5 Ways Your Brain Is Tricking You into Being Miserable

But of course, we all do it to varying degrees -- you might pass 5,000 cars on your morning commute, and 4,999 of them might be perfect, polite drivers. But then you pass that one guy in the SUV who literally stuck his buttocks out of his side window and took a flying shit on your hood. When you get to work, are you going to talk about the 4,999 good drivers or the flying hood shitter? You're going to focus on the negative, because your brain is hardwired to devote more attention to the misery in life.

Researchers have found this in a laboratory setting: They can show participants pictures of angry and happy faces, and the participants will identify the angry faces much faster than the happy ones. How much faster, you ask? So fast, we answer, that the participants had no conscious recollection of ever seeing the faces. That's right -- your brain already identified the shit parts of your day before you even knew it. You have a sixth sense for misery.

And that was a great ability to have back when evolution was deciding which of us would reproduce and which would get eaten -- we needed a brain tuned to spot threats. Giggling at the butterflies instead of running from the tiger puts you in the express lane through the tiger's intestinal tract. We focus on the negative because it's the negative shit that gets us killed -- there was no evolutionary advantage to stopping to smell the roses. But this has left us with a brain that not only devotes our attention to the bad stuff, but also makes us remember it a lot better. Think about the implications in your everyday life -- you can wind up walking away from a pretty good job or relationship because you only remember the bad times.

If there's a good side to it, the effect does seem to reverse as we get older, when nostalgia starts to set in and we focus more on the good memories. Unfortunately, for many of us the only effect of that seems to be that we can't stop talking about how freaking great things were back in our day.

All right, you think, if negative thoughts are so powerful and make us so miserable, we'll just force ourselves to stop focusing on them. After all, we're conscious animals; we have control over our own brains. Now that we're aware of the problem, we just won't do it -- we'll look in the mirror and force ourselves to not think about the pimple.

Sure. First, let's try a really simple brain exercise:

Imagine a white bear humping another bear. Try to get a really clear picture of them in your mind. All right, now stop thinking of the humping bears. Use all of your powers of concentration to eliminate all traces of them from your mind. You shouldn't be seeing the white bears at all now, or their frantic thrusting, even when we repeat the words "humping white bears."

Did it work? Hell, no! In fact, the more you tried to not think about bear sex, the more you thought about it. This, unfortunately, is the same thing that happens when you try to force yourself to not think about the pimple in the mirror: Suppressing negative thoughts actually makes them stronger. You read that right. Negative thoughts are like the Sand People: If you chase them away, they'll come back in greater numbers.

It's actually insane when you think about it -- we're constantly trying to banish bad thoughts from our mind, but the human brain simply doesn't have a mechanism for doing it. After all, the only way to know for sure that you are not thinking about horny white bears is by monitoring your thoughts and "scanning" them for any traces of them. So the process basically goes like this:

"Am I thinking about humping white bears?"

"Well, I wasn't, but now I am ..."

Psychologists call these ironic thought processes. They are the reason why you only want the stuff that you can't have, why trying to suppress laughter only makes you laugh more, why you fail at stuff when somebody is watching, and so on. Telling yourself not to be afraid of failure puts failure right at the center of your thoughts. It's the difference between overweight people who are always counting calories and rail-thin people who have to be reminded to eat at meal time because otherwise they just "forget to eat." The overweight dieters are constantly failing because staying under the calorie count requires them to do the one thing they should be avoiding: thinking about food.

This is the cruel irony of people who are chronic worriers. Brain scans show that people who are constantly worrying about every little thing have much more active brains than other people ... but the extra energy is wasted. When worriers try to complete a task they worried about, they end up doing worse than non-worriers doing the same task. So much of their brain power is being used to try to foresee all the bad outcomes that they almost guarantee that one of those bad outcomes will occur.

Meanwhile, people who aren't concerned about what will happen can dedicate all their concentration to solving whatever problem is in front of them, meaning their chances of success are higher. That's right -- you could say that some people succeed purely because they're too dumb to know why they should fail.

If you were trying to come up with some kind of logical explanation, you could maybe say that it's because focusing on terrible things reminds us of how good we have it. But the science says that we actually take pleasure in the negative emotion itself. We willingly dive back into misery again and again for the same reason we willingly board a roller coaster or go bungee jumping: We get a rush from it. That is, the pleasure/reward centers of your brain light up and release dopamine. And you can get addicted to whatever causes your brain to release dopamine, whether it's chocolate or fistfights.

And just as with any addiction, there are some people who can handle it better than others -- we all respond differently. And what researchers are finding is that some people get addicted to grief.

They think this may be why some people can just pick up and move on after a trauma, while others never do. They just keep reliving it, refreshing that feeling over and over. Because of the jacked-up way your brain is wired, even the most horrible thing that's ever happened to you gave you a rush. Don't get us wrong -- that chronically grieving person you know isn't enjoying it, any more than the junkie "enjoys" being an addict. They just get trapped in a feedback loop because they're subconsciously afraid to let go of the one strong emotion that makes them feel alive.

And when it comes time to try to break us out of that cycle, something else comes into play, which is the fact that ...

For that decade of life, young people don't have a "NO" switch in their brains, and while it meant that a lot of them fell off cliffs while chasing the woolly mammoths, overall it has been beneficial to the species. In fact, you could argue that the people who are successful later in life are the ones who never gave up their lust for taking stupid risks.

But for the most part, as you get older, your brain wants you to stop taking those risks. You already did all your kid-having, now you need to settle down and stay alive so you can raise those children. Forget mammoth hunting; you're picking berries. You are less likely to quit your job and start a garage band at 50 than you were at 17, and that's a good thing.

The problem is that most people grow so scared of risk that they are more likely to stay in situations that make them miserable than take a chance at happiness. Sure, you only drew a three of hearts out of the deck of life, but if you ask for a new card, you might wind up with a deuce. You stick with the misery you know.

And even worse, it actually gets to the point where a change that works out for the better can be scary because it's better. In other words, even if you take the risk and the risk pays off, if you're not used to happiness, then it just feels weird, or phony. Studies have found that taking depressed, self-critical people and trying to make them think positively about themselves just confuses the shit out of them. Make them stand in front of a mirror and shout compliments at themselves and they just think it's weird and pointless. "What is this? Are you making fun of me? This is stupid." It actually takes a whole different type of therapy for those people, because they see warmth and happiness and can only think, "What the hell is this shit?"

Some of you think that's absolutely bizarre, and some of you know that as your everyday life. Ask yourself: When you're sitting in a bar or coffee shop and there's a group of friends next to you just laughing and having the time of their lives, how do you react? Do you find yourself annoyed by that? Do you hate them just a little? There you go.

Now imagine a depressed person. You picture him sitting on the sofa in the dark, maybe drinking alone, staring at infomercials at three in the morning. Maybe he just never got out of bed.

The primary difference there is that the former person is actually doing something. It's ridiculous to imagine the roles reversed -- there aren't any sad ballads about people snowboarding.

So despite how much cocaine Sigmund Freud did, it appears he was right when he said that unhappiness was the default position of our brains -- meaning that happiness takes effort. As one study put it, having the right genes and being surrounded by the right people are a part of the equation, but the rest is doing things that make you feel good.

And if reading this made you roll your eyes and say, "Well, duh," then you have to stop and realize how many people never do this. How many people do you know who say their ideal vacation would be to just kick back and do nothing at all? All of the "doing" in their lives comes at the job or at school -- all the stuff that they're forced to do by other people. So they think that relaxing means doing nothing at all, rather than doing the stuff they like.

They fall into the trap of thinking that happiness is simply the absence of doing unpleasant tasks instead of actively doing pleasant ones ... and the human brain just doesn't work that way. And this isn't going to get any better as time goes on; among seniors, their satisfaction with life didn't correlate with the state of their health or anything else -- it was based on whether or not they had friends and hobbies.

Of course, it's never harder to go out and make friends or start a new hobby than when you're in the throes of depression, and at that point, all of the above cycles that keep you in that valley start coming into play. Hey, when we said your brain was a dick, we weren't kidding.

Kathy wrote a very funny book called Funerals to Die For that is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. She is also on Facebook and Twitter. Dieter Melsens is a Belgian psychology student.

For more evidence that your brain clearly hates you, check out 5 Ways Your Brain Is Messing With Your Head and 6 Ways Your Brain Is Sabotaging Your Sex Life.

And stop by LinkSTORM to discover the best way to extract your gray matter without losing any motor skills.

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