Yes, it’s really tricky to know when we’re evading, why, and what. I think it has a lot to do with the multidimensional nature of consciousness, and how complex our minds are. We can definitely make progress with what we’ve got though!

Thanks for the kind invitation to the Morelife Yahoo group, I’ll let you know if I have anything to contribute. :)

All the best finishing your book, what a great topic to explore. As well as a topic that we need more books on!

I’m glad to hear you appreciated my comment.

Your extension on my thought: “many of these ‘positive affects’ are actually masking ‘more negative affects,’ as a sort of distracting or even numbing-out defense mechanism”, I agree with. I have heard people call it “evasion” or “evading reality, when they become conscious that some problem or internal conflict exists, but they choose not to expend the effort, and focus their mind, to resolve it. The psychotherapist and author Nathaniel Branden discusses the phenomenon of “evasion” in quite some detail in his books, such as “The Psychology of Self-Esteem”. It sounds like you’d be interested in these, if you haven’t already read them.

I also agree when you state that it would be in one’s best interest (maximizing happiness) to define, understand, and solve what is bothering one, rather than ‘evade’ it with some other activity.

Human denial is definitely a complex onion. For me, while I pay close attention to whether I’m doing it, it’s often difficult for me to tell. That is, I try to be extremely honest with myself, but even so, I find that sometimes I talk myself into things I don’t really believe (a seemingly strange possibility, to me).

I’m also glad to hear you being inspired by investing one’s time into long-term beneficial activities. I am in the process of writing a book on this subject (although it is currently more like a long series of brainstorms and essays). I found your having written a book to be interesting and I could identify with it, since I, too, think I have a lot of interesting ideas to discuss and share with others, and have thought of a book as a medium in which I could communicate them.

Finally, I’m glad to hear you visited http://www.selfsip.org. If you found this site interesting, you might also be interested in the public discussion at the Morelife Yahoo group. Given your inquisitiveness, intellectual honesty, and interest in self-improvement, I think the discussions there may be of great interest to you (and it would be of interest to me to hear your thoughts on the posts at this group).

The Morelife Yahoo group can be found here: http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/morelife/

Thanks for the consideration of your reply and feedback, Melissa.

You are definitely onto something with many enjoyable activities having “accumulated positive affect by little-to-no conscious decision-making on the part of the person.” And even further, many of these “positive affects” are actually masking “more negative affects,” as a sort of distracting or even numbing-out defense mechanism.

Which is really ironic when you think about it, because why would people want to continuously tune-out their problems and pains — that they need to attend to in order to fix problems and maximize their happiness — when they could be partaking in genuinely gratifying and more substantial activities, that aren’t used as compulsions?

Ah, but then human denial is a complex onion. :P

I’m really inspired by your mindful look at how you want to invest your free time into your long-term health and well-being. It seems like there are always ways to sharpen our optimization of time, energy, and our other limited resources, and then, to figure out what optimization even means to us.

But there is a HUGE difference between understanding that potential, and simply playing video games, or going shopping for that matter.

I took a look at Paul and Kitty’s webpage, a lot of thought-stimulating information that broadens the concept of optimization and “lifetime happiness.” Thanks for sharing.

More specifically, I agree that emotions are more-or-less automatic valuation responses to a stimulus, and that those responses can be changed by conscious thought, reasoning, consideration, and learning.

I thought you might be interested in an idea I’ve thought a lot about recently that is related to this post. My idea is related to the phenomenon that many people seemingly stop learning new things and exploring new experiences as they progress in age. My idea is a hypothesis that attempts to explain this: that people, during their, perhaps, first 20-30 years of life, accumulate positive associations with a set of activities (i.e. the “bar scene” or “video games” or “reading fiction novels”, etc.). Thus, as a person advances in age, they learn that they have a fairly small selection of activities they can participate in to experience happiness.

If a person has a reliable number of activities with which they’ve accumulated what I call “positive affect” which result in their enjoyment, they cease experiencing new things. That is, they consciously or unconsciously conclude “why should I try something new, when I’m pretty sure one of ‘the usual’ activities will make me happy?”.

While all well and good, there is one aspect of this situation that concerns me (both for myself, and for the optimization of happiness for other people). This concern is that many enjoyable activities have accumulated positive affect by little-to-no conscious decision-making on the part of the person. That is, all of us have experiences that were “managed” for us by our parents, teachers, and caregivers. Thus, to some extent, I think we have all “inherited” enjoyable activities from our youth – activities which, while enjoyable, may not be *the best* for us (i.e. drinking a dangerous amount of alcohol in a social scene, avoiding interacting people because we were picked on in school and are now shy, etc.).

I am now (and have been for about 2 years) in the process of consciously, and deliberately re-evaluating those activities I find enjoyable. As I discover alternative activities that can both be enjoyable *and* result in some possible future benefit to me (i.e. optimizing my happiness), I am replacing “old, enjoyable activities” with “new, enjoyable activities”. For example, I used to play video games in my youth, spending too much time on them (for my liking). However, in the past few years I have developed the habit of reading about health, diet, exercise, and longevity in the evenings while eating dinner or relaxing, rather than playing video games. I think it is intensely interesting to read about how the body works, and all the various chemicals, proteins, and pathways that are involved with life, much as I found video games to be intensely entertaining. However, my time spent studying biology, diet, exercise, and biochemistry is more likely to result in a future benefit to me, than is my experiences of playing video games (by my evaluation). That is, with accumulated knowledge of biology et al., I can better take care of my health (or the health of others), enabling me to enjoy my life to a greater extent or degree.

The central point of my personal story above is that I *changed my habit* and tried something new – I decided to read about health one evening, rather than play video games.

In summary, it seems to me that mindful exploration of the activities of existence, and full, long-term consideration of the implications of engaging in them, is required to optimize one’s lifetime happiness.

For a more lengthy discussion on lifetime happiness, and a possible mode of social organization to optimize it, visit my friends’, Paul and Kitty’s, webpage http://www.selfsip.org

You may have already read it, but I think the vulnerability is a strength as well, because it allows us even more flexibility to learn and change, known in brain science as neuroplasticity.

Thanks for sharing that LeDoux link. I am familiar with the concept of reconsolidation and that eyewitness accounts are statistically not very reliable, have not looked into it much beyond that, but hope to in the future. I think you are definitely onto something about this being key in dysfunctional conditioning.

This is actually another reason why journaling is so so important in tracing those beliefs. When I go through things I’ve written about honestly, say a year ago — I can’t deny that I actually believed those things at that time because they are written on the page. Of course, looking back I can see how dysfunctional they were, but at the time it was all subconscious. Without the journal entry to jog a memory, it could remain hidden for years.

It’s like arguing. ;) You know how easy it is to remember “what you said” as a completely different version from what your opponent “remembers”? Well, recording the exchange can help straighten things out. :) Just as journaling helps to record the raw emotions and streams of consciousness.

The more that I learn about the constructive nature of the brain, the more I am reminded of Morpheus’s quote… and like you say, how the human mind is *fertile* ground for mindful contructs! :D

I think it was the first time that it really hit me how emotionally vulnerable we are. Emotions seem so “real” and “authentic” throughout childhood, yet… the above Morpheus quote…

On a tangent– have you heard about the 2000 discovery by Joseph LeDoux? In a nutshell, he discovered “each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it.”

http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_1.html

I kind of think that this is how we condition ourselves into dysfunctional beliefs– by thinking that we are accessing memories which are really just mostly imagined by us. Our memories of our memories become so diluted from reality that we make up any old thing we want to make up about our past! Fertile ground for dysfunctional beliefs (or mindful contructs!) :)