OUR PREDICAMENT
My father was a minister and my mother was a nurse so I split the difference and became a physician. One of the best things about my career has been the privilege of listening to my patients' stories. Unlike the superficial conversations we share in polite social situations, patient stories in the doctor's office occur behind closed doors in a place of psychological safety. They are full octane, unfiltered, and comprised of two things: chief complaints about signs (things that can be seen or measured such as a fever or rash) and symptoms (sensations that the patient can feel but that others cannot see or measure, such as pain and fatigue), and more importantly, chief concerns about the causes and consequences of their signs and symptoms. After listening to a few hundred thousand of these stories over three decades, I am convinced that our predicament is universal and unavoidable. By that I mean that I have yet to meet a patient who does not have a tale of woe. As Brene Brown says, "Everybody has a story that will break your heart. And if you are really paying attention, most people have a story that will bring you to your knees." The particulars of our woes are diverse, but the end result is always the same: we feel unsettled at best, despondent at worst, and we are separated from our joy and meaning.
ITS RESOLUTION
MINDFULNESS
The present moment, with all its elephants and nuances, more than deserves our full attention and decision-making capabilities. However, most of us live in a world of distraction and multitasking, frustrated by our inability to focus on the task at hand and get things done in a sequential fashion. The solution to this chaos is mindfulness, Jon Kabat Zin's secular pullout of Buddhist meditation. It works like this: the next time you are faced with a stressor and its associated tension, take a slow deep breath and remind yourself that you have a choice about how to respond to the tension. As you exhale, let go of those long-standing maladaptive responses and choices that no longer serve you well (negative judgments, social withdrawal, and avoidance behaviors such as drinking and gambling). Because as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, "If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction." Take the time you need to mindfully choose responses that lead to wellness (self-compassion, positive distractions, exercise, and prayer to name a few; read on for more). Such choices have the power to favorably reset the trajectory of your life journey. In the words of William Jennings Bryan, "Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for. It is a thing to be achieved." Bottom line: slow down, be mindful, make good choices.
GRATITUDE
Gratitude is a thankful appreciation for what you have already received. The research of Bob Emmons has shown that people from all walks of life who are grateful enjoy superior physical, emotional, and social health. A simple way to be more grateful is to keep a gratitude journal and start each day by writing down three things you are grateful for. Similarly, instead of waking up everyday and saying to yourself, "Woe is me," proclaim "WOW is me!" WOW that you woke up instead of dying in your sleep; WOW that you stayed dry overnight and can empty your bladder and bowel on your own terms; and WOW that for one more day you have meaningful work and the strength to do it.
CONNECTION
John Travis, the founder of the modern wellness moment said, "The currency of wellness is connection." To paraphrase, connection is the coin of the realm in the kingdom of wellness. In a similar vein, family physician Richard Swenson writes in his book Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives that all wellness comes not from things but the connection found through relationships. He defines your relationship with others as your social life; your relationship with yourself as your emotional life; and your relationship with God as your spiritual life.
Social life The hierarchy of social relationships spans from loneliness, to connection, to connection for the greater good. In a 2019 Scientific American essay titled "Loneliness Is Harmful to Our Nation's Health," Claire Pomeroy from the Lasker Foundation points out that 47% of Americans often feel alone and disconnected from meaningful relationships. This loneliness has numerous negative emotional and physical consequences, including high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, dementia, depression, and suicide. Conversely, as demonstrated in Harvard's 75-year study of adult development, connecting with others through deep and long-lasting relationships is the primary driver of human health and happiness, far outweighing factors such as status, income, and residential zip codes. In other words, there is desolation in isolation and consolation in community. Finally, as described by Craig and Marc Kielburger's in Me to We: Finding Meaning in a Material World, the ultimate relationship, the type that maximizes joy and meaning, is one in which individuals commit to working together for a cause greater than themselves. Think barn raising.
Emotional life Your relationship with thoughts and feelings and the story you tell yourself about you is called your emotional life. It's normal to have the occasional blues and to harbor self-doubt, but many of us live with a pervasive negative narrative. The British rock band Keane captures this phenomenon in The Way I Feel: "There's something wrong about the way I feel, a missing link, a broken part, a punctured wheel." An essential first step in establishing a healthy emotional life is to take inventory of your values and to compose a personal mission statement based on those values. Only then can you pursue a values congruent life, one in which you choose thoughts and actions that help you live on purpose. As you consider what you truly believe in and what you are trying to get done in your one life, I encourage you to read David Brook's "The Moral Bucket List," his 2015 opinion article in which he challenges us to take a look at the relative merits of pursuing resume virtues (think prestigious university degree, fancy awards, and material wealth) versus eulogy virtues (the ones talked about at your funeral; were you kind, brave, honest, faithful, and capable of deep love?). Due to the high stakes and complicated nature of one's emotional life, many people hire a professional therapist help them sort through their thoughts and feelings, compose a mission statement, and coach them on how to tell themselves a better story about themselves. This is time and money well spent.
Spiritual life A 2010 survey showed that worldwide, 43% of people believe in God or a supreme being. The range of belief spanned from 4% in Japan, to 70% in the United States, to 93% in Indonesia. A more recent Pew Foundation report suggests a downward trend in America, with the percentage of respondents being absolutely certain that God exists dropping from 71% to 63% from 2007 to 2014. This can be explained in part by Darwin's 1859 The Origin of Species, Mendel's unraveling of the mystery behind smooth and wrinkly peas, and the Manhattan Project's creation of the atomic bomb. Such discoveries and inventions have led some to conclude that human beings are the ultimate source of knowledge, wisdom, and power and that a belief in God is irrational. Suffice it to say that others believe Mendel is Mendel and God is God and that a belief in God is not irrational, but rather transrational (beyond human reasoning). For these people, their relationship with God and decision to serve God is the primary driver of their joy and meaning.
POSITIVE ADAPTATION
We seek the comfort of stability and sameness, but Heraclitus' proclamation that "the only constant in life is change" rules the day. Some changes are easily overcome, but others such as the loss of a job, dissolution of a marriage and family, or death of a child are devastating and send victims free falling into a deep and dark crevasse where they come face to face with the five stages of grief described by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Effectively adapting to such turmoil is an essential skill of a life well-lived. In Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Chip Health reminds us that in the wake of change and challenges, there are always individuals and/or groups who are adapting more favorably than others. He calls these super adaptors "bright spots" and advises that the most effective way for us to deal with change is to either be a bright spot or learn from bright spots. My personal version of this practice is to maintain a "liger" (from the movie Napoleon Dynamite, "It's pretty much my favorite animal. It's like a lion and a tiger mixed, bred for its skills in magic") composed of my favorite role models for positive adaptation. When faced with high stakes stressors, I bring forth my best effort by imitating the habits that these people have used to overcome adversity.
A positive mindset also helps to maintain joy and meaning when swimming in a pond of pain. Remarkable examples of the power of mindset were the 29% of women Holocaust survivors, who when interviewed as older adults, said they had lived a good life. How could this be? Sociologist Aaron Antonovsky found that these women had an unflappable sense of coherence - a deeply held belief that despite circumstances that screamed otherwise, life was comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. Cataclysmic change also has the potential to be the catalyst of positive transformation. Based on her work with terminally ill patients, Kubler-Ross observed that suffering can fill its hosts with newfound empathy, compassion, and a deep loving concern for others. Adds Mark Thibodeaux in God's Voice Within, ". . . dark times can be breakthrough moments in our own salvation history," creating opportunities for repentance, fortitude, humility, patience, trust, self-assurance, self-confidence, and wisdom.
This principle of goodness emerging from our brokenness finds its artistic home in kintsugi, the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery by filling its fracture lines with gold. The resulting masterpiece is a moving metaphor for our capacity to adapt to suffering and emerge as more beautiful people.
Blue Zones - Live Longer, Better It's about habits
The Happy Secret to Better Work - Shawn Achor Choice trumps circumstances
Falling Upward, A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life - Richard Rohr Reconciling the two, and the importance of the transition to finding joy and meaning
Greatness Redefined - James Chuck Moving away from me to we
Enjoy Every Sandwich - Lee Lipsenthal With a shorter horizon comes clarity
The Handbook of Salutogenesis - Mittelmark et al The umbrella is big and includes a lot more than just kale
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Chuck, M.D. is a family physician in Davis, CA. His mission in life is to love God and love people. He draws on over thirty years of patient care, teaching, and leadership experience to help people find solutions to complex problems related to wellness, joy, and meaning. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley, the UCLA School of Medicine, and the family practice residency program at the UC Davis Medical Center. He can be reached at johnchuck1@gmail.com
