It’s perfectly natural, then, to apply this approach to solving the “problem” of unhappiness. But it’s often the worst thing you can do because it requires you to focus on the gap between how you are and how you’d like to be: in doing so, you ask such critical questions as, What’s wrong with me? Where did I go wrong? Why do I always make these mistakes? Such questions are not only harsh and self-destructive, but they also demand that the mind furnishes the evidence to explain its discontent. And the mind is truly brilliant at providing such evidence.
Imagine walking through a beautiful park on a spring day. You’re happy, but then for some unknown reason a flicker of sadness ripples across your mind. It may be the result of hunger because you skipped lunch or perhaps you unwittingly triggered a troubling memory. After a few minutes you might start to feel a little down. As soon as you notice your lowered spirits you begin to probe yourself: It’s a lovely day. It’s a beautiful park. I wish I were feeling happier than I am now.
Think about that for a moment: I wish I were feeling happier. How do you feel now? You probably feel worse. This is because you focused on the gap between how you feel and how you want to feel. And focusing on the gap highlighted it. The mind sees the gap as a problem to be solved. This approach is disastrous when it comes to your emotions because of the intricate interconnection between your thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations. They all feed into each other and, left unchecked, can drive your thinking in very distressing directions. Very quickly, you can become trapped inside your own thoughts. You begin to overthink; you begin to brood. You start to ask yourself endlessly the same pointed questions that demand immediate answers: What’s up with me today? I should be happy—why can’t I just get a grip?
Your spirits sink a little deeper. Your body may tense up, your mouth may frown and you may feel downhearted. A few aches and pains might appear. These sensations then feed back into your mind, which then feels even more threatened and a little more downbeat. If your spirits sink far enough, you’ll start to become really preoccupied and miss the small, but beautiful things that would normally cheer you up: you might fail to notice daffodils beginning to bloom, the ducks playing on the lake, the innocent smiles of children.
Of course, nobody broods over problems because they believe it’s a toxic way of thinking. People genuinely believe that if they worry enough over their unhappiness they will eventually find a solution. They just need to make one last heave—think a little more about the problem … But research shows the opposite: in fact, brooding reduces our ability to solve problems; and it’s absolutely hopeless for dealing with emotional difficulties.
The evidence is clear: brooding is the problem, not the solution.
Escaping the vicious circle
You can’t stop the triggering of unhappy memories, negative self-talk and judgmental ways of thinking—but what you can stop is what happens next. You can stop the vicious circle from feeding off itself and triggering the next spiral of negative thoughts. And you can do this by harnessing an alternative way of relating to yourself and the world. The mind can do so much more than simply analyze problems with its Doing mode. The problem is that we use the Doing mode so much, we can’t see that there is an alternative. Yet there is another way. If you stop and reflect for a moment, the mind doesn’t just think. It can also be aware that it is thinking. This form of pure awareness allows you to experience the world directly. It’s bigger than thinking. It’s unclouded by your thoughts, feelings and emotions. It’s like a high mountain—a vantage point—from which you can see everything for many miles around.
Pure awareness transcends thinking. It allows you to step outside the chattering negative self-talk and your reactive impulses and emotions. It allows you to look at the world once again with open eyes. And when you do so, a sense of wonder and quiet contentment begins to reappear in your life.
CHAPTER THREE
Waking Up to the life You Have
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking out new landscapes but in having new eyes.
ATTRIB. MARCEL PROUST, 1871–1922
Picture yourself on a suburban hilltop in the rain and looking across a gray cityscape. It could be the town you grew up in or the one where you now live. In the rain it seems cold and inhospitable. The buildings look tattered and old. The streets are clogged with traffic and everyone seems miserable and bad-tempered. Then something miraculous happens. The clouds part and the sun comes streaming through. The whole world is transformed in an instant. The windows of the buildings turn to gold. Gray concrete changes to burnished bronze. The streets look shiny and clean. A rainbow appears. The mucky river becomes an exotic, glistening serpent threading its way through the city. For one fabulous moment, everything seems to stop; your breathing, your heart, your mind, the birds in the sky, the traffic in the streets, time itself. All seem to pause, to take in the transformation.
Such beautiful and unexpected changes in perspective have a dramatic effect—not only on what you see, but also on what you think and feel, and how you relate to the world. They can radically alter your whole outlook on life in the blink of an eye. But what’s truly remarkable about them is that very little actually changes; the cityscape remains the same, but when the sun comes out you simply see the world in a different light. Nothing more.
Viewing your life from a different place can equally transform your feelings. Think back to a time when you were getting ready for a well-earned vacation. There was far too much to do and simply not enough time to cram it all in. You got home late from work after trying and failing to “clear the decks” before allowing yourself to take time off. You felt like a hamster trapped in a wheel going round and round and round. Even deciding what to take with you was fraught with difficulties. By the time the packing was complete, you felt exhausted and then had trouble sleeping because your mind was still churning through all of the things you’d been working on throughout the day. In the morning, you woke up, put all the bags in the car, locked up the house and drove away … And that was it.
A short while later you were lying on a beautiful beach, laughing and joking with your friends. Work and its priorities were suddenly a million miles away and you could hardly remember them at all. You felt refreshed and whole again because your entire world had shifted gear. Your work still existed, of course, but you were seeing it from a different place. Nothing more.
Time can also fundamentally alter your outlook on life. Think back to the last time you had an argument with a colleague or a stranger—perhaps with someone in a call center? At the time you were fuming. For hours afterwards you were thinking of all of the clever things you could have said, should have said, to put down your opponent. The aftereffects of the argument probably ruined your whole day. Yet a few weeks later, you didn’t feel irritated by it any more. In fact, you hardly remembered it at all—the sting had gone out of your turbulent emotions. The event still happened, but you were remembering it from a different point in time. Nothing more.
Changing your perspective can transform your experience of life, as the above examples show. But they also expose a fundamental problem—they all occurred because something outside of you had changed: the sun came out, you went on vacation, time passed. And, the trouble is, if you rely solely on outside circumstances changing in order to feel happy and energized, you’ll have to wait a very long time. And while you wait, constantly hoping that the sun will come out or wishing that you could travel to the peace and tranquility of an imagined future or an idealized past, your actual life will slip by unnoticed. Those moments might as well not exist at all.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
As we explained in Chapter Two, it’s all too easy to become locked into a cycle of suffering and distress when you try to eliminate your feelings or become enmeshed in overthinking. Negative feelings persist when the mind’s problem-solving Doing mode (see p. 28) volunteers to help, but instead ends up compounding the very difficulties you were seeking to overc
ome.
But there is an alternative. Our minds also have a different way of relating to the world—it’s called the Being mode.1 It’s akin to—but far more than—a shift in perspective. It’s a different way of knowing that allows you to see how your mind tends to distort “reality.” It helps you to step outside of your mind’s natural tendency to overthink, overanalyze and overjudge. You begin to experience the world directly, so you can see any distress you’re feeling from a totally new angle and handle life’s difficulties very differently. And you find that you can change your internal landscape (the mindscape, if you will2) irrespective of what’s happening around you. You are no longer dependent on external circumstances for your happiness, contentment and poise. You are back in control of your life.
If Doing mode is a trap, then Being mode is freedom.
Throughout the ages, people have learned how to cultivate this way of being, and it’s possible for any of us to do the same. Mindfulness meditation is the door through which you can enter this Being mode and, with a little practice, you can learn to open this door whenever you need to.
Mindful awareness—or mindfulness—spontaneously arises out of this Being mode when we learn to pay attention, on purpose, in the present moment, without judgment, to things as they actually are.
In mindfulness, we start to see the world as it is, not as we expect it to be, how we want it to be, or what we fear it might become.
These ideas may initially seem a little too nebulous to grasp fully. By their very nature they have to be experienced to be properly understood. So to ease this process along, the next section explains the “Mindful” (Being) mode of mind by contrasting it with the Doing mode, point for point. Although some of the definitions and explanations may remain a little unclear to you for a short while longer, the actual benefits of mindfulness are beyond question. In fact, it is possible to see the long-term benefits of mindfulness taking root in the brain using some of the world’s most advanced brain-imaging technology (see pp. 46–9).
As you read the rest of this book, it will be helpful to remember that Doing mode is not an enemy to be defeated, but is often an ally. Doing mode only becomes a “problem” when it volunteers for a task that it cannot do, such as “solving” a troubling emotion. When this happens, it pays to “shift gear” into “Being” mode. This is what mindfulness gives us: the ability to shift gears as we need to, rather than being permanently stuck in the same one.
How to double your life expectancy
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Being locked into the busyness of Doing mode erodes a vast chunk of your life by stealing your time. Take a moment to look at your own life:
Do you find it difficult to stay focused on what’s happening in the present?
Do you tend to walk quickly to get to where you’re going without paying attention to what you experience along the way?
Does it seem as if you are “running on automatic,” without much awareness of what you’re doing?
Do you rush through activities without being really attentive to them?
Do you get so focused on the goal you want to achieve that you lose touch with what you are doing right now to get there?
Do you find yourself preoccupied with the future or the past?3
In other words, are you driven by the daily routines that force you to live in your head rather than in your life?
Now extrapolate this to apply to the life you have left to you. If you are thirty years old, then with a life expectancy of around eighty, you have fifty years left. But if you are only truly conscious and aware of every moment for perhaps two out of sixteen hours a day (which is not unreasonable), your life expectancy is only another six years and three months. You’ll probably spend more time in meetings with your boss! If a friend told you that they had just been diagnosed with a terminal disease that will kill them in six years, you would be filled with grief and try to comfort them. Yet without realizing it, you may be daydreaming along such a path yourself.
If you could double the number of hours that you were truly alive each day then, in effect, you would be doubling your life expectancy. It would be like living to 130. Now imagine tripling or quadrupling the time you are truly alive. People spend hundreds of thousands of dollars—literally—on expensive drugs and unproven vitamin cocktails to gain an extra few years of life; others are funding research in universities to try to expand radically the human lifespan. But you can achieve the same effect by learning to live mindfully—waking up to your life.
Quantity isn’t everything, of course. But if it’s true, as research suggests, that those who practice mindfulness are also less anxious and stressed, as well as more relaxed, fulfilled and energized, then life will not only seem longer as it slows down and you are really here for it, but happier too.
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The seven characteristics of “Doing” and “Being” modes of minds
1. Automatic pilot versus conscious choice
Doing mode is truly brilliant at automating our life using habits, and yet it’s the feature that we notice the least. Without the mind’s ability to learn from repetition, we’d still be trying to remember how to tie our shoelaces, but the downside comes when you cede too much control to the autopilot. You can easily end up thinking, working, eating, walking or driving without clear awareness of what you are doing. The danger is that you miss much of your life in this way.
Mindfulness brings you back, again and again, to full conscious awareness: a place of choice and intention.
The mindful, or Being, mode allows you to become fully conscious of your life again. It provides you with an ability to “check in” with yourself from time to time so that you can make intentional choices. In Chapter One, we said that mindfulness meditation frees up more time than it takes to carry out the practices. This is the reason why. When you become more mindful, you bring your intentions and actions back into alignment, rather than being constantly sidetracked by your autopilot. You learn to stop wasting time pointlessly running through the same old habits of thinking and doing that have long since stopped serving any useful purpose. It also means that you are less likely to end up striving for too long toward goals that it might be wiser to let go of for a while. You become fully alive and aware again (see below).
2. Analyzing versus sensing
Doing mode needs to think. It analyzes, recalls, plans and compares. That’s its role and many of us find we’re very good at it. We spend a great deal of time “inside our heads” without noticing what’s going on around us. The headlong rush of the world can absorb us so much that it erodes our sense of presence in the body, forcing us to live inside our thoughts, rather than experience the world directly. And, as we saw in the previous chapter, those thoughts can easily be shunted off in a toxic direction. It does not always happen—it’s not inevitable—but it’s an ever-present danger.
Mindfulness is a truly different way of knowing the world. It is not just thinking along a different track. To be mindful means to be back in touch with your senses, so you can see, hear, touch, smell and taste things as if for the first time. You become deeply curious about the world again. This direct sensory contact with the world may seem trivial at first. And yet, when you begin sensing the moments of ordinary life, you discover something extra-ordinary; you find that you gradually cultivate a direct, intuitive sense of what is going on in your inner and outer worlds, with profound effects on your ability to attend to people and the world in a new way, without taking anything for granted. This is the very foundation of mindful awareness: waking up to what’s happening inside of you, and in the world, moment by moment.
3. Striving versus accepting
The Doing mode involves judging and comparing the “real” world with the world as we’d like it to be in our thoughts and dreams. It narrows attention down to the gap between the two, so that you can end up with a toxic variety of tunnel vision in which only perfection will do.
Being mode, on the other hand, invites you temp
orarily to suspend judgment. It means briefly standing aside and watching the world as it unfolds, while allowing it to be just as it is for a moment. It means approaching a problem or a situation without preconceptions, so that you are no longer compelled to draw only one preconceived conclusion. In this way, you are saved from closing down your creative options.
Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World Page 4