The Toll March 20, 2020

Lately my friend Laura and I have been enjoying a bevy of explorative walks in the Bay Area, checking out architecture and other points of interest.  Last Thursday we were supposed to have done the final third of the San Francisco Crosstown Trail, a 17-mile pathway through parks and neighborhoods. 

But that morning I got a call from her, and her voice immediately told me that she was in a little distress.  Laura suffers from asthma and other lung issues, and she is well into an age demographic that is vulnerable to coronavirus infection.  I could sense some worry as she told me that she was not feeling so well and we needed to postpone. 

I hung up and found myself with an epiphany.  Someone I know, maybe even someone I love, may not survive this epidemic.  I went through the mental list of the people who seemed the most vulnerable to me – friends in their 70s and 80s, friends who had bouts with cancer, friends who work in the medical profession, mothers and fathers of friends.  Some of these people will undoubtedly get sick.  They will suffer and some may succumb. 

Of course, loss is inescapable.  People in our lives will leave us, unless we leave them first.  But thoughts of loss don’t come to the front of our mind unless something happens to jostle them into that place, and this is what coronavirus has done to me.

The thought of losing Laura frightens me.  As close neighbors, she and I raised our daughters almost as sisters.  We have shared all of our hopes and frustrations with each other over the 28 years of our friendship. 

Laura, get well and stay well.  The hike will still be in our future.

Pushing the Pause Button March 20, 2020

In the midst of my career as a professor, coupled with single motherhood, I often wished for a pause button that could grind the world to a halt.  There would be no scientific papers being published or reviewed, no bills due, no meetings, no one rushing to work, and no news.  Instead, we could insert a few moments or a few days of tranquility to catch our breath and to appreciate simple pleasures and each other.

Enter Coronavirus.  We are now in a world that has slammed on the brakes, but perhaps to an extent that even my wishes couldn’t have had imagined.  San Francisco went into lock-down three days ago, with many adults working from home and kids being instructed online. The San Francisco Ballet and Symphony, two of my staples, have shuttered for the season.  Colleges throughout the nation have folded up for the semester.  Libraries, gyms, restaurants, bars, pretty much any place you might want to go is out of business.  Only the groceries, the pharmacies, and a few hardware stores remain open.

And suddenly, a huge opportunity for humanity has opened up.  People are spending time with their families.  Instead of sweating it out at a spin class, people are taking their bikes into the fresh air.  Dogs see their masters.  My cat and I are nearly inseparable, and my garden is getting some long-overdue attention. 

But in my imagined scenario, we could also push a play button and, like a song paused in midstream, we would pick back up just where we had left off.  The stock market would be unaffected, no one would have lost his job, kids would be back at school and proceed to graduation, weddings and reunions would proceed as planned.

The coronavirus shutdown isn’t going to be like that, and the longer we pause with that button pressed, the direr the consequences will be for our mental health and for our economy. I am starting to wonder whether the cure, in the long run, will prove worse than the disease. 

The Coursera Course. Part 3. Reflections on Happiness March 20, 2020

I am writing this post on International Happiness Day, an occasion brought into being by the United Nations to promote happiness and wellbeing as a human right.  What a nice way to celebrate the completion of the Coursera course on wellbeing!

Despite my many blessings, I often struggle to be happy, which is why I signed up for the course to begin with.  At the outset, we students were asked to gauge our happiness through two metrics, Authentic Happiness and PERMA, run through the University of Pennsylvania and Yale, respectively.  At the conclusion of the course, we were prompted to take the quizzes again.  I’m “happy” to report that both tests registered my increased feeling of wellbeing.  And yes, I’m just plain … happy!

In my two recent posts, I talk about particular aspects of the course that resonated for me and strategies that I learned to augment wellbeing.  Here, I just want to take a moment to reflect on the impact of the course overall.

One aspect of the project that kept me engaged was our professor’s presentation of data gleaned through careful psychological experiments.  As a scientist, I really appreciated that rigor, though I have to say that often the studies seemed a little “underpowered”, as measurements often lacked error bars or statistical significance.  Still, one got the impression that overall, there really was something there.

These vignettes opened up new avenues in my thinking, leading to insights into both my own attitudes and behaviors as well as those of others around me.  Here’s a little nugget, for example: did you know that spending money on experiences, like a dinner with a friend, rather than a thing like a new gadget, is a better return on your investment towards happiness?  Memory, it turns out, has no hedonic adaptation, but stuff does.   Or that the mind doesn’t think in absolutes, only relatives?  No wonder that we try to keep up with Joneses, rather than being satisfied or grateful for what we already have.  Or that developing a “growth” mindset, rather than a “fixed” one promotes happiness?

Finally, I have to ask myself, would my happiness have gone up if I had completed any other 10-week Coursera course?  I love learning and I love projects, so maybe if I taken a course in Greek history I would be feeling the same buzz now.  Unless one does the control, we will never know if I’m feeling better because I’ve been studying happiness, or just studying.  What do you think?  Seems like somebody should study that.

The Coursera Course. Part 2. WOOPing it up March 16, 2020

Week 6 of the Coursera wellbeing course (described in the previous post) was the second most impactful week for me.  The nugget offered up that week was a nuts-and-bolts strategy for getting to the place you want to be.  It is a four-part technique called WOOP, developed by Gabriele Oettingen, which stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacles, and Plan.

The idea is that just wishing or envisioning some desired future is insufficient to make it happen, because we don’t realistically account for the various obstacles that might derail us, nor do we develop a plan to overcome them. 

Oettinger suggests finding five minutes of uninterrupted quiet and calm to focus on the task, and ask yourself four questions:

What is my most important wish for today?  Search for it, and try to boil it down to three or four words.

What would be the best outcome?  Again search for it, imagine it, and clarify it with a handful of words.

What stops me? What is it within me that is the obstacle?  Search for the obstacles. Imagine the habits, beliefs, and criticisms within me and try to experience them.

What is an effective action or thought that will allow me to overcome these obstacles?  Make an “if-then” plan.  If I encounter this obstacle, then I will take this action.

Oettinger emphasizes that WOOP takes mental effort, but that eventually, the mechanisms will become automatic.  She also says that one must let go of wishes that are not feasible; presumably this process will indeed clarify which dreams have some hope of coming true.  The idea is that motivation heightens energy and that pushing against the obstacles is part of the process.  She recommends WOOP-ing on a daily basis and promises that it can provide much awareness and clarity in life.

I enjoy goal setting and problem solving, so I enthusiastically succumbed to dreaming.  What is my deepest wish?  I am already blessed with everything a human being could possibly want, except for one thing: a partner to share my life with.  So that wish had to be top of the list.  What is the best outcome?  Being in a committed relationship with a man who is brilliant, curious, healthy, generous, thoughtful, energetic, and kind.  (OK – that was way more than four words.)  What are the obstacles? Oy!  Well, first there’s the statistical problem of simply meeting someone that satisfies that Venn intersection. Then there is the delicate process of getting to know someone intimately and trying to navigate a life together. Also, underneath it all lies the mishugas of my own psychology: could I actually let someone into my life?  This wish seemed to fall into the category of challenging to the point of hopeless, so I abandoned it (for the moment).

Instead, I decided to try something theoretically simpler.  I had gained some weight during architecture school, and I made a decision to shed those pounds.  My wish is to lose weight.  My desired outcome is to be twenty pounds thinner by June.  The obstacles to that are clearly eating too much and maybe not eating the right things.  I settled on a realistic eating plan: a low-carb diet, but flexible enough to indulge myself in certain food groups I wasn’t willing to give up, specifically tomatoes in any form, chocolate on long hikes, a treat at my monthly book club meeting, and a glass of wine if I am out to dinner with a friend. I’m about three weeks into it as of this writing.  Come June, I'll let you know how it worked.

The Coursera Course. Part 1. Strengths and Flow March 8, 2020

A few months ago, my sister forwarded me a recommendation from her good friend Beverly about a free Coursera course on wellbeing.  It was taught by a young Yale psychology professor, Laurie Santos, and filmed in an informal living-room setting.  I admit I was skeptical.  I’ve read dozens of books on wellbeing, happiness, meditation, path-finding, you name it.  I knew the drill: exercise, cultivate friendships, meditate, have a gratitude practice, eat well and mindfully, sleep.  I was already doing all of that to one extent or another, and I was still in a funk.  What could this course possibly have to offer that I hadn’t already tried?

I decided to give it a go, and within the first week (of ten total), I was hooked.  That first week spoke to me, reminded me of what I need to be truly happy, and how what I need isn’t necessarily what somebody else needs.  That first week wasn’t about sleep, gratitude, meditation, exercise, friendships, or food.  It was about figuring out what makes you tick, and it did it two ways.

First, it directed us to an on-line strengths finder tool to tease out our underlying abilities.  I had done other versions of this self-examination previously with my coach Cathy.  So I wasn’t surprised that two of my top four strengths were curiosity and love of learning; these fell under the uber-category of “wisdom”.  But my eyebrows shot up by my highest two scores, honesty (#1) and zest (#2), which fell under a different category altogether – “courage”. Though I am scrupulously honest and contagiously zestful, I wasn’t really conscious of the impact of these strengths on the way I run my life.

Our assignment, then, for that first week involved doing something everyday that plays to these strengths, hopefully in new ways.  I was surprised by this directive, since I had assumed that the idea would be to bolster the things we weren’t so good at.  But here we were, prompted to reinforce, extend, and relish abilities that came to us naturally. I logged in a week of little experiments that pushed me to be even a bit more courageous and some that indulged my curiosity.

The second revelation came from a TED talk by Marty Seligman, a Penn professor who specializes in positive psychology.  I had read about Seligman’s work before, but I must have been particularly receptive to what he had to say at that moment.  He opined on three different types of happy lives: 1. The pleasant life: a life imbued with positive emotion, simply by being social and having as many pleasures as one can.  2. The life of engagement: what Aristotle described as Eudaemonia, or flourishing, a life of “flow”.  3. The meaningful life: the most venerable, using one's strengths in the service of others.

I immediately recognized myself as happiest when living the second kind of life.  I have known my whole life, well since 5^th grade anyway, that flow (though I didn’t know to call it that at the time) was my middle name.  In school, in science, in writing, in crossword puzzles, in art projects – flow happens when my mind is in a relationship with a problem that causes me to lose track of time completely.  

I was immediately happier – I wasn’t being told to turn down the dial, instead I was being given permission to be my full and authentic self.  And I recognized, too, that the kind of “retirement” that was going to work for me was not the kind of retirement that was going to work for others, and my failure was in trying to fit myself into a cookie cutter that wasn’t my shape at all.