| The Happystat This afternoon when I was typing a report about a colonoscopy I just did, happiness was not on my mind. I was neither happy nor sad, not lonely nor feeling any kind of special intimacy. At that very moment, I was not overcome with grief about my most painful memories nor with excitement about any particular thing in the future. I was not super-interested in the subject at hand, nor was I bored by it. I was in a gray zone, like a machine, a robot. Not empty nor fulfilled. In a word, neutral. Each person has their own internal thermostat -- some feel hot when it's 68 degrees outside and some feel cold when it's 78. When you get a fever, your internal thermostat is adjusting to the new infectious mileu in your body, and you start feeling cold all of a sudden even when there has been no change in the ambient temperature. The thermostat in your body determines how you experience the outside environment. Some have termed the word glycostat to refer to what your body's metabolic systems interpret as a normal blood sugar level, and cardiostat for what the cardiovascular system interprets as a normal heart rate. I believe that in our minds we have an emotional equivalent to this phenomenon, which for lack of a better word I will call the happystat. Stupid-sounding, I know. But I think the implications of realizing that this may be at work in each of us are far-reaching. It explains so many things. For example, when a billionaire is reduced to a six-figure salary after a major stock market shambles, he is miserable, while the 21 year-old kid who worked and paid his way through the last 4 years of college lands that same $150,000 job during his rookie year in NYC, he is ecstatic; two happystats catapulted in completely opposite directions leading to completely different results despite landing at the same point. It's the reason why it usually feels worse to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. You could literally think of a hundred examples of profoundly altered happystats if you sat there for even a half-hour and thought about it... The Patriots losing the Superbowl, boring sex between a husband and a wife, winning the Special Olympics, dirty warm river-water when you're dying of thirst in the desert, etc. By default, the lower you set your stat, the happier you will be. Lower expectations lead to a greater degree of happiness and satisfaction at every point on the spectrum of having met those expectations. Does this mean, then, that we should set the stat low for the sake of feeling good? And even if so, how would you do it? Would you be able to control it if you tried? Doesn't it just happen naturally, like all the other biological stats we are subject to? I think the more carpe diem types among us would argue that happiness in the context of a low stat is no way to live life, that this would constitute a life of blissful ignorance and stagnation. You never strive for anything greater for fear that failure will lead to disappointment and therefore unhappiness. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, you see chronically unhappy type-A personalities who never seem satisfied with anything. What to do? Based on this, you'd think that in general, the ideal stat setting (the subjective) should correspond exactly to where the actual circumstances of your life have placed you (the objective). You will never be too unhappy, and with modest gains in your objective circumstances, you will be able to exceed your stat setting and experience happiness and satisfaction. Even better, I think, is the way laid back people do it. Their stats are set slightly lower than their actual circumstances and can easily absorb the minor misfortunes of daily life. The go-getters set theirs a little more than slightly higher -- they are always vying for change, trying to improve themselves and those around them, never satisfied but not so unhappy that they don't function well. But this doesn't really get rid of the ultimate problem. Undoubtedly, at some point, tragedy strikes. And when it does, in a single moment, a huge chasm is created between the actual the old stat, regardless of where it was initially set. When the grief sets in immediately after, the length of time spent in grief is a matter of how quickly that stat can get reset, i.e., how well you can adjust to the new circumstance. When a loved one dies after a long sickness during which everyone had come to terms with the terminal nature of the illness prior to the actual death, usually the death itself is not as painful for the survivors (think Mandy Moore in Walk to Remember) because they were able to do a lot of the stat-adjusting in advance. If you get your arm slashed in a sword fight and lose 30% of your blood volume, you will not do well unless your heart can adjust quickly, increase its rate and compensate by beating faster. If you have lost someone or something, you will not do well until you have accepted the loss and find new sources of meaning in your life that make it all seem worthwhile again in spite of the absence. I don't think we have complete control over how quickly we can do this. Some are just better than others at it, and I don't think there's anything wrong with any of the natural variations that exist in most people. This all assumes that being happy is some kind of genuine and meaningful goal in life. If it isn't then I shouldn't be so concerned. In fact, happiness all the time is kinda erie, like the neighborhood in Edward Scissorhands or the Stepford Wives. Sometimes I want to ask people, what the heck are you so happy for all the time? I think that emotions are a symptom, sometimes true and sometimes false, of a deeper state of being, i.e., spiritual, but how it is decided whether any given emotion is a true or false one I don't know how to describe. Regardless of whether it corresponds to truth, I do think that happiness, in and of itself and apart from any deeper notion of joy, is a worthwhile thing to strive for and to want for others, and that whatever we can do to better manage the stats that govern our experience of it is also worth doing. The happystat is a knob in our souls that gets turned back and forth by forces that are barely within our control, like the rudder on a boat in a hurricaine. You struggle to turn it this way and that, sometimes it makes no difference and the boat still capsizes. On a sunny day, however, one flick of the wrist and you are sailing off into the sunset like crazy. |
