The (real) Secret to Happiness: Relaxing Craving and Enjoying Life

hey everyone welcome to being well I'm Forest Hansen if you're new to the show thanks for joining us today and if you've listened before welcome back and I'm glad that you decided to join for today's episode because today we're going to be focusing on what I think is truly the real secret to happiness first learning how to like this means getting better at enjoying the truly enjoyable parts of life becoming more aware of the full stream of our experience without getting so wrapped up in the more difficult parts of it and learning how to deliberately find more things in life to really authentically enjoy and then second relaxing around wanting this is craving in the Buddhist tradition and includes everything from excessive comparison and envy jealousy and addiction to much more everyday experiences like something that I've been dealing with for a long time wanting to be seen a certain way by other people today we're going to be focusing on how to like without getting so wrapped up in wanting and I'm joined by somebody who's made that a major focus of his career clinical psychologist Dr Rick Hansen so Dad how are you doing today I'm doing great and thoroughly liking our topic yeah same very much I was really excited for this one a third thing to maybe just name at the beginning here that I think is essential for everyday happiness which is what we're going to be focusing on is getting better at coping in different kinds of ways developing coping skills the reason that I didn't include it is that's what we talk about most of the time and it's what we wrote a book on together called resilience so if you're interested in that you can look it up and before we get into the material for today's episode just a quick reminder you can follow me on substack I'm writing over there now uh and if you would like to support us in other ways you can find us on patreon it's patreon.com beingwell podcast but Dad I would love to actually just start with you here you've thought about these ideas for a very long time both as a clinical psychologist and as a Buddhist teacher and I'm Wonder wondering how you think about this just whole field of liking and wanting to kind of get us going here well the first thing I want to headline is to appreciate how you are centering this topic you're not just saying oh by the way we're going to do a little casual riffing about something you're saying well by the way from my perspective you know as someone with some real in your case expertise here this is probably one of the I think this is it man yeah if not the it's tied for first place as one of the most Central matters in a in a good contributing fulfilling life wow totally I want to Second That Emotion it's a big claim it's a big claim and we can talk about why that is maybe a little bit during the episode yeah yeah definitely and of course there's a lot of other stuff that matters too I'm not saying this the only thing but I'm saying it's way up there yeah especially it's how to be about other important things like for example people can love but yeah and you can love from a standpoint of enjoying loving and um being motivated toward loving without getting caught up and being L sick craving turning into a stalker needing other people to love us a certain kind of way totally yeah so you're really getting out about how to approach so many of the things that we care about as well fantastic I guess I would just put it as kind of a difference between uh so I've walked through casinos probably a lot of us have been in casinos and uh one time I recall I decided to play Blackjack and I had almost no clue I said okay I'm gonna I'm going to invest $20 not an expert blackjack player dad I didn't really H didn't really think you were but if you had been that would have been great to find out right now I I respect game in that area and I thoroughly enjoyed uh playing blackjack with my $20 I knew it was a hard limit and I of course gradually rather quickly gradually lost it all at the cheapest possible table but I had a great time in the process so I liked it but I wasn't driven around it on the other hand I passed these people who would be sitting in stools feeding quarters into slot machines if for which is you know there's no skill whatsoever and they just kept pulling the lever they looked exhausted uh when the quarters occasionally started piling into the bowl they won there was some kind of a payoff they would sort of glance set it grab the quarters out put them into their pile and then keep shoving quarters into the slot frankly like pigeons or rats pecking a lever to get a pellet or a little bit of electricity into a pleasure Center in their brain they did not seem to be enjoying it all and they were very driven around it thus the traditional saying liking without wanting is heaven wanting without liking as hell so we have these ordinary examples all the way around us you're familiar with my example of um aspiration without attachment in which I talk about trying to succeed at a level of rock climbing that was pretty much a stretch but I I went for it but I wasn't attached to the outcome so that would be another example of where we can we can really care about things we can bring passion to it we can feel disappointed or sad if we don't get it in normal ways but we're not invaded in the core of our being by a compelling um overwhelming sense of drivenness related to whatever it is uh there's a lot of interesting stuff about it in terms of biology and how we evolved uh to like and and how our systems in our brain get going when we shift from I would call it healthy desire into kind of driven wanting in the way we're using that word here there's good biology there there's some interesting brain science as well we're going to get into it in the ultimate um it's about living in the World on the basis of a profound underlying contentment and equinity even as your heart is touched by the Sorrows of the world and you do the best you can about them as you said we're going to talk a little bit more about like the hard science side of it in terms of the the underlying neurology and neurobiology but I actually just wanted to start with the psychology here ask you as a clinical psychologist there are two major impediments or issues that I see people have over and over again in this area and that I've seen inside of myself frankly and the first is inhibition around liking this can kind of take two forms for people first form is there's just nothing in my life to like I don't like my life as it is there's a lot of stuff that frustrates me about it there's just not that much that's very enjoyable that's going on that's kind of one inhibition that people have another inhibition that people have is for whatever reason and I'm really curious what your take is on this just like not letting themselves fully enjoy something that's enjoyable the sort of funny thing that will happen with people where I think of myself I'm eating a dish of ice cream this is like a basic enjoyable activity right but as I'm eating that dish of ice cream I'm just getting swept Along by the brain I'm thinking about other stuff I'm not really in the experience of eating that thing I'm thinking about this interaction I had with a friend that went a little sideways and uh how do they really think about me and then I look down and the dish is gone you know or the ice cream is gone the dish is still there it's an empty dish now so I haven't reallyy that experience then on the wanting side of it one of the problems that people often run into is this kind of defensive wanting that exists inside of the culture this notion that if you're not really intensely driven towards some kind of end you will just never achieve like real success in life and so what you need is that wanting push to get you there what do you say to those two natural things that people tend to bring up about this material wow well you've brought up so many things and I'm curious about your take as well maybe we ought to do a whole episode on the power of distinctions you do you love a distinction dad I I don't think I know anyone who loves a distinction as much as you do you love rigorous clarity about which bucket a thing goes into so yeah go ahead here but make some distinctions yeah you know the basic decision is you I'm holding up a piece of paper here you draw a line down the middle of the page and on this side and on that side right uh fruit not fruit just basic category stuff you do that with your little kids we would do this with you when you were a little kid just sorting things into categories category formation so it's really helpful to appreciate both and that's a way of putting it that for example a person can let's say honor their depressed mood let's say their grieving maybe their disappointment in the life they have maybe a sense of outrage about Society they can honor those things while at the same time enjoying the bowl of ice cream or being glad that others are enjoying wholesome things or can see the flower and see the beauty in the flower even while recognizing the Wasteland of let's say the inner city uh you know that's been neglected for Generations by the powers that be so you can do both that and in fact neurologically and biologically and psychologically with tons of good evidence the more you attend to that which is legitimately also good the more resourced you become for the long struggle against what's bad second another both and you can pursue your work with a lot of passion and enthusiasm and I think there are certain kinds of work at certain kinds of moments where you better do that if you're working at full speed in an emergency room you you of course your pulse is running is over 100 it better be I'm a fan of the San Francisco 49ers you know wish them well if you look if you're on the practice field or on the Real playing field and you look to the guy or person to the left or the right of you um and they're not really sweating bullets with their full effort you don't really want to be you don't want them on your team okay there's a place for that but when we get caught up in a lot of anger or self-criticism or we become exhausted we don't really have a way of balancing those moments of intense effort with with the rest of our life then we're in then we're in trouble so you could do both end again look for the passion look for the focus look for the work ethic I'm astonish frankly uh I know I'm going to sound like that cranky guy yelling at the kids to get off his lawn but I'm astonished at the lack of work ethic in so many people just at the most basic level of you know respect your craft respect your team do a reasonable day's work right uh so you can do a both end there so that's what I would I would say to people and I would actually finishing here invite people to think about um models of high performance in any domain they all with almost no exception if they have any kind of long career of highperformance they find a way to work their butt off along with life balance and with a cheerful joyful Spirit along the way yeah no and I I think that for most people that's totally the case also some aspect of this that I wonder about is bringing more liking to wanting huh and it's that example that you gave of pulling the slot machine right where there's this habitual pattern that we have or this profound desire that we have but the actual question of how am I enjoying this along the way and how would I enjoy it if I got it truly not in the fantasy of it but in the reality of it like would I really enjoy that experience um I have a very serious hobby or had a very serious hobby for a long time as a dancer semi-professional spent a lot of time in competitive dance communities I know so many people who love dancing then get into competing at a very high level and they stop loving dancing so much at least it seems that way from the outside yeah and if they don't make their final or they aren't competitively successful it's a disaster but if they get a trophy it just goes on the mantle with all the other trophies it vanishes into the wallpaper of their existence did they really enjoy it that much along the way and a lot of the time people will strive and strive and strive to achieve this goal get there look around and be like wait is this really it and that's another problem that comes up all the time with craving is that the craving tells us a story about how good things will be when we get it and the goalposts just constantly move they get pushed back and pushed back and pushed back and the experience is never quite as good as we want it to be in part I think because we haven't just learned to like along the way I think that's true and you brought up um inhibition on enjoyment yes I think this is a huge one I think here I'm going to go full Freudian on you I think a fair amount of that honestly for many people is rooted in childhood experiences of being shamed around their body yeah I think there's some total repression stuff here going on yeah that's right we're shamed around sensual desires some of which were you know could be eroticized in ways that are just natural to them okay no worries uh and then you think about later experiences in life related to sexuality and and other forms of pleasure so I I really appreciate the work of for example John kid inin talking about come to our senses and both meanings of that come literally back into our senses and come to our senses in in the meaning of hey folks it's time to get sensible you know about life in a lot of ways right Charlotte silver her work about sensory a awareness and Lee lesser major teacher in that area uh there's a lot about this that's just wonderful uh the classic mbsr mindfulness Bas breast reduction raisin exercise for five minutes or even 10 minutes one raisin sustained mindfulness just enjoy that raisin for people who might not be familiar you eat one raisin and you try to stay with the experience of it for this long period of time yeah so yeah I I think that's really true and um you're also really getting at being in the present yeah I mean if you think about so much about wanting is about the future uh or you know or the past yeah I'll call it negative wanting regrets related to not fulfilling wants which often have to do with the past and liking lives in the present totally no I think this inhibition issue that you're you're raising here Dad including the psychological elements of it around just pure pleasure are super real not to do the we live in a society thing but like we live in a society that has this like two funny things about it on the one hand it is hyper centralized and hypers sexualized and on the other and how much actual like pleasurable physical enjoying do we really do on a day-to-day basis and how good are we at really getting all of the juice out of the orange to use a phrase I love when we're in an enjoyable experience and I think most of the time we're not that great at it in part because people get shamed for it they feel silly when they do things that their body actually likes and I'm not even talking about like sensual experiences here I'm talking about you do something at work that you enjoy and you authentically enjoy it for its own sake and you kind of have this impulse to like move your body a little bit yeah or like do something really quote unquote cringe like give yourself a high five or whatever it is like some other kind of like uh do I really want to do that sort of thing it's like life is too short man just just do it just like do what you can to actually enjoy an experience because that'll help you stick with it so much um it'll feel good on its own it motivates good behavior in the world and I just think we're really inhibited around that stuff is there anything that was real for you uh as an example related to either allowing yourself to enjoy it Andor really um kind of foregrounding it as something that's to be deliberately focus on bringing more enjoyment to yeah I had a I think that a lot of the sources for me with this stuff is really exactly what you were talking about I think it was not early childhood but child childhood experiences with other kids and experiences of feeling like my enthusiasm about something really rubbed other people the wrong way I was I just came across a little too enthusiastic a little too energized a little too big and loud and wanting to play and other kids were like whoa that's that's a lot man um even in understandable ways and that just really caused me to get a little inhibited around self-expression and around the pleasurable aspects of that kind of enthusiasm and I I think that you could frame a lot of my I don't know from 20 to 36 where I am now as a journey to reclaim that enthusiasm which got kind of trained out of me um to answer your specific question which is like how do you do that um for me a huge part of it was frankly getting out of my head uh I'm a very cognitive person that probably comes across on the podcast that's my natural resting state but so much of enjoyment is is sensory it's not driven by our thoughts it's driven by Body Sensations and Associated feelings it can be driven by our thoughts but the house of it is in the body H what a phrase the house of your body thinking about that a little for myself when I create a model here or name a model in which emotion uh and we could say this as well for um things in life in general you can think of these two Dimensions uh is it effectively uh negative or positive or sensually sensory let's say negative to positive and then you have this other dimension low intensity to high intensity that gives you kind of a quadrant right you can have intensely negative experiences you can have mild negative experiences you can have mild positive experiences you can have intense positive experiences and there's a lot of life that's about mild mildly intense liking that's really worth paying attention to subtle enjoyments of various kinds and learning how to find them like one of the things I've actually kind of played with tried to do is to learn how to help myself learn to like something including something like honestly the pattern in a a brown rug just an ordinary kind of 10-year-old rug I'll look at it and I'll help myself just find beauty in it like it be amazed by it for examp example right then there are um experiences that are uh very positive and very intense and can you let yourself move into that really passionate you know area if you imagine the 2 by two Matrix you know highly uh positive and highly intense let's say and that's been a that was definitely a journey for me I mean I grew up in a family where both my parents were wonderful my mom was very focused on propriety uh partly as as part of her kind of effort to reclaim the you know the myth of high status or that her family her her mother's family lived with until they lost everything in the depression and then they lived in kind of gential poverty after that and for my dad uh it was more button down kind of North Dakota Lutheran Methodist yeah Midwest kind of culture family of ranchers born in the sod house the whole thing yeah strong silent types and then you throw in gender socialization and so uh for for me to be able to reclaim partly through rock climbing and through some through some other things a capacity for intensity physical activity right there interesting right yeah that was a that was a big one and you know and to to to explore that so people listening might think about this okay how can you make more room uh for both very subtle mild forms of liking with so many opportunities around you and also make room for intense passionate liking and notice noting by the way is as you know that as soon as you try to hold on to the experience of what you like but because you want it you want to reify it to essentialize it to keep it to possess it to stabilize it as soon as you try to hold on to it based on wanting the liking goes away so through your course yeah to let yourself really like something while simultaneously letting go and that's that I think is the Crux of a lot of this right is that because of the way the brain is built there is a natural movement that we have from enjoying an experience to craving more of that g Forest why would that be useful during Evolution tell us please who could possibly imagine why that might be why why would be we be incentivized to approach positive stimuli and run away from stimuli wow so this is actually pretty intuitive like we can go into some you know hardcore biology here but just think about it on a basic level it makes sense that we would have this drive to crave more of the things that we like because the things that we like are tied to our survival you know consuming calories resting and recovering having sex passing on Gene copies whatever it is like these are the things that the brain incentivizes but what's really important to recognize in in how we work is that the brain cares essentially about three things it cares about conserving energy it cares about living to see the sunrise tomorrow which is a big part of conserving energy and it cares about passing on Gene copies AKA having sex that's what it cares about from a biological standpoint and it's really important to recognize that enjoying life while nice is actually not on that list and and there's often a pretty big gap between enjoying life and fulfilling those three goals so while those three goals made us the most successful species on the planet um and were essential for our survival under incredibly harsh conditions thousands if not millions of years ago these days they got a lot of problems associated with them I got to drop this in I'm suddenly imagining you and me 30,000 years ago hanging with their buds there in I don't know south of France or something uh and trying to make our way sitting with each other around the fire I don't know why I'm going there but hey I like it it's fun I think maybe part of what you're saying here Dad that's kind of funny about it the notion of the the two people 30,000 years ago is that some of these problems that we're talking to are kind of first world problems or maybe a another way to put it is their 21st century problems um if you're 30,000 years ago you're mostly focused on hello living to see the sunrise tomorrow uh problems are immediate they are intense and they are intimately tied to whether or not you survive yeah these days thankfully for most people if you're in a position to listen to a podcast like ours and take an hour out of your day to do it that's probably not the condition of your life your life is focused on problems that are amorphous they feel highly threatening um but they're often not right now this moment and we live in this constant Haze this as you've described it this pink Zone where we're neither really totally rested in Safety and Security and comfort but also really not under immediate threat yeah and that creates this fuzz of anxiety and stress that permeate our lives and that fuzz I think is one of the reasons why it's actually really hard to drop into liking it's also one of the reasons that we're so sensitive to craving because there's always something to be a little bit worried about there are very powerful forces that are heavily incentivized to keep us worried in different kinds of ways and to nudge us down the stream of craving uh in part so we continue to satisfy the capitalist Endeavor but for other reasons too and that just creates a stew that we're swimming in of nudging toward craving without actually that much liking along the way a breakthrough for me was to realize that I could be strong and determined and firm and enthusiastic without being hijacked by wanting or craving and without getting incredibly invested in the results that for me at least was really quite a breakthrough I've been exploring lately as you know uh you know the the wisdom of both uh caring and not caring you know like TS Elliott wrote teach us to Care and not to care teach us to to sit still and that's been a real big one and I just want to kind of name it and foreground it and I guess I want to ask you is there a concrete example of maybe an area in your life that you really been exploring in which you're bringing your whole heart to it right you're liking you're caring but you're not letting yourself get caught up in drivenness about it when in the past maybe you had been a really big example for me these days that in some ways I'm practicing with to an extent right now as we're doing this conversation uh relates to my work life and relates to aspiration around wanting people to perceive the work a certain kind of way in other words wanting them to like it wanting to achieve at certain levels of success that could maybe create other conditions in my life where I would be able to provide for for other people or you know retire at a reasonable time or whatever it is and then more ego- driven stuff stuff around being told a story as a young person and this is the classic like gifted kid problems you know for a whole generation of quote unquote gifted kids who emerged into the real world thought that they would just continue to be praised endlessly and it turned out actually sorry we're going to give you like economic collapse instead there's an aspect of it where you have aspirations for yourself like I want to be as successful as fill in- theblank person and there can be a lot of craving around that certainly for me there can and a place of practice for me has been shifting more into enjoying and appreciating and having self-respect for the work that I do and the kind of content that I make like we were talking recently about the kind of podcast that we have Dad and we have you know a podcast that probably isn't going to appeal to everybody that's okay and really coming to terms with that while retaining you know a feeling of real authenticity um has been super important for me and has been really tough honestly like I've really struggled with it at various moments in time and so getting into more like a feeling of enjoyment of what I'm doing in the moment as opposed to thinking while I'm writing about how good something's going to do or whether or not other people will like it has been a total place of effort for me that I'm that I'm still working on that I'm not a finished product around at all does that make sense is friend I'm really glad for you and yeah encouraging uh the process here and and I very much relate to it if you don't mind I would love to ask you here Dad what do you think um because this is such a common problem that people deal with there's something that they like something that they enjoy and then there's this natural shift from liking into wanting and craving what do you think helps people work with that space stay in liking without tipping into wanting maybe get better at Rec recognizing it as it's going on like what are some of the key skills there for people wow you know my inner clinical psychologist SL Buddhist teacher is just yeah which is great and you know I know I'm sure I gave you like things popped up on the list let's try to start with one of them and then we'll go from there so wherever you want to start here I would say first meet your own needs because craving wanting um is in reference to received needs and so the more that you actually meet your needs in legitimate wholesome sustainable ways there's honestly less of an underlying engine uh I've nearly drowned and I craved breath I craved air um as it turned out um you I was panicking you know because I craved air and it's when a process that is still mysterious to me uh occurred in which that craving was just gone I was then calm enough and at peace enough with no sense of inner disturbance whatsoever to gradually untangle myself from the Kelp I was trapped in so it's appropriate to Crave uh under certain conditions so take care of your needs in real ways and uh that's a really underestimated priority um there are many people who live in relative material Comfort these days they're not starving they're not running for their lives from some bombing attack in their City although unfortunately some people are uh but they they don't feel that their basic needs are met and and in some ways because they haven't yet been uh maybe their financial situation is still precarious maybe um they really are worrying about some health issues that you know they're not doing what they can to take care of and I'm speaking strictly in the frame of what you can do but in the frame of what you can do your needs really matter start there second uh be mindful of the distinction between liking and wanting and right there you can feel it as soon as you move into wanting you'll start to experience contraction pressure uh insistence and a surge of the sense of me myself and I and related to that a subtle and then increasingly not so subtle dysphoria of different kinds anxiety uh irritability sense of hurt that tends to just start coming in so if you're kind of watching and I I think of it almost like of I guess maybe old school um stereo systems where you see the the green lights going up and then coming down and then you see the red lights coming going up and coming down and sometimes both go up and some both settle down da that kind of ongoing inner dashboard of liking and wanting woof really service because then you start to notice oh wanting in the sense we mean it here problematic craving clinging drivenness problematic attachment soon as you're moving into the wanting Zone The Red Zone it's not so much fun anymore you don't like it so much it's not so pleasurable and it's not so good for you and you start to noticing that notice that increasingly with that inner dashboard good changes kind of follow so it's say those two things for sure and then uh I'll just say that at a kind of a deep level around all this uh I really think there's a value in valuing autonomy valuing freedom to really appreciate that what we're talking about here is a growing inner freedom in relationship to outer and inner conditions they're occurring and some are Pleasant some are unpleasant some are relational some are neutral none of the above they're occurring but in our relationship to them we claim for ourselves a kind of freedom I don't want to be a puppet I don't want to be bossed around by the ancient little craving addict inside my brain I don't want that I don't want my wants to dominate me I don't want to be dominated by them I don't want to be bossed around by them I want to be able to choose what are my real purposes what do I really care about and I don't mean to ashame people I mean to really appreciate to have kind of a jaist view about being pushed around by your wants right so I was just okay three things what do you think of those well I I think they're they're really important they're totally Central I love that you started with satisfying essentially useful wants is maybe a way to put it essential needs needs um as the as the basis from which we can work more skillfully with the wants that are kind of getting in the way of our happiness because pick your pick your model here maso's hierarchy or whatever else like we are needy beings and that's part of what I think is important to recognize here too is we make being needy just the worst thing that you can say to another person right nobody wants to be needy yeah we're all needy man it's okay including we need to be loved God it we're talking about survival early on and how wanting is tied to the survival system of the brain because it leads to us pursuing things that are good for meeting those three core goals that the brain has guess what one of them is relationship being with other people being seen as a useful member of the band so you don't get kicked out of it because that essentially was a death sentence thousands and thousands of years ago right you're not going to survive on your own and you're certainly not going to pass on genes on your own so you need other people to like and love you so yeah that's a total fundamental need that we have and so feeling that way there's no shame in it it's really okay a lot of this is about what is our relationship with our needs and what's the influence that they have over our life and so I would love to ask you about one subset of wanting dad that I've really struggled with myself and I call this the search for the slightly better experience and so I'll try to model this for you and you tell me what you think okay I'm I'm already completely interested okay great awesome there's this funny thing that I've seen in myself I think I've recognized in other people you're in a situation where something is happening that is pretty good an example for this for me is um I got into this pattern for a long time when I was in social situations with other people I could absolutely find things in that social situation to really like they were fun on their face I'm with other people I find basically enjoyable I'm in a situation that you know I don't find deeply uncomfortable it's just like a normal social environment right as that is happening there's this kind of little shift inside of my brain where these other thoughts start coming up all of a sudden I'm looking forward to the next time that we do something like this that's maybe a little different it's a little better it's a little more the way I want it to be I'm picking all of these nets habitually I'm finding ways where there is some slightly better experience that's kind of on the horizon for me and so I've shifted there from enjoying what's going on right now into craving this slightly better version of the thing and that really takes all of the enjoyment out of whatever is going on for me in the moment and this is a pattern that I had for I think a really long time actually I habitually did this um it led to frustration with other people frustration with my friendships because they weren't quite the way that I wanted them to be even if they were like pretty darn good and I'm wondering if you think that this is something that a people do or is this just a me problem um and then how people can work with that tendency to do that little shift into wanting something that's a little bit different a little bit better when what's going on right now is really pretty okay that's so interesting may I ask you a few questions yeah totally when you're doing that think about the distinction between a purely cognitive process of assessment and discernment and making little mental notes I'm thinking of people who cook for a living and they're thinking oh this was good how can I make it better next time so there's a purely cognitive kind of appropriate analytic process okay distinguishing between that what's the underlying mood is there an underlying sense of discontent a little some frustration frustration yeah yeah this feeling of not quite getting what you want that there's this thing there's this itch on your back that you can't quite scratch and you keep on scratching around the itch and scratching around the itch is pretty good but it's really not quite scratching the itch does that make sense great underneath that frustration or discontent what longing is there W what an interesting question well I think you're right I think is a longing there I think it's hard for me to put my finger on it in terms of like expressing it in clear language but I do think that there is this feeling of like wanting a kind of a morphous thing that's sort of hard to put your finger on yeah if if we were doing real therapy I yeah we would we would start uning that totally yeah absolutely but also just because we're doing more like a therap we're on a podcast right now yeah yeah I'll kind of move a little more rapidly myself yeah so which might make some real therapists listening they might be cringing like oh reick slow it down but okay um so well around that longing just to name some things there there might be a a kind of a childlike longing for certain kinds of experiences yeah yeah yeah totally okay uh such as like for a just world or to be deeply heard in a way that's not quite happening and you know the Rough and Tumble of just hanging out with friends you know at a restaurant or something deeply Hur and or um along longing for a sense of Purity or Infinity some people do talk about that kind of thing or longing for a a love to be immersed in a a sense of love and relatedness that feels uh utterly Carefree utterly content there's an aspect of that Purity bit that feels true to me um which is more about like this feeling inside that it should be more fun than it is if that kind of makes sense like it's not as fun as this is supposed to be the thing that's really fun oh maybe wow this is actually really helpful for me um I I think that there's a craving story that's happening here here's what I mean you've looked forward to the thing for so long you've idealized it in your mind this is the thing that you were really excited to be doing with other people you're you're jazzed up for it there's so much wanting that's happening in the system you're wanting wanting wanting you're looking forward looking forward looking forward and then you get in the room and it's just what it is which is you're with your friends and you're hanging out and it's okay but it is what it is it is not Nana you know what I mean it is good not great or hey it's great but it's not perfect you know whatever it is like there's a gap there right because no nothing is ever as good as the idealization right so I I think that that is actually what's really going on here that I was sold a story by the craving that was that was not accurate that was just short in the moment and my perception of that rather than uh doing something called technically updating the reward value of the experience so this is when we look at our experiences and go hey your brain is selling you a false bill of goods here it is selling you something that it cannot deliver on you know our experience says do not deliver on that because we live a real life with real problems real imperfections right yeah and but instead of updating the reward value and just going like oh it's good to look forward to this looking forward to stuff is great but anticipating Nirvana is just not going to happen here dude rather than doing that I was making the experience wrong I was saying oh the problem isn't the wanting the problem is that this experience isn't quite right and if it were a little more right right then my wanting would be accurate does that kind of make sense Dad I think that's and you're in the middle of insight which is awesome right thank you thank you love that yeah no totally that this was helpful for me yeah if it's okay uh so I want to kind of restate a little bit of what you said there yeah totally oh just back at you something you were going to bring up in this conversation I'm sure we'll get to it in effect you're speaking to a prediction error in other words right um the brain I I call it the inter agency with regard to both threats and opportunities you know negative and positive tends to overdo it to to motivate you know monkeys and lizards and you know goldfish uh to just really do what they have to do to stay alive but when you actually come come into the reality that's being predicted uh it's usually e neither so bad nor so great okay and and then that sense of a prediction error is dysphoric it's a little frustrating it's like H dopamine levels slump we don't like that uh when there's a prediction error and then we want to you know get engaged with that so that's one part of it if it's okay I do want to go back to this longing thing and for me here's kind of the step that's possible when it rings true underneath wishing for certain things to happen or words to be said or people to act a certain way is a long longing for a certain kind of experience a beautiful love just profound contentment inner ease a sense of the sublime and as a sidebar there is sometimes an intuitive sense of Paradise Lost or being cast out of Eden that can go back to early childhood and which some people talk about you know in terms of birth and rebirth and then rebirth a sense of getting stuck here and planet Earth with bodies that start decaying from the moment you're born there's a longing and then here's here's the money question kind of related to that uh or the step can once you have a sense of what you long for can you unify or join with that experience already now can you rest in already being centered in that kind of contentment or unconditional love or sense of unconditioned you know spaciousness and so forth so I'm asking you and I'm also mentioning this as a SE that was that that wasn't a rhetorical question that was an actual question both yeah I'm naming this as a sequence that people can engage in to to unify yourself with that which you long for already in the present and then you know for you do you relate to that I do actually um and I think that existential craving maybe to put it a certain kind of way is totally a part of this conversation yeah and whether it is that longing for something that never really existed which is something that we've talked about on the podcast in the past longing longing for a kind of family that you never had in your life longing for a certain kind of experience in your 20s when your 20s don't exist anymore and you just never had that experience that's super real for me even more existentially longing for being in a different body wow that's a huge one these kind of spiritual experiences that you're indicating Dad where people will have uh a a pretty wild experience whether it's in deep meditative States or with the aid of psychedelics or they just have a moment where their brain just does this to them for whatever reason where they get some kind of feeling about some other bigger thing from themselves and then they kind of wake up and find themselves in this one human body and wow that's got a lot of problems associated with when you were just like hanging out in Oneness and allness a second ago right that was a much more enjoyable experience like lung for all of those things is totally a form of craving that we kind of need to Grapple with in life to I I think really be truly fulfilled with the life that we have with all of its bumps and bruises and WS along the way totally I'm kind of underlining a counterintuitive way in here uh in which you honor the longing and you use the longing thinking about I've never flown a plane but I understand if you're flying a plane coming into a landing and uh it's you know it's pitch black there no stars or no lights and you're you're coming in through you know a downpour of rain uh on your instument p panel there's kind of a 5x5 Matrix or Square in which you locate the dot of your plane and you want to keep your plane in the center of that 5x5 square right and that will bring you home that will bring you to safe landing uh you kind of Follow The Beam the the carrier Beam on the way home and there's something about honoring your longings they're really really deep ones that are underneath often surface cravings and then the Fulfillment of the longing is is always in the present is to find ways in which you can be unified with one with the Fulfillment of the longing rather than swerving away from it so that's just what I want to kind of underline here so as I kind of expected when we were planning for this one this has become a very expansive conversation we've covered a lot along the way in part because I think that it's just such a central topic and I would love to end the episode today by getting a little bit more practical as we've talked about all of this stuff that can feel kind of big and and fuzzy and very personal um but there is a fundamental skill here that really impacts our ability to work with liking and wanting and it's the ability to just see the whole of our experience with all of its parts as opposed to getting wrapped up in certain parts because if you think about any experience like you're drinking a cup of coffee right that experience has a ton of different parts there's the feeling of your hand against the cup there's the feeling of the coffee in your mouth there's the warmth there's the flavor there's all of this stuff then there are all of these other parts too there are your associations with yourself as a coffee drinker there's how you think about drinking coffee there's when you drink coffee in the day all of this stuff is there we're aware of almost none of it 90% of that lives in the background of our mind and typically for most of us with the sensory stuff it's like is it warm does it taste good you know that's what's being centered but that's true of all of our experiences right they're all made up of parts and the brain is making choices about what to push up the priority stack into our direct Consciousness and because as we've said liking and particularly wanting and craving are so intimately tied to survival those are the feelings and Sensations that the brain tends to prioritize in the wholeness of our experience but a basic notion of mindfulness practice is the ability to be with all the parts of the experience rather than getting so captured by a small number of them so let's say that we've developed that skill a little bit we've got some mindful awareness going on we can see all the parts okay or at least some of them and we notice in a moment oh there's some stuff over here to like or we notice in a moment wow I'm just really getting wrapped up in some craving right now for each of those examples dad I would love you to give a little bit at the end here practically for people about what they can do to either like more of the stuff that there is to like or unhook themselves from that craving drive when they're in the moment with it really cool so one thing is to uh and this is fantastic homework I want to give everybody listening this homework assignment it's really sweet homework it's to deliberately have experiences over your day you could do it every day and just or you could do it from time to time routinely but to really as you put it for us squeeze the juice out of the orange have an experience it's great to start with simple experiences like taking a shower or drinking some water when you're thirsty or eating something that tastes good or you know having somebody you know scratch your back or just hugging your friend or you know looking out a flower it could be really simple deliberately turn up the volume turn up the intensity on that experience so that you're really in the deliciousness of it the lusciousness of it you're really in it and as you do that here's the kicker really be aware of Contin continuously letting that experience change even as you're sustaining the focus of it and the enjoyment of it that combination turning up the volume while letting it keep changing I don't know if I've ever heard you give that specific CU before Dad I'm sure you've done it probably actually more in the in the meditative stuff that you lead as opposed to the stuff we do on the podcast together but I think that's a great cue I really love that okay super and and explore let change aspect yeah yeah because and and what you're doing in effect too uh you're in increasing your sensory acuity and awareness to it you're also countert trining a brain that's designed to the better it gets the more the brain wants to hold on to it the brain's design as you say to to to want what it likes you know to Crave what it enjoys and instead you're you're defeating it you're undermining it you're dissolving it so that I would I would say that to people that's a really good practice and you could do it around accomplishing little things like you finished a thing slow it down really really really enjoy it another little detail of this is to appreciate we do have the power to increase the intensity of our experiences that's one of the eight ways to um internalize positive experiences so that they become lasting changes inside so you grow the good that lasts inside my material on the taking in the good the heal process Etc one of the five ways to enrich an experience is to increase its intensity research shows we can increase the intensity of experiences even fairly subtle experiences like Tranquility you can be intensely tranquil and so getting good at being able to turn up the volume on your own that's a useful skill around that I think it's really important to pay attention to the routines of our days our schedules and our sense of what we're allowed to experience to make room for more enjoyment in our life yeah you know if our driv some of the inhibition stuff yeah totally yeah uh if we're just if we're just dog tired every time we go to bed I I've had to deal with this you know cuz I as you know work my butt off I I do have a work at to a fault but anyway I'm trying to with you maybe it needs to relax pull it back a little bit buddy we might be wandering into craving territory who knows I know I know I know oh yeah driven oh the puppet right just automatic yeah just automatic um habit so yeah I'm trying to be less work ethical if you follow me you know anyway um is to make just to take a look at what you're crowding out and what what you're exhausting and also what you feel entitled to do you do you feel entitled to take breaks uh when other people are working whoa in terms of gender socialization how do you feel about being witnessed by others doing things that somehow are counter that socialization in terms of personal enjoyment like not being so on task for example so I think that's useful too can I do a thing on craving yeah I'd love to to end here with you're in the knot the the craving process is happening in the brain you got that thing that you're going after in a way that just doesn't feel good anymore yeah what do you do to untangle yourself from it yeah go wide what I mean by that is for example notice uh tension in your body craving has a sense of pressure and contraction so pressure contraction think of that as a kind of knot or a place of squeeze right you could as I'm doing right now you could put your hands together you're making a fist you're squeezing the fist what I'm calling go wide is just a general felt sense an idea an image of opening out opening out there you are with this really intense should in your mind a rule a standard a goal I must I should right well there's a cognitively and emotionally there's a certain Contracting around that instead open it out what else is true what are what are other values in your life what else is in play um often when we're caught up in craving the sense of self really intensifies as this localization again that's noted it's contracted it's sort of congealed go wide open out that sense of self lift your gaze to the Horizon be aware of so many processes in reality altogether that are operating all this might sound kind of abstract it's actually really quite felt that that's a real clue craving involves pressured contraction so if you release a sense of pressure and you are less contracted less craving you can still be fully purposeful that's also really interesting to explore how to be purposeful and passionate and open to positive wholesome current carrying you along but doing so in a way that has a sense of streaming in it rather than pressure and contraction that's a uh really summary introduction to an extremely deep topic but I think that for most people on like an everyday level that's a great way to work with some of those difficult experiences oh great well we could just keep going here we could keep going here endlessly but I think that this is this is good for one episode and really glad that we talked about this today this is honestly one of my favorite ones that we've done over the last little while so I'm really glad that we did it yeah I and if may I add one last little thing I was just reflecting on sort of final takeaways here and another one is to be attentive to how other people want you to Crave other people want you to want yeah I mean think about ads think about the um structuring of so much in our politics that's about outrage or grievance in which they want you to want to be grieved and angry at them right uh they're manipulating you think about people in your or immediate situation where they're just really wrapped up in something and they want you to believe it so I I think about being attentive a to influences coming toward you okay in which other people for their their own agendas even well-intended agendas want you to be pressured contracted and driven about something to avoid it or approach it being aware of that and creating more buffers between you and them w super helpful additionally what do you do when someone you really care about is really caught up in something they're upset about something you know and when we're upset often we start moving into craving you know we want the source of the upset to change or go away or we want a different result or we want other people to come in and be helpful and you know supportive and and even agree with us that oh yeah that terrible thing happened okay someone you care about it's caught up in the moment in some kind of contracted pressured drivenness wanting craving how do you be with that and for me the art a distinction a both and uh is to find compassion for them and be attentive to their needs and what are the longings under the surface that are in the mix here while at the same time not at the same time preserving an inner Independence we talked about an inner liberation of the mind and heart that just isn't willing to be swept along with the presumptions and the intensities and the ways of being you could care about a result just as much as they care about but you refuse to get caught up in that pressured contracted drivenness that is so problematic I love today's episode which focused on as I said in the intro in my opinion you know January 10th as we're recording this what's the real secret to happiness everyday happiness normal happiness we have constrained lives circumstances are imperfect what can we do anyways and for most people I think that that's two things first getting better at liking and this means means enjoying our experiences more getting better at looking for experiences to enjoy finding the little parts of life that we really can feel as enjoyable for their own sake and then working with inhibitions that people have often to different kinds of liking and the second thing we can learn how to do is relax wanting in the Buddhist tradition this is talked about as craving and it includes everything from addiction to jealousy to excessive comparison to little tendencies that we talked about during the episode about the brain looking for some slightly better version of the good experience that you're already having or finding other ways to want something else even when life is pretty good around you right now and those two tendencies that the brain has to not really enjoy things fully in the moment and to look constantly for new things to like are based on our underlying neurobiology and we didn't talk too much about that during the episode itself so here in the outro I'm going to spend a little bit more time unpacking some of the basics of that so in order to be able to tell what's going on out in the world and therefore to make any sense of our experiences of our senses of how we feel and also importantly to be able to survive it needs to be able to sort different experiences into different buckets and the three important categories are good bad and kind of indifferent or neutral and this helps the brain make choices about what to approach and what to avoid and it needs to make those choices in order to have you survive but what makes something good or bad is actually really complicated particularly in how the brain perceives it and our experience of reward is broken up into two big Parts which get to liking and wanting first there's liking and this is our experience of and reaction to pleasurable hedonic tone and then second there's wanting and this is how Salient an incentive is to our brain and how motivated we are to obtain it now each of those things liking and wanting have related brain mechanisms associated with them there are different places in the brain where these things are processed and while there's a lot of overlap between those different areas in the brain they're mechanically distinct what this means is that it's totally possible for us to experience liking pleasurable hedonic tone without experiencing wanting and vice versa and this gets to the example that Rick gave of the people on the slot machines at the beginning of the episode where they're just pulling away at that slot machine they want they want they want but they're not actually enjoying the experience that much or at least they don't seem to be while they're doing it and if you're the kind of person who listens to a podcast like this you've probably heard of the chemical dopamine this is a really important neurotransmitter it has a bunch of functions in the brain and for a long time dopamine was referred to as the pleasure chemical so you might think of it as something that's really closely tied to liking liking is pleasure right but the thing is dopamine is actually a lot more associated with wanting than it is with liking so because I think this is really great I'm going to actually read a section from some research that was done by Kent barage and morn cringle conversely dopamine stimulations do not reliably cause pleasure dopamine elevations in NAC this is a section of the brain fail to enhance liking for sweetness despite increasing motivational wanting to obtain the same rewards the intensity of dopamine NAC surges even when evoked by addictive drugs correlates rather poorly with subjective liking ratings but correlates much better with wanting ratings and the difference between sections of the brain that are responsible for liking versus sections that are responsible for wanting and the tying of dopamine to wanting rather than liking helps explain why very high dopamine activities like watching the news or scrolling on Tik Tok can cause us to crave more of that activity in the future without actually enjoying it very much in the present and that's really what we were focusing on today how we have this whole category of experiences that have a lot of opportunity for liking in them that for whatever reason we just don't bother to fully like we don't really take it in we don't sit with it we get hijacked by craving all of this other stuff happens and then there's this category of experiences that activate a ton of craving but that we end up actually not really enjoying that much while we're doing that the brain is built to want more of what it likes when we have an enjoyable experience we tip pretty quickly into craving more of it rather than just hanging out with the enjoyment that we're already feeling as I said during the conversation the brain has three real priorities survive to see tomorrow conserve energy pass on genes that's what it cares about from an evolutionary perspective those things are great for survival not so great for quality of life in the 21st century and then we spent a lot of the episode talking on what we can do about this how this tendency emerges in Us in the moment and what we can do to hang out more in enjoying without getting so hijacked by craving and one way that we can really see the problems with craving in real time is looking at the gap between the story that our brain tells us about the way an experience is going to be versus the way that it actually is and we had a really interesting section of the conversation that was about this during the episode where Rick was really investigating why I used to have this problem and still do from time to time with craving some slightly better version of an experience that I'm already having and to use Rick's language we have a kind of inner Ad Agency the brain is selling us a story on how good something will be to motivate us to pursue it more maybe this isn't telling you that that next beer is going to be the best beer ever maybe it's telling you that uh if you just keep on pushing to achieve this thing then people will finally like you now the problem is that of course an idealized experience an idealized Vision that the brain is selling us for how good something will be or can be it's probably never actually going to be that good in real life the version of the hamburger that they show you during the hamburger commercial is not actually what ends up coming in the bag so what happens we feel disappointed by the experience that we're given we look for something a little bit better and we tell ourselves or at least I told myself in this case hey maybe next time but guess what next time never comes tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow right we're only ever experiencing today the brain is constantly pushing the goal posts back on us and this is only made worse by all of the many forces in society that are pushing us to want more without actually enjoying because craving is a great way to sell stuff so okay a couple of practical pieces of advice that Rick gave when you find yourself wrapped up in wanting try to take a wider view try to see the whole of your experience without being so captured by any one part of it recognize what's also true for you see all of the little pieces of the Mosaic rather than the ones that the brain is focusing on right now second satisfying our real needs like the meaningful underlying needs that are driving us is a great way to Short Circuit craving there are a lot of different ways in to meeting needs and often what happens when we're in a craving cycle is we tell ourselves that there is only this one way to meet this need and if I don't get that one perfect version of it my need will never be met and that's just not true most of the time we can find a lot of ways in to satisfy ourselves ways that are often again tied to enjoyment and when we get better at liking when we get better at seeing all of the pieces of our experience hanging out in enjoyable experiences while we're having them finding more things to like and liberating ourselves frankly becoming less inhibited about experiences of enjoyment which by the way one of the things we talked about huge inhibition around pleasure in our culture broadly as we get better at really feeling good about the good stuff this craving for other stuff tends to lighten up a little bit because we start to feel more and more satisfied by what's going on right here right now this is not a perfect solution unless you become a enlightened being in some kind of way you know unless you really get to the end of the road here you are always going to be grappling with this throughout your life almost everybody is even when you think you've reconciled some of these issues you will see craving and wanting and problematic forms of Desire pop up in the brain it's literally what it's built to do it's not about not craving anymore that's a Target that's probably not reachable for most people it's about seeing craving for what it is getting less allied with it and learning how to turn toward basic forms of finding the good in life where you can and when you can so uh I hope you liked today's episode I hope you really enjoyed this one I definitely did if you've been enjoying the podcast for a little while and would like to support us couple different ways to do that best way please subscribe if you're listening and you haven't subscribed yet also you can tell a friend about it that's the best way we have to reach new people if you'd like to support us in other ways you can find me on substack I'm writing over there these days and you can also find us on patreon it's patreon.com bewell podcast and for just a couple of dollars a month you can support the show and you'll get a bunch of bonuses in return until next time thanks for listening and I'll talk to you [Music] soon

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 13,242

Keywords: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Self-Help, Psychology, Forrest, Forrest Hanson, Being Well, Being Well Podcast, Rick Hanson, Resilient, Self-Care, Anxiety, Psychology Facts, Self-Development, The (real) Secret to Happiness, The Secret to Happiness, liking vs. wanting, craving, emotional craving, cravings, anxiety, prediction errors, prediction error, meeting needs, lies our brains tell, desire, trapped by desire, inhibition, inner freedom, somatics, somatic cues, listening to the body

Id: qEmFfarIh-c

Length: 70min 18sec (4218 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 05 2024