The fact that you’re reading this right now on a computer screen or a smartphone or tablet, just goes to show that you have so, so much to be grateful for. When you think about how 663 million people in developing nations go without access to clean drinking water, it’s easy to acknowledge your relative privilege. But how long does that usually last? Why is it so easy to forget how many things we really do have going for us?

Our brains are rigged to take things for granted. We tend to adapt to our comforts and privileges and after a while, we come to expect them. On an evolutionary level, our brains are set up to keep us alive. That means we are naturally more alert to threats and danger than we are to how good we have it. Fear and scarcity is given higher priority by default. Happiness is not exactly essential for our survival.

The good news is we don’t have to live our lives on default. We don’t have to remain on automatic pilot. We can choose what is important to focus on. And the more we focus on what is good, the more good we see. And the more good we see, the more grateful we are. Eventually, a positive feedback loop is created.

But when our brains are wired for survival and scarcity, it takes a special kind of effort to get it re-wired for gratitude and abundance. When our brains automatically categorize information as non-essential, it gets overlooked and taken for granted. Mindfulness allows us to interrupt that automatic process and we can look at things with new eyes again. When we approach our experience in this way, with openness and curiosity, it is easy to appreciate it. But it does take effort.

You have to choose to see things in this way. And it isn’t positive thinking either. Mindfulness doesn’t require a positive spin on your experience in order to appreciate it. It’s just a way of noticing what is there and knowing that whatever it is, it’s enough. As the Buddhist proverb goes:

Enough is a feast.

Imagine feeling whole and complete without needing to achieve or acquire anything extra.

So how do we make this effort? It’s not new, but it works. Gratitude journaling. Get yourself a journal or notebook and a pen. Or, if you’re already in the habit of jotting notes into your smartphone, just create a new folder in your Notes app and call it Gratitude Journal. Starting TODAY, and that is really your biggest hurdle, write down 5 things you are grateful for. You can do it anytime of day, but do it for 21 days. It takes 21 days to develop a habit. You’ll be surprised that you will never run out of things to be grateful for, because the more you look, the more you’ll find.

What treasure awaits if you allow yourself to sit with fear or discomfort? Death is nothing new. Neither is survival. But if you’re willing to stay in your feelings and your perspective changes, or your priorities shift, or you discover something essential to who you are, that is revolutionary. Thriving is the willingness to be transformed, to live more fully and with a greater sense of meaning.

Anxiety serves a purpose. In and of itself, it’s not “bad.” Anxiety prepares us. It puts us on alert. It positions us to take action. In a crisis, don’t we need to be prepared, alert, and ready to respond? That is exactly what anxiety is suppose to do. It’s a feature, not a bug. To thrive in crisis, we must use that anxiety to shift into action.

Thriving in crisis means that we are mobilized to take action. Anxiety begins to dissipate once you are engaging meaningfully in the moment. Like a key in an ignition, once the engine has started, you no longer need to keep turning the key. But if action is not taken, anxiety builds and is counter productive. 

If you apply the rules for survival to anxiety, you might end up making it much worse. Our survival instinct is what makes one struggle when they fall into quicksand. You’ve seen the movies. What happens when you struggle in quicksand? That is your survival instinct working against you. 

If you want to get out of quicksand alive you have to do something different than what your survival instincts tell you to do. Instead, you must relax your body, stretch out like you would if you wanted to float on water (counterintuitively making even more contact with the quicksand), and eventually, the quicksand will elevate your body to its surface. 

It’s the same with anxiety. To thrive in anxiety you can’t struggle against it. You’ll need to relax and open up to it. Make space for it and allow it to inform you and do its job, which is to prepare you to take meaningful action.

It’s going to be different for all of you. Meaning and values are uniquely your own. As for myself, I wish to thrive during this pandemic, and so I’ve committed to taking the following actions:
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• Physical distancing. This is not because I fear becoming infected (although that fear is just as much with me as it is with you). I believe physical distancing to be the most effective way to “flatten the curve” and not overwhelm our medical systems so the sick can be treated more efficiently. It is meaningful to me to keep others safe and to contribute to our helpers on the frontlines. I want to be part of the solution.

 

• Connect with family and friends more often. FaceTime and Google Hangouts have been around for a long time. But now that we aren’t interacting in person with other humans, it seems to be even more important now more than ever, to stay connected with the people you love. To laugh and share our lives with each other, albeit over a buffering computer screen.

 

• Parent with presence. School closures means that the kids are home, all the time. I’ll admit, this has been a struggle for me. Between having to adjust my work schedule to accommodate homeschooling and provide activities and structures to the kids’ days, let’s just say, it sometimes feels impossible to do it well. Notice that “homeschooling” is not on my list. Of course, I care about my kids’ education, but I’m not under any delusion that I can supply anywhere close to the quality education that their teachers have been trained to provide. I’m not the greatest parent, but I’m a much better parent than I am a teacher. So I’m going to lead with my strengths on this one. That means that our relationship and the quality of my interactions with these little humans are going to take priority. I am committed to playing with them (this is so much more difficult that it sounds) and giving them my full attention whenever possible.

 

• Loving my wife. She’s a nurse by the way, and I am so proud of her. I am also scared shitless that she’s going to get sick, eventually. She’s scared, too. But she goes into that hospital every week to do what she is trained to do. Sitting with that fear reminds me how important she is to me. Sure, she was important before all this, but the fear of losing her brings this fact clearly into focus. A survival response to that kind of fear might be to distance oneself to protect against loss. To thrive, however, I must lean into it and embrace what it means to love fully and unconditionally, making the most of the time we have together. I’m committed to showing her kindness and treating her like the hero she is.

​It’s a short list. It’s not that nothing else matters, but these are the things I can fully commit to prioritizing above all else. My recommendation is to narrow your priorities to the few things that really matter the most to you, and do them to the best of your ability. That is how we will thrive during these times. Not only will you get through this alive, you’ll come out even better than when it started. Thriving implies growth. How will we be transformed? What will we become?

In my book How To Feel, I make a distinction between “Clean Pain” and “Dirty Pain.” To recap, Clean Pain is inevitable. Dirty Pain is optional . . . sort of.

Technically, it’s optional insofar as we learn how to leave it. We are wired to create dirty pain just because of how our brains are designed. Remember, we have survival brains, not happiness brains.

Our evolutionary past inclines us toward avoidance and struggle. If we encounter a wild animal we are inclined to avoid it or fight it. Here in Tucson, we have an unsettling population of coyotes and bobcats (and javelinas and rattlesnakes . . .). It is not unusual to stroll past a pack of coyotes on my morning walk, or to discover a lone bobcat taking shelter under the oleander bushes in the backyard.

I’m new to this area and maybe a little more on edge about this than many of the locals, who seems to have greater ease coexisting with wild predators. So far, I have not been eaten or maimed, and I owe this to my natural avoidance abilities. Or, perhaps they’re just not that interested in me.

When it comes to psychological or emotional pain, avoidance tends to have paradoxically unhelpful outcomes, and often creates additional problems. The same adaptive strategy for survival is woefully ineffective when it comes to dealing with private, internal experiences. Yet, it seems to be a strategy that, although maladaptive, gets deployed by default. We are simply programmed to move away from pain automatically.

Remember, Clean Pain is inevitable. Eventually, someone you love will die. Eventually, you will get sick, or you will be betrayed, or you will lose an investment, or your heart will be broken, or you will stub your toe. If we evaluate the feelings associated with these events as bad, we will instinctively want to avoid them. Our minds define a problem as: anything you don’t want. And nobody wants pain.

It starts with the evaluation that pain is bad, and then how we interpret and create stories around the existence of that pain. Instead of acknowledging and accepting the existence of clean pain, we struggle with it. We curse it. We go to war with it. We say, “That’s not fair!” And “This isn’t suppose to happen!” And “Why me?”

Or we avoid it by distraction, using substances, working late, pleasing others, or opting out of parts of our lives where the pain is likely to show up again. We start engineering our lives to avoid feared outcomes until our lives get smaller and smaller, more and more restrictive and predictable.

Things can be unpleasant without being evaluated as bad. Just because you don’t like it, doesn’t mean it’s wrong. If we can allow the feelings to be what they are, we have a chance to get through it without making it worse by dumping Dirty Pain on top of it. In other words, if we can allow the pain, we don’t have to suffer.

Pain + Resistance = Suffering

Let me offer you another emotional equation: Happiness = What is - Your Opinion about it. If you can have a painful experience, and let go of your judgement that the pain must be bad, then, and only then can you be happy. Happiness is not the absence of pain. It’s the ability to live meaningfully and have whatever life gives you without running from it.

Living a life of meaning often requires a reasonable amount of Clean Pain. It is the currency of living your values. When you go to the movies to see a film you’ve been looking forward to, you don’t argue with the ticket seller about the price. Even if you think, “Dang, ticket prices have sure gone up lately,” it’s still worth it to see that movie, right? So you’re more or less happy to pay the price.

Now if you were to balk at the amount you are expected to pay, and start cursing under your breath as you swipe the ticket from the box office attendant, and start going on and on about how movies use to be $6 back in the day, and how everything is unfair, well now you are experiencing Dirty Pain.

Essentially, now you’re throwing emotional currency down the drain. Because it doesn’t buy you anything but needless suffering. So when it comes to Dirty Pain, it’s helpful to “let it go.” Or rather, to let go of your grip of it. It’s unnecessary to hold onto it so tightly, and it’s wasted energy.​

When it comes to Clean Pain, it’s a matter of “letting BE.” Allowing it. Making space for it. Giving it permission to be there and to accept it as part of life. The better you are at recognizing clean pain and how to open up to it, the more your life will open up and the more meaning you will find.

It’s my favorite question to ask therapy clients. It usually gets evoked when they start telling me things like, “That’s not me,” or “I could never be like that.” Says who?

As little kids we start to develop a conceptualization of who we are. This self conceptualization is basically a character. Our minds understand the world in story form. We have to link events and experiences together in time, with cause and effect relationships, to create a coherent narrative that explains why things are the way they are. And that goes for our own understanding of who we are.

For example, let’s say a little boy has undiagnosed ADHD and he keeps getting in trouble for talking out of turn and not paying attention in class. During test times, he zones out and can’t stay focused so he runs out of time and turns in his work half completed. After a while he notices that other kids are finishing before him and getting A’s, while he keeps getting frowning faces on is papers.

This little boy starts to make sense of why this is happening, and the most logical conclusion he comes up with is, “My brain is dumb.” This is a painful thought. So he starts to avoid things related to what kids with smart brains do. He steers clear of challenges that might expose his dumb brain, and make him feel less than or embarrassed.

Fast forward through many painful school years and his belief about his cognitive abilities have had plenty of opportunities to bake right in. This is now a part of his identity. There are other qualities that make up his self conceptualization, too, like maybe he’s really fun at parties, or maybe he’s charming with the ladies. It’s not all bad.

These beliefs about who we are start to narrow our behavioral repertoire. Our sense of self is now a character playing a role. We just keep acting the part without question. We are all actors. We are all pretending.

I heard this story once. There was this 10 year old boy who came to his mother and said, “Hey mom. Pretend that you were surrounded by a hundred hungry tigers and they’re all closing in on you from every direction. What would you do?”

The mother, engaging genuinely in her son’s often absurd queries, thinks hard. After a moment she admits, “Wow! One hundred tigers? That’s a lot! More tigers than I would ever imagine to be gathered in one place at the same time. Gee, I suppose I have no idea what I might do in that situation.”

The boy smiles triumphantly. “Stop pretending.”

Of course! Stop pretending. That “you” that you think you are, it’s not really you. It’s a story that your mind has compiled and arranged so that you can function as a solid, coherent thing. Your mind needs you to be something reliable. But that reliability comes at a cost.

It makes you predictable. It puts you in a box. It steals your freedom. Who you think you are is only one story from one perspective. And if you’re bought into that role, it’s very difficult to break character. The only way to break out of character is to realize that you are pretending.

Fiction writers do what’s called a “character analysis.” This is a process of evaluating the specific traits of a literary character. It’s an important literary tool for writing good fiction. If this is done well, that character could easily be transported into another story of an entirely different genre and still behave true to its character.

Some items to consider when doing a character analysis might include:

• Motivation: Why does this character act the way they do? What are they motivated by?
• Actions: What actions does this character take? How do their actions affect others?
• Speech: How does this character speak? What kinds of things to they say and how do they say it?
• Outside perspectives: How do others perceive this character? What do they think about the character being analyzed? How would they describe the character to someone else?

It may be helpful to do this exercise with your own sense of self as a character in a literary work or a film. Who would you cast to play yourself in a movie? Can you see them acting out the last time you made a fool of yourself? Or how about the last time you received a compliment? What about how you might respond in the future to hearing some really bad news?

If you can see your character being acted out by a professional, the next step is to realize that you have already been acting this whole time. Now what if you were a free agent? What if you could choose your own roles? If the role you’ve been playing is a coward, could you act like you were brave?​

Either way, you’re pretending. There really isn’t a “real” you. There isn’t really a self at all, except what you think it is, which is really only a sense of self. So as long as we’re all just pretending here, why not pretend to be someone worth writing about? Expand your acting range to include roles that you would feel proud to play.