No Alarms, No Problem? Think Again
Nirvana. No, not the ‘90s grunge band; I mean the religious and philosophical concept. There are a lot of different ideas around what nirvana is: it’s a state of perfect peace and happiness; it’s the cessation of suffering and desire; it’s a place or state of oblivion to care, pain, or external reality.
Now I’m no religious scholar, and I couldn’t compare and contrast for you all the different interpretations, origins, and implications of the various ways people define nirvana, but my very rudimentary understanding was that nirvana is happiness, bliss, peace; it meant no more pain and suffering. And given my developing lexicon of Erna-speak, nirvana sounded an awful lot like not having any Alarm Emotions blaring.
Oh! How amazing would it be if my Snake Brain would just shut up! I honestly couldn’t dream up a better state of being.
When I told Erna this, she gave me a kind smile but sighed. Clearly I’d missed something, but there was such pity in her sigh that I had to find out what was behind it. After all, what could be better than having no Alarm Emotions going off?
“I would not have immediately called the removal of unease ‘happiness’. This is an idea I really want to trample on, because everybody says having zero alarms is enough. No, being at neutral is just the basis to becoming happy.”
“But being at zero alarms makes me happy…” I countered.
“If you are just happy that your Snake Brain is not screaming at you, then you’re selling yourself very short.”
Why having no alarms is not the same as being happy
In the Snake Brain, Alarm Emotions do not have gradations, just like alarms don’t have gradations. The brain is built in a way that, if there is an alarm, you can only turn off the alarm if you heed it; if you don’t turn it off, if you just push it away, that doesn’t resolve the problem. It’s like hitting the snooze button: the alarm will go off again and again until you actually wake up and deal with it.
This is part of the frustration with focusing on coping mechanisms instead of problem solving. If you experience an Alarm Emotion and do something to calm your physiological response, like pushing your face into cold water, it just makes your body switch off for a bit. But unless you engage your Sage Brain, the alarm will go off again because the problem still exists. So you can’t just keep pushing your alarms away, you need to get your Sage Brain to assess the situation and figure out why the alarm is going off.
The thing is, engaging the Sage Brain is complicated, time-consuming, and difficult, but that’s the only part of the brain that can learn. For some reason, what some segments of society have decided to do is to try to teach the Snake Brain not to be alarmed. So we try to teach a fire alarm not to be a fire alarm, to play Fur Elise when there is a fire – completely nonsensical. Being able to ignore the alarms so you can go back to baseline is not going to solve the problem, and therefore it’s not really going to make us happy.
Here’s another dirty trick we’ve played on ourselves: we don’t turn our Alarm Emotions off because we don’t know they’re alarms. We’ve been taught that you shouldn’t feel bad because feeling bad is bad in itself: you’re weak, you’re indulging in self-pity. All of a sudden, people tell you that your bad feeling is your character trait: he’s an angry kid, or she’s an anxious woman. We slap a character judgment on someone because they’re stuck experiencing an alarm that they haven’t turned off.
Why do we do this? It’s so disempowering! We need to teach people that when they’re unhappy, not to avoid it and push it under the rug, but to figure out why you feel that way and fix what’s bothering you. If a kid is angry, you need to figure out why he feels his power is suppressed, what he wants to achieve and what obstacles are in his way. If we don’t recognize that these feelings are alarms, then we can’t go through the process of shutting them off, and we are sentencing ourselves to perpetual unhappiness.
That’s why it’s important to call out these bad emotions for what they are: alarms. Then we’ve got to engage our Sage Brain because the Snake Brain can only do things on automatic, which usually are not enough to solve the problem. Alarms go away when the Sage Brain has acknowledged it. If your Sage Brain can recognize that your anxiety is not a character trait, but arises in certain situations because you don’t feel prepared, then the Sage Brain can come up with a plan to be as prepared as possible. When you have enough time to react to things, and you have enough power to act in those situations, then your anxiety goes down.
Solving your problem is just the start of happiness
Here’s the thing: if you manage to legitimately get your Sage Brain to turn off the alarms, that means you’ve balanced back. And sure, that balance produces some happiness. But this is a lot like not being hungry: just because you’re not hungry, doesn’t mean that you’re full, that you’re satisfied. A lot of people who’ve managed to turn their alarms off stop at neutral and don’t do anything to build on their happiness, to reach satisfaction. A lot of the time, they just wait for the next shoe to drop.
If we’re told that not feeling bad is the purpose of life, then we conclude that if we feel neutral, we’ve achieved our purpose in life. Absolutely not! We should be asking, what can I do now that my alarm is off? How can I get to the next level? “We need to learn how to harvest happiness,” Erna replied in her unique parlance. It’s as if I’d completely forgotten what she explained about the higher levels of happiness.
