The Undefeated Mind: On the Science of Constructing an Indestructible Self

Chapter 10. Muster your courage

“Few things have as much power to make us suffer as fear. More than merely an obstacle to strength, fear is nearly its antithesis, for nothing weakens us quite as much.”

“Further, because fear feels bad, when we can’t escape the things that cause it, we often try to stop the feeling itself. But trying to suppress fear rarely works. In fact, as described in Chapter , it often leads to greater harm than that caused by fear alone. In contrast, accepting fear often paradoxically reduces its intensity. Accepting fear also (and arguably more importantly) reduces fear’s influence, thereby providing a path for us to find courage, the ability to take action in spite of fear. Aiming to be courageous rather than fearless, then, may be not only safer but also more realistic”

“Though research shows that 80 percent of people suffering from anxiety aren’t receiving professional help for it, it also suggests that most of them don’t actually need it: anxiety self-management techniques in many instances work just as well”

“We might also manage fear by realizing that in the long term we don’t actually remember most of what happens to us. Thus, when facing obstacles, pausing to remind ourselves that we won’t likely even recall having faced them—implying that we’ll have found a way to surmount them or to live with them—may also offer us a path to facing them with courage.”

“Despite its various causes, panic is always seeded by a thought (though one often not remembered). It may be the thought that the chest pain we’re feeling is now radiating down our left arm, or that airplanes sometimes crash, or that we can’t answer any of the questions on a biochemistry exam. But when such thoughts lead to the belief that we’ve become trapped in an acutely dangerous situation from which we have no escape, they begin to trigger many of the physical symptoms characteristic of panic. These symptoms then often lead to a belief that something is seriously wrong with us, something that might actually kill us”

“A second technique to quell acute anxiety involves rating the severity of the anxiety as we feel it moment by moment. Few things bounce us out of an experience more quickly than pausing to examine our own reactions to it, which takes us from having an experience to watching ourselves have an experience”

“A third technique involves looking for and correcting thought errors that cause us to panic. Most of us, for example, think anecdotally rather than statistically”

“Finally, we can habituate ourselves to the things we fear by deliberately and repeatedly exposing ourselves to them. For just as pleasures become less enjoyable the more often we repeat them, fearful stimuli become less frightening the more often we encounter them”

“One final technique that can help us counteract this tendency involves, paradoxically, imagining the worst possible outcome as well as we can. For in asking ourselves detailed questions about how a disaster might play out in the future, we’ll often begin to imagine ways we might manage it and thus fear it less in the present. Also, when anticipating a disaster, we tend to imagine our future only in terms of the consequences to which we think the disaster will lead, failing to consider all the good things that will inevitably occur as well. Additionally, we fail to realize that disasters don’t, in general, affect us as much or for as long as we predict they will. Further, after playing out the worst possible outcome as well as we can, if we then envision other events we think will occupy our thoughts in the future besides thoughts about a potentially impending disaster, research suggests we’ll start to believe our future won’t be quite as bad as we think. “

“Yet in his book Staring at the Sun, Irvin Yalom holds out hope for a third possibility: that by willfully and directly confronting our fear of death we can increase our determination to live well; that a finely honed awareness of death can help us avoid wasting time on pursuits for which we’re ill-suited or in which we have no real interest but in which we participate out of a sense of obligation or guilt; and that keeping our life’s end firmly in mind can help us focus on those things that the wise know are most likely to bring happiness: our relationships and helping others. In other words, Yalom argues, though death itself may destroy us, the idea of death may save us. ”

“What she was describing, I realized suddenly, was Yalom’s concept of rippling. As he writes, “Rippling refers to the fact that each of us creates—often without our conscious intent or knowledge—concentric circles of influence that may affect others for years, even generations. That is, the effect we have on other people is in turn passed on to others, much as the ripples in a pond go on and on until they’re no longer visible but continuing at a nano level.”  He then draws an important contrast between the hope to preserve our personal identity after we’re gone—a futile attempt doomed to failure—and “leaving behind something from [our] life experience.””

“But whether that comfort comes from merely having a mystical experience or from the belief in the persistence of life beyond death that such mystical experiences often create isn’t clear. Many people who’ve reported such experiences, whether drug-induced or otherwise, say they have indeed concluded from them that life continues in some form after death and that they’re no longer afraid of it as a direct consequence, while many who haven’t developed such a belief (like me) often report their fear of death continues.”

“The self-fulfilling prophecy theory of social interaction argues that the way we expect other people to behave alters our behavior in such a way that causes them to fulfill our expectations”

“Not only that, but we also tend to attribute our subsequent behavior not to previous expectations others have had of us but to our own disposition, especially if multiple people confirm our self-perception in multiple contexts. 0 Thus, if our parents, our teachers, and our friends all treat us as if we’re helpless, helpless is what we’ll believe ourselves to be and thus what we’ll likely become so”

“Because the people with whom we surround “ourselves have more control over what we feel than we often do ourselves and because we have more control over what they feel than they often do themselves, we have to take responsibility for whom we pull out of them if we want to enjoy whom they pull out of us”

“For we can resist discouragement by articulating our life’s mission; accomplish that mission by making a great determination; overcome the obstacles that naturally arise when we make such a determination by changing poison into medicine; gain the strength to change poison into medicine by accepting responsibility and standing against injustice; endure pain by accepting it and loss by letting go of what we cannot keep; enjoy what we have by learning to appreciate it and help ourselves through trauma by helping others; conquer fear by leveraging our connections to the ones we love. And, finally, I realized, gain inspiration from others who’ve managed to forge an undefeated mind of their own—as I did in that moment from Rita.”

“Acceptance, for example, really does make pain easier to withstand, yet sometimes only slightly. But when added to a fierce determination to accomplish an important mission, as well as to an expectation that accomplishing that mission will require the feeling of even more pain, strength often appears that makes large problems seem abruptly small. Though”

“On the other hand, sometimes no matter how hard we pull, our lives don’t seem to move at all. Some struggles, in fact, take years or even decades to win (one of the titles bestowed upon the Buddha was “He Who Can Forbear”). But as long as we refuse to give in to despair and resolve to continue taking concrete action, some kind of victory is always possible. So when everything seems hopeless and you want to give up, no matter how much others may doubt you or you may doubt yourself, hold that knowledge fast to your heart and fix your mind unwaveringly on this most imperative of calls to action: never be defeated.”

Chapter 9. Encourage others

“Which suggests that the reason love makes us feel good has less to do with romantic attraction or even personal connection than it does with the way it causes us to regard those for whom we feel it. That is to say, not just with empathy (according to Oxford Dictionaries Online, “understanding and sharing the feelings of another”) or sympathy (“pitying someone else’s misfortune”), but with compassion—meaning with the same concern for their happiness as we have for our own.”

“Thus, if our aim is to help others become happy, we must always apply our own judgment to the actions we’re asked to take on their behalf.”

“Indeed, a compassionately wise person cares about his own happiness as much as the happiness of others—no more and no less”

“Though compassion can certainly be gentle, it must also sometimes be harsh, forceful, and even angry. We can’t judge the quality or intent of an action only by its superficial appearance. With the intent to increase another person’s happiness as our constant aim, we may sometimes find ourselves taking action that paradoxically seems on the surface to lack the very compassion that drives it, as when a parent reprimands a child to teach him not to hit other children.
Nor, finally, does compassion even require us to like those for whom we strive to feel it. Being compassionate may mean thinking benevolently about people despite their flaws, but it doesn’t mean acting as if those flaws don’t exist. Nor does it mean we can’t prefer one person to another. We neither have to pretend that some people don’t annoy us nor open ourselves up to establishing personal relationships with those who do annoy us for their happiness to matter to us.”

“Loving-kindness meditation consists simply of making conscious attempts to generate feelings of compassion for others, a practice that research now shows improves our ability to feel compassion in general”

“In Nichiren Buddhism, however, practitioners are taught to go one step further and chant for the happiness of people they actively dislike”

“And still others have managed to embrace one of the most controversial ideas of all: that people we deem purposely malevolent are in fact only grievously deluded. Deluded, that is, in believing that someone else’s suffering has in some way become necessary for their happiness”

“And though it may be true that we need to become angry to fight against injustice, that doesn’t mean we can’t also feel compassion for the people who commit it.”

“Even when we do manage to summon up feelings of compassion for others, maintaining those feelings can be exhausting, often requiring that we simultaneously restrain our annoyance, frustration, and even rage. Which”

“Research now shows what many of us know from experience to be true: taking action to alleviate the suffering of others helps us better”

“One possibility, suggest Schwartz and Sendor, is that focusing on the problems of others alters the way we see ourselves in relation to our own. Thinking about a problem we have in the context of someone else’s life, divorced from how it impacts us, may open up avenues of creative thinking and produce ideas about managing it that would otherwise have remained obscured by our emotional reluctance to apply that same creative thinking to ourselves.”

“If we feel compelled to help, whether by another person or by internally self-generated pressures such as shame or pride, helping others won’t actually increase our well-being. Our sense of well-being may indeed increase in proportion to the help we provide, but only if our desire to provide it is autonomous”

“Supporting someone else while we’re suffering ourselves may be the last thing we want to do, but like swallowing bad-tasting medicine, it’s often the best thing for us.
“So don’t think about all the reasons you”

“We may think our advice represents the most valuable thing we have to offer those who suffer, but it pales in comparison to the power of our encouragement. Encouragement, at its heart, represents an attempt to make others feel that they have the strength, wisdom, courage, and ability to solve their problems themselves; it aims not to provide specific solutions but to make others believe they can find those solutions on their own. With encouragement we express our belief in the indefatigable power of the human spirit to make what appears to be impossible possible, all in the hopes of awakening the same belief in those we’re trying to encourage.”

“Even if we can’t produce a victory from failure, even if we don’t grow personally as a result of adversity, we can always—always—use our experiences to encourage others. Especially when others are facing obstacles similar to those we ourselves once faced and survived”

Chapter 8 . Appreciate the good

“Studies suggest that positive emotions in general play a key role in increasing resilience. They diminish physiologic stress by reducing heart rate and blood pressure, as well as broaden the scope, creativity, and flexibility of our thinking, which increases our ability to cope with adversity psychologically. ”

“Gratitude not only brings joy but also improves our sense of satisfaction with life to an even greater extent than either pleasure, meaning, or engagement”

“Yet gratitude doesn’t increase resilience only in the manner of other positive emotions, by making us feel good. It also does so by making us feel less bad, lowering our levels of anxiety, anger, depression, self-consciousness, and emotional vulnerability”

“In short, gratitude represents a powerful tool to help us construct and maintain an undefeated mind. It improves our well-being and buffers us against a wide range of maladies, including major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, phobias, nicotine dependence, drug abuse, posttraumatic stress disorder, and even bulimia. ”

“Research suggests that the closer we come to attaining a desired outcome, the easier it is to imagine achieving it, and therefore the more difficult it is to accept that we didn’t, which is why missing winning the lottery by one digit is harder to accept than missing it by eight”

“Habituation eventually turns all of our possessions—our marriages, our health, our arms, and so on—into parts that feel indistinguishable from the whole of us, parts that we therefore rarely, if ever, imagine we could lose”

“This all suggests that simply pausing to remind ourselves that we still actually have our cars, our health, our marriage, or our arms should be enough to make us feel grateful”

“Undoing positive events, Koo and her colleagues concluded, does increase our sense of appreciation more than simply bringing those events to mind.”

“When he then assessed their resultant levels of gratitude, he found subjects he’d asked to imagine dying in a specific and vivid way felt significantly more grateful than either subjects who imagined dying in abstract terms or subjects who imagined only a typical day. ”

“Try writing out a list of things you love about your life,” I told Anne, “and carve out some time every morning, even if just a few minutes, to imagine how you really could—or better yet, one day will—lose them.” By repeating this practice on a regular basis, I told her, she could transform it into a habit. And as a believable fear of loss doesn’t seem to be something to which we habituate, it might become a habit that would continue to fill her with gratitude as long as she continued to do it.”

“Though the real trick, I told her, wasn’t just learning to appreciate obstacles in retrospect; it was learning to appreciate them before we knew what benefits they might bring. It only required confidence, I said—confidence enough in our ability to wrestle value out of adversity that at the very first moment we encounter an obstacle we feel gratitude for the opportunity it represents instead of fear of the suffering it might bring”

“Funny you should say that,” Anne replied. After her breast cancer scare, she told me, she’d taken stock of her life and created a “mental file cabinet” of past ordeals upon which she could meditate whenever she felt incapable of handling a challenge, whether one related to her Parkinson’s disease or something else. Now whenever she felt discouraged or daunted, she’d summon up vivid memories of how horrible and helpless she felt when those past problems first confronted her and soon would usually then find herself awash in confidence that having survived them she could survive anything.”

“Thus, the victories we’ve achieved in life represent more than just our past accomplishments; they represent evidence of our ability to win, which, when we call upon it, will buttress us against the despair we often feel when facing obstacles that lie ahead of us. And the more we believe in our ability to win, the more we become capable of feeling grateful for obstacles themselves.”

Chapter 7. Let go

“But in those cases in which the thing for which we hope is destined not to occur, hope does indeed stand between us and peace, blocking as it does our ability to feel the one thing that might bring us peace: acceptance of the inevitable.”

“And wanting something we can’t have is awful: tethered to uncertainty, our minds ruminate obsessively, inventing improbable schemes for somehow finding a way to get that which we desire, both raging and trembling at the thought of being denied it. In such cases”

“If the purpose of accepting painful feelings is to be able to continue fighting for desired goals, the purpose of accepting painful losses is to be able to stop fighting for goals that lie beyond our power to achieve.”

“And though we can’t entirely rule out the possibility that the latter group refrains from seeking such explanations because they’re more resilient than the former, studies suggest that attempting to make sense of loss might increase one’s suffering without offering any benefit beyond that gained from avoiding the attempt altogether”

“What we have instead, and often in abundance, is influence: not the power to guarantee the result we want in all circumstances, but the power to make those results more probable”

“Given that sense-making exposes us to an increased risk for prolonged or even increased grief, to speed our recovery from loss we might instead consider employing a different type of meaning-seeking that psychologists call benefit-finding. Unlike sense-making, research shows that attempting to create benefit out of loss—attempting to turn poison into medicine—actually reduces grief.”

“Third, if we lose something that subsequently alters our self-image—for example, our ability to exercise—we may either need to find another way to retain that self-image or to accept and embrace an entirely new one”

“But that regret, I argued, is caused by a belief in a faulty premise: that had we only chosen a different path from the one we did, our life wouldn’t just have turned out different but better. We idealize the road not taken, imagining only the good things that would have resulted from our taking it, conveniently leaving out the bad things that would invariably have followed as well, including all the unrelated bumps and bruises that would happen in the day-to-day course of any alternative life. ”

“Certainly, anticipatory regret may be adaptive, often motivating us to do things we don’t want to do but should—like pay a condolence call or study for an exam. But regret over past actions, I said to Ravi, is nothing but a poison that prevents us from enjoying the life that’s resulted from the things we did do, which is the only life available for us to enjoy at all.”

“suggested he try something called compassionate mind training, which had as its goal the changing of “an internalized dominating-attacking style into a caring, compassionate way of being with one’s distress.” Compassionate mind training teaches that automatic reactions—our emotions—are not our fault; that we have no direct control over our feelings and therefore can’t be blamed for them. It also teaches people to reduce their submissive acceptance of self-attacks, not by attempting to refute them but instead by asking themselves why such attacks occur. Finally, it teaches people to have empathy for their own distress by accessing feelings of warmth they have for others and then transferring them onto themselves.”

“that the greatest barrier to self-comfort wasn’t the actual degree of difficulty involved in creating it, but rather that we often think we don’t deserve it”

“Forgive yourself for whatever past mistakes you’ve made. Empathize with yourself for all the losses you’ve suffered. Your job, your physical prowess, your professional status, your role as patriarch of your family.” I paused. “It’s a lot to lose all at once.”

“the transtheoretical stages of change model.
Originally developed to help people stop smoking, recent research, I told him, had suggested that the transtheoretical stages of change model could be adapted to help people who were dealing with loss. It recognized five distinct stages through which people pass on their way to making difficult behavioral changes or adjusting to new circumstances”

“The first it termed precontemplation, a stage in which conscious recognition of the need to change (to quit smoking, for example) or, in the context of bereavement, to accept a loss, hasn’t yet occurred”

“We know we’ve entered the second stage, contemplation, when the emotional tumult of precontemplation starts to abate. At that point, we typically come to realize that we’re still attached to what we’ve lost and that we have to take some kind of action to let go of it, even as we typically remain ambivalent about doing so”

“In the third stage, preparation, we finally recognize we have to move forward and begin to muster the determination to do so. We may be helped in this by preparing to do things that symbolize our intent: by imagining rituals of completion (for example, to whom we might give away our deceased spouse’s clothing), or by designing alternative routines that accommodate a life without the thing we’ve lost (for example, fitting swimming into our daily schedule when arthritic knees stop us from running”

“Yet in the fourth stage, action, we do just that. Here, we consciously choose to bid our attachment a final good-bye with a promise not to forget it, but also with a firm decision to live without it.”

“The final stage, maintenance, acknowledges that feelings of grief may resurface at any time. To navigate this stage successfully is to allow them to do so without judgment, recognizing, especially with unexpected and traumatic losses, that a return to grief is common, and that longing for what we’ve lost is acceptable as long as we don’t allow our lives to halt as a result”

Chapter 6. Accept pain

“Studies have further shown that expecting pain to be severe worsens our experience of it, and expecting it to be mild improves it. Further, being psychologically braced for pain also lessens its unpleasantness. This is true regardless of its cause, whether it’s from a medical procedure done for our benefit, or from torture (even though pain caused with the intent to harm has been shown to hurt more than pain caused incidentally or accidentally ).
Another way we might be able to improve our ability to manage pain is by retelling ourselves stories of previous painful experiences from a different perspective: not with a focus on the intensity of the pain we felt but on the fact that we survived it.”

“In the same way, then, that believing ourselves to be strong can increase our strength, believing in our ability to handle pain can increase our pain tolerance”

“You’re going to be in pain whether you’re working or not,” she’d said, “so if you want to work, you should work.”

“The key to making distraction work, she said, wasn’t just doing something that riveted attention, but doing something that aroused emotion. For the mechanism by which distraction reduced pain, she’d said, seemed to involve not only having one’s attention turned elsewhere but also being made to feel good as a result.
But she’d also warned him that pain was essentially unrivaled in its ability to command our attention (as it needed to be given the survival advantage that attention to injury or potential injury clearly provided ). Relatively minor pain, like the kind associated with jogging, seemed reasonably amenable to distraction with humor or daydreaming or conversation (useful for getting into shape, certainly), but past a certain level of pain, distraction, in her experience, offered chronic pain patients only minor relief.
Also, given the severity of his pain, getting back to work to test the power of distraction would undoubtedly prove physically challenging. So she had something to suggest in addition, she’d told him, a type of cognitive behavioral therapy called acceptance and commitment therapy that had as its goal not the reduction of pain but the improvement of the ability to function in spite of it”

“Acceptance and commitment therapy proposes that by fully surrendering to pain, the sufferer can paradoxically prevent himself from being defeated by it. Such acceptance, his therapist had said, while having little power to decrease his pain, might have great power to decrease his suffering. For one thing, accepting his pain might enable him to stop making futile efforts to avoid it and perhaps to start doing things he wanted, like going back to work. Also, she suggested, clinging to the possibility that he might still avoid his pain could also be engendering fear—fear that he might not avoid his pain—which could actually be intensifying the unpleasantness of his pain”

“Suffer what there is to suffer. Enjoy what there is to enjoy. Regard both suffering and joy as facts of life,” wrote Nichiren Daishonin”

“By accepting and even embracing such painful experiences, we prevent ourselves from engaging in the undesired behaviors to which they often lead.”

“Likewise, when painful thoughts arise—for example, that we’re worthless—an exercise in which we repeat the words “I’m worthless” again and again until they stop triggering any meaning at all, becoming in essence nothing more than sounds, can help us recognize that our thoughts are just stories, not truths that necessarily reflect objective reality at all. In this way, by learning to withhold judgment of our painful feelings and draining the meaning from our painful thoughts we’re able to reduce our desire to be rid of them”

“This then helps us with the real goal of acceptance: preventing those phenomena from interfering with the achievement of our goals. For acceptance doesn’t mean allowing our problems to go unchallenged; it means accepting the painful thoughts and feelings that invariably arise when problems occur so that they don’t stop us from trying to solve them.”

“Thus, though we might think we need to control our emotions when facing adversity—to feel brave when fighting cancer, for example, or stoic when losing a loved one—we might do better if instead we give ourselves permission to feel what we actually do. For if we fail to give ourselves that permission and instead aim to be something we aren’t, we’ll be more likely to experience suffering not only at the hands of our pain, but also at the hands of our failure to live up to our expectations”

“Which was why by learning to accept whatever pain we feel—as Dan had—we become capable of handling, and thus of accomplishing, far more than we ever believed we could.”

Chapter 5. Stand alone

“This represents the Nichiren Buddhist view, that not only is karma alterable but alterable only by actions we ourselves take—this, because karma is created by actions we ourselves have taken”

“This isn’t to suggest, however—and this is crucial—that we’re to blame for what happens to us, or worse that we deserve what happens to us; instead, it’s to underscore the notion that at every moment we have the power to affect what happens to us. That at every moment we remain capable of taking new action and therefore of altering the trajectory of our future.”

“Which is to say, if a problem is making us suffer, that suffering is our problem to solve.”

“Research shows, for example, not only that actively venting to others about traumatic experiences creates a psychological distance that engenders a more objective perception of them, but also that the encouragement of others, as many of us know from our own experience, can increase the likelihood that we’ll achieve our goals.
Other research, however, suggests that too much support from other people may actually prevent us from taking action toward those goals”

“diffusion of responsibility. The reason no one had called wasn’t because the idea hadn’t occurred to anyone, but rather because it had occurred to almost everyone, each of whom then in turn presumed that someone else had done it. The larger the group before which a task is placed, it turns out, the less that each individual will feel personally responsible for accomplishing it, and the less likely, without an explicit assignment of responsibility, the task will be accomplished at all. ”

“Studies show that when we think about supportive partners helping us we actually become less motivated, a phenomenon termed self-regulatory outsourcing, so named because depending on others for their support causes us to unconsciously “outsource” our efforts to them”

“With no one else able to help her, she turned to the only person who could: herself.
The reason to accept responsibility for solving our problems, then, isn’t just that our problems belong to us, and that if we don’t, no one else will. It’s also that a growing body of research now suggests that accepting responsibility for solving our problems makes us more resilient.
For one thing, just like embracing a mission, embracing responsibility, as my wife did, seems to increase our ability to tolerate pain”

“Embracing a sense of personal responsibility is also associated with better psychological adjustment following trauma”

“Finally, perhaps the most significant way in which embracing a sense of personal responsibility increases resilience is by motivating action (remember, resilience is also defined by our ability to persevere through obstacles). In fact, feeling responsible for achieving an outcome may motivate us even more powerfully than our desire to achieve it”

“Not that possessing such a stand-alone spirit, as it’s known in Nichiren Buddhism, means refusing help that only others can give. Rather, as with everything else we might need to achieve victory, it means taking personal responsibility for getting them to give it—or for getting it from somewhere else. It also means refusing to allow that support to weaken our determination to take complete responsibility for the outcome of whatever task lies before us. "

“Nor, finally, does standing alone only mean accepting full responsibility for weathering obstacles, achieving goals, and resisting the urge to let others do for us what we can do for ourselves. It also means, from the Nichiren Buddhist perspective, standing up for what’s right, even if others mock us for it or even attempt to prevent us from doing it. For standing alone also means standing up—against injustice”

“When participants were again asked to hold up a five-pound weight, those who had donated their dollars were able to do so a full seven seconds longer than participants who hadn’t. Why? According to Gray, because doing good increases our sense of agency, or potency, a phenomenon he terms moral transformation. (Interestingly, this effect wasn’t seen only with acts of charity but also with acts of ­villainy. )”

“When we take moral action, we seem to rely not so much on moral reasoning as on moral intuition and then work backward to rationalize the judgments we’ve already made”

“What makes people monsters, in other words, isn’t their belief that the ends justify the means. The ends must always justify the means. What makes people monsters is that they don’t agonize over the means they feel forced to choose.”

“Justice, in the Nichiren Buddhist worldview, exists only because human beings make the effort to stand against injustice”

“In fact, I argued, we have the responsibility to fight injustice even if we’re committing another injustice in some other way ourselves.”

“If we stand against injustice because we care about making the world a better place, we can increase our resilience as much as when we commit ourselves to a personal mission. But to be able to carry out a commitment to doing what’s right (and therefore be able to typecast ourselves as resilient), we have to be able to stand against whatever forces rise up to sabotage our attempts. And to do that, we have to recognize where those forces come from.”

“What explains these results? According to Milgram, when we perceive someone as a legitimate authority, we tend to accept the meaning they assign to actions even when that meaning contradicts what we ourselves perceive. In Milgram’s experiments, the experimenter told the subjects that the purpose, or meaning, of the experiment was to test how punishment influenced learning, which appeared to transform the purpose, or meaning, of the shocks into something constructive. Further, when an authority tells us to do something, we tend to surrender our sense of agency, so that, in Milgram’s words, “when we feel responsible to the authority, we simultaneously surrender our sense of responsibility for the content of our actions”

“And as Shelton’s study suggests, our power to resist their direction may be more limited than we think.
How, then, can we increase the likelihood we’ll do what’s right in any particular circumstance and, through such action, gain strength? Perhaps not by resisting the negative influence of authority, but, as we should do also with temptation and negative thinking, by avoiding it. In other words, when facing a moral dilemma, we might consider deliberately not asking anyone we view as an authority figure for advice.”

“Or that I no longer care if I’m liked. But in freeing myself from the need to be liked, in learning to derive my self-esteem from internal sources, I can more easily let go of the dissonance that occurs when I’m not”

“That’s what you have to make her understand. The way to reach the hearts of others is through courageous action and sincere demonstration of compassion for their suffering. What you need to do is find a way to reach her heart.”

“For in the end what inspires others to rally to a cause is the commitment we bring to it ourselves, our courage, as Gandhi said, to “be the change we want to see.” For only when we stand up ourselves do we inspire others to stand up beside us, whether we’re a world leader like Gandhi or a fourteen-year-old high school girl.

Chapter 4 . Expect obstacles

“Similarly, according to Nichiren Buddhism, though obstacles invariably arise in the course of goal pursuit, because of our innate capacity to learn from them, we’re able to use them to generate the very thing that enables us to overcome them: strength”

“Our minds are story-telling machines, I told him, constantly making predictions about the significance of everything that happens to us. But so rapidly and unconsciously do they do it that we often fail to realize our predictions are only that—theories, not unalterable facts.”

“We change because we’re forced to. Change requires pain.” Aversive stimuli, I told him, are now recognized to contribute to growth even at the neurological level. According to recent research, learning itself—in fact, thinking itself—causes inflammation that, when followed by a sufficient stimulus-free period (meaning rest), actually increases our resistance to a number of neurologic conditions, including migraines, seizures, and even dementia. Though no evidence yet links this finding to psychological resilience, it does at least suggest we’re actually built to benefit from some degree of pain”

“This ability to “change poison into medicine,” as it’s known in Nichiren Buddhism, makes plausible the transformation of even the most horrific tragedy into something that enables us to become happier”

“We think because we can’t see the exact path to success from where we stand today, the path doesn’t exist at all, and we let our misguided confidence in our restricted vision squash our determination. But our determination is what creates the path—our determination to make use of adversity rather than escape it.”

“We change poison into medicine by taking action to flip the significance of events ourselves. And not just by reframing adversity (“at least it’s just a stroke, not cancer”), but by actually overcoming it. Not by rationalizing failure (“I didn’t want that job anyway”), but by turning it into a genuine victory.”

“According to Nichiren Buddhism, we don’t feel pain in life because we’re denied our attachments; we feel pain in life because we mistakenly believe we can’t be happy without them”

“Once you begin to conceive of adversity as the raw material necessary for advancement and personal growth, so does it become. But besides that? Question your assumptions. Challenge your weaknesses. Good advice grates on the ear, so if you don’t like what you’re hearing, you should probably listen to it”

“A pessimistic self-explanatory style, then, describes the tendency to attribute the causes of adversity to forces that are internal (“This is all my fault”), universal (“This affects absolutely everything”), and immutable (“This isn’t changeable”). ”

“In other words, if we spend our energy defending a rationale for why we can’t do something, we’ll almost certainly not be able to do it”
“But when things aren’t going well—when the team on which we’re playing is losing—pessimists often stop trying.
Or, at least, some do. It turns out that not all pessimists are created equal. Depressive pessimists, research suggests, believe they lack the necessary ability to succeed and therefore that their efforts are irrelevant. Defensive pessimists, on the other hand, worry about negative outcomes as well but use their anxiety to motivate themselves into action”

“How, then, do we develop such flexibility—a realistic optimistic self-explanatory style—remaining balanced in the way we evaluate the causes of negative life events without surrendering our sense of power and control over them?”

“On the other hand, if we tend toward a depressively pessimistic self-explanatory style, we need to practice refuting self-defeating views”

“Which is to say, the stories we tell ourselves about why bad things happen really do affect what happens next.”

“Rather than expend energy resisting our negative thoughts, then, we can concentrate instead on ignoring them, our ultimate aim being to treat them the way psychologists train patients with panic attacks to treat anxiety—which is to say, not by denying them, but by observing and accepting them, waiting patiently until they do what unresisted thoughts generally will: pass quietly away.
“So the goal isn’t to convince yourself you’re not going to fail,” I told Paul. “The goal is to stop paying attention to the possibility.”

“Finally, sometimes our impulse toward negativity is nothing more than a habit, a reflex born of past feelings of frustration or powerlessness that have long since vanished but whose footprint nevertheless remains. In contrast to negativity that arises from a lack of self-confidence, negativity like this, the kind with no real thought behind it, can best be extinguished not by avoidance and distraction but by their opposite: vigilant self-monitoring. Studies show the best way to break a bad habit is by noticing when we do it and consciously forcing ourselves to stop”

“Sometimes, therefore, it can also be helpful to substitute a different response to whatever may be cuing the habit we want to extinguish. Rather than just interrupting ourselves from biting our nails when nervous, for example, we might train ourselves to stroke our chin instead. Likewise, rather than only interrupting negative thoughts, we might train ourselves to consciously substitute positive ones. That way, we’re not just trying to stamp out a bad habit, but also trying to program in a good one—one that with repetition over time may eventually become as automatic as the one we’re trying to abolish. ”

“You’re exactly as strong—or not—as you tell yourself you are. You may not want to go through this, imagining, as I’m sure you are, all the horrible things you might have to face if you do, but that doesn’t mean you can’t. Can’t is just another story we tell ourselves. A decision we make.” A decision, I told him, that had an important consequence: it would change his focus from trying to solve his problem to trying to escape it. And once we begin trying to escape our problems, they become paradoxically even more daunting, the consequences of not solving them abruptly appearing even more awful, and our sense of helplessness even more overwhelming. And as a result, we almost suffer more from believing we can’t solve our problems than from actually having to do the work of solving them.”
“Uncertainty also blinds us to the truth that our lives will continue despite the losses we suffer—and not just continue, but in light of the set-point theory of happiness, in most cases return, more or less, to feeling like they did. “One reason you can’t imagine right now how you might be able to put your life back together,” I told Paul, “is that you’re obsessed with the possibility that it’s about to fall apart. But because it hasn’t, you haven’t devoted any resources to figuring out how you would put it back together if it did, which makes you feel that you couldn’t.”

The only antidote to uncertainty, I told Paul, is to attack the very obstacle we doubt we can overcome. As Nichiren Daishonin wrote, “Only by defeating a powerful enemy can one prove one’s real strength.” We tend to feel strong, in other words, when we’re actually experiencing our strength.”

“We also tend to find a way to experience ourselves as strong when facing an obstacle we think we can’t avoid. I remember a high school classmate who was once paralyzed by anxiety when her turn came to deliver a speech until our teacher told her she had no choice, at which point she calmed down and delivered her speech without difficulty. One reason for this may be that fully accepting and embracing the notion that no other path remains available to us but forward activates our fight-or-flight response, concentrating the mind, as it were, in preparation for what it perceives as a life-or-death struggle. Another reason may be that freely choosing a painful experience reduces the degree to which we experience it as painful, an effect that seems to occur even when the choice we make is to decide that we have no choice. Committing to the inevitable, in other words, seems to prepare us to endure pain.”

“A growing body of research now shows that our expectations profoundly influence our responses to our experiences. In some cases, in fact, our expectations have a greater influence over our responses to an experience than does the quality of the experience itself.”

“The expectations we have of unpleasant experiences, however, seem especially influential. In a meta-analysis of twenty-one studies designed to test the effect of warning patients both about what would be done to them and how much it would hurt when they were scheduled to undergo unpleasant medical procedures, such warnings were found to significantly reduce the amount of discomfort patients reported during the procedure. It seems when we’re warned that an experience will be unpleasant, we find it easier to tolerate.
Discrepancies between our expectations and our experience not only affect how we experience events, but also how we respond to them”

“So however long you think your goal will take you to achieve,” I advised Paul, “however much work you think it will require and however many times you think you’ll get it wrong before you get it right or fail before you succeed—multiply that by a factor of ten or a hundred. Expect a level of difficulty so beyond what it’s likely to be that the chances of it actually being harder than what you imagine are minuscule, the contrast making what you do have to go through seem easy. Though we may not be able to control how difficult a goal is to accomplish, we can control how difficult we expect it to be.”

“Taking the time to predict what specific obstacles we might face on the way to our goal also prevents us from becoming too attached to the means by which we accomplish it”