The Undefeated Mind

On the Science of Constructing an Indestructible Self

Alex Lickerman

• Publisher: Health Communications Inc EB
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780757316425
• eBook ISBN: 9780757316432
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Self Improvement

Legions of self-help authors rightly urge personal development as the key to happiness, but they typically fail to focus on its most important objective: hardiness. Though that which doesn't kill us can make us stronger, as Nietzsche tells us, few authors today offer any insight into just how to springboard from adversity to strength.It doesn't just happen automatically, and it takes practice. New scientific researchsuggests thatresilience isn't something with which only a fortunate few of us have been born, but rather something we can all take specific action to develop. To build strength out of adversity, we need a catalyst. What we need, according toDr. Alex Lickerman, is wisdom—wisdom that adversity has the potential to teach us.Lickerman's underlying premise is that our ability to control what happens to us in life may be limited, but we have the ability to establish a life-state to surmount the suffering life brings us. The Undefeated Mind distills the wisdom we need to create true resilience into nine core principles, including:

• A new definition of victory and its relevance to happiness
• The concept of the changing of poison into medicine
• A way to view prayer as a vow we make to ourselves.
• A method of setting expectations that enhances our ability to endure disappointment and minimizes the likelihood of quitting
• An approach to taking personal responsibility and moral action that enhances resilience
• Aprocess for managing pain—both physical and emotional—that enables us to push through obstacles that might otherwise prevent us from attaining our goals
• A method of leveraging our relationships with others that helps us manifest our strongest selves

Through stories of patients who have used these principles to overcome suffering caused by unemployment, unwanted weight gain, addiction, rejection, chronic pain, retirement, illness, loss, and even death, Dr. Lickerman shows how we too can make these principles function within our own lives, enabling us to develop for ourselves the resilience we need to achieve indestructible happiness. At its core, The Undefeated Mind urges us to stop hoping for easy lives and focus instead on cultivating the inner strength we need to enjoy the difficult lives we all have.

Notes-1

1. Marsha Somers, “A Comparison of Voluntarily Childfree Adults and Parents,” Journal of Marriage and Family 55 (1993): 643–650.

2. Douglas Jordan and J. David Diltz, “Day Traders and the Disposition Effect,” Journal of Behavioral Finance 5 (2004): 192–200.

3. Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 142–143.

4. Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), 112.

5. George Bonanno et al., “Resilience to Loss and Chronic Grief: A Prospective Study from Pre-Loss to 18-Months Post-Loss,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83 (2002): 1150–1164.

6. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (New York: Hachette Book Group, 1994).

2

Find
Your Mission

Nietzsche once wrote that he who has a why to live can bear almost any how. According to Nichiren Buddhism, however, not every why is created equal. To build the strongest life force possible—one that can bear the weight of any how—Nichiren Buddhism argues we need a why to live that in some way involves contributing to the well-being of others.

The first hint that my patient Steve had a problem related to the absence of just such a why came from, of all things, a series of sighs. Immediately after we exchanged names and shook hands at the start of our initial visit, he gasped as if poked by an invisible finger, sucked in a deep breath through his nose—then stacked a second, even more forceful breath on top of it, as if his lungs still weren’t satisfied—before finally exhaling loudly from his mouth. Then, a few moments later as I was navigating to his record on my computer, he did it again.

After I pulled up his demographic information and quickly scanned it, I turned away from my screen, folded my hands in my lap, and asked why he’d come to see me.

“I’m having trouble sleeping,” he said.

I took a moment to study him. Standing, he’d towered over me, but even sitting down he seemed a giant, his torso almost as long as his legs. He wore an expensive-looking suit, but sloppily, with his belt buckled too tightly, his pants wrinkled as if he’d recently lost weight, and his tie loosened at a sharp angle to the left.

I asked if he had difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep, or both. “I get into bed at ten o’clock and lie there until two or three in the morning, wide awake,” he answered. In the last two or three months, he said, he’d averaged only a few hours of sleep a night.

“What time are you getting up?”

“Six o’clock. Even though I don’t have to anymore,” he added ruefully. “Old habits die hard, I guess.”

“Why don’t you have to anymore?”

He took in another deep breath and let it out slowly. “Lost my job.”

He was the second patient I’d seen that morning who had. “I’m sorry,” I said. He waved my sympathy away with his hand.

“When?” I asked.

“January.”

Four and a half months ago—only slightly longer than he’d been having trouble sleeping. This was almost certainly the precipitating cause of his insomnia, I thought. But ever wary of my tendency to come to early closure, I forced myself to conduct a disciplined fleshing out of the details surrounding his complaint.

“How well were you sleeping before four months ago?” I asked him.

“Like a baby.”

Did he ever get a normal night’s sleep now, I asked, even one night out of seven? No, he said. In fact, two or three nights a week, he never fell asleep at all. Did he take naps? He did. Were they restorative? They were. How often did he drink alcohol? At most, a few beers on the weekend. Had he ever used alcohol to try to induce sleep? Once or twice, but it hadn’t worked. Did he use any other drugs recreationally? None, he said. He reported no significant past medical history, no allergies to any medications, and he took no medications on a regular basis.

“Have you lost any weight recently?” I asked him.

He admitted he had.

“Not hungry?” I guessed.

He shook his head no.

“On a scale of one to ten, how anxious would you say you’ve been feeling since you lost your job?”

His eyes widened slightly. And then, seeming as much to his surprise as mine, he began to cry.

Can Happiness Be Increased?

The set-point theory of happiness suggests that our level of subjective well-being is determined primarily by heredity and personality traits ingrained in us early in life and as a result remains relatively constant throughout our lives.1 Our level of happiness may change transiently in response to life events, I told Steve, but then almost always returns to its baseline level as we habituate to those events and their consequences over time.2

“How long does that usually take?” he asked, wiping at his eyes.

“That’s hard to say,” I said. “It’s different for everybody.”

He sucked in another deep breath and shook his head. “I just don’t understand it. I’ve got more than enough money. A great house, two cars—a boat, which I love. My marriage is great. My kid’s not in any trouble. My health is good.” He looked utterly bewildered.

I nodded. Habituation, a growing body of evidence now tells us, occurs even to things like career advancement, money, and marriage, which was almost certainly why, I told him, none of the things he mentioned were able to carry him through his crisis.3 They’d long ago lost their capacity to boost his happiness, so had no power now to defend him against significant loss.

And Steve’s loss was clearly significant. Despite the numerous studies that support set-point theory, other research suggests a few events—chief among them the unexpected death of a child and repeated bouts of unemployment—seem to reduce our ability to be happy permanently.4 Few would have trouble understanding why the death of a child might impair a parent’s capacity to feel joy over the long term. But the reason repeated bouts of unemployment erode happiness isn’t quite as straightforward: research has also shown an excessive focus on material goals like career advancement is actually associated with a slight decrease in happiness.5 Why, then, should repeatedly becoming unemployed prove to be so scarring?

The answer, of course, is that money isn’t the only reason we work, as most multimillionaires and billionaires who still get up every morning for work well know. We also work to create value. In fact, according to Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, an early-twentieth-century Japanese educator and founding president of the Soka Gakkai (the lay organization of Nichiren Buddhists), creating value for others is the key to attaining hap...

Table of contents

• COVER
• PRAISE
• DEDICATION
• TITLE
• COPYRIGHT
• CONTENT
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• Notes-Introduction
• Chapter_1
• Notes-1
• Chapter_2
• Notes-2
• Chapter_3
• Notes-3
• Chapter_4
• Notes-4
• Chapter_5
• Notes-5
• Chapter_6
• Notes-6
• Chapter_7
• Notes-7
• Chapter_8
• Notes-8
• Chapter_9
• Notes-9
• Chapter_10
• Notes-10
• AFTERWORD
• AUTHOR