If You Can’t Change the World, Change Your Feelings – Arthur C. Brooks

Everyone, even the most privileged among us, has situations that they would like to change. At the beginning of the sixth century the Roman philosopher Boethius wrote: “One has money in abundance, but one must be ashamed of the humility of one’s birth; this other is famous for his lineage, however, imprisoned by the narrowness of his means, he would prefer to be less famous, but richer. The other is surrounded by both of these goods, but he spends a life without a wife ”.

Think about your life and something that causes you discomfort, worry, or sadness. For example, you find it difficult to feel interest or satisfaction in your job. Or maybe your friendships don’t give you much and you feel lonely or alone. How can the situation be improved? You might say, “I should get a move on, look for another job and meet new people.” In other words, you should change the outside world and make it a better place for you.

It’s not easy though, is it? Getting a move on, changing jobs, and making new friends can be impossible at this stage in your life. And then you would always have the doubt of carrying your problems with you because, in short, you can’t get away from yourself.

Margin of freedom
Now I’ll tell you a secret that can help you. There is a space between the conditions that surround you and the way you react to them. In this space you have a margin of freedom. You can choose to try to reshape the world or you can start by changing the way you react to it.

Sometimes getting out of situations you find yourself in is difficult but absolutely necessary. This is the case in situations of abuse or violence. Other times it’s quite easy: if you die of sleep every morning, start by going to sleep earlier in the evening.

In the gray area between these extremes, however, fighting reality can be either impossible or incredibly ineffective. You may have been diagnosed with a chronic disease for which there is no promising cure. Maybe your partner left you against your will and you can’t get him to go back. Or again, you like your job but your boss doesn’t and no one will give you a new boss.
In these kinds of situations, changing the way you feel can actually be much easier than changing the actual reality, even if this may seem unnatural to you.

Your emotions can seem out of control at best, and this feeling gets worse in times of crisis, which is exactly when changing those emotions could be really good for you. Part of the biology may be to blame. Negative emotions like anger and fear activate the amygdala, which raises your alertness to threats and improves your ability to identify and avoid dangers. In other words, stress causes you to struggle, run away or be paralyzed, not to think. What would be a prudent reaction in these moments? Let’s consider the various options available. This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view: half a million years ago taking the time to manage your emotions would have turned you into a tiger’s lunch.

Harmful strategies
In the modern world, however, stress and anxiety are usually chronic, not episodic, conditions. It is likely that the amygdala no longer needs to help you defeat the tiger without asking your conscious brain for permission. In fact, you use it to manage non-lethal problems that bother you throughout the day. Even if you don’t have tigers to defeat, you can’t relax in your cave as the emails keep piling up.

It is therefore not surprising that stress often induces maladaptive coping strategies in modern life: for example, abusing drugs and alcohol, ruminating on the origins of stress, harming oneself or blaming oneself. These responses not only do not give relief in the long run, but they can aggravate our problems with addiction, depression or growing anxiety. When these kinds of coping strategies don’t help, a person can give up managing their negative emotions and try to change the outside world.

The thinkers of antiquity recognized this difficulty but were convinced that with the right tools we can be able to manage our reactions effectively. Buddhism postulates that our minds are usually but not inherently unbalanced; everything is about building new habits of thought. Similarly, the Stoics held that human reason, practiced with diligence, can prevail over impulsive emotions. These ideas (especially the last one) have inspired modern schools of psychotherapy such as rational-emotional behavioral therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, which aim to create practical strategies to change our reactions to negative situations in our life, and therefore to be happier.

Four steps
If you have evaluated what worries you and have decided that managing your negative emotions is a better strategy than trying to change the world around you, you can follow four steps to achieve a happier state of mind.

If you observe your emotions as if they belong to another person, you can give yourself better advice. After all, you would never advise a friend who is anxiously awaiting the outcome of a medical exam to spend all day mulling it over and then getting drunk. In order to observe oneself, it is necessary to pay attention to what one is feeling at that particular moment and to approach one’s emotions with detached curiosity.

Let’s say you are sick of working from home all day, with endless meetings on Zoom and no real human contact. Instead of fantasizing about your possible resignation, take some time to dissect your boredom and discomfort. At what time of day do they get worse? How long after starting a meeting does your desire to run away screaming overflows? Write down situations in which you are feeling down in a journal, noting the time of day and the activity you are doing. Then consider how you could alter small aspects of your routine to improve your mood. Following this procedure during the coronavirus pandemic closures, I began scheduling virtual meetings while out for a walk. This made a big difference.

The idea that you need to change the circumstances you are in if you are sad is based on the assumption that your negative feelings need to be eradicated. In many cases, negative emotions can be debilitating and therefore require treatment, as in the case of depression or clinical anxiety. In most cases, however, negative feelings are an integral part of a full human experience; erasing them would make life grayer. Research also shows that negative emotions and experiences can help you find meaning and purpose in life.

In the journal we talked about in step one, evaluate the things you can’t realistically alter and the emotions they cause you. Ask yourself what you are learning about yourself from each of those feelings and how this might make you grow.

Once, as a young man, I told my father during a phone call that I was thinking of quitting my job. “Why?” He asked me. “Because it doesn’t make me happy,” I replied. He paused for a long time and finally said to me: “What makes you so special?”. My problem – but it’s a fairly common problem – was that I had set totally unreasonable expectations about how happy the world was supposed to make me.

Quietly ask yourself if you are asking the world for something that the world cannot or does not want to give you. If so, maybe you are looking in the wrong place for your bliss. For example, I strongly believe in creating happier jobs, but I constantly advise people not to base their happiness on a particular job. Nor should you assume that all your happiness can come from a single love affair, a single material object, a single activity. You need a “portfolio” approach, balancing faith or philosophy, family, friendships and work to derive your successes and put yourself at the service of others.

A study by Insead, a French business school, shows that people who see themselves as victims of circumstances feel they have no responsibility for them. They are also more likely to become torturers themselves, harming people who try to help them. One way to break this vicious circle is to help others voluntarily and without payback. Putting yourself at the service of others is one of the most effective ways to increase your happiness. Not only that: it is very difficult to keep standing at the same time the idea of ​​being a victim and a person who helps.

If you feel lonely at work, find someone who is probably in pain like you and keep them company. If you have health problems, look for other people like you and offer them some listening or help. By helping others you will help yourself too.

Boethius, who reminded us how everyone suffers, knew a lot about problems. In fact he wrote the words I quoted above from a prison cell awaiting death in 524 AD, accused of treason by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric. A crime of which he was probably not guilty but for which he was actually killed in the end.

Boethius could not change his appalling conditions. But he could change his attitude towards them, and that’s exactly what he did. “It is so true, therefore, that nothing is sad, if you do not consider it as such, and vice versa, every fate is happy for those who bear it with a good heart”. Doing just this teaching and acting accordingly is one of the biggest secrets to increasing well-being, but it doesn’t have to be a secret. If Boethius did it, you can too.

(Translation by Giusy Muzzopappa)