes narrow and rigid and we begin to think that anyone different from us is the enemy. We all have specific fear triggers embedded in our memories which we react to emotionally without knowing why, especially when we’re stressed. We’re at the mercy of old associations.

  If we met just one person with a beard who may have scared us when we were young, later in life we might fear the entire bearded race. This may include Muslims and people dressed as Santa. We can develop a bias even if we just read about a bad guy with a beard. (I don’t think I need to drive this one home, but when I see a man with a short little moustache under his nose and a hairdo with a side parting, I run for the attic …) We can learn our way out of this with mindfulness, or by growing a beard and joining the ‘them’ group.

  Memory and Emotion

  So, none of us is aware why we react the way we do to specific things, people and incidents. We never see anything for what it truly is, only through the interpretation of our own memories.

  For example, when we see a cigar, we don’t all think it’s a penis, as Freud suggested. I’m sorry, Sigmund, but when I see a penis I don’t think ‘cigar’, or vice versa. (The first man I saw naked was John Lennon on the front of his album cover with Yoko, who really was wall-to-wall hair, like a carpet. Since then, when I see a genital, I think of the Beatles. We see what we see because of early associations.)

  Gut Feelings

  People sometimes say they have a gut feeling about something and then act on it, as if their gut is some wise sage from Tibet. Sometimes a gut instinct is right on the button, but so often it isn’t. If gut instincts were always right, there would be far more winners in Vegas than there are. The gut has 500 million neurons compared to our brain, which has 100 billion, so the brain is a little more in charge. Every experience we have is registered at Grand Central Memory Station and every feeling must pass along those train tracks. So, unless you’re conscious of that memory, you won’t know how you got the gut feeling. It’s the awareness of a memory that helps us make better decisions.

  My Story

  A while ago, while browsing in Selfridges, I was suddenly caught in a full-frontal panic attack and had to flee from the shop to go outside and hyperventilate into a bag. On reflection, I remembered that when I was about eight or fourteen (one of those) I was bitten by a Dalmatian, and that’s why I got hysterical: I was trying on spotted leggings. Aha! I thought, I’ve figured out my fear, so I went back into the shop and shouted, ‘Wrap up those Dalmatian pants. I’m not afraid any more.’

  We’re Nuclear Giants but Ethical Idiots

  In my opinion, in order for us to survive in the future, we have to upgrade our minds in the same way that we keep upgrading technology. We need to consciously develop our emotional intelligence. If we keep lashing out our emotions without any remorse, we might end up a criminal, a rock star or a comedian.

  We need to learn how to repackage those emotions and to activate our kinder sides. If we don’t get a grip on them, they’ll destroy us and everything around us. I sometimes think we take out some of our rage on the environment, and that its demise reflects our fury.

  Success should be measured not by our cognitive accomplishments but by the level of our emotional intelligence. That’s what gives us the ability to be aware, to self-regulate, to control our impulses and empathize with others. This ability involves developing a stronger prefrontal cortex, which, fortunately, you can grow just like a houseplant (see mindfulness).

  The Monk, the Neuroscientist and Me

  Over to the experts …

  Ruby: So, what are emotions? That’s the million-dollar question.

  Neuroscientist: Do I get a million dollars if I answer it? I guess emotions are really a bodily side of thinking. We can almost always point to a place in our body where we feel we’re holding an emotion – love is in the chest, fear is in the gut, anger in the shoulders. We think of those phrases as metaphors, but emotions are how the brain and the body communicate.

  Ruby: If I wanted to locate an emotion, where in the brain would I be looking? I always like to know where everything is … like on a Google map.

  Neuroscientist: The first place you’d look is in the limbic system. That includes brain areas that control hormones, like the hypothalamus, structures that control memory, like the hippocampus, and arousal areas, like the cingulate cortex. From there, you can add the amygdala for fear, the nucleus accumbens for reward and the orbitofrontal cortex for behavioural inhibition.

  Ruby: I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please, Thubten, make it simple for me.

  Monk: Okay. Emotions are just thoughts with bells on. Why do we have them? Sometimes they let us know who we are and what makes us tick, but at other times they make us suffer when they’re negative and we don’t know how to let go. Just as with thoughts, we can learn to observe emotions, both positive and negative, without latching on to them or thinking they’re solid or real.

  Ruby: But they must have some physical signature in the body for us to translate. When we feel a pang in our chest, how do we know if it’s love or acid reflux (to me, they feel the same). I wasn’t sure when I met Ed if he was the one or I had eaten a bad pickle. A stab of fear in the abdomen can also be confusing – worry or wind? Call the police or find a toilet? So, physically, is there something going on differently when you have heartburn or heartbreak?

  Neuroscientist: There’s definitely an overlap. Emotional pain activates the same centres in the brain as physical pain. When you have an emotional sense of suffering, your brain treats that the same as a bodily injury. When your feelings are hurt and you feel a stab in your stomach, your brain is reacting the same way as if you were actually physically stabbed.

  Ruby: So, what about happiness?

  Neuroscientist: Well, the body and brain respond a lot to negative events but they respond less to happiness. It’s too bad, because when you’re happy you tend not to notice, but when you’re injured you can’t think about anything else.

  Monk: So, this suggests that happiness would optimally be our default state. When we’re unhappy, we feel that error signal. Maybe emotions are signalling to us that we’re off balance? And we tend to feel sensations in specific locations when we’re upset, but happiness isn’t that easy to locate – it feels more generalized, as if it’s natural.

  Ruby: I can locate happiness. It feels like my chest is drinking champagne. It’s throwing up a lot of bubbles.

  Neuroscientist: What, do you mean, your breasts are bubbling?

  Ruby: Why do you always go to the lowest common denominator, the na
ughty-boy stuff? The more they’re educated, the smuttier their minds are. What do you think, Thubten, when I say ‘chest’?

  Monk: I’m still thinking about the bad pickle that Ed gave you.

  Ruby: Thubten, come back to us. What do you think happiness is? Don’t say a bad pickle.

  Monk: Maybe we could redefine our idea of happiness. Many people think of it as a buzz, which you get from some kind of trigger. But that kind of dependency leads to grasping. Grasping always makes us feel that things are never enough, and then we get disappointment. Instead, I would aim for a stable state of inner contentment which doesn’t require a trigger, something which lasts and is constant.