Buying Happiness
A New Standard
Is the stress of buying happiness worth it? As we work harder, are we happier? As we purchase more, are we happier? As we raise our living standard, are we happier?
A Wall Street Journal article speaks about how today 30-year-old men are worse off than their fathers were at 30. “The study suggests that absolute mobility — the rate at which an entire generation’s lot improves relative to previous generations — has declined.”
The idea of a standard of living was created by corporate leaders to be the carrot that would keep workers working despite having everything they needed. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution it became apparent that man’s needs were being met, so why would he want to work more, why would he want more? The answer was to manufacture a new need, a need to raise his standard of living, to climb the economic ladder.
A New Trend
The old standard may be changing; I suspect we’ve finally maxed out. Not only have we long surpassed our survival needs, we are now surpassing our resources of time and energy to enjoy the amenities of modern life. The silence of the past is now what we strive for. How many restaurants have you seen which had a sign that said “no cell phones” or, in some cases “no perfume”? We are over-stimulated with the pleasures of life and overworked trying to achieve a higher standard of living
Society has peaked – we can’t handle any more. Now, for many the greatest pleasure is escaping our success. Instinctually, we first think of fleeing our environments. That can help. I moved to northern
Inner Escape
It is true that people are more relaxed here in Sandpoint, and I would say happier, yet they are often still stressed out by many of the same things they thought they were escaping. When that realization hits them, they experience a slight depression. Then, if they are brave, these folks begin to address the psychological/physiological causes of their stress.
Teaching our conditioned (or you may say addicted) minds and bodies to slow down initially can take some work. The return on this investment is greater than the return from investing more of our resources to gathering more stuff, or doing more.
It Is Not Age – It Is Stress
We all know too well that stress wears us down – it ages us. Simply put, we allocate our resources to what our bodies experience as survival. These resources could go to regeneration. Have you ever seen someone age over night from stress. Maybe their hair grayed quickly or their face lost its youth. Chronic stress is cumulative. The effects may not show for a few years, but after years of stress, you will be older than your twin who moved to that South Pacific island.
Long-term emotional stress causes the genes in our cells to shorten their life span. If our genes are not living as long as they could, neither will our cells. If there was a way to measure the qualitative age of our bodies, I suspect we would discover all of our cells are aging.
The closest measure of the relative age of our bodies may be the fascial (connective tissue) system – Hans Style, M.D., the father of stress research called fascia the organ of stress. Much like the rings of a tree, these thin sheets of collagen fiber exhibit the chronic strain of stress. Plastic surgeons and dermatologist inject collagen into tissue to temporally bring back youth.
We can not only slow down the aging process, we can reverse it to some extent.   We may not be like salamanders,  who can regenerate  lost legs, but we can reverse the accumulation of stress and how that manifests in our body. Once the chronic stress response subsides, the body will naturally begin to allocate its resources to healing. After survival, out next hard-wired behavior is regeneration, not unlike the salamander. Our bodies want to be young. The fountain of youth is not an external exilir, but rather the body’s inherent ability to heal itself.
Once you reduce your body’s stress response and it has begun its healing you can aid in its rejuvenation through the use of an array of holistic disciplines. There are many spa treatments that pamper and prepare you to look young. Don’t get me wrong, Hedonism has its value: there is great health value in receiving pleasure, let alone the pure enjoyment! What I am speaking of here are the treatment regimes that address restoring your deep vitality. In the last 25 years, everything from Rolfing to acupuncture has proven their efficiency for catalyzing healing.
Through my private practice, I see clients who remove their chronic stress, learn not to recreate it and then begin to support their body in rejuvenation - transforming their health and their appearance. Not only do we want to feel good and look good, but so does our cells. When given the choice they will choose health. Being vain is good – it can lead us to rejuvenation.
Cry Your Stress Away
A quick way to release stress is to cry. While this technique may not be appropriate in all situations, allowing yourself to cry can immediately release a lot built-up stress
These emotional tears contain toxins, the toxins of stress. In Native American traditions, the Medicine Wheel describes the Four Worlds or elements. Some lineages put the emotions and water together in the south of the wheel. Thunder Strikes, a Native American elder/shaman, speaks about giving with our emotions. There is no better way to give these emotions away than to allow our waters, our tears to carry them away. Expressing emotion allows the body, which sits in the west of the Medicine Wheel, to not hold them as tension.
The act of crying, even in private, is an act of courage and surrender. When we cry, we allow ourselves to feel and express what we held. The courage comes from letting go of our mind controlling to allow our emotions to release. When we admit to our feelings by permitting our bodies to express them we are catching up to ourselves, we are getting congruent with our felt sense. In a mindfulness sense, we are now fully present in the moment.
When we let our tears flow in public, we step beyond the social restraints to model courage and emotional honesty. Initially, we do experience more stress at the thought of being vulnerable. Whenever I have done it, I always initially felt more stress. Once I allowed the tears, my stress released. From working with thousands of clients, students and group members over the years, I can say in every case, these people were glad they released their tears and their stress.