Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
miserable-happy
symptoms and underlying cause
Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.
— St. Augustine
Our nation is in the grip of a severe health care crisis which fuels and sustains our seemingly endless financial crisis. Both crises are complicated by our politicians. Our political leaders, who are elected to serve all of us "we the people" instead pander to the extreme elements of their parties fearing that special interest groups will run them out of office if they act reasonably and responsibly. All three crises are symptoms of a much deeper and more pervasive problem. The underlying cause of our troubles is our indiscriminate pursuit of happiness. Our indiscriminate pursuit of happiness obscures our sense of what is reasonable and responsible. Our desire to be happy, happy, happy is leading us down a path that can only end in our becoming more miserable than Pinocchio became as he was morphing into a happy, happy, happy Jackass on Pleasure Island.
Our obsession with happiness has an addictive quality. Our relentless search for our next happiness fix fuels Madison Avenue, which sells all its wares based on the promise of delivering the happiness we so desperately seek and believe we are entitled to. Our addiction to pursuing happiness is apparent by the fact that, as of this writing, there were 42 titles on Amazon that claim to hold the secret to happiness. Moreover, happiness road map books are usually at the top of the New York Times Best Seller list. There are also thousands of Internet sites and articles that claim to have a pill or a process that is certain to make us happy 24/7. Lastly, the pharmaceutical industry markets and sells over 279 billion dollars' worth of drugs all based on explicit and implicit claims that the drugs will not only protect us from the unhappiness of illness and death, they will turn our lives into happy walks on the beach. Most of these drugs and virtually every other legally addictive "happy" product sold on the corner of "happy and healthy" will lead us to the misery and despair of skid row if they don't kill us first. In reality the happy market has a lot more in common with Pinocchio's journey to Pleasure Island than with health and genuine happiness.
Our book takes a different approach. Our book will confirm that we humans have the capacity to live deeply meaningful and genuinely happy lives without the happy pills, happy sugar drenched, happy additive filled, and happy GMO'd products, happy "secrets," and happy egocentric me, me, me guidelines that are in reality discussing excuses for healthcare treatments, food, and Pleasure Island utopías. Our book will also offer an invaluable, yet non-prescriptive, path to health and genuine happiness. Our book will argue that the counterweight to Pinocchio's Pleasure Island happiness is reasonable and responsible action. Reasonable and responsible action, while often accompanied by discomfort and the sacrifice of the immediate experience of pleasure, is our exclusive path to health and genuine happiness. Moreover, as will be shown, reasonable and responsible action is the essence of both our DNA and spirituality.
Our book will not anchor its argument on concepts or guidelines that might define reasonable and responsible behavior. Instead, this book will identify the fixed laws and patterns of biology which, moment to moment, seek optimal health by pursuing, grasping, and sustaining healthy connections which are nature's inbuilt demands for reasonable and responsible action. Optimal connectedness to ourselves, others, and our environment, irrespective of our emotional experience — pleasant or painful — defines genuine happiness. Thus, if we shift our focus from Pleasure Island happiness to achieving optimal connectedness through reasonable and responsible action we can eliminate our political gridlock, solve both our healthcare and financial crises, clean up our life-sustaining planet, and create a culture of genuine happiness.
The path to genuine happiness has little to do with our common beliefs about happiness. In fact, as will be shown, our common beliefs and experiences of happiness are the primary cause of our fall from the mountaintop of genuine meaning and purpose into the dark and lonely canyon of misery and despair.
As indicated above, in presenting an invulnerable path to genuine happiness we will not offer a series of exercises or prescribed daily activities or "to do lists" as a path to happiness. Such formulas for happiness are counter-productive and are doomed to fail because they do not, and cannot, consider the unique make-up of our individual life and the circumstances of our moment-to-moment situations. Moreover, the bulk of such formulaic approaches to happiness base their claims on sentimental and ill-defined or undefined concepts of what it means to be human. For example, authors often claim that human happiness is based on some unexplained spiritual entity that exists outside of us. They often suggest our spirit is not human. They claim that while our "mystery" spirit is within us, it is not part of us. Thus, we are told to ultimately base our lives on an undefined and unknowable "spirit" that plays a critical role in our experience of happiness. We are led to believe we can plug into this unknown "spirit" or energy, which will provide us with a happiness utopia for no discernible reason. However, the great spiritual leader Thomas Merton cautioned us about such assumptions of happiness fearing that what we perceive as good might indeed be evil. In other words, relying on an unknown spirit or energy as the source of happiness often becomes a quicksand pit of misery and despair. Others offer "magic" pills, herbs, or prescriptive lifestyles. Rarely is there any attempt to ground these claims and any foundational understanding of what it is to be human or the basic demands of the biology from which we humans have emerged.
Currently, religion, self-proclaimed happiness gurus, and evidence-based "scientists" ground human happiness on their dogmatic beliefs rather than comprehensive and systematic research data. Science demands comprehensive data and a systematic understanding of data to achieve a close approximation of the phenomenon being studied. Religions rely on dogmatic beliefs about God, prophets, scripture, or tradition rather than science in determining the reality of human happiness. Happiness gurus typically rely on some unexplained claim of a "vital force," "universe energy," "secret," or hide behind some other bait that can't be proved or disproved rather than science to sell their claims of human happiness. Evidence-based "scientists" rely on the completely and utterly discredited notion that human science must be restricted to observable data to sells their claims of happiness pills, procedures, and products. Evidence-based human "science" is dogma not science. Evidence-based research, by deliberately excluding that data of our non-observable mental properties is not comprehensive.
Evidence-based human research is simply the statistical manipulation of material-only data masquerading as science. Evidence-based research, while producing trillions of dollars for its profiteers, is an emperor with no clothes that now kills close to a million people a year, eats up 20% of our GDP, causes 6270% of personal bankruptcies, creates superbugs, and inflicts massive environmental pollution on our planet.
Herein loom some critical questions, such as "what is this spiritual force, energy, or agent?" "What if there is no spiritual force, energy, or agent?" "If such a force, energy, or agent does exist, what if it is an anti-happiness force, energy, or agent?" These elephants in the room issues are denied, masked, or suppressed for no apparent reason other than they upset the happiness profit machine applecart. However, if such a spiritual source does exist, it is possible that it has absolutely no interest in our happiness whatsoever and, in fact, may punish our pursuit of pleasure-based happiness. Thus, the reasonable and responsible course of action would be to identify whether or not such a happiness source, energy, or agent actually exists. If it does exist we can then try to determine how it actually supports or diminishes our experience of happiness. In the meantime, it is unreasonable and irresponsible to make claims about something we can conceive of, but can't comprehend or validate. Such unverified claims are little more than magical thinking, and recommendations based on such claims run the risk of causing more misery and despair than the sought after happiness outcomes. From a professional standpoint and in virtually any regulated industry, making claims about the unknown is considered malpractice or illegal. However, in peddling spirit-based happiness snake oil and happiness in general, it is buyer beware.
This book will break with the vast majority of happiness manuals, prophets, and products by providing precise definitions of our human make-up: body-mind-spirit. These definitions are open to scientific verification and represent a quantum leap in our innate demand for a reasonable and responsible explanation of what it is to be human and how humans can come to experience genuine happiness.
To this end, Chapter 2 will provide a brief history of happiness and propose an understanding of happiness that recognizes both the positive and negative dimensions of happiness. We will discuss how the negative dimension of happiness results in the preponderance of human suffering. I will also discuss how positive happiness is at the core of human nature and determines the meaning and purpose of human life.
Chapter 3 will provide an overview of our evidence-based conventional medicine system. While necessarily technical, the presentation is essential in understanding how our culture is being evidence-based into mental, spiritual, economic, and environmental misery.
Chapter 4 will provide an overview of naturopathic medicine, a comprehensive primary care medical system that can overcome the challenges of the evidence-based conventional medicine system. It will be shown how naturopathic medicine works with our body-mindspirit dramatically increasing the possibility of preventing illness, supporting body-mind-spirit health and wellness, and supporting genuine human happiness.
Chapter 5 will provide an overview of emergent property theory, which provides a scientific explanation of our body-mind-spirit. Again, while technical, the overview of emergent property theory will provide a solution to the core challenges we face in our personal lives, our communities, our nation, and the world, by giving both a scientific explanation and methodology for understanding the human bodymind-spirit. Thus, we will provide a definitive understanding of human meaning, purpose, and genuine happiness.
Chapter 6 will provide some concluding thoughts. It will be shown that the normal functioning of our body-mind-spirit determines what genuine happiness is and what role genuine happiness plays in the genuine meaning and purpose of human life. It will be shown that genuine happiness is often a humbling byproduct of selfless service to others. Moreover, it will be shown that genuine happiness often emerges when we embrace the discomfort of reasonable and responsible actions and patterns. It will also be shown that Pleasure Island happiness is not only destructive to our body-mind-spirit, it is destructive to our relationships, our communities, and our planet.
At our clinics we see firsthand how addictive and destructive the pursuit of Pleasure Island happiness can be. At the beginning of virtually every first office visit our patients, in a rather sobering manner, say in one way or another, that they have come to the clinic because they are "not happy." Our response is to tell them that their unhappiness is their best friend. It is telling them that something is out of balance. Moreover, by the fact that they know they are unhappy they have begun to mine their critical body-mind-spirit data to meet whatever challenges they may face. We often, based on the specific patient's situation, tell them that their unhappiness is a blunt message confirming that the meaning and purpose of life is not happiness or the pursuit of happiness. We tell them that every genuine impulse in our body-mind-spirit has two aspirations-neither of which are the attainment of pleasure-based happiness. The first is to seek the reasonable. The second is to act responsibly. By seeking the reasonable and choosing to act in accordance with what they determine to be reasonable or, in and other words, to act responsibly, they become deeply connected to themselves, others and, indeed, the universe. In other words, our body-mind-spirit is our source of wisdom or knowing the right path of action to take and our capacity for integrity, which is to act in accordance with what we know to be reasonable.
The reasonable and responsible governs nature's innate impulse to create healthy connections. Your body-mind-spirit is engaged in the process now. You are questioning whether or not what you are reading makes sense. Through your questioning, you will either reach a reasonable understanding of what you are reading or realize you need additional information. Unless you obstruct it, your body-mind-spirit relentlessly pursues the reasonable. Responsible action is simply to act in accordance with what you know to be reasonable. The objective of biology is to secure healthy connections and healthy connections are created and sustained by reasonable and responsible activities. Reasonable and responsible activities are activities that embrace biology's innate laws and patterns. Both concepts, reasonable and responsible, will be precisely defined and discussed in Chapter 6.
In short, we tell our patients that the meaning and purpose of life is to live within the nature of our body-mind-spirit which demands reasonable and responsible action, moment-to-moment, irrespective of emotional, physical, financial, or any other consequences. For example, most, if not all, genuine religious prophets and heroes are prophets and heroes because of the sacrifices they made and suffering they endured in pursuit of what they knew was a reasonable and responsible response to whatever challenge they faced. We all know the permanent satisfaction we experience as the result of any uncomfortable, or even painful, reasonable and responsible action we've taken. For example, as any parent, caregiver, or person who has ever been responsible for the welfare of others knows, reasonable and responsible care is not concerned with the caregiver's happiness. We don't give a child candy or let them engage in dangerous activities so they will be pacified and we will be happy. Caregiving is about creating reasonable and responsible relationship patterns in our children, which instills a deep sense of secure attachment. Such secure attachments deepen the experience of connectedness, which is the hallmark of meaningful, sustainable, and healthy relationships, that is, genuine happiness.
The reasonable and responsible is not interested in happiness, but instead is focused on operating within the reality of the biological laws that connect all aspects of the natural universe in a healthy and sustainable unity.
Happiness, genuine happiness, as it turns out, is realized through the ever-deepening sense of connectedness we realize through our body-mind-spirit properties. When we embrace the activity of being reasonable and responsible, moment-to-moment, we experience genuine happiness.
P is an example of a patient who realized the power and strength of her body-mind-spirit by following through on what she knew would be an uncomfortable but reasonable and responsible course of action to protect her children and herself from potential danger. P came to us just after leaving an abusive partner. She was emotionally and physically hurt by the relationship, but knew she had to get out of the relationship to protect her two children. P was unsure of herself, anxious, and in need of support. She was adjusting to her failed relationship and also needed help with nutrition, sleep, and emotional and physical exhaustion. While uncomfortable with engaging in the legal process, she sought and received legal protection. She also reached out to her family, friends, and community support systems. Additionally, based on blood work and lab tests she changed her diet. Together, her actions enabled her to tap into her vast inner reservoir of energy which allowed her to experience a deep sense of peace knowing that, while uncomfortable and painful, she was facing her challenges in a reasonable and responsible manner. She knew she would have no regrets about her course of action and that she was experiencing and developing an effective pattern of dealing with any future challenges she might face. She was deeply satisfied that she was successfully working through her adversity without having to take any "happy" pills that would mask her need to take the painful actions she needed to take, potentially harm her health, leave her with significant medical bills, and reduce her capacity to experience and learn effective problem-solving processes.
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Excerpted from "Miserably Happy"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Dr. Kevin Brannick, PsyD, MA and Dr. Michelle A. Brannick, ND, DC..
Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
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