by Ruby Wax
Much later, with the advent of kings and kingdoms, people didn’t question their place on the God-approved hierarchical ladder. The king was the cherry on the pie, his court the whipped cream, then waaaaay below was the rest of society and the bottom crust were the peasants. They knew their lot: to be down in the mud planting some bulbs or baling hay. No peasant suffered from low self-esteem because they knew they were the lowest of the low with no chance of an upgrade. There’s a certain satisfaction in knowing you can’t go any lower.
Calling Dr Freud
Then Freud came along and said that everything was our fault and we should pay people like him to root out our id or wild-man tendencies. He was the first one to say that our problems came from our deep unconscious, which, to this day, no one can find, but we all know it’s there. It’s like the Black Hole of Calcutta of our Souls.
We could take control and find peace but only if we paid a lot of money and lay on a sofa for years talking in a stream of consciousness while someone behind us took notes. The problem was we found out that everything is our fault. Not Zeus’s. Not Jesus’s. Not nobody’s but ours. The Jews were right, we’re all guilty.
And now to the twenty-first century, the century of the self, where it’s all about me (well, not just about my me, about your me too). The word ‘individualism’ took its first curtain call in America in the sixties, and the culture of narcissism began. Our suffering is directly related to our self-involvement; that sense of never having enough and demanding what we want when we want it, which is now.
We believe we’re in charge of our destiny. I was told when I was young that I could climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every rainbow … well, you know how the song goes. How wrong that advice was. You can climb and ford as much as you want, you are not going to find your dream. If we believe this babble from The Sound of Music, it will only lead to heartache … and irritable bowel syndrome.
Today, we’re at the zenith of the ‘each man for himself’ age, and this is the source of our discontentment. We’re on a constant search for who we can blame for this unhappiness, so what we do now is pick on someone of a different colour, religion or ethnic background. We’ve lost any sense of community and that was the glue that held us together in the first place. Inclusion is the condition where humans flourish best.
Today’s Trade-offs
I don’t want to be a party pooper about the success of the human race but, trade-off wise, things are out of kilter. Today, more people die of overeating than of starvation. In 2010, malnutrition and famine killed about 1 million people but obesity killed 3 million. More people will die because there is too much salt in their diet than in any contemporary conflict. More people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined. We are now our own biggest threat. We still haven’t grasped the fact that there never will be an end to craving for ‘stuff’ because, no matter how much we acquire, we will always lose it, or it will rust and disintegrate, just like we all will someday. We forget that we are all biodegradable. Wanting more is what’s making us sick.
Wanting something is different from chasing a goal. It’s that niggling, agitated feeling that we haven’t got what we’re after. Goals are biologically motivated. No one ran over vast terrains or climbed mountains for fun, they ran and climbed to find food. Now what’s with us? Triathlon runners? Give me a break. Explain to me what their purpose is in the modern world when all they do is sit behind a desk for a living? I know a little jog is healthy but rehearsing for Iron Man? Please. You’re never going to have to swim the Nile, run over the Rockies and bicycle the length of the Amazon, believe me. This is all filed under ‘wanting’, as it serves no purpose other than getting enlarged pecs, and that does not affect our survival in any way.
In the past, we lived for spare time and time off. Now, we live to get things done faster and more efficiently. A few decades ago, we’d meander over to an answering or fax machine and respond to the messages in our own time; we didn’t have to answer anything if we didn’t feel like it. You could send a pigeon back with a note, but if the other guy didn’t get it you could always say it got lost or shot. Now, if you don’t answer an email within four seconds of it arriving, people think you’ve dropped them and will probably delete you from their contacts. This yanks our primitive fear-chain of being dumped and made tribeless.
People used to leave the office behind when they went home. Now, thanks to emails and smartphones, we never leave the office. The Japanese have come up with a whole new fatal illness called karoshi, death from overwork; our ancestors would spin in their graves if they heard about that. Money used to mean you could only spend what you had in the bank but now, credit cards have flung the spending floodgates open wide. We used to shop until the stores shut, but these days they never close and, if they do, we go online. You don’t even have to leave home, you can shop in bed.
Back in our prehistoric past, after a hard day’s killing and rooting around, we’d retire to the fire. This habit of sitting around the fire continued until recently and was only replaced in the fifties, when we started watching TV. You would still be together, but talking and reflecting were left out of the equation. Today, we’re not even sitting on the same sofa or staring at the same square of glass, we’re all lost in our own private screens, unaware that there’s even a fire to sit around.
In 2014, in a research study, a group of students was asked to sit quietly and reflect for ten to twenty minutes. They were hooked up to a machine that administered mild electric shocks and were told that if and when they got bored they should press the button and give themselves a shock. One guy did this 120 times over 20 minutes. About two thirds of all the male students and one third of the females pressed the button at least once. They found the experience of sitting and being quiet so unpleasant they preferred a shock to break up the anguish of doing nothing but thinking. The experiment demonstrates how easily we give in to any distraction, however disturbing it might be. It stops us from having to confront any of our thoughts or feelings. This is probably why so many of us choose to do extremely challenging things, just to keep our minds occupied, like buying and building Ikea furniture. Thousands of books tell us how to have a more peaceful, undisturbed life but, in truth, very few people want to have one.
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Thoughts
Don’t let me give the impression that thinking is bad – on the contrary: you wouldn’t be able to read this book if you didn’t think, let alone find your shoes in the morning. But our problem with thinking is that we can’t distinguish between the thoughts that are helpful and those that drive us nuts. The deal is that when we have a tangible challenge, whether it’s figuring out the speed of light or finding Hoover bags, someone, somewhere, will come up with a solution. But we will never fathom our emotionally motivated thoughts about why we aren’t younger/richer/happier/more gifted. Thinking about these things only leads us down the rabbit hole of rumination and sleepless nights.
‘What are thoughts?’ I hear you ask. Are they products of this thing we call imagination? Let me be the first to tell you that imagination is a physical reality and not an elusive thought bubble in your brain. Yup, even when you imagine something, a physical and biological occurrence is happening in your brain and body.
As soon as we created language, we could think in words and sentences. The brain uses the same regions for talking out loud as it does when you speak to yourself in your mind. When you sing a song to yourself, you’re using the same auditory cortex as if you were hearing it in the external world. The same thing goes for when you picture a scene in your mind: you’re using the same visual cortex as when you actually see something.
We like to think that our thoughts are who we are; we imagine our head to be a giant computer. We are the stars in our own reality shows and everyone else is a bit player. Even though we know other people have their own shows and opinions, deep inside, we feel it’s because they’re deluded and not so bright. This is usu
ally why we smirk and roll our eyes when other people give their opinions. We sometimes forget – everyone is watching a different ‘me’ channel.
‘I think therefore I am,’ Descartes wrote, which I always thought was clever of him. But it turns out he was wrong. You are not your thoughts, you’re a consolidation of millions of processes, none of which you’re aware of. In a single day, we grow 40 trillion new cells and 40 trillion die. Who comes up with these numbers? I’ve often wondered. While I’m at it, I might make up some too. Okay, in your lifetime, you will have grown 8.2 miles of fingernails and filled 561 ton-barrels of urine. Impressed? And all this is happening while you’re choosing a carpet, blissfully unaware of all the comings and goings inside you. Nothing in you ever stops working. There’s never a day off until the final curtain so it turns out it’s more like ‘I am, therefore I think.’
What you are is much bigger than your thoughts. In fact, thoughts make up only about 1 per cent of what’s going on inside your brain. The other 99 per cent of the mental caboodle you’re unaware of and haven’t got the bandwidth to ever know. Your brain is too busy to bother with thoughts because it’s having to sort out about 11 million bits of information per second. It’s a miracle we get any mental information at all with those statistics. There are a few things we’re aware of: for example, we know when we have to go to the bathroom. I would say that’s not incredibly impressive or earth-shattering; squirrels can do that.
Bees
To help you with this concept, picture your thoughts being manufactured by a single queen bee sitting in her larvae in your brain (for those of you who are new to neuroscience, there’s not an actual bee in your brain). Around her are waiter, room service, maid, construction worker, valet parking and plumber bees. Okay, now imagine that in your brain there are also bees in charge of your actions and thoughts. Say some of them are watching films of coffee in your visual department; others are manufacturing the smell of coffee in your smell department; and the movement bees are manipulating your feet towards a Starbucks. The queen thinks she wants coffee but she’s deluded, it’s all the bees working in their separate departments sending in their votes which motivate her to go for the latte. There is no one bee that makes the decision, it’s whichever department buzzes the loudest.
So when you say, ‘I think I’ll have a dry skinny double cappuccino ginger and pumpkin blend picked in Nicaragua by eco-friendly slaves,’ you’ll get and drink the coffee while some bees are already putting together plans for a chocolate muffin. Even though you/the queen will be (arrogantly) certain that you came up with the plan, there are actually a million bees working ahead of you.
It turns out that, when we do anything, it’s not because we had a thought and then acted on it, it’s the other way around. If either of these thoughts came into your head, say, 1. I have to buy this shoe because it’s on sale and there will never be another shoe like it at that price or 2. I think I’ll devote my life to saving Armenian turtles, you may think they have just popped into your head, but the choice has already been made by the 99 per cent bit of you you’re not aware of. Thoughts are just the tip of the iceberg. If you purchase the shoes or air vac a turtle to safety, it’s already been decided. So much for free will. Our thoughts are like hitch-hikers to the rest of the brain.
For you neuroscience nuts, here’s the scientific explanation of the activity in the brain. For the rest of you, you don’t have to read the following if it gets too complicated – just stick with the bee metaphor.
More Advanced Information
You are physiologically equipped with various sensory receptors which receive all incoming information from the environment. If you didn’t have these sensors or electrical impulses sending information to your brain, you wouldn’t even be aware that there is an external world. The brain lives in total darkness until it gets a message. Go down a manhole and sit there – that’s what your brain experiences until it gets some stimuli. The stimulus it receives is nothing more than energy molecules: photons entering our eyes create vision, vibrations through the air enter our ears and create the sounds we hear, and only because certain chemicals land on our tongue do we experience taste. All our experiences are nothing but electrochemical energy, and that’s what we call reality. Sorry to reduce you to a telephone switchboard, but that’s who you are. Bummer, or what?
When you pick up a signal through your eyes, ears, nose, mouth or, really, any orifice of choice, to enable you to experience any of these senses, various areas in your brain give their input to create the illusion that it’s a single sensation, as in taste, smell, touch (see the bees above). Thoughts are not solid things, they’re fleeting events, always flowing and changing. Thousands of experiences play in your head, stick around for a second and are then replaced.
This should give some of you folks who worry too much a sense of liberation because, if there’s no ‘you’, there are no problems. You are so much bigger than your narrative. There is no definitive story of you, so don’t try to create one. (Mindfulness will teach you this.)
I don’t want to namedrop, but even Plato had a hunch about this. He knew that we can’t trust our senses and that what we see is more like a shadow on the back of a cave wall. He completely agrees with me … even though there’s a slight age difference.
What are We Really?
First, let me clear one thing up. The ‘you’ who you think you are isn’t something that’s fixed or solid. ‘You’ are more like a pile of sand pelted by blasting winds which are, metaphorically, zillions of bits of information sculpting and re-sculpting your neural networks. So the ‘you’ who started reading this sentence will be a slightly different ‘you’ by the time you finish it. You’re shape-shifting millisecond by millisecond. It’s memory that keeps your sense of self cohesive, meaning that you don’t wake up a feminist one day and the next become a clown.
Hurrah! We don’t have to search for meaning any more! Some people dig around to find out who they are, like they’re looking for the toy in the Christmas cracker of their psyche. I wouldn’t read anything into dreams either. In my opinion, they are just a random grab-bag of sleep detritus. Some people make a profession out of helping their patients piece together bits of rubbish from their dreams, but to me it’s like trying to read your future by looking at what you left in the loo. (Forgive me, Freud.)
My Story
I have dreams that would get me hospitalized, if I took them seriously. I once went to a shrink to help me analyse them. I told him I had a dream about a cow who takes me to school on my first day. An elephant shows up, which I find even more embarrassing than the cow. Then the elephant turns into a balloon with a baseball bat and bats a ball into the outfield. Everyone involved boos, especially the cow. Get this, I was told by the shrink, the cow represents my mother, for reasons unknown, but maybe because a cow has udders and so does my mother, in a way. The elephant represents my father, with his dominant, dictatorial ways, which were daunting. My father then turns into a balloon (?) and the ball he hits into the outfield symbolizes me. The shrink told me this suggested that my father didn’t hold out much hope for me ever making a home run; anything I try to achieve, my ball will always end up in the bleachers. And voilà! I was charged £120 for that evaluation. I felt much better (not).
Fifty Shades of Critical Thinking
Above, I’ve explained that our internal thinking is a small part of who we are, but it might be of interest to some of you to know why we think mostly negative thoughts. These days, around 80 per cent of our thoughts are negative. But why?
We humans don’t use instinct as animals do. We have to figure things out with our brains. True, when we were in our fish phase in the sea, we got the flippers without having to think too much about it, but we didn’t stay in the water long (don’t ask me why). For some reason, we crawled on to land and, suddenly, we needed legs. Sadly, those legs didn’t help us out when running away from our friend the sabre-toothed tiger, so we needed to make spears, then fire, and
by this point things got so complicated that, if we were ever going to stay alive, we would need to start thinking. This new thing called thinking meant we could use abstraction, sequencing, prediction, imagination and make decisions. Along with these ritzy new features came worrying about the future, churning up the past and the thing that makes us crazy today: rumination.
So much of our language was built around warning us of dangers (which really existed), and these messages became internalized. So what started off in the past as something helpful, like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to be eaten or caught in another Ice Age, without any gloves,’ has become, ‘I’m going to get a million dislikes/no followers/rejected on Tinder/lose my job/girlfriend/looks/money/life.’ Our inclination is to lean towards the negative, so the very thing that once saved us now drains and disables us, keeping us on a treadmill of worry.
If we receive good news, we can always think about it tomorrow, whereas bad news has to be dealt with immediately or it’s curtains. Bad experiences are fast-tracked to brain central; from this, the concept of ‘once bitten, twice shy’ was created. Rick Hanson, a very good-looking and smart neuroscientist says, ‘The brain is Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.’ I know this metaphor in every cell of my being because I am almost 98 per cent Velcro.
My Story
When I was in my twenties, I got into the Royal Shakespeare Company and felt that out-of-body experience with the accompanying stab of joy in my heart. I told everyone I knew that I had got in, although many didn’t believe me: I was a terrible actress. For the RSC audition, I did pull off one of the great auditions of all time, presenting a monologue from Antigone with full saliva-spitting and deep, sobbing verve. Maybe the people auditioning me thought that this was normal behaviour for the Greeks. I mean, when you find out your brother was eaten by his aunt, what do you expect? (I didn’t read the rest of the play, but I know something bad happened.) I saw Trevor Nunn (at the time the artistic director of the RSC) out of the corner of my eye. He had been eating an ice-cream cone when I began and, when I’d finished, his tongue was still out but the ice cream was down his front. Anyway, I got in and was offered the role of a wench in Love’s Labour’s Lost. I was ecstatic.
