Practising Happiness: Why Is It So Hard To Live What We Know?

This post about practising happiness is the second point raised in Brian’s questions. The question of how to apply what you know.

I talked a while back about the 10,000 hour principle. The idea that to become a true expert at something takes 10,000 hours of practice. That’s true in every area of life.

Professional athletes work every day for years to condition themselves and their mental co-ordination so that on a set occasion they can bring out the very best performance.

Musicians and artists spend years honing their skills and getting in the right emotional state to perform at their highest levels.

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Becoming skilled at life takes just the same practice.

We walk into situations with our attention scattered in ten different ways, with our hormones pulsing around us and then beat ourselves up for not being perfect.

If you want perfection, then you have to do what Olympians do in their discipline, go spend 15 years away from the world training your brain, set up some situation, prepare for it by making everything just right and then walk into the situation.

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Even then they’ll always be another level, just as every athletics record is broken eventually.

The more you practice and the more you prepare, the better you will respond. But it takes time to change habits.

Say someone of 40 years old has been responding with a certain belief, from habit. Then when you give the idea serious thought you realise that actually the belief is false. So intellectually you believe one thing, habitually though you act a different way.

I read something recently that our capacity to hold things in our heads is either lower than previously thought or is shrinking. It used to be that people could remember 7 items (+/- 2). New research suggests it might only be 4. The point is we are easily distracted from an idea by the events in our life.

Intellectual knowledge is only of any value while you are giving it attention. That’s why so many books and seminars have no effect. Because you go off and do something else and you go back to your old habits, because that’s how your brain is wired up.

So you have to consciously change directions. Again and again, until the new idea becomes more habitual than the last.

The brain works from one neuron firing to another. Imagine someone in an adventure film, being chased at full speed on rooftops and jumping from one to another. They don’t stop and wonder which is the best roof to jump on. Any roof will do, preferably the next available one.

Now when you think as you normally do, your brain will follow the path it usually takes because that’s the way it’s wired up. When we moved home a couple of years ago, I missed a couple of turn-offs because I wasn’t paying attention and I just drove the way I’d got used to driving.

So while you might intellectually be capable of being more evolved, when you’re caught up ina situation, before you know it, you’ve trod down the Ego’s path and you feel bad (jumped the same rooftops).

So to make a different chain of thoughts, a new neural pathway, you have to be able to change directions, and jump to a different rooftop. To interrupt the sequence of thoughts before they take you where they usually do

That’s why I asked everyone to put down their thoughts on the survey before and after reading the report. Because the more involved you become, the more it stains your neurology. You have to catch yourself quicker and quicker, so that it becomes an effort for your brain to think the way it used to. Then you have a new habit.

Do this a few times and that will become the default way of thinking on this topic.

There’s an idea called the Triune Brain Theory developed by Paul MacLean. His theory is that the earliest animals had a reptilian brain, then as species evolved others needed a Limbic brain, to moderate emotional responses and eventually a Neo-cortex that could handle language and abstract thought.

It is more complex than we need to go into, but if for our purposes we simplify it, it can help us to understand why we seem weak willed or fail to live up to our principles.

If your life seems to be, under threat, the Reptilian brain will send you into fight or flight and override your more evolved thought. But you don’t have to be in mortal peril. The threat of embarassment or loss will have much the same effect.

If you really, really want that sumptious chocolate cake, but know your hips say no, the emotions can make you feel you have no willpower. Really it is just your emotions overiding your logic.

So how do you prevent this happening. You have to so much want peace, happiness and growth more than that which the Ego promises that, it stains through to the core of your brain. That you hold the idea of wanting to be happier over being right, in the forefront of your mind in any circumstances.

People generally want this intellectually. But emotionally they are more tempted by the Ego. That is why allowing is so important.

When someone continually chooses the Ego over their more evolved thought and no-one interferes between their choices and the consequences, they get to link the Ego to pain. But what often happens, is that some well meaning person interferes. So any resulting pain, either gets prevented or, the person has the Interferer to blame for any negative consequences.

So you have to learn from pain. Or you can learn from other’s pain or you can review situations from your past in the light of Ego choices and the consequences. Eventually this will have a sufficient impact that you’ll link the Ego’s choices with pain and more evolved choices with pleasure.

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