avoid pain or challenges, we wind up creating bigger problems.
It’s often healthy to deal with a difficult situation, endure a little pain, or put off pleasure for a beneficial long-term result. We teach our children about delayed gratification, yet forget to apply it in our own lives. Rather than reacting to feelings and desires that arise, it’s important to take a moment to reflect on making healthy choices that contribute to a durable lasting well-being and a life we define as meaningful.
“If you can change your mind, you can change your life.” WILLIAM JAMES
One of the most important realizations I have come to over the past thirty years—the essence of the inspiration for this book—is that most people, given the opportunity to reflect, already know how to improve the quality of their lives.
When I taught high school, my students could easily make a list of five things they could do to improve their lives. Yet, despite being able to make such a list, most of those students (like the vast majority of people in this world) were unable to follow through and actually do the things they listed. I’m sure all of us can relate to this. We are all aware of some simple things we could do to improve the quality of our lives right now and, for some reason, we don’t do them.
Recognizing this dynamic challenged me to ask one of the most important questions of my life: What is it that prevents me from doing the things I know are healthy and beneficial? If I valued honesty, why did I lie? If I wanted to help people, why did I hurt them? If I wanted to be healthy, why did I do unhealthy things?
It turns out that I was not unique. The inability to answer these questions is a nearly universal problem, affecting almost all human beings. One of our biggest problems is that we rarely ever ask ourselves where the resistance to being the person we want to be comes from. The primary obstacle preventing us from being able to make healthy and productive changes in our own lives is not our circumstances, nor a lack of knowledge about what to do, it is our untrained mind. We have untrained minds that are conditioned by our experiences, habits, and tendencies and are constantly producing thoughts and emotions that draw our attention away from being present and able to make wise choices.
The best explanation of this phenomenon that I have found comes from one of the scholars I mentioned earlier, B. Alan Wallace, who calls it obsessive compulsive delusional disorder. This is not a disorder you will find in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM); rather, it is a pervasive condition of the mind that nearly everyone has.
The first point Wallace makes is that the mind is obsessive in its constant production of thoughts, images, emotions, and desires. This is easy to verify; just try to keep your mind free from thoughts for a minute or two, and watch what happens. When we try this, we notice something quite remarkable: We are not consciously producing the thoughts that arise; our minds are producing them—regardless of our conscious desire to have them or not. What’s more, much of the time we are not even conscious of all the thoughts and images that are steadily flowing through the space of our minds.
Secondly, with this obsessive stream of thoughts running through our minds, our attention is compulsively drawn toward those thoughts. Instead of being present in our current moments, our minds are diverted to past events or future concerns. If we make a conscious decision to simply sit and relax and be present, very soon we will observe this compulsive activity of the mind. Within moments, our attention will turn to plans, memories, fears, or desires. We quickly realize our minds have much more control over our attention than we do.
This strikes at the root of our problem. We have little conscious control of our attention. If we are to establish any free will in our lives, we need to be able to direct our attention where we would like it to go, rather than have our unruly mind dictate what we think about.
A clear example of this is worry. We may be aware of a potential future concern that creates worry. Intellectually, we can understand that worrying about this problem won’t affect its outcome, and we might realize there is nothing to worry about at this time. Yet, despite our conscious decision to not worry, we find the mind continues to bring our attention to the potential problem and create worry. We can tell the mind there is nothing to worry about, and the mind will answer, “Oh, yes there is!”
If we take a moment to observe the mind, its obsessive and compulsive nature is apparent. A consequence of it dragging us from one thought to another—whether a past event, future concern, or mere distraction—is we are not even present for most of our daily activities. Do any of these statements sound familiar?
“Have you seen my car keys? I don’t know where they are.”
“I just had that piece of paper a moment ago, and now I can’t find it.”
“Where did I put my glasses?”
“What did I come in here for?” (after walking into a room)
And, one of my personal favorites:
“What were we just talking about?”
We believe we forgot where we put our car keys, what we did with the paper, or what we are talking about. While this may be true on some level, the more accurate explanation is that our minds were somewhere else when we put down the keys or that piece of paper, and we were not even listening to our own conversation. Our attention was pulled away by our obsessive-compulsive minds. Even when we consciously decide to do some task during the day, we may forget all about it as our minds get caught up in other thoughts and activities.
Many studies have shown that simply having a distracted mind negatively affects our well-being. A Harvard study, published in the journal Science, conducted by Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, found that almost half of the time people’s minds were wandering, and their thoughts were not related to what they were doing. It also found that people were happiest when their thoughts and actions were aligned. Their level of well-being, though impacted, actually had less to do with what they were doing or thinking about and more to do with their mental presence, matching their thoughts with their actions.3
According to this study and many others, mind-wandering (thinking about things that distract us from what we are doing), whether it involves pleasant or unpleasant thoughts, leads to less happiness than being attentive to what we are doing, even if it is just raking the yard. Mind-wandering should not be confused with consciously and intentionally allowing one’s mind to rest or daydream. Mind-wandering is a research term that is the opposite of presence of mind. Just having presence of mind increases our level of happiness.
In addition to being distracted, the mind rarely sees the world accurately. Based on our conditioning, biases, attention level, and current emotional and physical states, the mind projects distorted qualities, characteristics, and judgments onto the people, places, and events in our lives. Ultimately, this is the main cause of our mental and emotional suffering, and our inability to cultivate genuine happiness. The untamed mind, influenced by our emotional and mental biases, prevents us from seeing things clearly and making healthy choices based on reality.
Most of the time, the mind is quite delusional. By delusional, I don’t mean the psychotic-level loss of contact with reality described
