Science & Self-improvement

There exist basically two types of feelings: the positive ones and the negative ones. Positive feelings are so because they increase our wellness, making us feel that life is worth being lived. Negative feelings, on the other hand, make us feel tired, empty, and lonely. When we reach a long desired goal we experiment positive feelings. When we suffer a loss we experiment negative feelings. Positive feelings may make us more creative, or can lead to an act of altruism.

What we must strive for is to be as free as possible from negative feelings, and so we will be also free from the burden of defenses that we erect to maintain feelings unnoticed. We will be more creative and productive, because we will have no longer to spend energy preventing feelings from being expressed. When the occasion comes to be hurt, and negative feelings are unavoidable, we will recover sooner our well-being if we do not avoid them and permit us to experience reality as it is.

Feelings must arise from the present and not from the past. We may have memories of past events, glad ones or sad ones, but they should not be the cause of our current feelings. Past events must remain in the past. When we can look at the past without being affected by gloomy feelings, we gain the capacity to recover those happy events that had also been repressed. When we are afraid to look at our past, it is not only the sad memories that we bury, but all of the past including our cheerful moments.

The consequences of being disconnected from the past for fear of dark memories go beyond what one would imagine. As I explained, we lose all memories including the joyous ones. This causes that our energy, and consequently our attitude towards life, is impaired. We are less optimist and less joyful when we blockade those parts of the past that mortify us or that make us to be ashamed.

We must endeavor to be free of all need to distort reality, as this is the path to true development. Each stage of life must have its problems solved before we can pass to the next stage. When children, our problem was our dependency from the adults, and our goal to reach independence. Later, we have other type of problems, as to control our life and get freedom. Even later, we strive to achieve a sense of identity, to ascertain who we are. To this end, we must accept our feelings and not try to disguise them.

We learn to be by being opened to our feelings. Most of the time we can lie to ourselves by faking that we have no feelings or that our feelings are different from the real ones. But it comes a moment when all these defenses fall and we must admit what we are. In that moment we may feel sorrow for not having admitted it before, but it is really hard to simply learn to be what you are.

Sometimes reasoning may be used to deal with emotions, but this is not the right thing to do. Our capacity to reason is very important when it comes to categorize our perceptions and extract concepts by abstracting common features from many individual instances. Reasoning has a key role in understanding outer reality and without it we would be helpless when dealing with practical matters.

However, it is not good to mix reason and emotions because the interaction may be sometimes harmful. We may get involved in rationalizing our feelings, that is, searching for an admissible cause for them when we should be instead trying to comprehend them. Rationalizing means that the feeling is already there and we have to find an explanation to it, but this explanation must match a number of pre-existent rules and conditions. Comprehend, on the other hand, means to be sincere and find the real cause of our feelings.

Other times emotions can interfere with reasoning. To proceed rightly we must have a clear image of the outer world, one that is not muddled by emotions. Emotions can make that we think that the world is another thing that what really it is, and so our acts will be wrong. For instance, fear may make you feel apprehensively of the world. You will act in a way to over-protect yourself when there is no need to do so.

Although you must be alert to not let emotions interfere with your perception of the outer world, you must be aware that, in the inner world, emotions are reality. Inside us, feelings are the truth, and the way we deal with them will determine if we live truthfully or falsely. To explain emotions by reasoning does not eliminate them, as also does not blame others for our feelings. Feelings are there, and we must face them without denying or disguising them.

Growing up is a painful process, and we should not expect to grow up without experimenting pain. When you were a child, there were occasions in which your parents could help you with your pain and other occasions when they would let you alone. The term “to grow up” was invented in times when it was thought that development ended when a person became adult. It encompassed all sort of development: physical, intellectual, and emotional. Now we now that development in the intellectual and emotional spheres may continue during all the person’s life.

When you are an adult there will be occasions for suffering, and you will have to endure the suffering because it is part of the normal process of development. If you try to avoid the pain, you will be arresting development. However, this is what we often do when we think that a pain is unbearable. We may so proceed in the moment when we first suffer pain, but sooner or later we have to acknowledge it and go through it.

To deny pain is a defensive process. We defend against pain as we may defend against an enemy. This is only natural, as it is necessary sometimes to allow us some time to distance ourselves from the events. However, when we systematically build up defenses against pain the loss in energy that results from this process is almost as harmful as the pain itself.

Emotions are a sign of life: to have no emotions is like being dead. It is important to be conscious of our feelings, to understand them, and to be able to express them. Emotions are our way to react to our perception of the world, and so they contribute to shape the world we live in. They allow us to communicate with ourselves, which in turn enables us to communicate with other ones.

We perceive the world by means of our senses. However, each of us processes the raw data of the senses by a mental activity that leads to our own idea of the world. Our emotions have a part in building this image of the world, and consequently influence our acts in the future. The world that we perceive is in great measure a personal construction. When we accept responsibility for out feelings we are also accepting that we are responsible for our views of the world.

To have control of our feelings means to have control of ourselves and is the way to achieve autonomy and independence. This control can only be acquired by means of understanding what are feelings. Comprehension is the way to be the master of your emotions, and therefore to be the master of your life. When you acknowledge your emotions instead of hiding them, you are in a position to deal better with the world because you will not be avoiding reality.

To lose contact with our feelings means to lose contact with our inner part. Feelings should be acknowledged and expressed in a way that is socially accepted and appropriate to solve conflicts and foster our improvement. They can be faced defensively or constructively. In the first case, we are heading inwards; in the second, outwards. Obviously, the second should be the preferred alternative.

To comprehend our emotions means to comprehend which is our reaction to the world in which we live. They reflect our history and our development, our past, our present, and what we can expect of the future. To have emotions is to be alive. We cannot say that we are conscious of life if we are not conscious of our feelings towards life. Emotions tell us if what we have lived was gratifying or afflictive.

There are certain common ways in which people react to their experiences. Although each of us has his own way to manage experience, we are all similar when faced with events like a significant lose. This community of feelings is what permits that we have compassion for other people. That is what is meant when we say that human beings are linked by feelings. This is so because emotions are our most immediate reaction to events, rather than thoughts. We feel first and then we think. Thoughts are a way to deal with experience, while emotions are the experience itself.

Intelligence alone is not enough to understand feelings. By being very intelligent one is not bound to understand what one feels. We all know people that are very intelligent but that are dissociated from their feelings. They try to interpret the world exclusively by the use of reason, using a method that produces good results in many practical matters. In the case of emotions, however, it fails hopelessly.

An important tool towards building a healthy self-esteem is the control of emotions. This is something that seems strange to many people because the most common belief about emotions is that they cannot be controlled. People that admit that emotions can be controlled will affirm that there is no need of doing so, or even that the control of emotions is undesirable.

All these beliefs are wrong. Let us examine in turn each one of them. The first one says that emotions cannot be controlled. There is, however, a way to control emotions, and it is through one’s thoughts. This was known long time ago by a philosophical school called stoicism. Stoics maintained–and anyone can confirm it by his own experience–that an emotion is not the reaction to reality, but the reaction to what one think reality is.

Stoicism was originated within ancient Greeks and found two prominent exponents in the Romans Seneca and Epictetus. It asserts that one cannot change certain events, but one can choose his attitude towards them. This means that you can choose how you react to external events.

If you think that something that occurs will hurt you in any way, you will be sad. If, of the same thing, you think that it will not affect you, you will be indifferent. So, it is not the event what makes you sad, but what you think of it. You can control your emotions if you control what you think.

You can change the way you think about things. You can learn how to think differently about what happens to you, and can choose a way of thinking that permits you to avoid undesirable emotions. Of course, this must be done without faking reality because, if you pretend that reality is not as it is, the result will be that you will become insane.

Some people affirm that there is no need to control emotions. This is not the best approach to well-living because, if you exert no control over your emotions, your self-esteem will suffer. Self-esteem is the opinion you have of your capabilities, and it is mainly based on the history of your achievements(or what you consider achievements), or on the lack of them.

Any valuable achievement needs a continuous effort over time to be done. If you are at the mercy of emotions, you cannot deliver that continuous effort. You will work when you are happy and will fail to do so when you are sad. While this may be seen as very romantic, it is not the most efficient way to have important things done.

Self-esteem is also based on the perception you have of how you control your life. If emotions (and not yourself) decide what you should do, it is unlikely that you will feel that you are controlling your life.

Finally, there are people that say that it is harmful to control emotions. This conception is endorsed by a psychological school that argues that a mechanism called repression is the cause of many neuroses (mental disorders).Although therapies have been experimented in which patients were encouraged to manifest their repressed emotions, it has not been shown that this purification of emotions had lasting effects and, indeed, it may have contributed to increase the patients’ troubles.

A common mistake is to believe that if we get the things we are running after then we will have all that we really want. This is not always true, especially if we have not spent time in thinking on our goals. If our goals do not conform to our needs, we will never be happy and will always feel that something is missing because we can never get enough of what we do not really want.

Some of the excuses that we use to avoid doing what we ought to do are: “I am tired,” “I am scared,” “I can’t.” You may be lazy, you may accept that it is better to be sad but safe, you may accept defeat and failure; none of these attitudes will bring you happiness. Be honest with yourself. Admit what is wrong in your life. If you want your career, your relationships, your activities, and your behaviors to be in synchronization with whom you are, you have to be honest with yourself.

You have to figure out who you are through your values, your beliefs and your needs. Living your life authentically is what makes life meaningful, what will make you happy. You must take responsibility for what is wrong in your life. If you are unhappy with an area of your life, you are responsible for that unhappiness: either you chose to perceive the situation the way you do, or you chose to stay in that situation.

Being accountable for what is working and what is not working puts you in control. You may not be able to control all the situations, but you can control how you respond to those situations. You can use your painful experiences to discover more about you, and grow and develop through that pain. The alternative is to be a victim and remain miserable and unhappy.

You can use every type of experience to find out what makes you happy or unhappy, what are your values and your needs. Thus, you will be more aware of the opportunities you have to create the life you want. You will be able to choose consciously how to live instead of just living automatically.

Nothing in your life will change unless you take action. Fear, doubt, or lack of resources may stop you, but nevertheless you must act, must do something. By being aware of your thinking, you will be more in control of your negative emotions, but this will not help you to make any change. You have to set a goal, even an insignificant one, and take action.

Each day, you have the opportunity to make changes happen, to live authentically and deliberately. And each day gives you the chance to begin again, no matter what happened the day before. It is not necessary to set up impressive goals, and it may also be inconvenient, because the bigger the goal, the scaring it is.

Some people get motivated by big goals, but these people usually do not need counseling to manage their lives. If your problem is to get started, begin with little things. You may not feel a hero by doing them, but take them as a duty, and they will help you to get courage to undertake bigger things.

The way to change your self-esteem is to change your acts. Change is difficult, at least when it is a real change, a change that will make that your life take a new course. There is no way to learn rapidly how to change your life. Maybe you can learn some basic principles, but to know the principles and to know how to apply they are completely different things.

There are several reasons of why changing a life style is difficult. One is purely mechanic: living involves developing many habits that contribute to make you survive. The mind has not capacity to manage all the stimuli that reach a person at every moment. To be able to live, one must profit from many habits that make one react appropriately to each circumstance.

The habits of a person form a network where each one reinforces and depends on all the others. To break such a network it is not easy, because each habit is tied to so many others. To pull out a habit implies pulling out all that are connected with it. You may think of the process as similar to pulling out a plant whose roots are intertwined with the roots of several neighbor plants.

There is a second reason why the change of a life’s course is difficult, and it is psychological. As the human being is a rational animal, he has a reason for everything he does–right or wrong. Many times this reason is not clear, and many times a behavior seems so prejudicial that one cannot understand why the person persists in it. When one sees that a person is behaving in such a manner that damages himself, one cannot imagine what reason that person could have to do that. However, there is always a reason for a person to do something.

The persistence in a self-damaging behavior is nearly always caused by an incorrect perception of reality. The greatest motivation behind many human acts is fear, but one sometimes fear things incorrectly because one has an erroneous view of reality. In general, humans will always do what they think will hurt them less.

If a person considers that doing something is damaging or unpleasant, but he fears that doing otherwise he will suffer a greater evil, he will elect to do what causes him less damage. Take for example a woman that is harassed by his husband. If she thinks that she is unable to support herself, she will prefer to be harassed rather than living a miserable life.

In those cases what must be done first is to determine whether the belief that the person holds is true or not. Next, if it is incorrect the person must be induced to change his mind. This change amounts to building the missing self- esteem of the person. In the previous example, the woman must be convinced that she can really support herself.

If the belief that maintains a person in a painful situation is erroneous and somebody is able to convince him that it is so, this is normally enough to give him the power to make a change in his life. People sometimes refer to this as having an ‘insight’ that changed their lives.

I was planning to include here an article about a fable by Aesop when I found that Gilbert K. Chesterton had written a preface to the Fables that says some things that I would like first to mention because they are coincident with my reasons to publish the article.

Fables, says Chesterton, are “truisms,” that is, truths that are self-evident, that do not need demonstration. He calls truisms, “tremendous truths.” He says that in the language of fables “are written some of the first philosophic certainties of men.” I will leave aside the reasons that Chesterton gives about why these truths had to be written as fables, which are an interesting subject in itself. I was impacted by his conclusion that “man has learnt here to connect the simpler and stronger creatures with the simpler and stronger truths.”

I was always certain that important truths are simple truths, and fascinated with what is called “common sense.” I automatically mistrust any explanation that I find too long and involved. I have always preferred a simple fable to a complicated philosophical reasoning. May be it is a defect of mine, but I was glad when I read that Chesterton thought that fables are characterized by “firm foundations of common sense,” and “shrewd shots at uncommon sense.”

You may guess that Chesterton is one of my preferred writers if you recall that in his well-known series on Father Brown he always makes simple explanations triumph over complicated ones. Anyway, here is the fable.

The fox and the grapes

A hungry Fox saw some fine bunches of Grapes hanging from a vine that was trained along a high trellis, and did his best to reach them by jumping as high as he could into the air. But it was all in vain, for they were just out of reach: so he gave up trying, and walked away with an air of dignity and unconcern, remarking, “I thought those Grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour.”

What this fable has to do with self-improvement is that it shows a common mechanism called “rationalization.” It is a common pitfall that we must try to avoid as much as we can because it goes against our correct perception of what is reality. The right perception of reality is one of the premises of self-improvement.

In this case, the fox assumed that the grapes were sour because it was masking reality in order to heal its damaged ego. Rationalization can take many forms, some of them very difficult to detect. I said before that I preferred a simple explanation to a complicated one, and I also said that the great truths are simple. Somebody can argue that the second statement is a consequence of my incapacity to follow complex argumentation.

Self-examination must be a permanent concern if one is interested in having a right perception of reality. One of the most difficult tasks in self-improvement is to discern what you can really achieve, and what is out of your reach. Many times, only experimentation will tell.