Well here we are, a new decade.  Can you believe it?  Somehow we made it to 2020.  A part of me is still back in the late sixties and seventies – my high school and college/post-grad years.  I could not even imagine myself living in 2020.  That seemed so far in the future.  And yet here I am.  And strangely life seems not much different.  We have cell phones and the internet, but beyond that life still follows much the same paths.  We still sleep in beds at night, wake up and go to work five days a week, catch up on chores during the weekend, and start all over again the next week.

I remember back in the seventies the belief was that automation would replace much of the time spent working and that our work week would gradually dwindle down to about 25 hours a week by the turn of the century.  Somehow or other the opposite happened.  Instead of having abundant time to spend on leisure activities, our stress levels have steadily increased.  This is taking its toll on our health and wellbeing.  It is not as though we are getting ahead by working ever more hours.  It seems that we have to work more and more just to keep up with the lifestyle we had 50 years ago.  When I fact check my perception, I discover that when you adjust for inflation the average wage in the US is exactly the same as it was in 1973, considered an all-time high then and now.

50 years of US wages, in one chart

So it is not that we are making less and have to work harder to keep up.  That means we have to be buying more or spending more on what we do buy.  The consumer price index covers the 8 most typical types of consumer purchases like food, housing, transportation, and so on, and this is used to determine our rate of inflation.  Since that is already factored into our average wage, which is at an all-time high, what gives?  Why are we working more hours these days?  Have our wants increased so much that we are trapped in a cycle of more and more?

I don't know the answer, but I do see every day the consequences of this stress on the bodies of my patients.  Even though my patients are unique and special, I suspect that what I am seeing is happening all over the place.  I cover a lot of angles on improving health in this newsletter, but none of the many diverse ways to improve health work if you are under constant stress.  On the flip side, when you are under constant stress your ability to detoxify your body and eliminate poisons drops tremendously so the necessity of avoiding poisons is that much more important.  So stress makes the good stuff fail and the bad stuff ten times worse.

So what I am leading up to as a prime consideration for our New Year's resolution concerns stress management.  But I want to point out a common false belief we are feed by the marketing geniuses that fill our senses with all the things we believe we need to be happy.  Excitement is not the same thing as happiness.  In fact, excitement is just another stressor to the physiology of the body.  But we are taught that happiness comes from the excitement of getting our desires met.  At the same time “they” are busy programming our subconscious mind with all the stuff we believe we desire.  In reality, our true desires are not for stuff and not for excitement.  These are made up for us so we become good little consumers of commercial goods.

True desires are for feeling states, like ease, connection, belonging, empowerment, and so on.  Marketers know this and have many techniques for linking their products to these true desires.  They convince you that you won't be able to connect without their particular breath mint or toothpaste, or that you will be able to belong if you drink the right kind of soda or alcoholic drink.  Authentic connection and developing the participation skills to enable you to belong are seen as too much effort, which can all be avoided by simply buying the right product.  Obviously this is bogus hokum, but we fall for it.

Here is my suggestion for a New Year's resolution for 2020: stop the crazy shopping frenzy and find some authentic happiness instead.  Those new shoes will not make you happy.  Buying them will excite you briefly and feed your story that you are now a socially better person, but it will not bring you any real happiness.  Happiness comes from your flow out to the world, not you trying to fill the believed holes in yourself with outside stuff.  You are good enough just as you are to outflow your grace and goodness to the world.  And every day you have the opportunity to get even better.  You don't need to live in the “better” neighborhood and drive the newer car to be able to create loving relationships, and it is those loving relationships that will actually make you happier, not the other stuff.  Yes, we all need our basic survival needs met.  That is not the stuff I am talking about.  We all need a good pair of shoes to protect our feet.  We do not need this week's latest pair of fashion sneakers that will end up in the back of the closet with the other 23 pairs after a month or two.  Consumerism depletes us and ultimately makes us unhappy.  No matter how much stuff we buy, it is never enough, and the stress it produces is killing us.

So what can we do differently?  The goal is to reduce stress and increase happiness.  That is easy to say, but quite difficult to do.  To even approach the different choices we would have to make requires us to deconstruct some of the beliefs we have been taught.  We are always making the best choices we can with the information we have in each moment.  Our beliefs determine what information we can and will take in.  For instance, a pervasive belief we carry is that more money will make us happier.  The dream millions of people have is how happy life would be if we could just win the lottery.  But when you actually study the lives of lottery winners you find that they are ecstatic for about two weeks.  By week three the whole thing has worn off and their stress levels come right back – usually worse.  Interestingly that is about the same time frame people are devastated by injuries that cause a loss of their legs.  By week three people adapt to most things.  Research has shown that there is a definite increase in happiness when you raise a persons income from poverty up to average, but more than that amount of money only creates more stress.

The same faulty beliefs fly around subjects like weight loss or gain, beauty, height, color, family background, age, and so on.  Happiness comes from appreciating what you have, not from chasing what you don't have.  We have been trained into addiction to the chase.  The chase has highs and lows, excitement and depressions.  We have been taught to want to win in spite of the cost to our health and the loss of happiness.  I suggest dropping the desire to win and replacing it with the desire to succeed.  The desire to be either the best or the worst is a classic sign of addiction.  The desire to succeed is an achievable mature approach to life.

This speaks directly to the biggest problem with New Year's resolutions.  Most people pick an external goal and try to win.  This puts you in the chase mode which rarely lasts more than a few weeks.  Choosing a goal that is based on an internal positive reward, such as making many small choice changes to slowly build success, gets better results.  Make a tiny choice change and see how it feels.  If it feels good, enjoy it then make the next tiny change.  Expect to make what looks like backward choices as you need to test the validity of the results you seem to be feeling.  I am pretty certain that eating sugar does not work for me, but I will test it every now and then to see if that is still true for me.  Enjoying the positive results you get with each tiny step is essential.  That enjoyment is what builds authentic gratitude.

So for 2020 let's choose to make the choices that will produce a little more happiness for us.  Make tiny changes in your life that result in you feeling better.  Maybe create more time for yourself.  Maybe spend more quality time with loved ones.  Little changes that feel good are everywhere.  Try a few.

Take care and happy new year,

David            

Yes, there are no pictures this week, too much run around for my mother's 90th birthday...
      

   
Ellen update:    

This week has been insanely busy as we prepare for my mother's 90th birthday - one party on Friday for 19 people and one one Saturday for 33 people.  I am host, caterer, housing provider for my son, daughter-in-law, and two grand-kids, and cleanup crew.  Family is in from all over the place.  The chaos and noise that results from 5 kids between the ages of three and seven is amazing.  Ellen has been using her stroke status to give herself more time alone while I run around with the kids.