Author | Zhang Lianxin
Tagore's Illusion:
On this side of the river he sighed secretly: "I believe that all joy is on the other side." ”
The other side of the river let out a long sigh: "Alas, perhaps, happiness is on the other side." ”
The world is not always the way it appears, and many times our subjective processing is added.
The new japanese drama "Kai's New Life" Has a Douban score of 9.3, and the heroine Oshima is an ordinary office worker, who is a person who cares a lot about what others think, and has been thinking about the psychology of others.
Once when buying vegetables, she found that the clerk overcharged her when checking out, but because there were many people in the store, the clerk looked fierce, and she was worried that she was mistaken by others for trying to blackmail people, so she was ready to eat a dumb loss and go straight away.
But when she plucked up enough courage to point out the mistake to the clerk, the clerk not only did not kill her, did not accuse her of blackmail, but also apologized vigorously, returned the overcharged money, and gave an extra bag of enoki mushrooms.
The world is not always the way it appears, as the saying goes: "Hearing is not necessarily true, seeing is not necessarily true."
Maybe we will be tangled up in everything, like a pile of clothes that don't know which one to wear and don't know how to respond, but what makes you entangled and unhappy is often not the world itself, but your own wild thoughts.
As Dr. Yang Dingyi said in "Irrational Happiness":
"We take all our thoughts as real, even as defilements, and that's where our unhappiness comes from."
Dr. Dingyi Yang, Chinese-American, MD, Ph.D. in Biochemistry, Rockefeller University-Cornell School of Medicine, New York, has a unique research on holistic therapy and has published a number of "life series" works.
In the book "Irrational Happiness", through the perspective of Traditional Chinese medicine, physiology, neuroscience and other aspects, the book comprehensively discusses what irrational happiness is and how to achieve true and permanent happiness.
The parts of life that are far more than people can understand and summarize are irrational, and the so-called reasonable is a limitation, and our unhappiness is often caused by those factors that seem reasonable, that is, the reason why we have troubles is often because we are cocooned and self-bound.
Unpleasant circuits will occur if they are not pleasant at any time
Recently, the Internet has a buzzword, called "I emo", Baidu, found that emo is the abbreviation of Emotional, translated as mourning, decadence, depression and other negative emotions.
Today's young people seem to fall into the emo easily:
The assessment did not pass, emo;
The results are not satisfactory, emo;
Lover wants to divorce, emo;
……
Scientific research shows that long-term emo is very damaging to the brain, will damage the nerve structure of the brain, and the regular emo will shape your neural circuitry, so that you will habitually turn gloomy when you encounter things.
As Yang Dingyi said in "Irrational Happiness": "If we are unhappy at any time, we will naturally produce a fixed and rigid unpleasant loop, and the unpleasant response will become faster and larger." ”
That is to say, the brain and nerves are plastic, and constantly repeating some emotions will strengthen specific neural pathways, making the same emotional response faster and more intense.
People with long-term emo are rarely in a happy state, and their neural path to happiness is rarely activated, and in turn it is difficult to experience happiness.
So if you want to be happier, repeat some pleasurable activities to activate the neural pathways of pleasure in your brain, then our pleasure is more easily perceived.
Yang Dingyi said in this book: "New habits are established, and old habits are naturally eliminated, which is actually the neuronal mechanism of learning." ”
When you are unhappy, don't keep thinking about unhappiness, try to make yourself happy and pretend to smile.
In a psychological experiment, 55 men and 65 women, 120 participants, bit a pen between their upper and lower teeth so that their facial muscles maintained a smiling expression.
The experimental results show that the act of smiling stimulates the amygdala of the brain, causing it to produce positive emotions.
Happiness can also be contagious, if you smile at others, then even if others will respond to you with an unnatural smile, then you will also receive a projection of happiness, and you will be happy this day.
When you indulge in emo, your expression may be serious, you may wish to look in the mirror every day to adjust your facial expression and let yourself practice smiling.
When the habit of smiling is established, your "field" changes, you become happy, and you attract many happy people around.
Where the attention is, draw a reality
There's a saying that goes something like this:
"Where your attention is, the energy will flow to wherever it goes, and it will be amplified."
American educator Rita Pierson said in a public talk at TED that she once did a test, 20 questions, a boy was wrong 18, she wrote "+2" on his roll, and drew him a big smiley face.
The boy asked, "Why paint me a smiley face?" Pierson said, "Because you're getting better, you're not wrong with two!" You're going to do better in the future, right? The boy said happily, "Yes teacher, I can do better." ”
Pierson draws his attention to the two correct questions, amplifying the boy's strengths and allowing the boy to find in his happiness that he could have been better.
Yang Dingyi said in "Unreasonable Happiness":
"Attention builds our reality."
Wherever our attention goes, it exists:
Pay attention to when buying a house, wherever there are real estate advertisements;
Want to improve yourself, find that a certain sound has a variety of lessons;
Women who have just become pregnant can see many pregnant women everywhere they go.
This is the "retina effect" – a kind of error in collecting information that social psychology believes, and it is easier for us to collect the part of information that we care about.
Yang Dingyi said:
"Attention itself brings limitations, and we can only focus on it if we fall into a small corner."
Many people are unhappy because they limit their attention to a small corner in front of them - good, bad, yes, no, right, wrong, bad luck, poor, lucky...
Even the dark side of the little corner – bad, wrong, wrong, unlucky, selfish, wronged...
We sit in the well and look at the sky, but we still think that the sky is so small, we take a voyeuristic, and we think that the truth of life is like this.
Our world is actually a fiction of our narrow senses, we cannot see the real world, we cannot see the unity of life, we are made unhappy by our narrowness and short-sightedness, and we often suffer in the human world.
So how do you escape this unhappiness caused by attention limitations?
In the words of Dr. Yang Dingyi, it is "living in uncertainty".
The principle of hedonistic adaptation tells us that the happiness brought about by the change of the environment will return to its normal state as the environment becomes more stable.
If we live in uncertainty all the time, we will always be fresh, and our happiness will never be diminished by habit.
Any thought is delusional, and this realization is not equal to me
What would you think if you called your boyfriend or girlfriend, but he or she didn't answer four or five times?
I think most people have a lot of negative associations:
Will he or she be in a car accident?
Does he or she not love me anymore?
Is he or she messing around with other members of the opposite sex?
Is he or she mad at me?
……
In 2005, an article published by the National Science Foundation showed that between 12,000 and 60,000 thoughts flashed through the minds of ordinary people every day, 80 percent of which were negative.
Although in the course of human evolution over thousands of years, in a long-term state of crisis, we mobilize negative emotions to better prevent future crises.
But we mistake these negative emotions for truth, which leads to the kind of thing that Dr. Yang Dingyi said, "Not only can we not see clearly for ourselves, but we have made a biased judgment of the personality, behavior, and motivation of others." ”
In Chekhov's pen, the clerk Cherviakov and a group of people watched the drama offstage, but he accidentally sneezed on the head of someone else, and this person was still a third-class civil official!
Cherviakov repeatedly apologized for his offense and disturbed the civilian official's watching the play, and he said with great impatience, "Get out!" "Frightened Cherviakov, he died.
Cherviakov's death stemmed from the over-interpretation of others by inferiority complex, "He said he forgot, but look at how sharp my eyes are." ”
"I must explain to him clearly that I am completely unintentional. This is a law of nature, otherwise he will think that I am deliberately blackmailing him. "He doesn't want to talk to me at all!" He was really angry! ”
His judgment bias made him unhappy, and he even fell into a situation of sincere fear, and he lost his life.
So how does one get rid of the obsession with thoughts?
Yang Dingyi said that the antidote is simpler than anyone thinks, that is, to slow down or even stop the time and space at the psychological level.
When a person's attention is particularly focused and concentrated, it will enter this state, this state of "forgetting oneself" is also called "flow", a confident person is easy to enter the flow state, and people who enter the flow state at the same time are often physically and mentally comfortable, which gives people positive feedback.
A person who enters the state of flow can live out the infinite potential of life through the limitations of the human world, comparable to Zhuangzi's realm of "riding on the righteousness of heaven and earth, arguing with the six qi, and swimming infinitely".
Write at the end
Nishio wrote in The Tale of Flowers:
"Don't care about him. Those people are not you. One will think about this and one will consider that, when did you become so smart? ”
10% of your life depends on what happens to you, and the remaining 90% depends on your response to it.
If we want to be happy, let our attention not be spent on useless negative paths, just like Oshima Kai, disconnected, plain face can face the sky, the explosive head does not have to be hot, get rid of the days of over-reading the air, every day is a pleasant breath.
As Dr. Yang Dingyi said in the book "Irrational Happiness": "To be happy, you only remember happiness." ”
Want to be happy? Come and read this book!