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14 Habits of Feeling
Although the potential range of emotional experience is essentially the same in all human beings, each culture exhibits its own patterns, inculcating certain feelings while discouraging others, promoting either expression or restraint, and defining variously the place of the emotions in everyday life.
In America, each one of us is given an emotional profile that accords with the idea that we are separate, isolated individuals. If we are isolated from others, we see only our own needs and desires — nothing else is apparent to us. Our isolation leads us to see the world and other persons only in terms of our wants. When others frustrate the attainment of our desires, we become angry; when others have what we lack, we become envious; when we cannot get what we desire, we feel sorry for ourselves. Our isolation from others, then, predisposes us to such negative emotions as anger, envy, and self-pity.
Circumstances modify this emotional profile; nevertheless, all isolated individuals have a common profile. As a result, the emotional responses of Americans are predictable. Drive any freeway in Massachusetts or California, and you see raw anger, horns honking, and fists shaking. If you want to hear an expression of self-pity, turn on any country radio station in any city in the United States.
Anger, envy, and self-pity are such a part of everyday American life that we take the intensity with which we feel these emotions as natural. But the Inuit rarely experience these emotions. They speak of the white man’s “world where people are always loud and angry.”[1] In Inuit culture, showing anger to someone’s face is not acceptable. Anthropologist Jean Biggs was ostracized from her adoptive Utku community for several weeks because of her single outburst of anger against white fishermen who she thought were taking advantage of the Utku, a small group of First Nations people who live at the mouth of the Back River, northwest of Hudson Bay. Anger frightens and sickens the Inuit, for it destroys their web of human relationships. The rarity of anger in Inuit culture harmonizes with the need for group solidarity. The prevalence of anger in American life suits a political and economic system where isolated, autonomous individuals compete for prizes, prestige, and material goods.
How to Change an Emotional Habit
Neither intellectual insight nor verbal command alone will change an emotional habit. When sad, we may tell ourselves to cheer up; yet, the gloom remains, or if it does depart, it soon returns. We may realize that we grew up isolated from other persons and are thus distrustful of human relations; yet, we seem unable to break through the barrier that separates us from others. Most of us know that we have the power to choose what we think but mistakenly believe we cannot change how we feel. What we fail to grasp is that most habits are formed through repeated action and that consequently a new habit can only be acquired through the performance of a different action.
An undesired emotional habit can be eliminated in two ways, by direct or indirect action. Since an emotion moves a person toward or away from an object, one way to eliminate an emotional habit is for a person to use willpower to perform an action that opposes the tendency of the emotional habit.
To use sheer willpower to eliminate a bad emotional habit is generally difficult and unpleasant. A better strategy is to use indirect action. Surprisingly, if a person focuses his or her awareness on the physical component of an emotion, the emotion spontaneously weakens or disappears altogether. Suppose a man has formed the bad habit of becoming angered by the slightest inconveniences, or worse yet, just waits for something to happen so he can become angry. He can change this habit by focusing his awareness on the tightness in his chest every time he gets angry. Over time, his anger will become less intense and less frequent, and eventually, his bad emotional habit will be gone. But if the man focuses his awareness on the emotion itself, his anger will intensify and become more deeply established.
Another indirect way to eliminate an undesired emotional habit is through gradual desensitization. Many people, for instance, have a fear that is irrational even to them, such as the fear of being away from home, flying, or public speaking. What keeps a fear alive is avoidance of what is feared. Avoidance produces an immediate sense of relief but entrenches the fear. To overcome a fear, a person must face what he or she fears, which takes real courage, especially if the fear is a long-standing. Most people find it easier to gradually face their fear, often with the help of a friend.
Over thirty percent of Americans report that public speaking is their number one fear, ahead of the dark, heights, loneliness, sickness, and even death. For a telephone linesman, an assembly-line worker, or a lumberjack, the fear of public speaking is no more than an occasional nuisance; however, for a freshman college student enrolled in a seminar in an English literature class such a fear can be disastrous. Consider a young woman who fears being called upon by the professor and tries to hide by sitting at the corner of the seminar table. When she sees connections in a novel that the other members of the seminar miss, she ardently desires to contribute her insights to the discussion but cannot. Skipped heartbeats, a blushing face, and light-headedness prevent her from speaking. Her inability to speak in the seminar leads to embarrassment, lack of confidence, anger at herself, and increased fear.
To overcome her fear, she could start with an easy task, say, forcing herself in the seminar to ask one simple question, such as “I’m sorry. What did you say?” This first step probably would make her slightly anxious but not frighten her so much that she could not do it. Once comfortable with asking simple questions, she could offer her opinion or insight in terms of a question: “Is Aaron’s relationship with his mother important here?” Later, she could have a friend in the seminar ask her to repeat her question, and, in this way, she would begin to engage in public discourse. Through such gradual desensitization, her fear of public speaking will weaken. With courage, she will overcome the inevitable setbacks, and with persistence, she will continue, for years if necessary, to break down a bad emotional habit.
A desired emotional habit can be acquired by using the principle that a person becomes what he or she does. A person becomes courageous by performing courageous acts or generous by performing generous acts. Since we become how we act, a person can become a different person by acting as if he or she were already that person.
Anthropologist Ashley Montagu gives his own life as an example. He confesses that he was “brought up as a stiff, stuffed-shirt Englishman who considered that any exhibition of emotion was low class. To be very cutting in one’s wit no matter how unpleasant it was, how denigrating it was to another person, was correct behavior.” Montagu says he changed from a nasty, hostile, aggressive creature simply by acting as if he were a loving human being. He recommends, “If you’re not yet a loving human being, what you have to do in order to change is begin to act ‘as if’ you were by demonstrative acts, by communicating to others, by throwing your arms around them, by taking them by the hand, by putting an arm around their shoulders. It’s enormously important to remember that ‘as if.’ You behave ‘as if’ you were a loving human being. If you go on behaving ‘as if’ you were a loving human being, one day you’ll wake up and find you’ve become what you’ve been doing.”[2]
I learned how to acquire new emotional habits from Aristotle, not Montagu. I first read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics when I was twenty-six and was skeptical of the philosopher’s contention that a person becomes generous or courageous by repeatedly performing generous or courageous acts, until a habit is established. I decided to test what I had read. At the time, I was geeky, socially awkward, and withdrawn, not unlike many of my physicist colleagues, all seemingly afflicted with Asperger syndrome. If Aristotle were correct, then I would not necessarily be condemned to an emotional life determined by the accidents of childhood, by my neglectful upbringing that made me shun human contact and made me more at home with machines, electronics, and physics apparatuses. In the hope of becoming socially adept, I forced myself to go up to anyone I felt uncomfortable around and initiate a conversation. While standing in a grocery-store line, I talked to strangers, at times asking about their lives. Within six months, I enjoyed the company of other humans, took a genuine interest in their lives, and delighted in the diverse stories I heard. Nowadays, my friends cannot believe that I was once a mousy introvert, seldom seen and never heard. We can change our lives for the better.
Choosing Emotional Habits
Human life is extraordinarily difficult, for what is good for us is so deeply hidden. Every pet owner knows that we chare emotions with the higher animals; however, except for Homo sapiens, instinct determines what is good for an animal and how to achieve it. As we saw in Part I, a male white rhinoceros occupies the center of its territory and aggressively chases away any male rhino that challenges him. But a male rhino must leave its territory for water and then out of necessity crosses the territories of other adult males. When a rhino intrudes into another rhino’s territory for water, he becomes submissive. The farther a rhino strays from the center of his territory the more submissive he becomes. Thus, the aggression of the male rhino is regulated by nature.[3] An animal “knows” by nature what to eat, what to flee from, and when to breed. Fear forces a rabbit to flee from a coyote, not a ground squirrel; anger compels a moose to defend itself from an attacking wolf; desire causes bears to mate in late spring, so their cubs will be born in the winter den. Instinct directs each higher animal to have the right emotion at the right time, to the right degree, and for the right purpose.
If only human life were so simple. We must discover our deepest nature — the capacity to be connected to all that is. To further complicate life for us, unlike white rhinoceros and all the other animals, we humans have two ways of appraising what is good for us — the mind and the emotions — and neither appraisal is determined by nature; even worse, the mind and the emotions often give opposite appraisals of what is good for us. A person may know that he should lose weight, but he likes crusty French bread, camembert cheese, and wine; to further his career he should volunteer to give the next public presentation at work, but the thought of speaking in front of a group terrifies him; he should join a gym or a reading group to make new friends but lacks hope the effort will pay off.
Since nature does not prescribe a fixed way of life for us, we have extraordinary freedom. We can become hunters like the lions, carpenters like the beavers, or musicians like the birds. Every animal activity we raise to a new level. Yet, because of our freedom and undetermined nature, we become confused and acquire faulty intellectual and emotional habits frequently at cross-purposes.
Are there any emotional habits everyone should strive to acquire or avoid? At first, the answer seems “no,” since the human person is so unfinished by nature, and every culture constructs a different “I”. But one universal, ordering principle for human life does exist: every person has the capacity to be connected to all that is. Thus, any habit that disconnects a person from others should be avoided. For instance, a person quick to anger will not only anger those around him or her but will be unable to judge irksome situations accurately. A short-tempered person often gets angry with the wrong people under the wrong circumstances and afterward may feel regret.
Just as the short-tempered person is avoided by others, so too is the grouch. No one desires to be around a person enveloped in gloom and doom or to associate with a man or woman who sees only shadows and what is wrong with others. The constant complainer refuses to put up with anything, no matter how trivial, and as a result is quarrelsome.
If a person cannot share, he or she is cut off from others; so, clearly, stinginess and greediness are to be avoided. Stealing and cheating are worse, for the thief and the cheat cannot disclose their activities for all to see and consequently have cut themselves off from humanity. Similarly, the known liar will not be listened to by others. The liar deprives himself or herself of the full use of language and reason, two faculties that differentiate human beings from the animals.
Thus, short-temperedness, quarrelsomeness, stinginess, greediness, and deceitfulness cut us off from others; but friendliness, a cheerful disposition, generosity, and truthfulness connect us to others.
If truthfulness is extended beyond truth-telling to include the capacity to see things exactly as they are, free from subjective distortions, then truthfulness also means to see oneself exactly for what one is, neither more nor less. Such self-awareness is humility. Objective sight reveals that underneath the faults and weaknesses of one’s neighbor lies suffering and a profound unknown. Compassion flows from seeing that one’s neighbor is essentially no different from oneself.
Ignorance, greed, and anger, what Buddha called the three poisons, are the obstacles that stand in the way of a person becoming connected to all that is. If we wish to become who we truly are by nature, we must strive to be truthful, selfless, and compassionate.
The main image is courtesy of Pixabay.
Endnotes
[1] Jean Biggs, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 74.
[2] Ashley Montagu, interview Dennis Wholey, Discovering Happiness: Personal Conversations About Getting the Most Out of Life, (New York: Avon, 1988), pp. 37, 38.
[3] See Norman Owen-Smith, “Territoriality in the White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum) Burchell,” Nature 231 (June 4, 1971): 295.