The happiness feedback loop

In an unguarded moment, my mind can often drift to thinking about what might have been. What if I had never spent the majority of my twenties slogging it out in professional school? Getting ripped to shreds by my professors in front of my peers when I couldn’t come up with the right answer.

Apart from probably not having C-PTSD, I would never have had an outrageous amount of student loans or developed burnout. I might have studied art instead, or started a blog much earlier.

But then again, what if I’d just kept going in my career, even though I didn’t like it? I had already devoted so much time and energy to the whole thing, why quit during my peak earning years? What if walking away was a major mistake and I run out of money and have to eat cat food in my eighties?

And so it goes. From regret and anxiety to the fallacy of sunk costs and back again.

This, to me is a fast track to feeling unhappy. If things are going well, all I have to do is pull out one of these finely honed internal arguments to make myself feel miserable and anxious.

But, thanks to the process of mindfulness, I am starting to catch these babies as they come to the surface. And usually, I don’t catch the thought first, I catch the feeling.

But this wasn’t  easy for me. In fact, it has taken me until my forties to be able to check in with my body.

I grew up in a conservative evangelical church and school environment. Though my parents weren’t and still aren’t as conservative as the schools I went to, I don’t think they had any idea how culty they were. In fact, a lot of the ideas introduced in school were taken from the Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP, for short), which you can check out in this somewhat disturbing series.

The people running the schools I went to were clear on one thing. Our bodies were sinful. And, like so many people I know who have had a similar upbringing, I developed an uneasy relationship with my own body.

Learning to check in with how I felt in my body was a practice that I only developed relatively recently. And what I found was that it was holding onto a lot of emotions. When I had a thought about something uncomfortable, I began to notice a tightness in my body in specific places. Anxiety I felt in my gut. Worry around my neck and shoulders.

So, when I felt a certain pang in my gut, I knew I was anxious about something. But, it also went the other way, when I was thinking about something that I associated with anxiety, that would trigger the feeling in my gut. There was some kind of feedback loop that was going on without my conscious awareness.

I realized that, not only did I have to pay attention to all of this, I needed to figure out how to release the feelings that I did not want and embrace the ones that I did want.

It turns out that he body does indeed have many feedback loops to the brain, particularly when it comes to strong emotions. This is supposed to be adaptive from the standpoint of evolution. If you survived in the past because you were afraid, the brain and body remember that for you in the autonomic nervous system. Its like Google asking you if you want to save a password in order to make the next sign-in more efficient.

The problem is my anxiety was developed not from running away from predators, but in enduring humiliation by Napoleonic professors. There were a lot of situations that looked like this in the wilds of my schooling and career. And my body was primed for it by staying in an anxiety loop.

What Dr. Joe Dispenza would say is that my body had become my mind. It was running emotional programs on autopilot. In his book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, he talks about taking control back from the program through awareness and meditation.

For me, meditation has allowed me to not only quiet the chatter in my mind, but also slowly undo the maladaptive wiring that kept me feeling so unhappy. There are many meditation techniques that have been studied by scientists, and the finding that most intrigued me was how the heart can communicate with the brain through elevated emotions, like Joy.

When we feel elevated emotions in our hearts, it turns out that this directly communicates to the brain and begins to dampen down some of the negative feelings, like the anxiety I was having. Feeling joy and gratitude actually triggers numerous neurological and biological mechanisms that have a positive effect on the rest of the body.

Neat, right?

It turns out that all kinds of crappy feelings can be alleviated by bringing up elevated emotions. Catching a negative thought midstream and then challenging myself to refocus on an elevated emotion like joy is a practice I engage in regularly. Though it’s taken a while, I notice that I feel less baseline anxiety.

The process of doing this again and again (mindfulness) actually rewires the brain. This rewiring can get you out of a maladaptive brain/ body loop and into an improved brain/heart/body loop. The evidence of this, for me is that I now have days I automatically default to joy rather than anxiety. Which is a huge win given the years of anxiety-inducing events that initially kicked this whole thing off.

Learning to cultivate joy, just for the hell of it, has been a game changer for me. There are days when it’s difficult. But then I remember just how great I felt the last time I challenged myself to do it.

Another bonus of practicing mindfulness and feeling joy, is that it seems impossible to do it any other time than now. By that, I mean, in order to practice joy, I can’t be in the past or the future, I have to be totally present. By being present, I can’t focus on regrets of the past or the anxiety of the future, I can only focus on the goal of feeling joy.

Sometimes, after I do this practice, if a memory comes up, it seems that I can reframe it much more easily. From the standpoint of joy, I can see just how miserable those dental school professors were and why they had to pick on me. I can see the irrationality of being worried about quitting a career I didn’t like. I can have gratitude for where I’ve been and where I’m going.

(hey, I’m sure you know, but this is a personal story/experience. The disclaimer is that this isn’t medical or professional advice of any kind, just some information about what was helpful to me.)