Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love (31 page)

‘A day without laughter is a day wasted,’ said Charlie Chaplin. There is ongoing debate whether laughing is indeed a universal medicine, a panacea for a good mood. But if a smile can extend your life, there is a good chance that laughter might help, too. If nothing else, laughter can ease situations of pain. Again using a series of videos, scientists have shown that a good laugh raises the pain threshold of viewers. When participants in the study were shown a factual documentary, not much happened, but when they were shown a comic video, viewers who laughed could better sustain the pain of a tight cuff around their arms or contact with a frozen wine cooler sleeve.
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The effect was stronger when the viewers laughed in a group rather than when they watched and laughed at the video alone. Behind the raised pain threshold is the release of endorphins.

In general, a positive disposition does improve physical health. Feeling calm, cheerful and strong as opposed to sad, tense or angry can even increase your resistance to developing a cold!
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Down to a single nerve

Whether or not you are, like me, uneasy with being asked if you are happy, psychologists have learnt how to quantify happiness. Typical surveys of happiness explore whether, all things considered, people are satisfied with their lives, and to what degree, or if instead they would like to change anything.

In his book on the science of happiness, the economist Richard Layard talks about seven main factors that contribute to happiness: health, employment, income, freedom, personal values, family, and social relationships and friends.
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Of these, against common thinking, money and our financial situation are, in truth, the least influential. Happiness does not necessarily increase as a consequence of higher income. Rich people are not happier than the poor. Surveys have shown that, once what we earn has covered our basic needs, the surplus money doesn’t buy us happiness.
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If anything, better incomes make people desire even more.

What does seem to make a difference in levels of happiness is how we choose to
spend
money. Especially whether we pour money into selfish expenditure or whether we use it more altruistically. In the US, a group of about six hundred people were asked to report their happiness and how much they earned. Then, they were asked to list how much of their monthly earnings was on average spent on bills, on gifts for themselves and on donations or gifts for others.
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The happier bunch were those who had spent more on others. Similarly, when a group of employees rated their happiness before and after receiving a bonus and reported how they had used it, they were clearly happier if they had spent it on things like presents for others, donating to charity or meals with friends rather than goods for themselves. How they spent their windfall meant more than its amount and being generous towards others was a significant factor in the realization of their well-being. Taking a step back from our own concerns, and reaching out to others and embracing theirs is usually a source of happiness. A self-effacing attitude may earn us amplified rewards.
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From time to time, especially after a chaotic day spent running around people we don’t know or commuting in packed tube carriages, we may appreciate going solo, relishing the luxury of withdrawing from the world and enjoying the peace of solitude. But research on happiness is clear: we are better off when we are not alone. Of all the factors influencing our emotional well-being, by far the most significant is the establishment of social and emotional bonds. To be circled by people is good enough. It is even better if we surround ourselves with people with whom we have meaningful relationships. So, thousands of Facebook friends don’t count very much unless they are all good and dear friends.

Satisfactory social relationships improve the quality of life and considerably extend longevity, too. A systematic review of mortality studies on about 300,000 individuals across the world showed that people with satisfactory social relationships improve their chances of survival by 50 per cent compared with those with poor or inadequate relationships.
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The effect of having good friends is almost equivalent to the effect of quitting smoking and is greater than that of either physical exercise or abstinence from alcohol.

Friends have the capacity to uplift us and our relationship with them seems to affect us deep under our skin. If positive emotions have beneficial effects on our body and our health, it should be possible to discover physical indices of such improvements.

In search of such clues, psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has found one that is measurable at the level of a single nerve, the vagus nerve. Brains have long tails. Earlier, I mentioned how the vagus nerve is involved in achieving orgasms. It seems that it is also of help when we engage in social interactions. In general, the vagus nerve acts as a communication device that senses how our main organs are doing and sends this information back to the brain. One index of whether or not the vagus nerve is functioning properly is called the cardiac vagal tone. It reflects the variability of our heart rate during respiratory performance. Even if we can’t perceive it, our pulse is slightly more rapid when we inhale and slightly slower when we exhale. The vagal tone corresponds to the amount of difference between these fluctuations.
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Fredrickson has established how cardiac vagal tone is a signature both for our physical health and also for our propensity to feel positive emotions and that the two are, in fact, connected. A high vagal tone gives you the capacity to take advantage of positive circumstances. As Fredrickson puts it, it gives you the chance to capitalize and expand on your positive emotions in order to build, through the additive value of positive moments, rich personal resources that amplify your well-being. This is facilitated by the establishment and appreciation of social connections.

In one experiment, Frederickson and her collaborators monitored for nine weeks in a row the vagal tone and the emotional well-being of a group of individuals in relationship to their daily social interactions with friends and dear ones.
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Those who had a high vagal tone from the start showed rapid increases in social connectedness and reported the experience of positive emotions such as joy, love, gratitude or hope. At the same time, those improvements in social connectedness and positive emotions also predicted increases in their final vagal tone, which was higher at the end of the study. Basically, what the study found is that as we work on our close relationships and instigate social contacts with others, we regulate our cardiac vagal tone which, in turn, backs up and stabilizes our positive emotions. A perfect reciprocal deal between our physical and mental well-being. As a follow-up to the above study, Fredrickson extended her research, asking whether it is possible for people to deliberately work towards an improvement of their vagal tone. Her strategy to generate positive emotions was a meditation technique that induces feelings of love, goodwill and compassion for oneself and others.
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In combination with the meditation technique, higher vagal tone facilitated the improvement in the perceptions of social relationships and in the manifestation of positive emotions, which in turn increased again the final vagal tone.

What fascinates me about these studies is how slight but meaningful changes in our nerve physiology contribute to influencing our social behaviour. Interestingly, the branches of the vagus nerve are such that they are connected to the muscles governing our facial expression, eye gaze, as well as muscles in our middle ear that sharpen our ability to tune in to the frequency of human voices. Therefore, a positive vagal activity equips us with all the necessary qualities to engage in social behaviour.

So, it does make sense to invest in meaningful friendships and social interactions to contribute to your own and other people’s well-being. Darwin once said: ‘A man’s friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.’

What all this means is that while we steer towards our ideals, and our ideal life, we can enjoy the path. While we pursue a distant happiness, we can exercise skills, pleasures and virtues that can actually help us reach our goals and perhaps shorten the route.

Coda

Rising early has tangible benefits. I had a chance to savour the small triumph of the finished sonnet and abandon myself into a short state of bliss, without thinking about much, just taking in the sounds and light of the early morning. There are precious pleasures to be enjoyed on a morning walk. To be greeted by the joggers who cross your path, to smile at strangers and pick the person with whom to trade the first words of the day, to meet a parade of strolling dogs, grab the freshest bagel, collect the newspaper for the neighbours. When confined within the close boundaries of repetitive habits, we become in a sense blind to our surroundings. Our mental gaze is projected on to a distant purpose, and we overlook local opportunities of delight. But joy, or even just a small pleasure, gives us better eyes. For joy is also skilled in something else. It nails down fear. It pushes it down into temporary oblivion, vigorously, so that we can make room, look at everything with renewed optimism. Joy has the ability to cultivate itself, if we let it. If I find a reason to be joyful, however small the pleasure is, new joy will be making its way to me by some shortcut – I don’t know whether that shortcut is the vagus nerve or another path.

There is another trick to cultivate joy that I am fond of. In 1962, the American author James Baldwin published a beautiful essay entitled ‘From a region in my mind’ in the
New Yorker
, in which he wrote about the conditions of blacks in America. In a paragraph dedicated to the power of jazz, he wrote how only black people truly know the depths whence it comes. In the middle of it lies this treasurable sentence: ‘To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.’
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Here the word sensual, as Baldwin acknowledges himself, has nothing to do with the meaning most people associate with it. I interpret the skill of being sensual as the ability to own your actions and fill them with meaning and value, without letting them just occur to you, as if you didn’t believe in them. Baldwin’s exhortation is a tough call, but also one of great promise. It has haunted me ever since I first read it, but it has also been a source of hope and strength, a reminder to which I can resort whenever I need. What else is there to do but to participate fully in each of our ventures?
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If I write a line or two, if I scramble eggs, paint a wall, hang a picture, play the piano or do the dishes, I want to do full justice to those actions. Equally, if I dedicate time to my friends, listen to their stories, buy them a present or help them in one way or another, I want to fully enjoy and believe in the generousness of those gestures.

One could even say that, in a nutshell, Baldwin’s sentence unifies both the hedonistic and eudaimonic precepts. It helps you find what you most like doing and most believe in, and exhorts you to savour it, master it, cementing the pleasure derived from it to build for your preferred future. It takes courage and determination to find what that is, it might be scary at first. But remember, fear and bravery are two sides of the same coin. And if you practise joy and let it happen to you, courage will emerge. Whistle to keep up the courage, as William James would recommend.

My minor creative achievement in the New York dawn didn’t itself need much acclaim. But I knew that a new round of frustration with writing would be just around the corner, so, before the next bout of pain, the temporary joy I was in was not to be ignored. I felt like sharing it.

I learnt the importance of good friendships and conviviality as a child, when family friends in small or large groups would regularly ring our doorbell for company, even late in the evening, and my mother would improvise quick meals to feed the multitudes. ‘It’s us!’ they would shout from the other side of the door. Over time, she invented a pasta dish that became the regular food for those occasions. It was called simply ‘Spaghetti my way’. They would embark on conversations on all kinds of subjects, from the latest political issue to the newest film or book, or small local events. Daily successes and failures would be shared. Plans for joint holidays would be plotted. It didn’t really matter how the evening would unfold. What mattered was to be spending time together. Music was a constant presence at those gatherings. The piano would be opened wide for those who wanted to play and the adventurous would sing. Everyone was cheerful. Such impromptu visits to the house were enormously entertaining for me and a reward for all of us.

At the end of my morning walk, before returning to the flat, I stopped at the grocery for some food shopping and sent a text message to a bunch of friends: ‘Dinner tonight. Come early and we’ll cook together!’ I would be making the dish I remembered from those childhood evenings. My own way.

7

Love: Syndromes and Sonnets

Love is a better teacher than duty

ALBERT EINSTEIN

I . . . profess to understand nothing but matters of love

PLATO

I
recall it all started on a Sunday afternoon at the beginning of April, my second year in graduate school in Heidelberg, south Germany.