Chapter Content
Okay, so, like, creating stories of self-growth, right? That’s what we’re talking about. I think a really good way to illustrate this is with a little story.
So, there's this guy, Ethan, right? And he was living in downtown Brooklyn, totally a city person. But, you know, when the whole pandemic thing hit, he, like, moved back upstate to quarantine with his parents. I mean, he was alone in his apartment for way too long, just felt like he hadn’t seen the sun in ages, you know? And, walking around, he only did it in the evening, but even that wasn’t enough. He was just feeling super isolated. His job, working in media, just felt, like, meaningless all of a sudden. All his friends had already left the city, and he just couldn't take it anymore. He always valued his independence, but it just wasn't worth it anymore. So he packed a bag and headed north.
Ethan, being a city boy, he didn't even have a driver's license, let alone a car. And houseplants? Forget about it! Way too much commitment. The dude was the opposite of a gardener. But, his mom, you know, started getting the garden ready, and he was surprised, like, her love of roses and all that stuff actually started to grow on him.
Fast forward a few years, and he’s totally into it. He’s basically the family's weekend gardener, the unpaid groundskeeper. He's got, like, thirty-five different kinds of daylilies planted around the yard!
And this brings me to the point. Learning something new, on your own time, for your own reasons, is a, surprisingly, a great way to, like, shake things up, you know? We think of learning as school, but it doesn't have to be. It can be anything.
You don't have to, you know, spend tons of money on sailing or golf. You can just Google "daylilies," you know? See where it takes you. The point is, trying something new is totally doable. Just, um, make sure you're doing it for the right reasons. What I mean is, are you learning it to, like, become a different person, to change how you see yourself?
And this kind of ties into this idea of the self as a system, kind of like the, uh, HVAC system in your house. It keeps track of the temperature, right? The self is similar, it collects info, compares it to the stories we tell ourselves, you know, our "temperature settings".
As we get older, we become "historians of the self," weaving our experiences into a story that makes sense to us. These stories shape our decisions. Like, maybe you have this deep-seated belief that you’re never going to be like your mother, or maybe that you're always late, or, on a happier note, that you have a particular skill.
Life stories are psychological resources. They help us make decisions and move forward. When those stories are positive, great! But they also have to be, you know, true to what you have lived. If you're going through something horrible, a super sunny version of it won't work.
Though difficult life events can shape our self-narratives in unhealthy ways, we’re wired to want two things from them. The first is self-consistency. Research shows that when we are presented with feedback that is inconsistent with our self-concept, we rush to provide evidence to restore it. We also have a deep psychological need for a favorable or positive view of ourselves. Most people want to perceive themselves as above average, you know?
So, what kind of information are we collecting with these stories? How do we use them? There's social comparison, of course, where we compare ourselves to others. We also compare different versions of ourselves over time.
Like your HVAC system, the self-system also has its heating and cooling reactors. The emotional system is the heating component, and the cognition system is the cooling one. When information is all good or all bad, our feelings and thoughts are consistent. But, when it's a mix, things can get tricky. You can feel one way but think another.
Like, imagine you've been studying for a big exam for months, and then, right before the exam, a friend shows up with a ticket to see your favorite band. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! You go. It feels amazing! But the next morning, you feel guilty about skipping studying.
You know it's possible to feel bad and have positive thoughts at the same time. The tricky part is finding the balance, you know?
And, I think this ties into what I like to call the learning paradox. Every day, students go to school to learn, but they are also, at their unhappiest. To contribute to psychological well-being, learning has to be an autonomous decision to understand something that is personally meaningful or relevant. Adults are constantly exposed to new challenges, which can require developing expertise in a domain and learning new skills.
The wisdom we accumulate as we age never stops accruing; it just ebbs and flows and changes across our life span. Learning is a choice, and you can keep choosing it. It’s important, however, to assign value to the knowledge you have accrued for it to contribute to a positive self-image.
You know, speaking of learning, there's a woman I know, Sheila. She just started playing the violin. She's in her fifties, and she was feeling a sense of emptiness as her last child was about to leave for college. So, she decided to do something for herself. She decided to learn to play the violin.
It's been over a year now, and she says it’s hard. Learning a new thing as an adult is hard! She even has a recital coming up, and she's mostly surrounded by teenagers. People tell her how "brave" she is. She just chuckles and says, "Yeah, I am brave!"
She tells me that she has long fought against feeling marginalized. She wanted to feel that she has a presence that matters, an opinion that counts, an identity outside that of a wife, a mother, or a PTA parent. When she gave up her career years ago in order to raise three children, she didn’t intend to give up any voice of her own.
The violin has given her a voice again. It's made her feel younger, more vibrant, more independent, more in control of her own life. She's learning and growing, and she loves it.
And, you know, thinking about all this, I kind of want to leave you with some questions to think about, and just listen carefully to your answers, you know? Like, if you didn’t have to work at all, how would you spend your day, your week? Who are the people in your life you would like to be more like, and why? What are the possibilities and future outcomes that scare you most, and why? How can you make changes in your life without feeling guilt?
Speaking of learning, I’ve been a professor for a while now, and I see what learning looks like every day. My students come to class to learn, and I'm still learning how to be a better teacher.
But, being a college student has changed a lot since I was one. Back then, it was about the joy of learning, not just getting a good grade. Now, many students feel like they'll fail if they can't meet their parents' expectations. This pressure causes so much stress and it detracts from the beauty of learning.
My students are so stressed about grades that I've had to find ways to make the work meaningful and help them feel like they can succeed. To do that, I had to remember how to learn myself. It was possible that my class on happiness was mostly helping to make my stressed-out striving students a little more miserable?
I changed how I taught. I started to approach every topic from the perspective of how my students could use the material in their lives. I showed YouTube videos, and I assigned TED Talks. Soon enough, there were moments in each class when the material brought tears to their eyes.
My students were listening to those lessons, and taking notes of course but they were also living those moments in their own lives. They were worrying about parental disappointment, they were mourning their lost grandparents, they were suffering the painful fear of never finding love.
I had finally figured out how to make my lessons apply to my students’ lives. Just as exciting to me was when I realized that making learning relevant to them made teaching relevant to me.
I had stopped teaching as if they needed to learn about my discipline and started teaching as if they needed to learn something about themselves.
This all kind of points to a bigger truth: self-change is the only change that really sticks. When I was in therapy, my therapist told me that she expected to help me with, at most, 20% of any improvement I would experience. The rest, 80%, is entirely up to me.
When I found myself being triggered by unexpected or undesirable situations and people, I got better at working past my negative thoughts. I also had to learn to embrace some unpleasant realities in the process. Sometimes, I had to admit that difficult experiences from my past were heightening my emotions. I had to embrace the fact that I’ll never be able to control how other people behave, but I can choose how I react.
I also had to embrace another important lesson I learned from a Zen Buddhist who said that whatever is happening to you at any given moment is the best possible thing that could be happening to you. I get that the Buddhist philosophy is that we should sit with whatever is happening to us with complete awareness and try to accept it—and our response to it—without judgment.
As I said, building tolerance to negative emotions gives us more agency over how we choose to respond. Bringing complete awareness to our very real pain is something to strive for.
Chödrön wrote that we can “step into uncharted territory and relax with the groundlessness of our situation…dissolving the dualistic tension between us and them, this and that, good and bad, by inviting in what we usually avoid.” You gotta learn from the negative experiences in your life.
But as much as I believed in the merits of such a conviction, I needed examples of virtuous people who are capable of doing such an impossible thing.
We all have people we admire because they have gone through a lot but have remained good. But what happens when we start to compare ourselves to those people instead of simply admiring them?
Comparison can trap us in negative feelings. Recurring thoughts about how we’re not keeping up, that we’re not good enough and never will be, stop personal growth in its tracks. Admiration works by a completely different logic. It turns our attention inward because others we admire have inspired us to become a better person.
For most people, moving away from languishing will require a greater focus on functioning better in life, in making changes, especially changes that lead us to feel we have improved who we are and how we function in life. We tend to think that if we engage in the project of self-improvement, the results of this change, the improvements we see in ourselves, will be rewarding in and of themselves.
A few years ago, I set out to measure just how much people enjoy self-improvement. I was surprised to discover that when people are offered the option to stay the same or make changes, most respondents chose to stay the same. Making improvements might not be comfortable, but it means you can see that you are becoming a better person.
Anybody trying to become a better person, to change and grow from languishing to flourishing, will be tempted to move through the pain and difficulty of growth more quickly than might be desirable or useful. But so often, we find we are capable of so much more than we imagined.
Now, a quick note: we all have limited mental and emotional resources, and sometimes there's not enough energy left to create the changes we want to. If you're dealing with a mental illness, functional barriers, or systemic oppression, simply "putting in the effort" may not, in fact, be so simple. Our individual strengths, interests, and personalities mean that personal growth is not a one-size-fits-all process. Let’s be honest: Many of us probably feel that we’re just too busy to make real changes in our lives.
So when setting goals for personal growth and figuring out how to reach them, remember that it’s okay to go at your own pace.
Every single day, you can try to do one thing differently from the day before. Just remember that the next day, you will have a brand-new opportunity to try again—and that you can lean into what feels easiest and most motivating to you.
Now, it seems that humans can be held back from the very things they want—such as flourishing—if they are not challenged. We sociologists have a rather antiseptic word for such challenges: stressors. A stressor is a real adversity, in that it is external to you; it is an event or situation that represents change in your life or your circumstances, and it demands that you adjust yourself to the change.
There is a term in both stress and aging research that is relevant here: “manageable difficulties.” When stressors arrive that are “just right,” we believe that the changes and challenges can be met or overcome even if they exceed our capacity for coping but seem manageable.
Getting married is, for most people, a positive event, one that is eagerly anticipated—but when it happens, it is a stressor. There is a wedding to throw, for one. Then you have to confront actually being married. As I’ve covered, a lot of positive changes require us to adjust our lives and can cause stress reactions inside us.
Throwing a big wedding, celebrating a marriage—an undeniably positive event that causes stress is one thing, but what about an event that creates a less positive but still manageable level of adversity, such as failing a class, moving to a new town, or losing the bid for a new project at work? All of these slightly negative but definitely survivable occurrences have the potential to lead to personal growth if you allow them to. Instead of focusing on the very negative recent past, try to focus on the potential for growth on the other side of the challenge. This goes back to the Buddhist teaching earlier in the book: that fighting against a current is difficult, if not dangerous, but swimming with the flow of the river can sometimes lead you to calmer waters.
The most damaging kinds of stressors are negative or unexpected; the more prolonged or chronic they are, the worse damage they can do.
The study found that life satisfaction was highest among participants who’d experienced just above, or just below, the average number of total lifetime stressors. By comparison, participants who had the highest level of lifetime stressors or, oddly, the lowest—those who had suffered no adversity or very little of it—were less satisfied with their lives.
In other words, the study shows that there is a Goldilocks relationship between adversity and life satisfaction. Both too much and too little adversity leads to much lower satisfaction with life; the “just right amount” of adversity leads to people having the highest life satisfaction.
Experiencing, enduring, or overcoming adversity means that people no longer have to struggle with their fear of the unknown.
Without experience with adversity, your first setbacks in life may feel overwhelming. With experience, new adversities may seem more manageable.
Several years ago, I had a wonderful student, Nicole. She’d been trying to get into my class for most of her undergraduate career, and finally, when she was a senior, I was able to get her off the waiting list. When we caught up recently, she reminded me that before she and I had met, when she had been in her sophomore year, she had gotten very ill. She was at a loss. Everything she thought she knew and loved seemed as if it had vanished in an instant. She floundered about, not knowing where to put her attention, her energy, her displaced passion. That chance encounter started an informal mentoring relationship that would prove vital for Nicole at that critical juncture in her life. From that moment onward, she never lost the spark.
What was undoubtedly a period of terrible loss and isolation turned into a period of growth and learning for her. She experienced adversity—likely more than at any other point in her life up until then—and man, did she find it unpleasant, even painful. But instead of succumbing to the stress of it, she allowed it to change her life.
And that brings up another point: Allow your curiosity to triumph over your disappointment.
When we think of adversity and what accompanies it—stress, discomfort, pain—we may be making things worse by ruminating on the discomfort.
Participants who reported having a lot of stressors in their life and also reported that they believed that stress affected one’s health “a lot” were more likely to report mental distress and had a substantially increased risk of premature death. But adults who experienced lots of stressors but who thought that stress affected their health hardly or not at all reduced their chance of premature death and reported the lowest levels of mental distress.
Now, there are tolerable stressors and then, there are truly serious ones. But as someone who has experienced many of those traumas myself, I encourage you to work at separating out the serious stressors you’ve endured and continue to endure from the ones that are more manageable.
Work on the manageable stuff. Fix what can be fixed. Remind yourself that although some things cannot be undone, other more manageable stressors in life can be reframed in your own mind as opportunities for growth.
Think of a barrier in your life right now. Now, instead of thinking of it as a barrier, think of it as a speed bump you’re going to encounter as you head down a new road.
In his poem “The Guest House,” the Sufi poet Rumi wrote about how adversity arrives on our doorstep again and again over the course of our lives; our job is to welcome the sorrow, dark thoughts, shame, and anger and to treat them with the respect they deserve. They are our guests; eventually they will depart. Adversity can be useful; it helps us clear out what no longer serves us well.
None of us sets out to screw up in life. But the fear of failure has proven to be misplaced. The obsession with perfection is just as great a folly.
But there are instances where responsibility does fall on the shoulders of individual clinicians. Do doctors grow from such mistakes? The answer is yes, but only if they have the courage to face their mistakes—which often leave them wracked by shame, self-doubt, and fear of retaliation or even losing their jobs.
Doctors who maintained their careers after serious mistakes not only took responsibility for their actions, but they also “played back the tape” to figure out what had gone wrong and why. Others reported having developed an enhanced ability to tolerate disagreement as a way to move toward the best possible decision for a patient.
Self-change may bring us closer to perfection, but only if we embrace our own and life’s imperfections. Give yourself space to screw up (preferably not in a medical setting) and accept the inevitability of failure.
Rather than sitting mired in regret about something we’ve done until it becomes too much and we pack the memory away, can we “mine our mistakes” to unearth insights about ourselves, our deepest motivations, our coping mechanisms, and our behavioral patterns? This kind of introspection yields not only self-awareness but self-compassion.
Be like Rumi—accept that guest of adversity in your house as an opportunity, not an opponent, and learn the lesson it leaves behind.