and practices of your work environment, not having a way to implement them5 Falling prey to physical ailments and bad habits like jaw clenching, head scratching, and cigarette smoking that arise as you try to focus hard on an intellectual or creative problem
6 Feeling alienated from and out of sync with your culture, your family, and your friends
7 Getting trapped in a narrow corner of a field or discipline where you are forced to do repetitive work for a lifetime
8 Finding yourself in a culture that tracks children, thereby keeping late bloomers and children of poverty out of intellectually interesting professions
9 Dealing with a racing brain that, because it doesn't come with an off switch, inclines itself toward insomnia, manias, obsessions, compulsions, and addictions
10 Pining for productive obsessions (juicy intellectual or artistic problems to bite into) but succumbing to unproductive obsessions instead
11 Being smart, but not as smart as you wish you were or need to be
12 Defensively using your brain's ability to reason so as to reduce the anxiety you're experiencing
13 Loving language and getting trapped by certain words and phrases (for example, finding yourself chasing after the great American novel or the missing link)
14 Feeling sadder than other people by virtue of your ability to comprehend the facts of existence
15 Experiencing problems related to meaning because you see through traditional answers about the nature of the universe
This last challenge is especially poignant, which is why I want to introduce you to the principles and practices of natural psychology. For some years, I've been developing natural psychology as a way to update and expand ideas from classical psychology, cognitive-behavioral psychology, and existential psychology. Natural psychology takes as its starting point the question, what exactly is meaning? This is a question of real concern to smart people.
Natural psychology identifies meaning first as a subjective psychological experience, second as a certain sort of idea that we form, and third as a certain sort of evaluation about life that we hold. It then describes the profound shift that a person can experience from seeking meaning to making meaning and distinguishes between making meaning any which way and value-based meaning-making. It further identifies making meaning as the key to emotional health and personal satisfaction.
We might start our exploration by looking at what happens right from the beginning of life when a bright child is born into a family or society where being smart is underappreciated or disparaged. We might begin by trying to get a handle on what sort of thing being a smart person is by looking at some of the threats that come from a racing mind—threats like mania, insomnia, obsessions, and addictions. But I'd like us to start with the meaning instead. Here is a report from a client who nicely illustrates our existential themes. Jeanette explained:
My first negative experience of being too smart was in fifth grade. I had gone to a rural school (a tiny village on the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge) in a three-room school that combined grades since there were very few of us. I was in the largest class (five students). Whether it was intentionally progressive or not, we had stations and were free to roam the room and read or do arithmetic or work on puzzles as we chose. It was heaven.
Then my family moved to a Portland suburb, and I was in a regimented fifth-grade class with a Nazi teacher who made us sit with our hands folded if we finished an exercise before the others, which I always did. I learned how excruciating boredom can be; I began to eat sugar to soothe myself, and I acted out. I was in trouble a good deal of the time from then on.
I have always associated my intelligence with a propensity for boredom, for hypervigilance, for hypersensitivity, and a frustrated quest for meaning. Into adolescence, I learned that drama was an antidote to boredom, and then I discovered alcohol, and for the next twenty years, lived in drinking and drama as well as bad relationships that enabled both. However, I do credit my intelligence with helping me to be a highly functional drunk (graduate school, PhD, jobs as a professor, and an ability to look good while under the influence).
When I found myself in a treatment center, the staff apparently had a pool on how long I would stay. Their experience was that the very intelligent were the least trainable into the twelve steps and sobriety. However, I beat those odds and have been sober ever since. However, I still struggle with boredom, with food addiction as a soother, and with workaholism to stay engaged. Fortunately, I found painting and fiction writing as partial answers; and the idea of the necessity of making meaning has been the real lifesaver.
We hear in Jeanette's story many of our themes. We see how boredom arises as a special, terrible problem for smart people. A smart person has a lively brain; that brain wants to work; it is primed to think; and if you give it nothing to do, it will do nothing for as long as it can bear to do nothing, but it will not be happy. It will be bored and, worse, begin to doubt the meaningfulness of life. It will say to itself, “Golly, is this what life is all about, doing a boring job and then maybe watching some television?” A bored smart person is a person smack in the middle of a meaning crisis.
If you were to find yourself in that situation, isn't it reasonable to suppose that you might engage in something at once exciting and soothing to deal with this painful state of affairs? Mightn't you start drinking a lot? Mightn't you drive fast around town? Mightn't you gamble? Mightn't you seek out as much sex as possible? It is easy to see how sadness, obsessions, compulsions, and addictions arise as a response to meaning crises where you find yourself under-occupied, bored, and bereft of the experience of meaning.
We begin to see how, for example, addiction might arise in a bored smart person as a reaction to a meaning problem rather than as a medical problem, a genetic problem, a psychological problem, or a problem with willpower. For example, quite a number of our Nobel Prize–winning novelists have been alcoholics. Is it more likely that they share the same medical problem or that they share the same problems with smartness, boredom, and meaning?
Meaning is primarily a subjective psychological experience. A smart person is more likely than the next person to be aware of its absence and to be affected by its absence. He is more likely to get bored, to experience meaninglessness, to begin to see the extent to which neither his society nor the universe are built to satisfy his meaning needs, and to then hunt for soothing or exciting meaning substitutes that ultimately reduce his freedom.
Meaning is a smart person's most difficult challenge. In natural psychology we say: look to a meaning problem before you look to a medical problem, a psychological problem, or a so-called mental disorder. If you are smart and you do not know what to do to handle meaning crises when they arise, you are in danger of living in perpetual pain.
As a creativity coach and a natural psychology specialist, I talk to smart people every day of the week. I chat with lawyers, doctors, scientists, writers, painters, businesspeople, and folks from every walk of life. They include folks settled in a profession as well as folks struggling to find an outlet for their intelligence and looking for work that will allow them to be as smart as they are. They include individuals who are successful in their careers and those who, because of the realities of the marketplace, struggle to achieve success.
Virtually all of them are bothered by the sadness that dogs so many contemporary intelligent people. Virtually all of them are afflicted by anxiety that is connected to their very ability to think. Many have had to deal with addictions, and many still must deal with them. Some are not strangers to mania, and many live in that strangled calm state that smart people cling to so as to avoid actual mania. What they have in common is that they
