The protective functions of negative emotions also help to explain why they are often more vivid and more compelling than positive emotions, and why negative emotions usually override positive emotions. A feeling of relaxed contentment can be swept away in an instant by sudden fear, anger or sadness, but the reverse seldom happens. Our minds are ‘designed’ to be more responsive to negative events precisely because these are the ones most likely to threaten our well-being.
Sadness usually occurs in response to some loss or setback, and it encourages us to behave differently. We seek to change whatever is making us sad, or we withdraw so that we are no longer exposed to it. If things are going really badly, the best option may be to give up and withdraw rather than carry on and waste time or cause further damage. And because sadness is unpleasant, we try in future to avoid situations that experience suggests might make us sad. Sadness does not feel nice, but it sometimes helps us to do the right things. Pursuing this logic still further, the writer Gwyneth Lewis has argued that even severe depression can have its hidden benefits. In her autobiographical account of her own struggles with depression, Lewis explores the idea that it forces the sufferer to reappraise their life. ‘Depression’, she wrote, ‘is a lie detector of last resort. By knocking you out for a while, it allows you to ditch the out-of-date ideas by which you’ve been living and to grasp a more accurate description of the terrain.’
Much of the sadness we all sometimes feel is social in origin; it arises from our relationships with other people. To understand why people feel happy or sad, contented or anxious, it is usually necessary to understand their personal relationships. We shall return to this theme later.
The idea that unpleasant emotions are biological defence mechanisms, akin to pain and fever, has some non-obvious implications. Numbing the pain of an injured joint can increase the risk of inflicting further damage on that joint. Similarly, taking drugs to suppress a fever can actually impede recovery from infection. We feel better, but our defences are impaired. By the same logic, blocking negative emotions with anti-anxiety drugs, tranquillizers or antidepressants might carry risks as well as benefits. It would be interesting to know, for example, whether people who routinely take antidepressants or tranquillizers have more accidents or make more bad decisions. There are reasons to think they might. For example, controlled experiments have shown that the tranquillizer diazepam (trade name Valium), which is used to treat anxiety, impairs the ability to recognise facial expressions of anger and fear. Someone who has taken diazepam is prone to mistake fear for surprise, and disgust for anger. You can imagine how this perceptual distortion, combined with the lack of anxiety, might affect their ability to respond appropriately in an aggressive social situation or an encounter with a nervous mugger.
Routinely suppressing anxiety might also have unforeseen consequences on a grander scale. In early 2000, the American psychiatrist and leading Darwinian thinker Randolph Nesse published a superbly prescient article called ‘Is the market on Prozac?’ In it, Nesse asked whether the extraordinary boom in world stock markets, which was then still in full flood, might be attributable not just to the dot-com revolution, but also to the fact that a substantial proportion of investors, brokers and dealers were taking psychoactive drugs. Was it possible, wondered Nesse, that their natural caution and anxiety were being chemically suppressed, leading to irrational optimism, overconfidence and unsustainable rises in stock values? A few months later, the vastly overinflated dot-com bubble burst. A little fear or anxiety is not such a bad thing.
FOUR Where does happiness come from?
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet (1601)
Happiness is (mostly) in the mind
Why are some people consistently happier than others? Why do we all feel happier at some times than others? Historically, there have been two contrasting schools of thought as to what makes a happy person happy. According to one view, happiness is largely a consequence of what happens to us. It depends on how many pleasant or unpleasant experiences we have, whether we succeed in satisfying our desires, how people behave towards us, how much money we earn, and so on. Set against this is the belief, common to many ancient philosophies and religions, that happiness is essentially a product of how we perceive and construe the world around us – in other words, that happiness is all in the mind and has little to do with external events.
These two very different perspectives on the causes of happiness imply two very different approaches to achieving it. If happiness reflects the world around us, then we should seek to make ourselves happy by changing the world to match our desires – for example, by acquiring pleasurable experiences, possessions, wealth, fame or power. A belief in the ability of material possessions and pleasurable experiences to create happiness is one of the driving forces behind our consumerist culture. If, on the other hand, happiness is all down to our beliefs and attitudes, then we should be able to find it by altering our perception; nothing in the world around us need change.
The alluring idea that happiness is all in the mind has a long history. More than two thousand years ago Aristotle argued that happiness depends not on the external world but on how we perceive it. And because happiness depends on how we think, it can be cultivated. In similar vein, the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who was born in the first century AD, championed a lofty indifference to the hardships and imperfections of life. ‘What upsets people’, he wrote, ‘is not things themselves, but their judgments about the things.’ Epictetus argued that the path to happiness lies in wanting what you have rather than having what you want. Many other ancient schools of thought, including the Yogi, Taoist, Zen and Buddhist traditions, similarly hold that happiness depends on freeing the mind from the malign influence of external events. Strong echoes of this time-honoured view can be found in contemporary self-help books which advise that happiness comes from positive thinking or learning to love ourselves more.
Everyday experience, however, suggests that the reality is less clear cut. Events and circumstances obviously do have some bearing on personal happiness. Most of us would feel better after eating a delicious meal, having fantastic sex, being successful at work or winning a large sum of money. Equally, we might feel downcast if we had just lost all our money, suffered a major career setback, or if a close friend had suddenly died. But events clearly cannot account for more than part of the story, because individuals can respond very differently to identical circumstances. An event that casts one person into gloom might seem trivial to another and a source of amusement to someone else.
Many people manage to be reasonably happy (in the broad sense as defined in chapter 2) despite living in dreadful circumstances. Even severe illness, disability or poverty does not inevitably condemn someone to lasting unhappiness. Research has shown that people living in conditions of extreme poverty in developing nations are sometimes considerably happier than might be expected given their grim physical circumstances. One study of slum-dwellers in Calcutta found that they derived considerable happiness from their relationships with other people. Personal relationships make a huge contribution to personal happiness, but they have little to do with wealth or material possessions. You do not have to be rich to have supportive friends and a loving family.
Similarly, many people with severe illnesses or disabilities are found to be only slightly less happy than averagely healthy people, once they have come to terms with their condition. For instance, one American study found that more than 80 per cent of people who were paralysed in all four limbs considered their lives to be average or above average in terms of happiness, and more than 90 per cent of them were glad to be alive. Another study, which assessed paralysis victims years after their injury, found that those who were receiving good social support from family and friends were about as happy as anyone else. Objectively bad events