What we miss when we take this approach is the personal development that comes from working to solve our own problems. Each time we take the easy way out, distract ourselves with stuff, or simply don’t step up to the plate, we strip ourselves of an experience that will turn us into something more. Our pursuit of easy fixes keeps us a more limited version of ourselves.

Challenges are an essential part of life that force growth, bring excitement, and open possibilities. There is no running from them. They’ll always be there. Some things are supposed to suck—accept that and drive forth. Change how you approach the suck, and the world is brighter and more vibrant. 

This is an essential lesson. Great training and education should offer an alternate mental framework to operate from. We must study what composes success, so that we know how to get there. Once we understand ourselves, we must take action to intentionally create a happy, fulfilled life.

How Much Is Enough?

The foremost challenge in our age of abundance and constant distraction is hedonic adaptation: the tendency of people to return to a baseline level of happiness despite improvements in circumstances. Thanks to reality TV, we’ve all seen the rich and unhappy get bent out of shape when a waiter brings a “cheap” $100 bottle of wine. We scoff at them and consider ourselves so much less vain, but let’s put that into context.

If you are able to read this article, then you have access to more luxury and abundance than 99% of human history could even dream of. What’s your current problem? Bad cell phone reception? We have memory foam beds, unlimited music on demand, access to most of the world’s literature, free education, video games that let you control the NFL, Netflix, a camera built into your phone, and the ability to contact your entire social network in seconds. You can effortlessly travel thousands of miles from your home in a matter of hours, in air conditioning, while being fed a meal you had no hand in preparing. Despite all this, we are a chronically depressed nation. What gives?

Internet entrepreneur Kevin Rose calls this phenomenon “experience stretching.” He gives an example where you see the most beautiful sunset, and subsequently experience a deep sense of gratitude. The next night you bring a glass of scotch and are sure that life can’t get any better. The next night you add a cigar to go with the scotch. Wow! What an experience! Finally, the next night, you decide some moderation is in order—no scotch and no cigar. But now, you find that that original sunset has lost its luster. After stretching that original experience to bring such rapturous euphoria, you have trouble coming back. It appears you won’t be satisfied again until we bring back cigars, scotch, and add the company of a Brazilian supermodel.

Realizing this tendency in ourselves is an eye-opening revelation that we should all ponder. It has the ability to radically shift what you pursue in life and create a different perspective on what is of real value.

A Shift in Perspective

So why are we like this? Our tendency to crave more is an essential evolutionary quality. We don’t settle because our fulfillment requires growth and contribution. To grow, we must experience problems and continually fortify ourselves against the insidious death of apathy. This concept is very helpful in changing perceptions.

We need problems for growth, and growth for fulfillment, so frustrating situations become opportunities for growth. A traffic jam which once sent you on a tirade is now part of your daily patience training. Happiness comes from solving problems, and most of what we complain about are good problems. If there aren’t enough hours in a day, a) you like what you do, and b) this is your impetus to learn time management and prioritization. If your wife wants to spend more time with you, a) you’re loved, and b) you have an opportunity to create new shared interests. If you’re tired of feeling tired and don’t like the extra insulation you’ve added, you’ve got momentum to start a lifestyle change that could create a far healthier future for you and your kids. Look for opportunities for growth, and the world becomes rich.

While the dissatisfaction of hedonic adaptation has a role, there are also things we can do to live with more appreciation. The answer isn’t that we should feel guilty or avoid pleasures in life. I want you to be in the moment and suck the marrow out of life. But creating awareness of your own tendency to need more to be happy takes intentional training and focus.

Train Your Perception

Skewed perspective is not a new phenomenon. The first-century philosopher Seneca wrote about it in his letter, “On Festivals and Fasting.” Seneca, a very wealthy Roman, suggested taking a few days a year where “you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest of fare… saying to yourself the while: ‘is this the condition that I feared?’” There is a reset in perspective that comes from occasional, short self-denial challenges.

Seneca’s solution for hedonic adaptations was days of self-denial each month. Many religions have offered similar approaches with seasons and days of fasting. Rather than full days each month, however, what about daily self-imposed rules? This is a similar method to what most healthy people do in life. They make sustainable lifestyle changes and follow rules that allow control, productivity, and happiness.

• A great healthy rule would be to give up added sugar except one day a week.
• You could save yourself money and overabundance of useless stuff if you made a purchasing rule: any leisure item you want to buy goes on a list and cannot be bought for a full month. At the end of the month, you’ll find most items get cut.
• Most people constantly sabotage their productive streaks with email and social media checking. Set a rule that you can only check email at 12:30 and 4:30 each day.

For great success in training, in work, in relationships, and in life, the primary prerequisite is your perceptions and beliefs. Education should alter how we perceive the world. Education should change our lens and offer tools that create possibilities. A growth mindset and a trained perception are the most important variables influencing your happiness and ability to persevere towards a goal. Yet we offer our kids so little on the subject. Beliefs and perceptions are what we must target. Students must understand the pitfalls of their tendencies, and what actions they can take to create better mindset. Change your perception, and you change your life.

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To some, Pema Chödrön is known as sort of a spiritual master, while others would perhaps classify her works and philosophy as self-help. However, unlike what you hear from the vast majority of self-help experts out there, her philosophy is about facing our suffering versus trying to avoid the pain that causes it. Her philosophy (and that of Buddhism) is about leaning into pain versus avoidance of it.

Fellow Buddhist, Thich Nhat Hahn, is perhaps even better known and cut from the same cloth philosophically. Hahn reminds us that “People have a hard time letting go of their suffering,” and “Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.” Chödrön and Hahn might have vocal supporters and avid followers but their voices are drowned out by the much more popular self-help mantras du jour – “Yes you can, dream it, and believe it, Have fun, and you have the power!”

The Self-Help and Fitness Industries

The self-help movement, like the fitness and wellness industry, has seen increasing interest and popularity in recent decades. Simply put, people are searching for answers to their unhappiness or their expanding waistlines. Every once in a while Oprah will have some new self help author on and, lo and behold, it sweeps the nation by storm. Anyone remember The Secret? It seems Americans love the self-help sector, and it’s any wonder while we are increasingly unhappy country. Don’t take my word for it. According to the Happy Planet Index, our nation ranks 150th in happiness among the worlds’ nations.

Indeed, to combat our growing discomfort (and weight gain), Americans spent $11 billion in 2008 on self-improvement books, CDs, seminars, coaching, and stress-management programs – a 13.6% increase from 2005, according to Marketdata Enterprises. Closely correlated to the self-help sector is our very own fitness industry, which despite economic downturns in recent years, has continued to see strong growth. This also stems in large part from our collective dissatisfaction – from obesity to the sharp rise in correlated health issues from our weight gain.

While it’s interesting and impressive to note the gains in certain industry sectors and some of the successful products, authors, and businesses within these sectors, the larger question looms: is it working? Are people happier? Despite the growth of the fitness industry, are people healthier? I think we know the answers.

The fitness industry and the self-help industry have largely come together to tell us that what we need is a large dose of good old positive thinking. In her book Bright Sided, Barbara Ehrenreich talks at length about our nation’s insatiable appetite for positive thought. Ehrenrecih points out how this positive thinking permeates our culture, from the corporate boardroom to the cancer fighting industry. Hard to argue with positive thinking, right? No one likes a Debbie Downer! Nike sure has sold a lot of shoes reminding people to “Just Do It.” I like the positive approach myself, but one thing the Buddhists might remind us of, is that the positive is not the absence of the negative or pain, it is facing it. As a coach once said to me, “Courage is not the absence of fear, it is the mastery of it.”

Back to Buddhism and Fitness

Another quotation that stuck out to me from the same interview was from famed Buddhist philosopher, Shantideva. The statement read, “We (who are like senseless children) shrink from suffering but love its causes.” In responding to this statement, Chödrön commented that no one likes to suffer, but we go about getting happy the wrong way. We go about it by distracting ourselves, which in true irony actually perpetuates our pain and suffering.

It is, of course, natural to hope to minimize our suffering as anyone would rightfully want to do. However, we cannot avoid pain in life and it is only in facing it that we can move beyond it. In my estimation, much of what we see in the fitness and wellness industry is about giving people pleasant distractions. Processed diet food that is “healthier” than processed junk food is one such example of a distraction that actually compounds a problem instead of providing sustainable change.

What we need to tell people in the fitness industry is that we need to face our fears, answer the difficult questions – like why am I unhappy, fat, sedentary, and so forth. It is only in facing these answers and in the discomfort of moving a sedentary body that we can succeed with lasting results. As far as I can tell, the Buddhists would agree and suggest we minimize distractions, sit with pain, and become friends with it.

It’s also okay and essential to accept not having all of the answers and just commit to the process. Real answers evolve from the openness to not having to have them. In our land of rigid, black-and-white thinking, such concepts don’t seem to always resonate. It seems we want something concrete that immediately makes us feel good, no matter what. We want the first step of exercise to be easy and fun or the diet food we eat to taste good. The Buddhist philosophy is that feeling good is a practice, rather than some sort of distraction or simple will power of positive thinking.

I have often wondered what a gym would look like without all of the TVs, loud music, and fancy machines laden with bells and whistles – all of which are meant to distract. What would happen if we had to exercise without such distractions? Might we have to face ourselves?

I have had actually this experience in the martial arts. Save perhaps a little background meditative-like music, the focus of training in the martial arts is about being present in the moment rather than escaping it. If a punch or a kick is coming toward your head you want to make darn sure you aren’t distracted. This is the real reason I love the martial arts. It isn’t about the punches or the kicks. It’s about the mindfulness. The martial arts are about facing the pain and the discomfort versus finding a way away from it. I have found the same to be true in my life as an actor and writer. Creativity also stems often from a place of pain, suffering, and uncertainty.

Profound change and success in and around our journeys in health and wellness come from embracing and facing that same place. As Pema Chödrön said, “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.”

References:

1. Ehrenreich, Barbara 2009, Bright Sided Metropolitan Books

2. Melanie, Linder “What people are still willing to pay for” Forbes , January 2009

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

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