The Antidote (3 page)

This problem of self-sabotage through self-monitoring is not the only hazard of positive thinking. An additional twist was revealed in 2009, when a psychologist based in Canada named Joanne Wood set out to test the effectiveness of ‘affirmations', those peppy self-congratulatory phrases designed to lift the user's mood through repetition. Affirmations have their origins in the work of the nineteenth-century French pharmacist Émile Coué, a forerunner of the contemporary positive thinkers, who coined the one that remains the most famous: ‘Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.'

Most affirmations sound pretty cheesy, and one might suspect that they would have little effect. Surely, though, they're harmless? Wood wasn't so sure about that. Her reasoning, though compatible with Wegner's, drew on a different psychological tradition
known as ‘self-comparison theory'. Much as we like to hear positive messages about ourselves, this theory suggests, we crave even more strongly the sense of being a coherent, consistent self in the first place. Messages that conflict with that existing sense of self, therefore, are unsettling, and so we often reject them – even if they happen to be positive, and even if the source of the message is ourselves. Wood's hunch was that people who seek out affirmations would be, by definition, those with low self-esteem – but that, for that very same reason, they would end up reacting against the messages in the affirmations, because they conflicted with their self-images. Messages such as ‘Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better' would clash with their poor opinion of themselves, and thus be rejected, so as not to threaten the coherence of their sense of self. The result might even be a worsening of their low self-esteem, as people struggled to reassert their existing self-images against the incoming messages.

Which is exactly what happened in Wood's research. In one set of experiments, people were divided into subgroups of those with low and high self-esteem, then asked to undertake a journal-writing exercise; every time a bell rang, they were to repeat to themselves the phrase ‘I am a lovable person.' According to a variety of ingenious mood measures, those who began the process with low self-esteem became appreciably less happy as a result of telling themselves that they were lovable. They didn't feel particularly lovable to begin with – and trying to convince themselves otherwise merely solidified their negativity. ‘Positive thinking' had made them feel worse.

The arrival of George Bush on stage in San Antonio was heralded by the sudden appearance of his Secret Service detail. These were
men who would probably have stood out anywhere, in their dark suits and earpieces, but who stood out twice as prominently at Get Motivated! thanks to their rigid frowns. The job of protecting former presidents from potential assassins, it appeared, wasn't one that rewarded looking on the bright side and assuming that nothing could go wrong.

Bush himself, by contrast, bounded on stage grinning. ‘You know, retirement ain't so bad, especially when you get to retire to Texas!' he began, before launching into a speech he had evidently delivered several times before. First, he told a folksy anecdote about spending his post-presidency cleaning up after his dog (‘I was picking up that which I had been dodging for eight years!'). Then, for a strange moment or two, it seemed as if the main topic of his speech would be how he once had to choose a rug for the Oval Office (‘I thought to myself, the presidency is going to be a decision-making experience!'). But his real subject, it soon emerged, was optimism. ‘I don't believe you can lead a family, or a school, or a city, or a state, or a country, unless you're optimistic that the future is going to be better,' he said. ‘And I want you to know that, even in the darkest days of my presidency, I was optimistic that the future was going to be better than the past for our citizens and the world.'

You need not hold any specific political opinion about the forty-third president of the United States to see how his words illustrate a fundamental strangeness of the ‘cult of optimism'. Bush was not ignoring the numerous controversies of his administration – the strategy one might have imagined he would adopt at a motivational seminar, before a sympathetic audience, and facing no risk of hostile questions. Instead, he had chosen to redefine them as evidence in support of his optimistic attitude. The way Bush saw it, the happy and successful periods of his
presidency proved the benefits of an optimistic outlook, of course – but so did the unhappy and unsuccessful ones. When things are going badly, after all, you need optimism all the more. Or to put it another way: once you have resolved to embrace the ideology of positive thinking, you will find a way to interpret virtually any eventuality as a justification for thinking positively. You need never spend time considering how your actions might go wrong.

Could this curiously unfalsifiable ideology of positivity at all costs – positivity regardless of the results – be actively dangerous? Opponents of the Bush administration's foreign policies might have reason to think so. This is also one part of the case made by the social critic Barbara Ehrenreich, in her 2010 book
Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World.
One underappreciated cause of the global financial crisis of the late 2000s, she argues, was an American business culture in which even thinking about the possibility of failure – let alone speaking up about it at meetings – had come to be considered an embarrassing
faux pas.
Bankers, their narcissism stoked by a culture that awarded grand ambition above all, lost the capacity to distinguish between their ego-fuelled dreams and concrete results. Meanwhile, homebuyers assumed that whatever they wanted could be theirs if they wanted it badly enough (how many of them had read books such as
The Secret,
which makes exactly that claim?) and accordingly sought mortgages they were unable to repay. Irrational optimism suffused the financial sector, and the professional purveyors of optimism – the speakers and self-help gurus and seminar organisers – were only too happy to encourage it. ‘To the extent that positive thinking had become a business in itself,' writes Ehrenreich, ‘business was its principal client, eagerly consuming the good news that all things are possible through an effort of mind. This was a useful message for employees, who by the turn of the twenty-first
century were being required to work longer hours for fewer benefits and diminishing job security. But it was also a liberating ideology for top-level executives. What was the point in agonising over balance sheets and tedious analyses of risks – and why bother worrying about dizzying levels of debt and exposure to potential defaults – when all good things come to those who are optimistic enough to expect them?'

Ehrenreich traces the origins of this philosophy to nineteenthcentury America, and specifically to the quasi-religious movement known as New Thought. New Thought arose in rebellion against the dominant, gloomy message of American Calvinism, which was that relentless hard work was the duty of every Christian – with the additional sting that, thanks to the doctrine of predestination, you might in any case already be marked to spend eternity in Hell. New Thought, by contrast, proposed that one could achieve happiness and worldly success through the power of the mind. This mind-power could even cure physical ailments, according to the newly minted religion of Christian Science, which grew directly from the same roots. Yet, as Ehrenreich makes clear, New Thought imposed its own kind of harsh judgmentalism, replacing Calvinism's obligatory hard work with obligatory positive thinking. Negative thoughts were fiercely denounced – a message that echoed ‘the old religion's condemnation of sin' and added ‘an insistence on the constant interior labour of self-examination'. Quoting the sociologist Micki McGee, she shows how, under this new orthodoxy of optimism, ‘continuous and never-ending work on the self [was] offered not only as a road to success, but also to a kind of secular salvation'.

George Bush, then, was standing in a venerable tradition when he proclaimed the importance of optimism in all circumstances. But his speech at Get Motivated! was over almost as soon as it had
started. A dash of religion, a singularly unilluminating anecdote about the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, some words of praise for the military, and he was waving goodbye – ‘Thank you, Texas, it's good to be home!' – as his bodyguards closed in around him. Beneath the din of cheering, I heard Jim, the park ranger in the next seat, emit a sigh of relief. ‘OK, I'm motivated now,' he muttered, to nobody in particular. ‘Is it time for some beer?'

‘There are lots of ways of being miserable,' says a character in a short story by Edith Wharton, ‘but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running around after happiness.' This observation pungently expresses the problem with the ‘cult of optimism' – the ironic, self-defeating struggle that sabotages positivity when we try too hard. But it also hints at the possibility of a more hopeful alternative, an approach to happiness that might take a radically different form. The first step is to learn how to stop chasing positivity so intently. But many of the proponents of the ‘negative path' to happiness take things further still, arguing – paradoxically, but persuasively – that deliberately plunging more deeply into what we think of as negative may be a precondition of true happiness.

Perhaps the most vivid metaphor for this whole strange philosophy is a small children's toy known as the ‘Chinese finger trap', though the evidence suggests it is probably not Chinese in origin at all. In his office at the University of Nevada, the psychologist Steven Hayes, an outspoken critic of counterproductive positive thinking, keeps a box of them on his desk; he uses them to illustrate his arguments. The ‘trap' is a tube, made of thin strips of woven bamboo, with the opening at each end being roughly the size of a human finger. The unwitting victim is asked to insert
his index fingers into the tube, then finds himself trapped: in reaction to his efforts to pull his fingers out again, the openings at each end of the tube constrict, gripping his fingers ever more tightly. The harder he pulls, the more decisively he is trapped. It is only by relaxing his efforts at escape, and by pushing his fingers further in, that he can widen the ends of the tube, whereupon it falls away, and he is free.

In the case of the Chinese finger trap, Hayes observes, ‘doing the presumably sensible thing is counterproductive'.

Following the negative path to happiness is about doing the other thing – the presumably illogical thing – instead.

Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.

– Arnold Bennett,
Things That Have Interested Me

I
T IS AN ORDINARY
spring morning on the Central Line of the London Underground, which is to say that there are the usual ‘minor delays' to the service, and a major sense of despair emanating from the closely packed commuters. The only extraordinary thing is that I am a few moments from undergoing, entirely voluntarily, what I expect to be one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. As we approach Chancery Lane station – but before the automated voice on the public-address system announces this fact – I plan to break the silence and proclaim, loudly, the words ‘Chancery Lane'. As the train continues to Holborn, Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Circus and beyond, it is my intention to keep this up, announcing the name of each station as we go.

I am aware that this is not the most frightening exploit imaginable. Readers with experience of having been taken hostage by
pirates, or buried alive – or even just having endured a particularly turbulent aeroplane journey, for that matter – could be forgiven for finding this all rather self-dramatising. Yet the fact remains that my palms are sweating and my heartbeat is accelerating. I've never handled embarrassment well, and now I'm berating myself for ever having thought that deliberately courting it might be a clever idea.

I am conducting this ritual of deliberate self-humiliation on the instructions of a modern-day psychologist, Albert Ellis, who died in 2007. But he designed it to provide a vivid demonstration of an ancient philosophy, that of the Stoics, who were among the first to suggest that the path to happiness might depend on negativity. Ellis recommended the ‘subway-station exercise', originally prescribed to his therapy patients in New York, as a way of demonstrating how irrationally we approach even mildly unpleasant experiences – and how we might find unforeseen benefits lurking within them, if only we could bring ourselves to look.

Stoicism, which was born in Greece and matured in Rome, should not be confused with ‘stoicism' as the word is commonly used today – a weary, uncomplaining resignation that better describes the attitude of my fellow passengers on the Underground. Real Stoicism is far more tough-minded, and involves developing a kind of muscular calm in the face of trying circumstances. This is also the purpose of Ellis's excruciating exercise, which is intended to bring me face to face with all my unspoken beliefs about embarrassment, self-consciousness, and what other people might think about me. It will force me to experience the unpleasantness that I am fearing, and thereby to realise something about the situation that is psychologically intriguing: that my beliefs about how staggeringly awful it's going to be, when they're brought out into the open and examined, just don't seem to match the facts.

Unless you are an unusually unembarrassable person, you can
probably empathise with the apprehension I am feeling – yet when you think about it, there's something bizarre about having any negative feelings whatsoever in this situation. After all, I know nobody in the carriage personally, so I have nothing to lose from them thinking that I'm crazy. Moreover, I know from past experience on the Underground that when other people start talking out loud to themselves, I ignore them, as does everyone else; this is almost certainly the worst that's going to happen to me. And those other people speaking out loud are often talking gibberish, whereas I am going to be announcing the names of the stations. You could almost argue that I'm performing a public service. Certainly, it will be much less irritating than all the leaking iPod headphones in my vicinity.

And so why – as the train begins to slow, almost indetectibly at first, for the approach to Chancery Lane – do I feel as if I want to vomit?

Behind many of the most popular approaches to happiness is the simple philosophy of
focusing on things going right.
In the world of self-help, the most overt expression of this outlook is the technique known as ‘positive visualisation': if you mentally picture things turning out well, the reasoning goes, they are far more likely to do so. The fashionable New Age concept of the ‘law of attraction' takes things a step further, suggesting that visualisation may be the
only
thing you need in order to attain riches, great relationships, and good health. ‘There is a deep tendency in human nature to become precisely what you visualise yourself as being,' said Norman Vincent Peale, the author of
The Power of Positive Thinking,
in a speech he gave to executives of the investment bank Merrill Lynch in the mid-1980s. ‘If you see
yourself as tense and nervous and frustrated … that, assuredly, is what you will be. If you see yourself as inferior in any way, and you hold that image in your conscious mind, it will presently, by the process of intellectual osmosis, sink into the unconscious, and you will be what you visualise. If, on the contrary, you see yourself as organised, controlled, studious, a thinker, a worker, believing in your talent and ability and yourself, that is what you will become.' Merrill Lynch collapsed in the financial meltdown of 2008, and had to be rescued by Bank of America; readers are invited to draw their own conclusions.

Even most people who scoff at Peale's homilies, however, might find it hard to argue with the underlying outlook: that being optimistic about the future, when you can manage it, is generally for the best. And focusing on how you hope things will turn out, rather than how you hope they won't, seems like a sensible way of motivating yourself, and of maximising your chances of success. Walking into a job interview, you're surely better off to err on the side of assuming you can triumph. Preparing to ask someone on a date, it's surely advisable to operate on the basis that she or he might actually say yes. Indeed, a tendency to look on the bright side may be so intertwined with human survival that evolution has skewed us that way. In her 2011 book
The Optimism Bias,
the neuroscientist Tali Sharot compiles growing evidence that a well-functioning mind may be built so as to perceive the odds of things going well as greater than they really are. Healthy and happy people, research suggests, generally have a
less
accurate, overly optimistic grasp of their true ability to influence events than do those who are suffering from depression.

Yet there are problems with this outlook, aside from just feeling disappointed when things don't turn out well. These are particularly acute in the case of positive visualisation. Over the last few
years, the German-born psychologist Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues have constructed a series of experiments designed to unearth the truth about ‘positive fantasies about the future'. The results are striking: spending time and energy thinking about how well things could go, it has emerged, actually reduces most people's motivation to achieve them. Experimental subjects who were encouraged to think about how they were going to have a particularly high-achieving week at work, for example, ended up achieving less than those who were invited to reflect on the coming week, but given no further guidelines on how to do so.

In one ingenious experiment, Oettingen had some of the participants rendered mildly dehydrated. They were then taken through an exercise that involved visualising drinking a refreshing, icy glass of water, while others took part in a different exercise. The dehydrated water-visualisers – contrary to the self-help doctrine of motivation through visualisation – experienced a significant
reduction
in their energy levels, as measured by blood pressure. Far from becoming more motivated to hydrate themselves, their bodies relaxed, as if their thirst were already quenched. In experiment after experiment, people responded to positive visualisation by relaxing. They seemed, subconsciously, to have confused visualising success with having already achieved it.

It doesn't necessarily follow, of course, that it would be a better idea to switch to
negative
visualisation instead, and to start focusing on all the ways in which things could go wrong. Yet that is precisely one of the conclusions that emerges from Stoicism, a school of philosophy that originated in Athens, a few years after the death of Aristotle, and that came to dominate Western thinking about happiness for nearly five centuries.

The first Stoic, so far as we know, was Zeno of Citium, born in what is now Larnaca, on the southern shores of Cyprus,
sometime around 334
BC.
‘He had his head naturally bent on one side,' writes the third-century Greek historian Diogenes Laertius, in his
Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers,
which is the primary source of evidence for the early Stoics. ‘He was thin, very tall, of a dark complexion, [with] flabby, weak legs … and he was very fond, as it is said, of figs, both fresh and dried in the sun.' According to legend, Zeno was a merchant who came to Athens aged around thirty, possibly after the traumatising experience of being shipwrecked. There, he began to study under the Cynic philosopher Crates; Laertius relates one of Zeno's early experiences at the hands of Crates, which may help explain Stoicism's focus on irrational beliefs as the source of emotional distress. According to the story, Crates gave Zeno a bowl of ‘lentil porridge' and demanded that he carry it through the streets of Athens, but then Crates smashed the bowl with his stick, causing the contents to splatter all over Zeno's body. ‘The porridge ran all down his legs,' Laertius tells us, whereupon Zeno ran away in embarrassment. ‘Why do you run away [when] you have done no harm?', Crates called after him teasingly, mocking Zeno's belief that he had grounds for feeling ashamed. When Zeno began to teach philosophy himself, he did so under the
stoa poikile,
the ‘painted porch' on the north side of the ancient agora of Athens – hence the label ‘Stoic'. The school's influence subsequently spread to Rome, and it is these later Roman Stoics – above all Epictetus, Seneca the Younger, and Marcus Aurelius – whose works have survived.

From their earliest days, Stoic teachings emphasised the fundamental importance of reason. Nature had bestowed uniquely upon humans, the Stoics argued, the capacity to reason, and therefore a ‘virtuous' life – meaning a life proper and fitting to a human – entailed living in accordance with reason. The
Roman Stoics added a psychological twist: living virtuously in accordance with reason, they argued, would lead to inner tranquility –'a state of mind', writes the scholar of Stoicism William Irvine, ‘marked by the absence of negative emotions, such as grief, anger, and anxiety, and the presence of positive emotions, such as joy.' And here lies the essential difference between Stoicism and the modern-day ‘cult of optimism'. For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word ‘happiness'. And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one's circumstances. One way to do this, the Stoics argued, was by turning towards negative emotions and experiences; not shunning them, but examining them closely instead.

If this focus on negativity seems perverse, it may help to consider the life circumstances of the Stoics themselves. Epictetus was born into slavery in what is now Turkey; though later freed, he died crippled as a result of his masters' brutal treatment. Seneca, by contrast, was the son of a nobleman, and enjoyed a stellar career as a personal tutor to the Roman Emperor. But that ended abruptly when his employer – who, unfortunately, was the deranged Nero – suspected Seneca of plotting against him, and ordered him to commit suicide. There seems to have been little evidence for Nero's suspicions, but by that point he had already murdered his mother and step-brother, and gained a reputation for burning Christians in his gardens after dark to provide a source of light, so he can hardly be accused of acting out of character. Seneca, the story goes, tried to do as he was told, by cutting open his veins to bleed himself to death. But he failed to die, and so asked to be fed poison; this, too, failed to kill him. It was only when he took a suffocatingly
steamy bath that he finally expired. Perhaps it is unsurprising that a philosophy emerging from such circumstances as Epictetus's – or in a context where a fate such as Seneca's awaited even those of noble birth, if their luck ran out – would not incline towards positive thinking. Where was the merit in trying to convince yourself that things would turn out for the best, when there was so much evidence that they might not?

Yet it is a curious truth that the Stoics' approach to happiness through negativity begins with exactly the kind of insight that Norman Vincent Peale might endorse: that when it comes to feeling upbeat or despondent, it's our
beliefs
that really matter. Most of us, the Stoics point out, go through life under the delusion that it is certain people, situations, or events that make us sad, anxious, or angry. When you're irritated by a colleague at the next desk who won't stop talking, you naturally assume that the colleague is the source of the irritation; when you hear that a beloved relative is ill and feel pained for them, it makes sense to think of the illness as the source of the pain. Look closely at your experience, though, say the Stoics, and you will eventually be forced to conclude that neither of these external events is ‘negative' in itself. Indeed, nothing outside your own mind can properly be described as negative or positive at all. What actually causes suffering are the beliefs you hold about those things. The colleague is not irritating
per se,
but because of your belief that getting your work finished without interruption is an important goal. Even a relative's illness is only bad in view of your belief that it's a good thing for your relatives not to be ill. (Millions of people, after all, get ill every day; we have no beliefs whatsoever about most of them, and consequently don't feel distressed.) ‘Things do not touch the soul,' is how Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic philosopher–emperor, expresses the notion, adding: ‘Our perturbations come only from the opinion
which is within.' We think of distress as a one-step procedure: something in the outside world causes distress in your interior world. In fact, it's a two-step procedure: between the outside event and the inside emotion is a belief. If you didn't judge a relative's illness to be bad, would you be distressed by it? Obviously not. ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,' Shakespeare has Hamlet say, very Stoically indeed.