After four posts on emotions (1,2,3,4), it's time to continue the tour of knowing thyself through evolutionary philosophy. For a quick orientation, I'm still just working through things "concerning me." I started in the past examining the question, "Where did I come from?". I moved to the present to ask, "Where am I?", and then "What am I?". The question of what has been broken down into a body, a mind, and the mind-body interface. At that mind-body interconnection, I looked first at emotions, and now it's time to move to the next area of interest: needs and desires.

First, here is what I've written about needs and desires. It's short, but bears repeating.

The body and mind together have requirements for them to function properly. Abraham Maslow in 1943 devised the currently definitive list and hierarchy of these needs.

1. Physiological: breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, excretion
2. Safety: security of body, employment, resources, morality, the family, health, property
3. Love / Belonging: friendship, family, sexual intimacy
4. Esteem: self esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of others, respect by others
5. Self-actualization: morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts

Maslow later listed additional needs for those who live self-actualized lives. Truth, goodness, beauty, unity, aliveness, uniqueness, necessity, completeness, justice, order, simplicity, richness, effortlessness, playfulness, self-sufficiency, meaningfulness. Knowledge of these comes from philosophy. Once again, you must know philosophy to live life at its highest level. Know these needs and desires. Work to have them met. All of them. Higher order needs require the control of lower order needs. You must master them. Organize society to help individuals meet them.

How are you doing at meeting these needs and desires? At the root of my philosophy, I've pared things down to the essential truth that we are living things trying to stay alive in an uncaring universe. That sounds to some like a bleak call for meeting the minimum requirements for survival, and on occasion, that is all that we are reduced to. But in the long run, we need much more than this to want to survive. In the long run, the need for survival builds up a much more robust set of requirements. As basic physiological needs are met, we move up Maslow's hierarchy, aching for higher and higher needs that lead to longer and longer timelines of satisfaction and survival.

In Aristotle's view of ethics, he described an ideal state of man as one of eudaimonia. Historically, this word has often been translated simply as "happiness", but taken in full context, scholars now agree that Aristotle meant something more than our modern understanding of mere pleasurable happiness - he meant something closer to what can be described as human flourishing or thriving. Look again at the list of needs and desires that Maslow described above. These are a psychologists list of what it takes to flourish. This is what it takes, from a scientific point of view, for humans to thrive and survive.

In this lull between Christmas and New Years Day, once the families have been visited, the celebrations with friends have paused, the gifts have been put away, and the days have some spare time for contemplation, many of us take stock of the past year, make plans for the next one, and decide on a few resolutions to help us improve our lives. As you go through this ritual this year, keep Maslow's list in mind. Remember that the higher needs are completely undermined when lower ones go unmet. Remember that lower ones are not enough to achieve the flourishing state of eudaimonia that is necessary for long term surviving and thriving. Build a strong and unassailable base. Stretch yourself and meet higher aspirations. Know thyself. Choose your resolutions accordingly.

Do you have any resolutions that have worked for you in the past? Do you have any plans for big ones this year? What about tips to turn resolutions into lifelong habits? Share them in the comments below and help us all flourish. Until next week, have a happy new year!

Last week I wrote my second blog article about taming emotions using ruminations from philosophy. It was based on logical analysis of scientific findings from cognitive psychology and was illustrated through common stories about everyday experiences. A few hours after I made that post, an enraged man walked into a school and committed a horrific mass murder of defenseless children and teachers. Like everyone else, this tragedy filled me with a deep sense of sorrow and helplessness. I recognized the impotence of my words in the face of such mindlessness. I discussed the event with family and friends. I hugged loved ones. And I weighed in on the debates on social media sites about appropriate political responses. A week later, I don't feel like anything has changed, and now it's time for me to write about philosophy again. Why bother?

Here's why. In the wake of yet another mass shooting in America, the idea that better mental health interventions are needed is being discussed widely. This is a fine idea, but who really understands the definition of mental health? The last version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV) is over 940 pages and currently costs $84.49 on Amazon. No one in the general public is reading this. (And from the controversy that surrounds it, I'm not sure how many professionals agree with its giant list of disorders and symptoms and treatments anyway.) For widespread interventions into mental health, we need a widespread understanding of mental health. For a widespread understanding, we need something more basic that is easy to apply.

I don't have this figured out yet, but I am trying, and I'm using this website to both ask for help and also spread whatever I find. I happen to be thinking about mental health these days because it's the next issue to talk about in this blog tour of my Evolutionary Philosophy and because I have been considering how to add philosophical counseling to the mix of products and services that I offer. Philosophical counseling has been called therapy for the sane. I have no formal training in this emerging field, and I am still skeptical of some of its proponents who are clearly moral relativists*, but I do believe this idea holds promise. My last two blog posts hint at the kind of sane work one can do to improve one's life. Philosophical counselors can help to guide this work. But philosophical counseling has its limits. Philosophic counselors must know when to contact health professionals, and for me, that time would be when one encounters insanity. When is that? For me, as espoused in my philosophical discussion of emotions, that is when one sees the following:

Insanity is the inability of reason to control the emotions, either through brain chemistry that does not respond to cognitive appraisals or cognitive appraisals that refuse to respond to reality. This lack of control also ranges from mild (neurotic) to extreme (psychotic). Treatment for insanity must be based on the correct cause and severity of the affliction.

This is the kind of early warning sign I believe can be widely understood and disseminated. This is evidence of the kind of lack of mental health that needs intervention. Sometimes pleas for help don't come and sometimes wild mood swings are just temporary, but when emotional responses get stuck, that is when danger is not far behind. Look again at my chart of emotions. From the early evidence, it appears the Newtown killings were insane responses of anger, hatred, and rage. Where does this show on my chart?

Anger, hatred, and rage are emotional responses to a negative situation where the person feels "I need to do something about that." My guess is that the Newtown murderer had been exhibiting these emotions for weeks if not months or years. Fantasies about how his future actions would relieve his emotional pain determined which specific actions he took, but surely he was generally drowning in unregulated negative emotions.

For more clarity on this, consider another example of an insane act - the act of suicide. I said that the signs the Newtown murderer likely exhibited were ones that lead to destructive actions towards others. The signs that most often precede suicidal acts of destruction against the self though are persistent feelings of  misery, anguish, and despair. From the emotional chart above, we see that those are emotional responses to the negative situation where the person cannot shake the feeling that "My future looks bad." In the case of the Newtown murder-suicide, he was probably plagued with both sets of emotions caused by beliefs that "his future looked bad" and "he needed to do something about that". When these beliefs stubbornly remain intact, emotions become more and more intense until the only solutions to end these feelings are the most extreme actions.

Had the people surrounding the Newtown murderer understood where these emotions come from, they may have been able to intervene with changes to his beliefs, changes to his focus, changes to his cognitive appraisals. If those efforts failed at changing his emotions, then it would have been time to contact professionals for help. Emotions are the sign before the storm. We cannot wait for actions to occur. We must recognize the signs by understanding emotions, by understanding the psychology and philosophy behind them. Evil, we can recognize. Sane actions from extremists with wrongheaded beliefs are easier to see coming, argue with, tip off police about, and stop before they occur. It's the random acts of violent explosion from previously disturbed but law abiding citizens that are much harder to stop.

As I said above, I don't have this all figured out. In my philosophy, I wrote:

Due to a lack of understanding about them, some of these emotions are defined rather fuzzily and may apply to multiple places. If this classification of emotions proves valid, we may decide to define some emotional states more precisely.

Help me refine this chart. Share it. Print it out and use it. Send me comments about where you feel it is wrong. Please listen to my small plea for help so we can all become better attuned to the large pleas for help that are hidden in the darkest parts of our society.



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* Lou Marinoff, the Author of Plato Not Prozac is perhaps the best known philosophical counselor, but his book was filled with contradictory sayings just plucked from philosophers at random wherever he happened to find them. Feeling a mid life crisis coming on? Nietzsche wrote about that. Feeling depressed? Schopenhauer said something about that. Not sure what you are feeling? Roll some dice or draw some straws and let the Tao Te Ching tell you what the solution is. That kind of counseling has little more than random chance of actually helping anyone. As I say in my section on emotions:

Appraising something means understanding whether it is good or bad. In a relativistic or nihilistic worldview, this judgment is difficult so many emotions are out of control. A philosophy is required to control our lives. Appraisals that align with the truth give us the best control. Evolutionary Philosophy seeks those truths.

In my last post, I talked about how we can use philosophy to know thyself and learn to tame the elephant of emotions that we are all riding upon. The first step is learning to recognize what's causing these emotions, but once we do, once we recognize that emotions come from cognitive appraisals, from our internal judgments, then we can learn to change those feelings by either changing our beliefs or changing what we are focusing on.

The first example I gave of this taming process was a rather simple one of learning to control the temper that flares up when I am stuck in traffic. Looking at my chart of emotions, we see that I was able to change my response to a negative situation - being stuck in traffic - by simply changing my belief from "I need to do something about that" to "I can't do anything about it." That was a straightforward situation, but I want to go a step deeper to give another example of how to manage your emotions using this philosophical approach. Let's take a look at the holiday angst and worries that plague so many of us these days.

It's mid-December and the days are getting shorter and shorter as we descend into the deepest depths of winter. Our bodies want to sleep more and pack on some pounds to insulate us from the cold. But modern life doesn't accept that. We've lost touch with the rhythms of nature and instead we soldier on with the same working hours and the same expectations of looking great in our skinny jeans. This alone is enough to put us out of sorts and in a grumpy mood, but another challenge is lying in wait on the calendar. Christmas is coming and there are a thousand little errands that need to get done before it gets here. Just when our bodies want to rest more, we decide to pile on more work for ourselves. We start to feel a bit frazzled. Then the questions creep in. Will I get all my shopping done? What should I buy for my friend or loved one? What if they don't like it? Who are we going to see over the holidays? What if the weather's bad? What if my house is a mess? What if the cat pulls the tree down? What if it catches fire? No, wait, that almost never happens. But I do need to cook some special food for everyone. I haven't made a ham since last year. How does that work again? Maybe I should do something different. But oh, what recipe should I use? What if that doesn't work? What if everyone hates it? On and on the questions come and we feel jittery and nervous and unable to sleep. We are plagued by holiday worries, angst, and anxiety. What has happened? Let's look at my chart of emotions and see if that helps us figure it out.

Where do we see the holiday feelings I've just described? Worry, angst, and anxiety all flow from the cognitive appraisal, "My future is uncertain." They are the body's responses to questions about what lies ahead. They are preparing us to act and get ready for the future. But what happens when the questions linger? We can't know the future perfectly; there will always be questions about it. If we allow ourselves to continually roll them around in our minds though and keep the focus on the questions, the body keeps trying to respond to this. Our mild worries, turn to deeper angst, and for some of us, a serious case of anxiety characterized by panic attacks (when the body mistakes the chemicals in it for real threats) or depressed paralysis (when the body gives up and decides it can't do anything about what is happening to it). What to do?

Several approaches arise from this way of looking at our emotions. In some cases, the worries motivate us properly and we respond to the problem with the decision, "I need to do something about that." With steady determination, we make lists of tasks, plans to do them, or assignments to others until our questions and worries subside. Of course, not everyone's life is that simple to take care of. Sometimes the tasks outnumber the ability to handle them, and we need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that, "I can't do anything about it." Depending on the level of importance you place on the tasks that go undone, this will result in feelings of apathy, disappointment, sadness, grief, etc. Those feelings can also be managed through an examination of your values, but let's leave that for another time.

Suppose further, that you have made your list of tasks, done as many as you can, resigned yourself to accepting those that can't be completed, and yet still, your questions remain. Your worries and angst have not left you. As I said, the future is unknown, there will always be questions about it, but you do not have to dwell on that. You can learn to accept this uncertainty in life and spend your energy focusing on other things in order to feel other emotions. Look at the bottom five rows on the chart above. All of them are positive emotional responses that vary depending on whether you turn your attention to various items in the past, present, or the future. Instead of fixating on the uncertainty inherent in the future, you could focus on:

1. the past, thinking about how, "I have (just) acted well." Remember the good things you are doing or have done throughout the year. Remember the fun you had, the time you helped someone, the difficult hobby you got better at. The more you focus on these, the more you will be filled with a sense of satisfaction, pride, or happiness;
2. the past, but thinking about how, "I like what I have (just) seen." Remember the great things you have seen others do. Remember the present your mother sent you, the time your child cooperated with another classmate, the spouse who said just what you needed to hear, the co-worker who made your job easier, the community fair that raised money for local people who need it. Spend time contemplating these, immerse yourself in the memory by remembering how all five senses recalled the situation, make it come alive, and the body responds with gratitude, affection, wonder, and love;
3. the present, thinking, "I have an opportunity" in front of me. If it's a healthy opportunity for the body (I'll leave that to your private imagination) you'll be filled with desire and passion;
4. the present, but realizing the opportunity is one for your mind - a new project to complete, a new skill to master, a new fact to learn, a new habit to cultivate - you'll respond with emotions of interest, zest, and excitement; and finally
5. the future, thinking about something specific that makes you realize, "My future looks good." Consider that one gift you know your friend will love, the way the house will smell once the Christmas tree is up, the laughs you know you will share with a co-worker at her holiday party. There are some things you know you can expect and look forward to - these will fill you with a sense of hope, boldness, and even fearlessness. Try it now.

Questions about the future will always be there if you want to ask them. They can properly motivate us to prepare ourselves with prudent actions. But if you find that they are leading to neurotic destructive fears...then it is time to know thyself. Understand where these emotions are coming from, feel the tug of the elephant and rein it in by deciding what you would rather focus on. When you learn to do that, the holidays can be a great time for end of year contemplation and celebration. Enjoy it. Bask in the warm emotions of the accomplishments of the past year, the opportunities for fun in the next few weeks, and the confidence that next year, at least some of it will be better. Happy holidays. It's not just a cliche, it can be the truth for you and your emotions.

Yes, I know that's a camel. But I've never ridden an elephant. And there's also the fact that I can't yet say that I've completely tamed my elephant. I'll post a picture of that when I do.

What am I talking about? In his wonderful book The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt introduces a metaphor called the Elephant and the Rider, where our emotional side is the Elephant, and our rational side is the Rider. Perched atop the Elephant, the Rider holds the reins and seems to be the leader, but the Rider's control is precarious because the Rider is so small relative to the Elephant. Any time the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose. He is completely overmatched.

But is he? From an evolutionary perspective, our rational side, our reason, our sapiens (a latin word meaning wise), came along quite late to the game - well after our emotional response system had taken billions of years to develop a pretty sturdy system that seems to work for all other animals on the planet. From a simple perspective of elapsed time, it seems hopeless that our reason can ever catch up to our emotions. That is the case that Jon Haidt is making. But that is not the way that evolution works. New mutations and adaptations come along and they quickly have the ability to overwhelm what has come before. Our rational side has given us such widespread success precisely because it enables us to think more clearly about the long term and outwit others' emotional responses that are stuck in the short term.

Of course, we have both systems inside us and are likely to keep them for the foreseeable future. In Daniel Kahneman's latest book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman describes the two different ways the brain forms thoughts:

• System 1: fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, subconscious
• System 2: slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious

System 1 - the Elephant. System 2 - the Rider. We can't get rid of the Elephant because a) that's not the way evolution works, but more importantly b) it enables us to take instantaneous action whenever the situation requires it - when we touch a hot stove, when a car swerves towards us, when an assailant attacks us. Our system 1 quickly gets us out of harm's way. It is easy to rely on, and it would be impossible to let slow, calculating system 2 tackle all our questions. We would be wracked with doubt and inefficiency. We need to appreciate our Elephant. It seems to have a few innate or universal judgments already programmed into it at birth, but we also feed it with new rules of thumb from our experiences and we let our system 2's create new intuitive judgments that can be passed on to system 1 for faster action (such as when professional speakers go from fearing a crowd to loving the sight of one after a bit of practice). This is a highly efficient design, but one that can be used inefficiently when we don't take the time to let our system 2 evaluate what it has wrought in our system 1. When our youthful experiences leave our system 1 full of cognitive biases such as anchoring, loss-aversion, confirmation bias, framing issues, or the fundamental attribution error, we end up making faulty decisions based on poor emotional clues.

In an earlier post, I laid out the causes of emotion from the perspective of cognitive psychology - we make appraisals of situations, our bodily chemicals react, and our actions are motivated accordingly. As a philosophical task, I logically broke down the kinds of appraisals we can make - positive, negative, or uncertain, and focused on past, present, or future circumstances. From that task, I developed a chart of emotions that helps us understand and name the feelings we are feeling. It helps us recognize the direction the Elephant is moving. If we fail to grasp this, or lack the understanding of how to change it, the Elephant will blindly charge on. When we use our reason to learn how the reins work however, we can become more than mere passive Riders; we can become active Drivers. What do I mean by this? In my philosophy, I wrote:

When the external environment is calm, the power of reason allows us to weave stories together focusing on different times and different appraisals to feel multiple emotions or jump from one to another. To control our emotions, improve our lives, and learn to act for the long-term survival of life, we can change our appraisals and our focus through the use of cognitive behavioral therapy, neuro-linguistic programming, psychotherapy, and philosophic counseling. Except in cases where physical maladies dominate (brain tumors, chemical imbalances, genetic disabilities), emotional behavioral issues can be addressed through analysis of appraisals and focus.

Let me give you a simple example of what I am talking about.

When I am in my car, driving along to get some place that I want to be, I am actively doing lots of things. I am constantly making cognitive appraisals about: the car trying to enter my lane - I need to do something about that; the light up ahead that is changing colors - I need to do something about that; the change in speed limit - I need to do something about that.* All of these judgments are responses to a negative situation. Whatever I had been doing - driving along at a constant speed in one direction - was no longer right and I needed to change. I needed to do something about that. These are all normal system 1 emotional responses that according to my emotional chart, tend to leave us in a state of simple determination. This is the general emotion we feel while driving under normal circumstances. Now, however, let's say that there has been an accident up ahead in the road and traffic has snarled to a halt. As I sit in line, usually unsure of what has happened to cause this situation, I can feel my blood start to boil. I look around the cars in front of me to see what they are doing. I check the mirrors to see if anyone behind me is going around or coming too fast. I scan the radio to listen for traffic alerts. I need to do something, I need to do something, I need to do something. And yet, the situation remains unchanged. I stay stuck in line, and my desired destination remains out of reach.

Looking at my chart of emotions, I now understand why my emotions are changing with growing intensity from my initial determination, to mild annoyance, to rising frustration, to maybe a little anger at the situation, occasionally some hatred will creep in towards those I imagine have caused this situation, and finally I end up pounding the steering wheel in a full blown case of road rage. What happened here? My cognitive appraisal kept telling me, "I need to do something about this," so my chemical response system kept pushing me to more and more intense emotional feelings since nothing was happening to relieve me of that need to do something about the situation.

What happens next? I give up, I slump back in my seat, I maybe grab my phone to text the person I was going to meet to tell them that I will be late. My rage subsides, and it is replaced with: grief if I am really going to miss something of major importance, sorrow or disappointment if it is something of minor importance, or boredom or apathy if it really wasn't important at all. Why those range of emotions? Because something inside of me had flipped. I now recognized, "I can't do anything about this." My cognitive appraisal of the situation changed and my emotions responded accordingly.

Now that I know all this, can I change my emotions at will? Not quite fully. But when I get into traffic jams these days and start to feel my negative emotions rising in intensity, I will repeat to myself, "there's nothing I can do, there's nothing I can do, there's nothing I can do" until the acceptance of the situation comes around and I am as relaxed as I can be about it. I don't often get this done before some annoyance or frustration is felt, but I don't suffer from road rage anymore. I have learned to feel the tug of the Elephant in that direction and Drive him elsewhere with a wiser pull on the reins.

Do you have any similar stories to tell? How else are you taming your Elephant? Are there wild emotions you feel you can never control? Leave a comment or send me a message to let me know.

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* The fact that many of these appraisals are done without words, does not mean I am not making these appraisals. As I said in my philosophy:

We also have unconscious cognitive appraisals - cognitive appraisals without words. This is how all animals think. The rise of language and an inner voice provides a loud layer of consciousness that allows us to “talk over” our emotions, but that should not be used as an excuse to ignore them. It is easy to lose touch with our emotions when we do not listen to our bodies by noticing all the subtle sensations we feel. We can learn to focus our attention though and hold an internal (or external) dialogue to figure out our unspoken cognitive appraisals. We must do so if we want to regulate them and change them.


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