Living the Good Life

Why I’m Frugal

October 1, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Frugality Over the Ages: Frugality as a Virtue

Frugality Over the Ages

From Socrates to Thoreau, from Franklin to Gandhi, philosophers, moralists, and spiritual leaders have identified frugality as a virtue and associated simple living with wisdom, integrity, and happiness. The Cynics were the first to reject wealth, power, sex, fame, and other desires in favor of a simple life free of all possessions. Diogenes the Cynic (portrayed in image) famously lived in a wine barrel and had no worldly goods.

For the Puritans, the love of material consumption was an evil; their spiritual doctrine stressed, in the words of the American historian Edmund Morgan,

A man was but the steward of the possessions he accumulated. If he indulged himself in luxurious living, he would have that much less with which to support church and society. If he needlessly consumed his substance, either from carelessness or from sensuality, he failed to honor the God who furnished him with it.

Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, a doyen of the self-improvement movement, listed frugality as one of the 13 virtues he followed as a young man. Between 1732 and 1757, Franklin published such famous aphorisms in his Poor Richard’s Almanack as “be industrious and frugal, and you will be rich,” “beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship,” and “he that goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing.”

For the American philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, frugality or “transcendental simplicity” was a means to a higher end. In Man the Reformer (1841,) Emerson wrote, “Economy is a high, humane office, a sacrament, when its aim is grand; when it is the prudence of simple tastes, when it is practiced for freedom, or love, or devotion.” For Thoreau, “high thinking was preferable to high living;” he wrote in Walden (1854,) “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meager life than the poor”.

Thoreau inspired the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. After suffering a mental breakdown in the late 1870s, Tolstoy, who was born into Russian nobility, rejected his family’s estate and serfdom. He renounced his decadent, racy lifestyle and engaged in a revolutionary brand of Christianity based on spiritual and material austerity.

Tolstoy’s philosophy showed the way for the creation of utopian communities of simple, self-sufficient living—the most famous example being the “Tolstoy Farm” ashram that Mahatma Gandhi established in South Africa. Gandhi was the quintessence of simplicity and sported austere homespun clothing. He famously said, “you may have occasion to possess or use material things, but the secret of life lies in never missing them,” and “our civilization, our culture, our [nation] depend not upon multiplying our wants—self-indulgence, but upon restricting our wants—self-denial.”

Frugality is a Moral Virtue

The distinguished career coach Marty Nemko once wrote, “I even take care to tear-off single sheets of toilet paper. Because I’m cheap? No. Because it’ll help the environment? No. I just think wasting is wrong.” That, in a nutshell, is why I’m frugal.

For me, frugality suggests an appropriate limit on individual and collective desires; it denies the materialistic expectations that the modern society imposes upon us.

Frugality is not some form of world-denying asceticism or austerity. It is a part of principled stewardship of not only the resources I’ve been blessed with but also of myself.

Frugality is about forgoing a subset of desires—as part of a quest for an abundant life. In other words, frugality restricts my indulgence of materialistic appetite, with the intention that I leave space for the cultivation of diverse forms of pleasure.

When I started to work while still in college, frugality was an element of my quest for financial independence. It became the lynchpin of a deliberate set of lifestyle choices and values. But my focus on achieving financial freedom never let me pining for the pleasures I might have had.

Six years ago, I gave up a corporate job and significant earnings in favor of a simpler life with plenty of discretionary time and money for world travel, leisure, learning, culture, and meaning.

Idea for Impact: Enjoying a rich life is more important than zealously stewarding one’s savings and investments.

Living frugally, with the particular intention of achieving financial freedom, requires a good measure of renunciation. This renunciation is easiest when one regards it not as deprivation, but as a deliberate choice in a trade-off for an enriched life.

Summary of Richard Carlson’s ‘Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff’

September 4, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Stress follows a peculiar principle: when life hits us with big crises—the death of a loved one or a job loss—we somehow find the inner strength to endure these upheavals in due course. It’s the little things that drive us insane day after day—traffic congestion, awful service at a restaurant, an overbearing coworker taking credit for your work, meddling in-laws, for example.

It’s all too easy to get caught up in the many irritations of life. We overdramatize and overreact to life’s myriad tribulations. Under the direct influence of anguish, our minds are bewildered and we feel disoriented. This creates stress, which makes the problems more difficult to deal with.

The central thesis of psychotherapist Richard Carlson’s bestselling Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff… And It’s All Small Stuff (1997) is this: to deal with angst or anger, what we need is not some upbeat self-help prescriptions for changing ourselves, but simply a measure of perspective.

Perspective helps us understand that there’s an art to understand what we should let go and what we should concern ourselves with. As I mentioned in my article on the concept of opportunity cost, it is important to focus our efforts on the important stuff, and not waste time on the insignificant and incidental things.

I’ve previously written about my favorite 5-5-5 technique for gaining perspective and guarding myself against anger erupting: I remove myself from the offending environment and contemplate if whatever I’m getting worked up over is of importance. I ask myself, “Will this matter in 5 days? Will this matter in 5 months? Will this matter in 5 years?”

Carlson stresses that there’s always a vantage point from which even the biggest stressor can be effectively dealt with. The challenge is to keep making that shift in perspective. When we achieve that “wise-person-in-me” perspective, our problems seem more controllable and our lives more peaceful.

Carlson’s prescriptions aren’t uncommon—we can learn to be more patient, compassionate, generous, grateful, and kind, all of which will improve the way we feel about ourselves and the way that other people feel when they are around us.

Some of Carlson’s 100 recommendations are trite and banal—for example, “make peace with imperfection,” “think of your problems as potential teachers,” “remember that when you die, your ‘in-basket’ won’t be empty,” and “do one thing at a time.” Others are more edifying:

Let others have the glory
Let others be “right” most of the time
Become aware of your moods and don’t allow yourself to be fooled by the low ones
Look beyond behavior
Every day, tell at least one person something you like, admire, or appreciate about them
Argue for your limitations, and they’re yours
Resist the urge to criticize
Read articles and books with entirely different points of view from your own and try to learn something

Carlson’s succinct insights have hit home with legions of the hurried and the harried. He became a bestselling author and a sought-after motivational speaker. Before his tragic death in 2006 at age 45, Carson followed up “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff…” with some 20 tacky spinoffs intended particularly for spouses, parents, teenagers, new-weds, employees, and lovers.

That Burning “What If” Question

August 8, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Rightness of Past Choices Become Obvious in the Clarity of Future Hindsight

In the Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s philosophical novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984; film adaptation, 1988) the womanizing protagonist Tomáš deliberates if he wants to be single or with his eventual wife Tereza:

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

…

There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, “sketch” is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

The Mournful “What If” is a Powerful and Emotional Inquiry about Alternative Lives You Could Have Lived

Oftentimes, when dealt with adverse circumstances, life’s self-criticism apparatus kicks in. Plagued with self-doubt, life asks the questions “Why did things turn out this way?” and “Why wasn’t this experience what I expected it to be?” Regrets gnaw in the back of the mind, “How would my life be different?” and “I never shouldn’t have done this.”

And when you cognize life in hindsight, your lived life doesn’t usually compare favorably with your imagined, could-have-been life.

And that’s why you should refrain from ruminating about those non-lived lives—such projections of your mind only instigate sorrow.

Idea for Impact: Sketch the Picture of Our Own Choosing

One of the most effective ways of eliminating regrets is to eliminate the underlying ignorance that is the cause. The wise fancy what the past was once and appreciate how it is molded them. But they no longer desire to live there or evoke the choices of the life that could have been.

As the great Stoics taught, you must reject regret, appreciate that you are now the distillation of all your past choices and experiences, and take the next positive little step. Reflecting on “What do I want to make of all of this?” and “What am I looking forward to?” can clarify your potential.

As Viktor Frankl emphasized in his 1946 masterwork on positive approach to psychological treatment, “Live as if you were living already for the second time, and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

Who wants to lament the life not lived when you can do dive into the life you’re actually in and do so much good now?

Live this choice. Sketch the picture of our own choosing.

Conspicuous Consumption and The Era of Excess // Book Summary of ‘Luxury Fever’

July 3, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Superrich Influence the Standards for Desirability in Consumer Goods: The Less Rich Emulate Them

The core argument of Cornell economist Robert Frank’s Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess (1999) is that the extravagant consumption of the most affluent in our society has a ripple effect on everyone’s spending.

According to Frank, the desire for many to indulge in luxury “possessions” is motivated less by the gratification they may bring than by what others are buying or want to buy. We try to achieve happiness by improving our relative social status. For example, if your neighbor didn’t buy his new Mercedes Benz, you wouldn’t probably feel the need for the latest-and-greatest Jaguar, and you’d both work less, and spend more time with your loved ones and invest in meaningful experiences that bring you joy.

It is not just the rich who have gone on a spending spree. Middle- and lower-income earners have been spending more as well. The prime mover in this change may have been the increased spending of the superrich but their higher spending level has set a new standard for the near-rich to emulate, and so on down the income ladder. But although middle- and lower-income families are spending much more than in the recent past, the incomes of these families have not been growing.

While the rich have the money to indulge their whims, the rest of us tend to finance our wasteful spending through reduced personal savings or through increasing debt. To substantiate this trend, Frank describes burgeoning household debt and a remarkable increase in personal bankruptcies.

Luxury Fever summarizes persuasive biological and psychological evidence that suggests how human nature is such that we measure our success in relation to what others have. In other words, we tend to spend money on luxuries to appear to be more successful than others are. Frank concludes, “Evidence from the large scientific literature on the determinants of subjective well-being consistently suggests that we have strong concerns about relative position.”

Relative Consumption, Not Absolute Consumption, Affects Consumers’ Happiness

Much of the increased luxury spending is wasteful, given that consumers could get the same benefits by consuming non-luxuries with lower price tags. Research has proven that money doesn’t buy happiness,

Behavioral scientists find that once a threshold level of affluence is reached, the average level of human well-being in a country is almost completely independent of its stock of material consumption goods.

Frank’s thesis on runaway consumption and extravagant luxuries seems as valid now as it was in 1999, when his book was published at the height of the dot-com boom. The era of excess has now proliferated to India, China, Russia, and other developing countries that are facing not only widening economic inequalities between their rich and poor, but also mushrooming appetites for luxury goods among their affluent middle classes.

Can a Progressive Consumption Tax Challenge the “Luxury Arms Race”?

Based on the solid evidence he provides, Frank’s thesis on runaway consumption of extravagant luxuries and this era of excess is hard to dispute. Consumers have indeed been saving less, working longer hours, and spending more per capita on luxury goods. However, his claim that the spending patterns of the super wealthy has incited luxury fever among the non-wealthy lacks substantial evidence.

The Luxury Fever‘s solution to this problem is to come down hard on lavish consumption and to encourage more savings. To this end, Frank presents policy proposals that are reasonable in the abstract, but will face serious political and cultural hurdles. Frank promotes a tax exemption for savings and a steeply progressive consumption-based tax as a substitute for income and sales taxes. If Americans expend less on luxury goods, he argues, we’d collectively work less, and make more money available “to restore our long neglected public infrastructure and repair our tattered social safety net.” However, economists have argued that a progressive consumption tax would burden the non-wealthy more than the wealthy because the latter tend to save much larger percentages of their incomes.

The Good and Bad Sides of Consumerism: How to Clamp Down on Conspicuous Consumption and Encourage More Saving

Despite its flaws, Robert Frank’s Luxury Fever is a valuable read in behavioral psychology and behavioral economics. Luxury Fever offers an appealing compendium of interesting case studies, anecdotal evidence, and statistics on society’s current “wants-not-needs” and “more is better” materialistic way of life, and its harmful impact on our lives, relationships, and societies.

Complement with The Millionaire Next Door (1996, read my summary,) a bestselling exposition on the surprising secrets of America’s wealthy.

Elevate Timing from Art to Science // Book Summary of Daniel Pink’s ‘When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing’

May 29, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Daniel Pink’s When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing (2018) explores how the quality of the decisions we make are correlated with their timing.

Pink is an expert on motivation and management, and an author of such best-selling books as Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2009) and To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (2012.) He describes When as not so much a “how-to” guide for making the most of our lives, but as a “when-to” manual for individual and group work.

The Best Times of the Day to Make Optimum Decisions

Pink’s principal theme is chronobiology—the science of how the body’s biological clocks can influence our cognitive abilities, moods, and attentiveness.

Drawing on scientific research on the science of timing, Pink concludes that the mental acuity, creativity, productivity, temper, and frames of mind for most folks follow an identifiable “peak-trough-rebound” template. Most people get their best work done in the mornings, suffer a trough of mental weariness in the afternoon, and experience a late-evening burst:

Our cognitive abilities do not remain static over the course of a day. During the sixteen or so hours we’re awake, they change often in a regular, foreseeable manner. We are smarter, faster, dimmer, slower, more creative, and less creative in some parts of the day than others. … [R]esearch has shown that time-of-day effects can explain 20 percent of the variance in human performance on cognitive undertakings.

Needless to say, this “peak-trough-rebound” phenomenon is fairly universal but differs among individuals. There are “larks” who do remarkably well in the mornings and “owls” who tend to embrace their late night productivity habits.

Optimizing Your Day with Daily Rhythms

According to Pink, “peak-trough-rebound” is attributable to the body’s relatively low temperature when we wake up. The increasing body temperature gradually boosts our energy level and alertness, which consequently “enhances our executive functioning, our ability to concentrate, and our powers of deduction.” As the morning evolves, we become more focused and alert until we hit a peak. Then our energy level wanes and our alertness declines, only to be restored in early evening.

Pink concludes that mornings are good for decision-making and that errors increase in the afternoons. Studies recommend that we schedule surgery in the mornings when surgeons tend to make fewer mistakes and avoid petitioning a traffic ticket in the afternoons because judges tend to be less considerate than in the mornings.

“Breaks are Not a Sign of Sloth but a Sign of Strength”

Pink emphasizes the risks of clouded judgment that characterizes the afternoon “trough.” As an example, Pink speculates that the sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915 was about the time of day—it’s captain’s ill-fated decisions were made in the afternoon following a night of no sleep.

With case studies of error-reduction in hospital operating rooms, Pink suggests “vigilance breaks” (quick team huddles for reviewing checklists and verifying courses of action) and restorative breaks (naps, short physical activities, or mental diversions) during troughs to “recharge and replenish, whether we’re performing surgery or proofreading advertising copy.”

“Timing is Everything” and “Everything is Timing”

Based on the mentioned studies’ correlations and causations, Pink offers advice further than daily scheduling—from marriage to switching careers and sports:

The best time to perform a specific task depends on the nature of that task. Identify your chronotype (Pink offers an online survey,) understand your task, and decide on the most suitable time. Do not let mundane tasks sneak into your peak period. Additionally, if you’re a boss, understand your employees’ work patterns and “allow people to protect their peak.”
Tasks that need creativity and a flash of insight (rather than analytical perspicacity) are best done during the late-evening recovery period when the mind tends to be less inhibited and more open to inventive associations.
Harness the psychological power of beginnings—New Year’s Days, birthdays, and anniversaries are all natural times to make resolutions and start working on goals. Other opportunities for fresh starts include the first of the month, the beginning of the week, and the first day of spring.
“Lunch breaks offer an important recovery setting to promote occupational health and well-being”—especially for “employees in cognitively or emotionally demanding jobs.”
Afternoon coffee followed by 10- to 20-minute naps and leisurely daily walks are “not niceties, but necessities.” Drink a cup of coffee just before a nap—the 25 minutes it takes for the caffeine to kick in is the optimal length of a restorative siesta.
Morning workouts are best for people aiming to burn fat, lose weight, or build sustainable exercise habits. Folks trying to reach personal bests should seek out the afternoons, when physical performance tends to reach its zenith.
Studies suggest that people are most likely to run their first marathons at ages ending in 9—but those ages are also when people are most prone to cheating on their spouses.
According to one survey, switching jobs every three to five years in your early career can lead to the biggest pay increases.

Recommendation: Skim Daniel Pink’s ‘When’ for the Life Hacks

Daniel Pink’s When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing offers little fresh substance. Many of the cited studies’ implications, causations, and correlations are open to debate.

A speed-read of When, especially of the takeaway points at the end of each chapter, can offer some practical tips about when you are likely to be creative, focused, and least error-prone.

Parenthetically, the third and the final section on “Synching and Thinking” is out-of-place to Pink’s principal theme of timing, even if the case study of the synchronized effort that constitutes the Mumbai Dabbawala lunchbox delivery system is interesting. Pink explains that the importance of “syncing up” with people around you through a collective sense of identity and a shared purpose is “a powerful way to lift your physical and psychological well-being.”

Complement skimming Daniel Pink’s When with Michael Breus’s The Power of When (2016; Talk at Google.)

How Mindfulness Can Make You Better at Your Job // Book Summary of David Gelles’s ‘Mindful Work’

April 4, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Mindfulness Simply Means Being Aware and Being Present

Most religions and spiritual practices encourage some sort of meditation and mindfulness. However, the specific practice of bringing your attention and your focus to the present moment, and observing and accepting the experience as is, is most commonly associated with the Eastern meditative traditions.

Mindfulness is an element of the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path to nirvana (enlightenment.) The Buddha taught that a mistaken perception of reality inevitably leads to suffering. Mindfulness is the primary means of bridging that gap between how things seem to be and how they really are.

Attending to What Happens to Our Minds, Hearts, Attitudes, and Actions

In its secular form, mindfulness is but a practice of consciousness. It is heedfulness or awareness of your subjective thoughts, behaviors, and experiences—without evaluating or judging them.

Mindfulness can help you, through direct experience, become more comfortable with your life and to be better able to cope with the problems and issues in your daily life.

The heightened mental receptivity, together with an increased sensitivity to the environment, better openness to new information, and a sharper decision-making are understood to produce a great number of physiological and psychological benefits.

Mindfulness is the Best Antidote to Anxiety

In a world that barrages us with information and demands us to be incessantly active and reactive, mindlessness is being embraced increasingly in the mainstream culture. As a supplement to yoga, and without any specific religious association, mindfulness is today practiced as a way to prevent being swept away in an avalanche of thought, activity, and emotion.

David Gelles’s Mindful Work: How Meditation Is Changing Business from the Inside Out provides a remarkable account of the ever-increasing adoption of meditation-based mindfulness. Prominent American corporations such as Google, General Mills, Aetna, and Ford have built mindfulness-themed employee wellness initiatives to foster a happier, more productive workplace.

Gelles brings a business journalist’s objectivity to draw together his experience of practicing meditation for 15 years. He also reviews scientific research that has evidenced how people who have a mindfulness routine are less distractible and better at concentrating, even when multi-tasking.

Scientific research is making the benefits clear. Studies show that mindfulness strengthens our immune systems, bolsters our concentrative powers, and rewires our brains. Just as lifting weights at the gym makes our muscles stronger, so too does practicing mindfulness make our minds stronger. And the most tried-and-true method of cultivating mindfulness is through meditation.

Gelles discusses the teachings of many key influencers in the development of the mindfulness movement. The rising popularity of meditative mindfulness in the West has its genesis in a retreat organized in the ’70s by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Buddhist monk and teacher. One of his attendees, the University of Massachusetts psychologist Jon Kabat-Zinn, integrated Hanh’s teachings with yoga and medical science, and created the popular eight-week “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction” course. Over the decades, other psychologists developed mindfulness-based interventions that allow patients to observe their cognitive and behavioral processes.

Gelles summarizes much of the recent research that has confirmed the centuries-old Eastern wisdom about mindfulness practices. Developments in contemplative neuroscience have corroborated the effects that meditative mindfulness has on supporting the body’s immune system and counteracting the symptoms of burnout.

Indeed, mindfulness seems to change the brain in some specific ways. Broadly speaking, mindfulness increases activity in parts of the prefrontal cortex, an evolutionarily recent region of the brain that is important for many of the things that make us human. This region is the seat of much of our higher-order thinking-our judgment, decision making, planning, and discernment. The prefrontal cortex is also an area that seems to be more active when we are engaged in pro-social behavior—things like compassion, empathy, and kindness.

Some studies have shown that folks who practice meditation have a less perturbed amygdala. That means that the brain is less vulnerable to interpreting many flight-or-fight stimuli as threats and triggering anger, stress, or a defense reaction.

Meditative Mindfulness in the Emerging Context of Consumer Culture

Gelles warns that capitalism and commercialization could, due to many increasingly-visible entrepreneurial teachers, complicate something as seemingly simple as observing one’s breath and paying attention.

I’m sympathetic to the skeptics, who worry that a noble practice is being quickly corrupted by modern marketing. But having witnessed mindfulness in action for fifteen years, it is clear to me that rarely, if ever, does exposure to meditation make someone a worse person. On balance, the folks who become more mindful tend to be happier, healthier, and kinder. Nevertheless, it is worth addressing the various critiques of mainstream mindfulness, if only to put them to rest.

…

Even today, some of the most popular gurus in America have demonstrated a penchant for bling that strikes many as being out of touch with their mantra of inner peace. Bikram Choudhury, the litigious yoga teacher, cuts the figure of an oligarch, driving around Beverly Hills in a Rolls-Royce and sporting a gold-encrusted Rolex. A Thai monk with a taste for Louis Vuitton luggage and private jets had his assets frozen by authorities in 2013.

A Few Minutes a Day is All You Need to Reap the Benefits of Mindfulness

Recommendation: Read David Gelles’s Mindful Work. This helpful tome offers a succinct rundown of the benefits of mindfulness. In an era where our culture is increasingly questioning the frenzy of activity and reactivity that has entrenched the current way of life, mindfulness will continue to draw many mainstream practitioners for its ability to promote stress-reduction and produce improvements in one’s overall emotional state and outlook on life.

Indeed, mindfulness is about much more than simply observing sensations as they occur. It is about what happens to our minds, hearts, and actions when we deliberately continue these practices for weeks, months, and years. Mindfulness is a practice that allows us to achieve more sustainable happiness and to grow more compassionate. And over time, mindfulness requires one to confront thorny concepts like impermanence and compassion.

Warren Buffett’s Advice on How to Focus on Priorities and Subdue Distractions

December 8, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you persistently experience an overpowering sense of being besieged with tasks and responsibilities, perhaps a personal productivity transformation technique suggested by Warren Buffett may help.

Psychologist Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania shares a well-known anecdote about Buffett in her bestselling Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance:

The story goes like this: Buffett turns to his faithful pilot and says that he must have dreams greater than flying Buffett around to where he needs to go. The pilot confesses that, yes, he does. And then Buffett takes him through three steps.

First, you write down a list of twenty-five career goals.

Second, you do some soul-searching and circle the five highest-priority goals. Just five.

Third, you take a good hard look at the twenty goals you didn’t circle. These you avoid at all costs. They’re what distract you; they eat away time and energy, taking your eye from the goals that matter more.

As I’ve written before (see the world’s shortest course in time management, and detailed three-step course on time logging, time analysis, time budgeting,) the most effective time management practice involves eliminating the non-essentials—those numerous things you can and want to do—and focusing on the very few things you must do.

Idea for Impact: Success comes at a cost: the most time-effective folks I know are significantly better at dropping their second-rate objectives.

What the Buddha Taught About Restraining and Dealing with Anger

December 1, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi 2 Comments

Buddhist psychology identifies anger as one of the six root kleshas, detrimental emotional states that can cloud the mind, lead us to “unwholesome” actions, and cause our suffering.

Chapter XVII of the Dhammapada (ref. Max Muller’s Wisdom of the Buddha) compiles the teachings of the Buddha and his monastic community on the topic of restraining and dealing with anger:

“He who holds back rising anger like a rolling chariot, him I call a real driver; other people are but holding the reins.” (Verse 222)
“Beware of bodily anger, and control thy body! Leave the sins of the body, and with thy body practise virtue!” (Verse 231)
“Beware of the anger of the tongue, and control thy tongue! Leave the sins of the tongue, and practise virtue with thy tongue!” (Verse 232)
“Beware of the anger of the mind, and control thy mind! Leave the sins of the mind, and practise virtue with thy mind!” (Verse 233)
“The wise who control their body, who control their tongue, the wise who control their mind, are indeed well controlled.” (Verse 234)

As I’ve mentioned before, you will be at a marked disadvantage in life if you’re unable to perceive, endure, and manage negative emotions. And anger is the hardest of the negative emotions to subdue.

Despite the seemingly abstract nature of the questions philosophers ask, most philosophy books argue that investigating the nature of anger is important. Not only is it such a destructive emotion, but anger often sums up many other self-judgments—sadness, powerlessness, fear, regret—that are entwined into it.

The Zen priest Jules Shuzen Harris advices approaching feelings of anger with awareness and mindfulness in his insightful article on “Uprooting the Seeds of Anger” in the Summer 2012 issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review:

We must remember that we create our own anger. No one makes it for us. If we move from a particular event directly to our reaction, we are skipping a crucial awareness, a higher perspective on our own reactivity. What is that middle step, that deeper awareness? It is mindfulness about our own beliefs, our attitude, our understanding or lack of understanding about what has really happened. We notice that a given situation reliably provokes our anger, and yet somebody else can be exposed to the very same situation and not react angrily. Why is that? No one can tell us: we each have to find the answer ourselves, and to do that, we need to give ourselves the space to reflect mindfully.

We’re going to keep getting angry. It’s going to come up. It has come up in our lives before, and it will come up again. This practice is about becoming more mindful, becoming aware of how we are getting stuck. With care and work, we find ways to get unstuck. But we also know that the moment we get unstuck, we’re going to get stuck again. That’s why it is called practice—we never arrive. So when you find yourself upset or angry, use the moment as a part of your practice, as an opportunity to notice and uproot the seeds of anger and move into the heart of genuine compassion.

And as stated by the Chinese Sutra of Forty-two Chapters,

For those with no anger,
how can anger arise?
When you practice deep looking and master yourself,
you dwell in peace, freedom, and safety.
The one who offends another
after being offended by him,
harms himself and harms the other.
When you feel hurt
but do not hurt the other,
you are truly victorious.
Your practice and your victory benefit both of you.
When you understand the roots of anger in yourself and in the other,
your mind will enjoy true peace, joy, and lightness.
You become the doctor who heals himself and heals the other.
If you don’t understand,
you will think not getting angry to be the act of a fool.

Moral Disengagement Leads People to Act Immorally and Justify Their Unprincipled Behavior

November 20, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Temptation of Christ on the First Day of Lent

Rationality Drives Human Behavior Only After Emotion and Impulse Lose Their Hegemony

People adapt moral standards that dissuade them from objectionable behavior. But these moral standards do not serve as a steadfast regulator of their moral actions. Occasionally, circumstances can make people to become selectively disengaged from those moral self-sanctions and end up pursuing unprincipled actions.

Particularly when people feel angry, pressured, or depressed, their mental footing tends to ebb away. Any state of emotional threat can let up their determination to act ethically and resist temptations. They lose discipline, get into a defensive mode, and become susceptible to thinking only about short-term benefits. They are more likely to engage in self-absorbed behaviors that they would otherwise spurn, especially if the payoff for such behavior is high and the odds of getting caught and punished are low.

Circumstances Sometimes Sway People to Engage in Behaviors That Conflict with Their Internalized Moral Standards

Moral disengagement is the psychological phenomenon that describes how people rationalize behavior that is at odds with their own moral principles. For example, suppose a teenager who has a principled framework that forbids theft. If he takes a newspaper without paying for it from a Starbucks store, he may rationalize his actions by telling himself that Starbucks warranted some harm because it overcharges its consumers and, until recently, purchased not all its coffee beans from certified fair trade sources.

People engaging in wrongdoing often see that the rules are uncalled-for and unjustifiable. In their judgment, even though they may be breaking the rules and flouting conventions, they’re persuaded that they’re really not doing anything wrong because the rules deserve to be violated.

Moral reasoning usually deprives people when they devalue their prey and malign their victims (“her tattletaling deserved it” or “he brandish a knife, hence I pulled out my gun.”)

Stanford Psychologist Albert Bandura, who introduced the concept of moral disengagement, identified eight cognitive mechanisms (book) that disengage a person’s internal moral standards from his/her actions, thereby causing unethical behavior without conspicuous remorse or self-censure.

Idea for Impact: Be Wary of Suspending Your Moral Standards to Reduce Self-Censure

When circumstances or people provoke you to potentially regretful behavior, realize that you are a self-determining agent, and that you have a moral and ethical responsibility to behave with integrity and pursue wholesome actions. Step back and ask yourself, “Normally, would I judge this contemplated action to be wrong? Are my ways of thinking flawed? Am I defending the harm I am causing by blaming others? Am I criticizing the victim to justify my destructive actions?”

When in doubt, use Warren Buffett’s rule of thumb for personal integrity: “I want [people] to ask themselves whether they are willing to have any contemplated act appear the next day on the front page of their local paper—to be read by their spouses, children and friends—with the reporting done by an informed and critical reporter.”

Expressive Writing Can Help You Heal

November 8, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Give sorrow words;
the grief that does not speak;
whispers the o’er-fraught heart
and bids it break.
—William Shakespeare, Macbeth (Act 4, Scene 3)

Confronting Upsetting Experiences: Expressive Writing for Healing

People often block out thoughts that provoke negative emotions as a way of reducing their stress and regulating their moods. However, intentional suppression of deep-seated emotions not only increases susceptibility to illness, but also amplifies the emotionality and associated psychological effects of the suppressed thoughts.

Discussing, venting, clarifying, or expressing a trauma is a natural human response. When this necessity is inhibited, emotional stress and physical illness ensue.

Facing up to deeply personal issues can promote physical health, well-being, and beneficial behaviors.

The scientific research on the benefits of putting negative experiences into words is extensive. Studies have shown that expressive writing about oneself and one’s traumatic or stressful experiences does produce significant health benefits. Expressive writing helps ameliorate mood disorders, reduces symptoms among patients with serious illness, improve a person’s physical condition after a heart attack, and even enhance memory.

Writing about Emotional Topics Brings About Improved Physical and Emotional Wellbeing

James Pennebaker, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, first investigated expressive writing as a healing process in the 1980s. Since then, research that spawned from Pennebaker’s pioneering studies, has revealed benefits could accrue to those who were dealing with divorces, lost love, death of loved ones, job rejections, terminal illness, even college students struggling with first-year transitions.

Here are the main points about the expressive writing method:

Choose the part of the day when you are most contemplative (that’s the morning for most people.) Sit down at a place where you are not likely to be disturbed.
Reflect about a very personal and important event. Consider a significant emotional upheaval that influences your life the most or has in the past. Your topic can be about a distress or failure, lost love, health-, school- or career-related anxiety, relationships, inner conflicts, death of a loved one, or just about any topic that you would like to express.
If you’re writing about an experience or an event that involves another person, it can help to organize your writing as a letter to that person, whether alive or dead.
Write your deepest thoughts about your chosen event or experience continuously for 20 minutes. If you run out of things to write or reach a mental block, just repeat or recap what you have previously written.
In your writing, deeply explore your thoughts about the event and describe its effect on you. In other words, write both about what happened and how you feel about it. Think about how you can handle these events and their consequences now—what you can do specifically.
Connect your personal experiences to other parts of your life. How do they relate to your childhood, your parents, people you love, who you are, or who you want to be?
Write for yourself as your thoughts arise. Be as direct, intense, and serious as possible. Do not worry about grammar, spelling, comprehensiveness, legibility, or structure. On the opening day of writing, your stories are not very structured, but over the three or four days, you will develop a more structured narrative.
After writing for 20 minutes, do not look back over. Simply fold the papers you used, seal them, and put them away (read more about the “worry box technique.”) Unlike psychotherapy, the expressive writing technique does not employ feedback to the participant.
Make a mental note of how you feel. It is not unusual to feel sad or disheartened after writing—these feelings usually fade away in an hour or so. In research experiments, many participants have reported crying or getting upset by the experience of writing about emotional upheavals, but most participants testify that the writing experience was meaningful in helping them organize their experiences.
Repeat this exercise for four consecutive days. You can write about the same experience on all four days or about different experiences each day. If you choose to write about the same topic on all the four days, try to wrap everything up by the fourth day.

Note that expressive writing is distinct from keeping a daily journal in that it allows people to step back for a moment and evaluate their lives. Pennebaker once said, “I’m not even convinced that people should write about a horrible event for more than a couple of weeks. You risk getting into a sort of navel gazing or cycle of self-pity. … But standing back every now and then and evaluating where you are in life is really important.”

Translating an Emotional Experience Into Language Makes the Experience Graspable: it Can Help You Find New Meaning in Life’s Ordeals

New research has shown that expressive writing—followed by expressive rewriting—can improve happiness and lead to behavioral changes. Narrative storytelling of an unpleasant and chaotic experience may make the experience and its effects more controllable. For instance, according this New York Times article,

At the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute, life coaches ask clients to identify their goals, then to write about why they haven’t achieved those goals. Once the clients have written their old stories, they are asked to reflect on them and edit the narratives to come up with a new, more honest assessment. While the institute doesn’t have long-term data, the intervention has produced strong anecdotal results.

Idea for Impact: Expressive Writing Can Help Change the Way You Feel About Traumatic Events and About Yourself

Expressive writing is a method of self-help that supplements the value of therapeutic talking to someone accepting and non-judgmental.

By exploring your deepest thoughts and feelings with a reflective, inquiring, honest attitude, you can shift perspective. Standing back and reflecting on your suffering from different points of view can bring about an improved emotional state. You can create your greatest opportunities for change by confronting the realities, reframing your experiences in terms of your values and priorities, and identifying impediments that stand in the way of purpose, joy, and contentment.

For more on the means and methods of expressive writing, as well its many confirmed physiological and behavioral benefits, read James Pennebaker’s Opening Up: the Healing Power of Expressing Emotion (1997) and Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing (1999)

« Previous Page

Living the Good Life

Frugality Over the Ages

Frugality is a Moral Virtue

Idea for Impact: Enjoying a rich life is more important than zealously stewarding one’s savings and investments.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

The Rightness of Past Choices Become Obvious in the Clarity of Future Hindsight

The Mournful “What If” is a Powerful and Emotional Inquiry about Alternative Lives You Could Have Lived

Idea for Impact: Sketch the Picture of Our Own Choosing

Wondering what to read next?

The Superrich Influence the Standards for Desirability in Consumer Goods: The Less Rich Emulate Them

Relative Consumption, Not Absolute Consumption, Affects Consumers’ Happiness

Can a Progressive Consumption Tax Challenge the “Luxury Arms Race”?

The Good and Bad Sides of Consumerism: How to Clamp Down on Conspicuous Consumption and Encourage More Saving

Wondering what to read next?

The Best Times of the Day to Make Optimum Decisions

Optimizing Your Day with Daily Rhythms

“Breaks are Not a Sign of Sloth but a Sign of Strength”

“Timing is Everything” and “Everything is Timing”

Recommendation: Skim Daniel Pink’s ‘When’ for the Life Hacks

Wondering what to read next?

Mindfulness Simply Means Being Aware and Being Present

Attending to What Happens to Our Minds, Hearts, Attitudes, and Actions

Mindfulness is the Best Antidote to Anxiety

Meditative Mindfulness in the Emerging Context of Consumer Culture

A Few Minutes a Day is All You Need to Reap the Benefits of Mindfulness

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Rationality Drives Human Behavior Only After Emotion and Impulse Lose Their Hegemony

Circumstances Sometimes Sway People to Engage in Behaviors That Conflict with Their Internalized Moral Standards

Idea for Impact: Be Wary of Suspending Your Moral Standards to Reduce Self-Censure

Wondering what to read next?

Confronting Upsetting Experiences: Expressive Writing for Healing

Writing about Emotional Topics Brings About Improved Physical and Emotional Wellbeing

Translating an Emotional Experience Into Language Makes the Experience Graspable: it Can Help You Find New Meaning in Life’s Ordeals

Idea for Impact: Expressive Writing Can Help Change the Way You Feel About Traumatic Events and About Yourself

Wondering what to read next?