Creating Optimism

How do we make our lives meaningful? This is a question I often ask myself - particularly around my birthday or other life milestones. And it’s a question that often comes up with clients.

As a psychologist, I have observed that the depression of many of my clients seems to stem from their inability to feel that they have a purpose, that there is a meaning to their lives. They look for worth in possessions, in status, in wealth and, while they may get a temporary boost from these things, in the end many find that status and wealth are vacuous. What you earn and what you own do not give meaning to your life. Your life can be empty if you live in a palace or in a hovel, if you run IBM or if you are unemployed, if you are famous or unknown.

So many of us try to find purpose in achieving goals around our career, family, politics or social life. These goals have their place. But they are transitory, and achieving them can leave our lives as empty of meaning as before. Politics undergoes swings, our children go on to live lives of their own, social mores shift, and eventually we retire (sometimes at an absurdly young age). What can we count on amidst all the ephemera?

Recent research has taught us an extremely important lesson: good relationships are the most powerful healing mechanism of all. Even medications are much more effective if the patient has a good relationship with the physician.

The converse is also true: poor relationships cause illness. In fact, we are more prone to virus attack or even accidents if we have had an argument with a significant person in our life—our boss, child, spouse or friend. Depression which, we believe research demonstrates to be the greatest health problem of our time because it underlies so many other, is largely caused by relationships gone wrong in childhood. It can only be fully healed through good relationships.

Yet, in our convoluted society statistics show, 80% of all relationships fail. We’ve lost the art of connecting well to other people. Although the drive to form connections with others is innate, the “how-to” is learned. We learn relationship-forming when we are very young (under 6) from the ways our parents and other significant adults relate to us and to each other. We may unconsciously pick up their bad habits, such as criticism or emotional absence, and either do these things ourselves or gravitate toward those that do.

Yet you can learn to create fully healing, supportive relationships in all areas of your life. In fact, thousands have done so using our unique and powerful Uplift program techniques.

We live in a society quite unable to relax. It's not a human society, that is to say it's not a society that humans are genetically programmed to cope with. I'm not going to go into how this mismatch between our genetics and our society took place, enough has been written about that already (including by myself and Alicia Fortinberry in our book Creating Optimism).

But here we are: over 20 percent of us are depressed; an equal, if not greater number, suffer from anxiety and this does not include those with related disorders such as manic depression (bipolar disorder), ADD/ADHD, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and so on. The rate of depression alone doubles every 20 years!

We're told to relax, to take it easy, to live for the now, but none of these are possible unless we step back and ask: How are human beings genetically designed to relax? Some of the answers might surprise you.

For most women and men the push for 'fitness' has caused at least as much confusion, injury and guilt as it has physical health and enjoyment.

The word itself has come to mean to many people more about the flatness of a stomach (think of Princess Di and her bulemia, Ali McBeal and her skeletal appearance) or the bulges of the pectorals than about function, health and vitality. With all the marketing hype about what you must buy/eat/drink/not eat/not drink/wear/not wear, 'fitness' has probably done more for certain peoples' pockets than for anybody's wellbeing.

So how do we arrive at a true definition of fitness, one that takes into account the optimal goals for our bodies and our selves, and how do we achieve these?

To find the answers we need to look at how we evolved to live. What conditions did early humans live under and how was our genetic nature shaped to make the most of them?

In essence we are still hunter-gatherers. Our bodies and our social organization were geared over millions of years to carrying out the tasks necessary to hunting and gathering. Over the last five millennia a 'mismatch' has developed and widened between the way we live and the way we were meant to live. This has led to a whole range of assumptions about our bodies, our relationships, our work and our society that modern research is showing to be wrong and harmful.

Let's first examine the realities and myths about what a fit body is. Both men and women evolved to walk , the men in search of game and the women looking for berries, herbs, roots and so forth. Walking is, in fact, the best exercise a human can take, a fact supported by all recent studies. It has even been shown that this act of gentle weight-bearing prevents osteoporosis and stimulates the brain to think better.