A millennial's musings

Why daydreaming is so addictive

I only became interested in mindfulness as it enhances my ability to get insight into reality. It wasn’t to treat a condition such as depression. It wasn’t because I belong to a subculture where mindfulness is considered cool. It was the realisation that constantly being carried away in thought is a way to ignore reality.

It is a well known fact that dopamine (one of the many normal brain chemicals that makes us happy) gets released as soon as we anticipate something good, not when something good actually happens. It really is about the journey, not the destination. The more unpredictable the reward – the more dopamine is released in anticipating it. Robert Sapolsky in Stanford did a lot of interesting commentary on that. Apparently, when you’ve practiced a certain pathway/belief enough, it doesn’t matter how far away into the future the reward is. It doesn’t have to be immediate. He explains how this is the basis of gambling and, half-jokingly, says it may even play a role in how we think about religion!

At one point today, I noticed how I reached for the phone to check Instagram wondering if my friend posted more pictures of her exciting trip through Asia. I felt the rush when I picked up the phone, not when I saw the picture. Mindfulness at work. The other crazy thing I realise about my behaviour is that… the reward isn’t really all that rewarding. I mean, ok, I get to see a picture and vaguely feel connected to my friend.

So what about this theory? Getting carried away in thought – daydreaming – is similar to anticipating something. Whether we are obsessing about a person we have crush on, or worrying about the future – it is a form of anticipating something. Our brains clearly learnt that in the past there was a reward associated with this anticipation – we got to kiss our crush or avoid some fail through worrying about it enough at some point in the past. Furthermore, the reward isn’t predictable – you win some and you lose some. Not every crush is going to result in a wonderful experience and not every bout of worrying is going to result in avoiding peril. It is possible that our favourite day dreams cause a release of dopamine.

Mindfulness prevents getting carried away in thought, thus, I hypothesise that it prevents anticipation – and the accompanying dopamine rush. This is why it feels like more work than sliding into a day dream.

When I put it like that, it makes me realise just how addictive day dreaming is. I mean I kind of knew it already, but this little theory of mine helps me think about how I want to control it – not be controlled by it. Is mindfulness the cure? It is literally the opposite to day dreaming, but I don’t think in and of itself it will help with this particular addiction.

Assuming that everything is a habit – cue, action, reward – mindfulness can be slotted in instead of the day dream. In other words, whatever causes you to day dream (boredom?) has to be caught early, responded to with practicing mindfulness instead of day dreaming – and a chocolate bar, or whatever floats your boat, as a reward to stabilise the habit.

What patterns can you think of where anticipation is everything and the reward is meaningless? Would it be good for you to replace them?

Trust and likeability

What is trust? I think it is a feeling. It’s not an objective measure of how reliable somebody is.

I have many friends who are incredibly unreliable, incompetent at times – yet I still trust them because I somehow know that they will be reliable when it will really matter.

I think it is about having coherent values.

Belonging to one tribe – however you chose to define it. The reason we have tribes is probably deeply rooted in our DNA. A long time ago we were conditioned to know that if we lose our tribe, our survival chances are lower. It is the very reason why public speaking is so difficult for so many people. They feel that getting up on stage with a high risk of embarrassing themselves would lead to their audience – their tribe – to alienate them. It is one of the many examples where our brains are scanning for survival situations when really they would do much better to chill out a bit. It is one of the things that mindfulness really helps with: instead of assuming things and following the same scripts, it allows to take a step back and perceive a situation from a different standpoint.

In this day and age we have learnt to pay less attention to the superficial: race and socioeconomic background. Values lead the conversation on trust and exposing authenticity and vulnerability strengthens it. Trust makes us feel remarkably good. It is one of the things people value most in life: the goodwill of other people.

Trust emerges in the strangest situations. We seem to always restrict the group that we trust.

Having a common enemy automatically builds trust among complete strangers. Nostalgia is a phenomenal marketing strategy because it immediately builds references for values we all accept and love – hence it builds trust. This means trust is scalable.

You don’t need to know much about the person: just pick up on the relevant markers of trustworthiness – and there, you are best friends. Our brains sort of skip over the whole due diligence process required to build trust.

Celebrities always say that fans feel that they know them personally – that’s the power of the illusions that trust can create.

One of the key reasons why social media have changed the world is because it trades in trust. Social proof – knowing that our friends, whom we trust, trust ABC brand – that causes us to trust the brand too. It’s like human link juice.

Being transparent is hard.

It takes courage as we run the risk of being rejected – that’s what the survival brain thinks about first. “Always budget for the downside”.

A better strategy would be based on the realisation that by being transparent we will be able to find the people who share our values. They are out there.

The easier it is for them to find you – the better life will be. Haters will be there and they won’t accept you even if you try and deceive them into believing you.

In the words of Elbert Hubbard: To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing. Don’t stand for anything. Make unfalsifiable claims – like the multinationals that none of us have any time for. It seems that to get trust, you need to be directional.

After all, making a decision means, literally, cutting off other options. And we all know that being indecisive is worse.

I can think of an exception to that rule: when somebody takes a strong position in a conflict averse environment. Certain societies value a lack of extreme statements. When my friends started expressing their opinions on Brexit on social media, people were reluctant to engage either way. Sometimes having a strong opinion in and of itself is against the values of a given environment. It seems to be a mantra we now have in the West. What if being agreeable and non-directional has become a value? Or is it simply the easy way out? Is it just a special case of the Stanford Prison Experiment?

There is one situation where strong opinions should definitely be held back – and that is in anything you don’t know well. Most commonly, this appears to be geopolitics. People who know nothing about politics make black and white claims. Obviously, this will garner support and trust from some parts of society, but a low quality signal is just that. Over time it will become clear whether you know anything about the thing you are preaching about . Trust is a long game.

How to stop worrying about things that may never happen?

After blogging for less than a week, I am getting contacted by the audience – this makes me so happy! J. wrote:

I’ve recently started meditating and practicing mindfulness. I downloaded a couple of apps to help make it apart of my daily routine, but still have fears if I’m “doing it properly.” I guess this is a normal fear for most people starting out but I tend to overthink things that are seemingly out of my control. I’ve had this problem for as long as I can remember, dating back to my adolescence. I suppose my question to you is, how do we stop worrying about things and situations that are probably never going to happen?

The first thing that comes to mind is one of my favourite quotations from Mark Twain: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”

Even the way J. phrased the question is so interesting: how do we stop worrying about things and situations that are probably never going to happen? Clearly J. cognitively understands that his fears are unfounded: the things he fears are probably never going to happen. However, intellectually understanding something doesn’t always help us feel it. Depending on your personality, it may of may not be possible to outthink a feeling. As an ENTP, I only require a conscious realisation to change the way I feel. The answer is always within us.

What does worrying do for us? Why are we so addicted to it? How do we manage to continue to worry even though it hurts so much? The answer is that on some level we believe that worrying is better than not worrying. How can worrying be better? It is better because it keeps us safe. In a sense, it makes us feel like we are in control. If we are always looking out for what can go wrong – bad things are less likely to happen. This is a likely core belief for someone who worries a lot. Our brains are evolved for fear: fear is the software that keeps us safe. As a species who is only 200,000 years old and whose conditions have changed so starkly in the last few hundred years (food is more available and sabre-toothed tigers aren’t that common), we haven’t managed to change this core software of fear. Fear is our friend. It has kept us alive as a species. There comes a point where it just isn’t feasible to keep budgeting for the downside. Once you are prepared, once you have addressed everything that is in your control, that’s it. Fear is no longer useful (we’re not taking about survival situations).

Seneca’s letters are incredibly helpful when it comes to dealing with anxiety in my experience. The thought of reading or listening to an Ancient Roman philosopher is daunting, but it is surprisingly approachable. Seneca wrote a bunch of letters to Lucilius – and these letters are often regarded as a key text in stoic philosophy. They read like a reddit post though! Letter XVIII. On Festivals and Fasting talks about putting yourself in controlled situations that you fear. It’s not about leaving your comfort zone or skydiving if you are afraid of heights. It is considering: what is the worst case scenario. The outcome is that you become less afraid.

It is easier to believe something when you see it. Everyone has friends who are chill no matter what happens – they are the people you want to spend more time with. Maybe that’s not possible, but you have the internet – lot of bloggers, youtubers etc, who laugh in the face of fear – people who do extreme sports, etc. Seeing that another point of view exists is always helpful in getting out of a rut.

You can also play word associations with yourself. No thinking allowed. Just blurt out the very first thing that comes to mind. Say fear – what would you say next? I was very surprised when I did this exercise. The first thing that came to me was abandonment. Fear of abandonment is a very real thing. Cognitively, I thought that I would be afraid of not achieving certain goals. What bubbled up in this interesting exercise was that I was afraid for my relationships. It didn’t make cognitive sense before it happened, but when it did – it gave me a huge insight into a whole part of my life I was hiding from.

How does mindfulness make this better? It allows these fears to crystallise – when fears are less vague, they are easier to handle. It allows things that we are hiding from to bubble up and be dealt with. And of course worrying is a habit. It requires certain pathways to strengthen. By directing what your mind is doing, it is easier to replace the worrying habit with something much more productive. Scientific evidence that I will go through another time supports the idea that mindfulness helps with anxiety.

Some philosophers and psychiatrists believe that we only have two fundamental emotions: fear and love. It doesn’t make much sense at the start, but on reflection: what is anger? It is fear that someone is crossing your boundaries. What is regret? It is fear that you missed out. What is sadness? It is fear that life will never be this good again. The ultimate fear is that we aren’t deserving of other people’s love, that we’re not good enough.

In that vein, the only way to deal with fear is to focus away from it – onto something else. Instead of asking what can go wrong, ask how can I make it better? Instead of asking how do I avoid peril, ask how can I get what I really want? Instead of asking how do I stop worrying, ask how do I help my friend stop worrying? Our brains will probably default to looking for sabre toothed-tigers, unless we ask the right questions.

Mindfulness: must I practice acceptance?

The concept of acceptance has been a tough one for me to grasp when it comes to mindfulness – for a long time. The term acceptance is hugely common in guided mediations and among yoga practitioners. Accept reality, accept how you feel, accept how others treat you, etc.

Maybe I am a finished type A, but I am not about raw acceptance, I said. I want things to be better, I said. There’s more to life than just accepting what’s there in front of me. To me human nature is all about agency, about having a direction and doing things that I feel will be good for those around me. Acceptance and growth seemed at odds. It’s some kind of nihilistic concept that Nietzsche’s last man would appreciate. I am much more about Nietzsche’s will to power. Will to power is another misnomer. It sounds like something a megalomaniac would be after. In actual fact, it is the will to overpower yourself and your circumstances in order to do something meaningful. I think we will all agree that’s a pretty important force. In a sense though, we are resisting reality rather than accepting it when we are moving in a chosen direction.

I think I am not the only one misunderstanding the term acceptance. In fact, it nearly put me off the whole mindfulness thing. I don’t want to wallow in the sometimes pathetic present with no prospect of things being better. I had this anxiety that if I accept things, I will lose my drive to grow. From what I gather, that’s a very common thing among people who are driven to achieve. Then I figured it out.

It’s an order problem. You need to accept things before you can figure out what you want to do about it. Frankly, I think acknowledge is a better term. You need to acknowledge reality before you can change it. Mindfulness is all about being closer to reality. It’s about breaking down assumptions and models and coming back to the hard data of what’s around us.

Our desire for things to be a certain way may cloud our perception of how things actually are. The point isn’t tolerating bad things and hoping that the universe will put things right. The point is being fearless to examine reality and not run away from it. To see the wood and the trees. To not take it personally when you realise that things aren’t perfect.

I am not sure that’s how Buddhists approach acceptance. However, it doesn’t really matter. I am not here to practice a religion or do things as instructed by some high priest – no matter how en vogue they may be. I am much more interested in figuring it out for myself – and for the rest of us who are trying to make a change for the better.

Mindfulness: am I doing it right?

Being a beginner in mindfulness is hard – because you’ve no idea what to aim for. It is a personal journey and it is hard to imitate someone, which is how we normally learn.

Many take up mindfulness to relax, to not judge one self as harshly or to get rid of some anxiety. It can be a double edged sword: if you are used to judging and getting anxious we will do so indiscriminately, even in relation to mindfulness. “It’s not working for me”, “Why can’t I do this right”, “I am never going to feel better”… This can be very upsetting. Here you are trying this wishy washy new age thing, feeling like a fool – and it’s making things worse.

In reality, it is about managing your expectations. It’s like doing a burpee, or learning to drive – entirely counterintuitive at the start, but also entirely achievable and useful. The first rule is to just show up. Don’t set a crazy standard like: I will get up earlier and meditate for 20 minutes every morning and 20 minutes right before bed. Start with 5 minutes a session. It’s much more achievable. Developing new habits is all about the small wins that allow you to build momentum.

The goal isn’t to sit there for 5 minutes with absolutely no thoughts. The goal is to bounce back from any thoughts as soon as they show up. Yes, that sounds strange, but it really is the truth. Your experience can be serene and enjoyable or it can be like a game of whack-a-mole. Both are entirely legitimate and valuable. Why? Because you are training that same pathway of staying centred on one thing.

It’s like going to the gym. Some days you feel like you have killed it, you’ve done your new personal record in 2 different things, you feel unstoppable. Other days, for no apparent reason at all, it feels like you’re hungover and your whole body seems to be resisting the gym session. While the first one feels like winning, it is probably facilitated by the second. The good days are made possible by the struggle of the tough days. And how do you feel at the end of a tough session on a tough day: kind of not great, but also kind of proud for showing up. That’s exactly how you should approach the whack-a-mole days in mindfulness practice.

So what does it actually feel like to do mindfulness? There’s nothing esoteric: you can hear the noises around you, smell the smells. You don’t levitate or enter parallel universes.

It is something like this:

make a conscious effort to take a deep breath and feel it
focus on feeling it wherever you feel it most: maybe in your chest or in your nostrils
now the game of whack-a-mole begins: you hear some harmless noise – a car door closing in the distance
you consciously acknowledge that this is a noise and rather than going down the rabbit hole of wondering who it is that’s getting into the car, where they are going and where you should be going – and God know what else – you say to yourself: back to the breath
phew, breathing again and focusing on it
now a memory comes in
you consciously acknowledge the memory. You try really hard to not concentrate on it, but it just seems to unfold and carry you with it. You feel tempted to relive the memory. You even feel like it could be a better use of time to think about that memory. However, you remind yourself that you made a commitment to focus on your breath for 5 minutes. After all, you can always come back to that memory after the 5 minutes are done. You direct everything you’ve got to the breath and the memory fades
again, you’re breathing and focusing on the sensation in your nostrils. All is going well
until you suddenly find yourself amid your to-do list. You didn’t even notice how it snuck up on you and now you are figuring out whether it is best to collect the kids first and then go to pick up the new photographs, or do it in reverse. You may feel kind of disappointed that you’ve been duped by your own mind – here you are trying to do mindfulness and drawing a to-do list instead without knowing it. You may be even judging yourself for not being strong enough to sustain the focus. Still, you find the perseverance to go back to the breath
and just as you are calmly resting in a state of awareness, your chime goes off – it’s been 5 minutes already

There are plenty of reasons to give out to yourself for not being perfect. The point is though that mindfulness is like an audit: it shows you how well you are able to focus. I guess it’s better than an audit because it teaches you to focus better. But the point remains. Even if you become frustrated with mindfulness and just go on about your daily life without practicing mindfulness, all of these processes that you were able to observe insightfully will continue. Mindfulness is our chance to get insight and make change. To diagnose and treat. To strengthen to the good habits and weaken the bad ones. It gets better over time, or rather – you get better over time with practice. The trick is to acknowledge reality before judging. There is this expression in psychology: the tyranny of the shoulds. It really is a tyranny. It doesn’t mean that you can’t set goals and aspire to be better. It means that you need to take stock of what’s going on before you decide what you should do. Observe what happens while you are practicing mindfulness, acknowledge it – and work to change it if that’s what you want. Judging as a first step only clouds our ability to think clearly. In order to change something, to learn something or to get better, we need to first acknowledge our realities.

More than 7% of communication

Looking at things from as many angles as possible is my favourite past time. I was reflecting on the nature of how we use language in light of my recent musings on what psychiatry taught me. Most of all it taught me that what people say isn’t nearly what they mean. It’s like the same words mean different things to different people – and you needn’t be in psychosis for that to occur. Rather than considering one language from the point of view of two people, I scouted for insights the perspective of one person and two languages.

However, before we go there, we can even look at one language. The way we use words even differs within the English speaking world – I am sure you can think of examples. Saying someone is different in Canada is a polite way of saying they are an outright freak – and not in a good way. Not so much in Ireland: different can be good.

I happen to be bilingual in English and Russian. You can judge my command of English, and I can tell you that my command of Russian matches that. Consider this situation: you’ve just met a lovely new colleague over lunch and found the interaction pleasant. You meet a colleague you are friendly with later and tell them of your encounter with the new girl: “She’s very nice.” There’s no way you would use the word nice when speaking of someone you met and liked in Russian. You would say what literally translates as: “She’s very interesting.” The literal translation happens to be rude in some parts of the world, especially in Ireland. In Russia, nice is reserved for kittens and puppies. All the while, the emotion you experienced from the encounter is exactly the same. This is why translations go wrong.

Maybe it’s just a bad example and a poorly matched translation? Let’s consider something black and white then: yes and no. When Russians say no – and they do that a lot, it could mean that there’s some minor adjustment required, or it might even be an interjection – the same way that well is in English. When you say no in English – especially in the UK and Ireland – it means you never want to hear this again. A Russian nice is much nicer than an English nice, and a Russian no is much milder than an English no. No wonder there are misunderstandings. Words are able to cardinally change the way we feel about something.

So why do they keep saying that the words we use account for just 7% of communication?

What having no idea about psychiatry is like

In all my time in medicine, psychiatry was certainly the steepest and most unexpected learning curve.

The truth is that I started off as a pro nerd who wanted to be a surgeon. When they said medicine is an art and a science, I was just waiting for them to stop. In medical practice, choosing an antihypertensive drug is not an art. Perhaps, looking for new mechanisms of action is more creative, but not the practice of prescribing. There are scientifically rigid algorithms on how it should be done as of today, and the rest is harmful heresy – not art.

When I was in first, second and third year of medicine, I was convinced I wanted to do general surgery. Possibly paediatric. I took serious steps to that effect. I found a family friend who was a surgeon, and aged 19, I was spending my summers doing 36 hour shifts of shadowing surgeons. Scrubbing in on critical abdominal aortic aneurism ruptures, appendectomies, cholecystectomies, you name it. I learnt much faster in those 3 months of summer than surgical trainees in their cursus honorum residency.

At that time, I was shaping up to become a pragmatic and practical surgeon. We all know the kind of culture that is prevalent among surgeons – especially 10 years ago. Needless to say, it rubbed off on me too and I was expecting psychiatry to be a wishy washy waste of time. There was no stigma, no prejudice, no resistance – just an expectation of something I will have no interest in.

Then my college experience of psych began. I recall being late to the first lecture and sitting down at the back with one purpose only: make sure I am signed it. I wasn’t expecting to learn anything other than a bunch of genetics concerning schizophrenia and Alzheimers and be lectured on good communication skills.

I was so wrong.

My attention was instantly captivated by the lecture. It had nothing to do with the lecturer: he was ok, but it’s not like he was ultra captivating, charismatic or whatever. It was the substance of what he was saying. The lecture was on something called phenomenology (the study of subjective experiences). So for example, I learnt what the difference is between an illusion and a hallucination. What knight’s move is. Perseveration. Running commentary.

It was fascinating. It was like a parallel universe just opened up to me. I was entirely unfamiliar with all of these things. No portrayal of these phenomena in films comes close to actually considering what it is like, never mind meeting a person who suffers from such a thing. Maybe A Beautiful Mind is a place to start. But still, it barely, I mean barely, scratches the surface. I was in the industry, I was top of my class and yet until I went and properly exposed myself to it – I was so so ignorant. It is important to realise that the general population, no matter how educated, has absolutely no idea what a person with a severe and enduring mental health problem goes through. Zero.

As a fervent advocate of the scientific method, I would like to point out the role of art in this. It’s not art in some kind of mystical, deeper meaning sense. It is art in the sense that it is creative. Surgery is creative – but in a practical sense. It’s just a more conservative field.

Psychiatry is cognitively creative. It’s not algorithmic like most of medicine. Much of it has never been done before. The DSM differs so much edition on edition, that it is clear that we haven’t even come close to understanding what’s really going on. Paradoxically, the actual practice of psychiatry is quite intuitive 90% of the time.

Ten percent of the time, though, psychiatry requires a doctor to think outside the box in another dimension. Because you cannot MRI someone’s brain and say – this is mercury poisoning, not dementia. This isn’t depression, this is catatonic schizophrenia. You really need to not just think, but rely on something less tangible – does it feel like this person is depressed or does it feel like it’s EUPD? Freud tried putting all kind of names on these intangible feelings. It’s just a first attempt. Is it possible that both of these diagnoses are missing the point of what’s really going on beneath the surface and in another 20 years the DSM will have neither of those in it? If House solves puzzles, this is solving puzzles when you have no idea what the resulting picture is going to be.

Should we avoid losing?

Freud is famous for all kinds of weird reasons. I believe it is more of a reflection on society than it is on Freud. He got some stuff right and some stuff wrong. One of the things that he managed to articulate incredibly well is this simple concept: we are driven by wanting pleasure and avoiding pain. In this simple equation, avoiding pain is much more important. In other words, we will forego pleasure in order to avoid pain. I remember learning that lesson when I was 7: I am sure I’ve done a lot to learn it through my own mistakes, but what got really etched into my brain was my cat’s behaviour. My lovely cat, she was probably about 5 months old then, got on top of the kitchen counter while no one was looking. I may have been an accomplice in her trespassing. She speedily made her way to the divine smelling milk that was getting heated up on the hob. As she put her pus into the pan, she must have burnt herself off the edge of the pot. She jumped right down with a loud meow. She didn’t get seriously hurt. What fascinated me though is that she never went near the hob again. Ever. Even if I put her regular cat food bowl on the switched off cold hob. She would just proudly sit there and wait for me to put it back where it belongs. My cat made a decision – and it was final. Avoiding pain is key.

If you come to associate something with pain, you will probably fear it to some extent. So the question is: should you be afraid of losing and associate it with pain? On the one hand, it means that you will avoid losing. Is that the bottom line though? Winning isn’t the same as never losing.

I don’t know whether losing in some shape or form is part of the obstacle course. Maybe you can just get through a life of poetry in motion without ever losing. I don’t think I can think of any examples of it though. It is important to remember that the people we think of when we think of success generally have some control of what is put out in the world about them. So we are looking at a highlight reel. However, considering some really famous actors, politicians and business people – it is easy to think of things that were outright flops. Cringy films, awkward public statements, bad investments, a personal life that could be on Jeremy Kyle – it all seems part of everyone’s journey.

As somebody who has a clear sense of agency and whatever control that humans can have over their own lives, I envisage life as a series of option trees. Every time there is a fork in the road – that’s when life is shaped. Moments of choice are what shapes that part of our lives that we can control. However, I have been making the assumption that if I make the right choices, I will never experience losing. Hence, losing equals bad choice – my bad choice. I am starting to question that assumption.

It is important to take a step back and consider what we call losing. What do we call failure? Is failing simply falling short of our expectations? In that case, for anybody who likes philosophy and mindfulness, it is immediately obvious that losing happens in our heads – not in real life. Expectations are great, but a dose of humility can be a real treat when we get so carried away so as to believe that we are owed our preferences at all times.

Not to sugar coat it – because it is true – but losses now can mean large gains later. While that’s a metaphor for our experience, it is quite literally a description of an investment: debit now for credit later. To continue with the investment analogy what really matters is how you compound it. Does a loss mean new learning and information that adds to your overall game or does it mean debilitating poison that stops you from carrying on? It is clear that the latter option is better. So maybe being afraid of losing in and of itself is damaging. I don’t know for certain that losing is unavoidable. A consultant psychiatrist I used to work with and revere used to use this metaphor: if you want to box, prepare to get punched.

It’s not easy though, to find a balance. If you focus too much on being OK with losing, you will get too comfortable with low standards. This seems to logically make sense. There’s an interesting analogy I would like to draw. I have discussed the Stoic attitude to death in this article. Essentially, not fearing death is one of the most liberating things that a person can do. This goes against all logic: surely, if you stop fearing death you are more likely to die? Yes and no. It seems that literal life-or-death situations are thankfully exceedingly rare for most people. Unless you actively seek out dangerous situations, you are unlikely to die prematurely because you adopt this belief. However, you are more likely to take small risks – as now, they are framed in this bigger perspective and seem not that huge at all. So could it be that by de-vilifying failure, it is possible to make better decisions rather than worse ones?

If you focus too much on always winning, losing becomes too scary to deal with. I don’t think it is better to assume that losing is inevitable than to assume it is possible to avoid it. Assuming anything is always risky business though necessary to simplify things. Sometimes we will lose because the timing isn’t right, sometimes it will be completely beyond our control – but we have to keep our eyes on that part of it that is within our control. I think the key is to not think of losing as detracting from your final wins – that are surely ahead of us. Winning is a long game and losing is just a lesson that refines our approach and let’s us know how to do better next time. Failure is a form of constructive criticism or a reflection of conditions beyond our control. Should we be afraid of failure? All in all, I think it is too high a price to pay as it constricts our ability to get to the big wins. Should we avoid losing? I don’t even know if that’s completely necessary. It’s not the actual end result. If you make a P&L statement analogy, high costs don’t mean no profit.

In medical ethics, they often talk about an act of commission and acts of omission. In other words, to act and to not act are equally consequential. In the medical context it is something like this: you cannot euthanise a person by actively injecting potassium chloride in their veins, but you can allow someone to die by choosing to not instigate active treatment (in most parts of the world). In our culture, we have come to see failure as a negative consequence of an act of commission. Doing something outside of what is prescribed is an act of commission, meaning it takes more deliberation and implies more responsibility. It is much more likely to cause strong emotions if it doesn’t go right than ending up with the same result from doing nothing. So what about acts of omission? The definition of failure has to allow for acts of omission. I think failing to invest in something worthwhile or to tell someone you love them is as bad as investing with poor returns or being rejected. However, if we only concentrate on avoiding losing, we are bound to miss out.

Moving from Freud to Frankl, it’s important to consider the meaning of failure. I think the visceral fear of failure comes from the meaning people have been conditioned to attach to failure: you are failing because you aren’t good enough. I mean you may as well take a gun and shoot your sense of self. What is enough? Enough is completely in our heads. Maybe you are failing because you aren’t that good yet. It’s describing the same facts, but the way it makes you feel is completely different. A much better question to ask would be: how can I use this? Looking at failure from more than one angle instead of fixating on a bunch of assumptions is going to help. If you can make use of it, then there’s nothing to be afraid of.

Our brains are somehow wired to move towards the thing we think about the most. Those who survive car accidents tell how they could only think about the thing that they crashed into – rather than thinking of the gap that they may have been able to drive through safely. Budgeting for the downside is good, but once a decision is made, it has to be a fleeting thought at the back of your mind. You can’t focus on avoiding failure and expect success. Even in those forms of financial investments where avoiding losses is the foundation of all success, the game is to put yourself in situations where losses are least likely – rather than trying to predict them, e.g. in trading. In venture capital, it’s the opposite – you only need one smashing success. While we can’t be completely unaware of our surroundings, the focus has to simply be on winning.

I think it is time to start letting go of the fear of losing because that way we’re risking missing out on something really great. Losing requires humility to accept our own mistakes non-judgementally and use them. Only this way, we have a chance of winning in the long term.

Mindfulness and fear of failure

What is dealing with losing like for people? I am not talking about dealing with rejection. When other people are involved – that’s different. Losing, failure. This kind of thing.

I think the practice of mindfulness has taught me something really valuable on this front: we shouldn’t be quick to judge. In reality, calling something a success or a failure is quite closed-minded. It was easy back in school and college: if you get an A you’ve won, anything else – you’ve lost. If you score a goal, you’ve won – and so on. It’s not that clear cut in academics and sport in the medium term, and it certainly isn’t clear cut in life – because its a long game. I won’t really know what was a success and what was a failure until I am on my deathbed.

Looking back, things that seemed like overwhelming successes in the past lead me down pathways I soon abandoned. Being the best at something, winning competitions – the conventional definition of success – often leads to a tree of really tough choices and pressure of other people’s expectations. Success brings it’s own set of challenges, hence it is difficult to sustain it.

On the other hand, what seemed like giving into my weaknesses turned out to be huge wins. Giving up on relationships – huge relationships that really mattered in my life – at the time it seemed like shameful quitting, like a black mark that I could never wash away – yet I am liberated by my choices everyday. Getting invested into other relationships without knowing where it is going, uncovering my vulnerabilities – that felt like it could only end it tears, but in reality it turned out to be the biggest gift. Career pivots felt like controlled failure. Nasty people judge you, and nice people pity you. Of course, knowing what you want makes it all irrelevant, but nobody likes to feel that lonely.

The other things that matters when thinking about fear of failure is what do we actually fear? Who is the toughest judge? The career pivots were experiences in my life when other people felt I was failing whereas I knew I wasn’t. That taught me something: I fear not trying more than I fear letting irrelevant people down. I think a lot of people worry about letting people they care about down: their family and significant others. We make this erroneous assumption that we can make other people happy without doing what’s right for ourselves in the long run.

Martyrdom is a hiding place. Hiding from judgement; hiding from the accountability that going after our dreams brings. It’s a way to blame others for not doing what’s really hard. The most ironic thing is that it will probably come as no surprise to the people we are trying to please that we’re not happy, but they will never even suspect the weight and severity that we assigned to their opinion. There’s nothing malicious in this. In fact, the harm is done by ourselves: assuming that the people who are meant to care about us simply won’t understand. There’s a way to present our troubles in a way that is open and vulnerable rather than an acid test. Chances are that the people who care will come around to see our reasons.

Mindfulness is the best way to uncover our assumptions, that’s why I love it so much. No amount of reading or soul-searching will help to understand what’s going on inside unless we practice. Reflection to mindfulness is like stretching is to exercise. They go incredibly well together, but let’s not skimp on our practice either.

Technology and human interaction

Some worry, even fear, that technology may surpass human interaction. This is exactly what I would call a Promethean fear: the fear that a new technology will somehow lead to our demise or change human nature. Human nature seems robust. Things like running water, central heating – even money and fame – only expose and amplify what was there to begin with. There’s no significant change in human nature during any person’s lifetime. We live like the royalty of a thousand years ago, but still believe that we don’t have enough. We still crave the same things: love, meaning, safety, exploration and growth. When I see a guy sitting across from a girl in Starbucks looking at his phone – that’s boredom that has become socially acceptable whereas it wasn’t quite as “normal” before. It is the fundamentals of their relationship exposed – and it is obvious that something isn’t right. In days gone by it would have been a yawn – or simply staring into space. Now this is emptiness filled up with the instant gratification of likes and shares on social media and the lovely cats on YouTube. The ancient Egyptians would be proud.

It’s not that things don’t change. They change gradually. Human nature appears to remain fairly constant. What if technology gets a sprinkle of human nature when it comes to artificial intelligence. When machines can properly learn and execute without our approval – that can get scary. We may fall in love with AI – the way that was shown in the film Her. Something interesting happened today when I went running. Naturally enough, I procrastinated right up to the point of when it became dark as I was finishing my run. I went to turn on the flashlight on my iPhone only to realise that the latest update has changed the layout of the place that the flashlight button is normally in. It took some fiddling, but I found it. For about three minutes I was let down and disappointed by Apple – stranded in the dark. I was afraid that I’d step on something. In a way, that’s kind of the fear of AI: they will sabotage us by taking control. It’s happening already, in 2016. I never asked for my phone to move the flashlight button. Have my interactions changed? I don’t think so. In the 1990s, parents were terrified of adding phone lines into their kids rooms – because that would finish them. Video games. TV. Radio – before that. Nothing has really changed the fundamental needs we have. Do people actually spend less time in the pub? I think they do. However, they are spending more time at festivals – taking snaps of their tents and dirty boots – and surely to God, they are interacting with other people.

What did people do before the radio? Before this so called technology? After all, we are still using electromagnetic waves to communicate, so the radio is a closer relative of modern technology than it might initially appear. They read books and newspapers. Is it really that different that reading something online? For sure, there’s no instant feedback, but you are still finding out what people did miles and years away from where you are. I think that reading a book by Seneca or Tolstoy is a human interaction. It is deep, meaningful – it is life changing. Sometimes it is like getting advice from a grandfather you never had. To further emphasise that point, I remember having a brief imaginary love affair with Prince Andrei from War and Peace. Am I that different from the poor chap in Her? I have a bit more insight, that’s all. Human nature will drive us to find answers in whatever place is available – nature, books or social media. We seek and find human interaction no more and no less than we did before.

I honestly can’t be sure what the world was like before the printing press. I guess people were just bored more. I guess they craved each other’s company more. I am not sure that they had that luxury as going back even 200 years ago putting food on the table was a real struggle. Is it possible that people interacted more in the past? Possibly. However, if that is the case – that ship has sailed a long time ago.

If anything I would argue that my mother in her 50s has the opportunity to be connected to her classmates that she hadn’t seen in 30 years – an option she would never have had had she been born 30 years earlier. Technology gives us opportunities to be social or to hide from human interaction. The choice is down to human nature – the nature of any given human. It is tempting to blame technology. We all know that it’s not the development of advanced weapons that leads nations to be more aggressive. It’s not the development of social networks that causes people to give terrible anonymous comments. It’s the other way around. The problem is that blaming technology is just another way to hide from our own choices.