Читать книгу Making Happy People: The nature of happiness and its origins in childhood - Paul Martin - Страница 16

Happiness has a lot to recommend it and little to be wary of; the more, the better. What about unhappiness and its key ingredient, displeasure? Is there anything good to say about unpleasant emotions like sadness or anxiety? Biology casts some unexpected light on this issue. The capacity to experience displeasure is actually an immensely valuable asset. Being sad or anxious may feel horrible, but under the right circumstances it can be good for you. How could this be?

The human mind, like the human body, is the product of millions of years of biological evolution. The process of evolution through natural selection has given rise to immensely elaborate physical structures such as eyes, lungs and kidneys, which look as though they have been exquisitely designed for a particular purpose. The brain is also a product of biological evolution, and similar reasoning can be applied to the ‘design features’ of mental and emotional faculties, including the capacity to feel joyful or sad.

Emotions guide our behaviour, and they are crucial for our ability to function in the real world. They immediately point us in roughly the right direction, before we can begin to fine-tune our judgments using the more conventional instruments of conscious thought, logic and reasoning. Individuals suffering from certain types of brain damage that specifically impair emotional faculties can end up incapable of coping with everyday life, even though their intelligence and cognitive abilities remain intact. Even a simple decision like whether to have tea or coffee can become cripplingly difficult if the only thing you have to rely on is pure logic and rational analysis. The emotionless Mr Spock of Star Trek would have been useless.

Sadness, anxiety and other disagreeable emotions can be thought of as the mental equivalents of physical capacities like pain and fever. Being able to feel pain is essential for survival because it stops us doing things that would damage our bodies. Very rarely, individuals are born who lack the capacity to feel pain: they invariably die from injuries or infection before they reach middle age. In a similar way, fever is unpleasant but beneficial. Fever is one of the body’s defence mechanisms for fighting infection. The rise in temperature makes your body a less hospitable place for the invading bacteria or viruses and thereby speeds recovery.

Unpleasant emotions help to protect us in an analogous way. Feeling frightened is immensely beneficial if it stops you being eaten by a lion, and feeling anxious can pay dividends if it stops you ambling down a dark alley where muggers lurk. The American scientist Lewis Thomas described worrying as the most natural and spontaneous of human functions, and argued that we should all learn to do it better.

We are born with the capacity to experience fear, anxiety, sadness and other unpleasant emotions because they helped our ancestors to survive and reproduce (and hence to become our ancestors).² Someone who was permanently joyful, regardless of their actual circumstances, would be at risk of ignoring real threats to their well-being. Biology tells us that there is nothing natural or biologically optimal about feeling happy all the time. As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it: ‘There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy.’

If anything, negative emotions are more important in biological terms than positive emotions like pleasure or joy, because they help to keep us alive. Many different things can go wrong in life, threatening our well-being or safety, whereas relatively few things are needed to make a life good. This could explain why the number of distinctly different negative emotions far outweighs the number of different positive emotions. The repertoire of negative emotions includes numerous specific fears and phobias, anger, sadness, depression, anxiety, jealousy, hatred, rage, boredom, and so on, whereas there are relatively few variations on the theme of pleasure, joy and contentment.

The protective functions of negative emotions also help to explain why they are often more vivid and more compelling than positive emotions, and why negative emotions usually override positive emotions. A feeling of relaxed contentment can be swept away in an instant by sudden fear, anger or sadness, but the reverse seldom happens. Our minds are ‘designed’ to be more responsive to negative events precisely because these are the ones most likely to threaten our well-being.

Sadness usually occurs in response to some loss or setback, and it encourages us to behave differently. We seek to change whatever is making us sad, or we withdraw so that we are no longer exposed to it. If things are going really badly, the best option may be to give up and withdraw rather than carry on and waste time or cause further damage. And because sadness is unpleasant, we try in future to avoid situations that experience suggests might make us sad. Sadness does not feel nice, but it sometimes helps us to do the right things. Pursuing this logic still further, the writer Gwyneth Lewis has argued that even severe depression can have its hidden benefits. In her autobiographical account of her own struggles with depression, Lewis explores the idea that it forces the sufferer to reappraise their life. ‘Depression’, she wrote, ‘is a lie detector of last resort. By knocking you out for a while, it allows you to ditch the out-of-date ideas by which you’ve been living and to grasp a more accurate description of the terrain.’

Much of the sadness we all sometimes feel is social in origin; it arises from our relationships with other people. To understand why people feel happy or sad, contented or anxious, it is usually necessary to understand their personal relationships. We shall return to this theme later.

The idea that unpleasant emotions are biological defence mechanisms, akin to pain and fever, has some non-obvious implications. Numbing the pain of an injured joint can increase the risk of inflicting further damage on that joint. Similarly, taking drugs to suppress a fever can actually impede recovery from infection. We feel better, but our defences are impaired. By the same logic, blocking negative emotions with anti-anxiety drugs, tranquillizers or antidepressants might carry risks as well as benefits. It would be interesting to know, for example, whether people who routinely take antidepressants or tranquillizers have more accidents or make more bad decisions. There are reasons to think they might. For example, controlled experiments have shown that the tranquillizer diazepam (trade name Valium), which is used to treat anxiety, impairs the ability to recognise facial expressions of anger and fear. Someone who has taken diazepam is prone to mistake fear for surprise, and disgust for anger. You can imagine how this perceptual distortion, combined with the lack of anxiety, might affect their ability to respond appropriately in an aggressive social situation or an encounter with a nervous mugger.

Routinely suppressing anxiety might also have unforeseen consequences on a grander scale. In early 2000, the American psychiatrist and leading Darwinian thinker Randolph Nesse published a superbly prescient article called ‘Is the market on Prozac?’ In it, Nesse asked whether the extraordinary boom in world stock markets, which was then still in full flood, might be attributable not just to the dot-com revolution, but also to the fact that a substantial proportion of investors, brokers and dealers were taking psychoactive drugs. Was it possible, wondered Nesse, that their natural caution and anxiety were being chemically suppressed, leading to irrational optimism, overconfidence and unsustainable rises in stock values? A few months later, the vastly overinflated dot-com bubble burst. A little fear or anxiety is not such a bad thing.