Fixing Happiness — Carpentry, CBT, Meditation, and feeling less shitty.

Why would, and how could meditation serve as a foundation to make CBT more effective?

Also, what happened to the carpentry? — We will build our way there, hehe.. Nothing like a bad dad-joke to lighten up a conversation you know.

Seemingly CBT kicks ass, it promises and seems to deliver on being a sort of catch-all for most psychological problems. So why would you bother meditating when the studies are yet to be as rigorous as the ones of CBT and when real psychologists are yet to accept and prescribe it to the same extent? The thing is that there are studies looking at the coupling of the two showing great results, but rather than the science, I will be focusing on the phenomenological underpinnings of how this works and why meditation is, in my view, crucial for CBT to work at its best.

To paraphrase Sam Harris— “Meditation is most of the time talked about and sold as a mear improved version of an executive stress ball, when in reality it is actually more like a Large Hadron Collider for the mind”.

For those of you that do not know what the Large Hadron Collider is, it is basically the world's largest piece of machinery that the EU built, they built it and use it to gain a better understanding of the fundamentals of physics. So the Large Hadron Collider is a big fucking deal, in both a literal, figurative, and financial meaning of that phrase.

So, rather than being a specific thing or tool as it is marketed to be, Sam and I think of meditation as a way to make profound discoveries about your consciousness. It is also, just like the Large Hadron Collider more and more turning out to be a big deal in terms of the science starting to come out of it and in terms of the money being put into it, hence, they are basically the same thing.

However, none of those things is what I’ll be writing about in this post. Sure I love to talk about consciousness, I really like the science of it and I very much do think that most people (90% +) teaching meditation is spending most of their time (90% +) figuring out how to make it seem more complicated than it is to justify their prices, but those are stories for some other time, I just wanted to get that point across.

Rather I will be writing about a more limited view of meditation in terms of why and how it can serve as the base for getting CBT, and really any type of other behavioral change to work better.

See, CBT and similar techniques are built on the assumption that you are able to take a “meta-cognitive perspective”, i.e. to think about your thoughts. And while some might be able to do this, most are not, and even fewer are can do so often enough for it to be sufficient for these techniques to work as well as they might. The problem here does not lie in the thinking, but rather it lies in taking the step back and observing, in order to then be able to think about what was observed. Since the observation is crucial but also is the hardest part, this is where meditation comes in.

So, how does meditation address this hard part, and how should you do it for it to have the desired effect?

Starting out with the “how you should you do it” part, using meditation to get CBT to work better (as well as for most other purposes) is as simple as just sitting, literally just sitting, nothing else.

While some meditation practices emphasize that you start with following the breath others that you listen to a sound or that you say a mantra and still others that you go through elaborate thought experiments and visualizations, all these are great depending on what you are after, but I want you to just sit, and when I say just sit, I mean JUST SIT.

A keen eye will notice that the “SIT” part of the “JUST SIT” is also in caps, good catch! This is because the sitting part is important, you should not lie down or slouch on a sofa. Everyone that has seen pictures of Monks notices that they all look the same when sitting, and the reason for the similarity is that they are all sitting with a straight ass back. And they do this because it works best this way, sure this is not as chill or feels as good, but that was not the point, was it?

If you simply sit down, with the back straight for five minutes, and do nothing, things should start to dawn on you.

My prediction is that unless you happen to be born into a Tibetan-lama lineage (there are more than the Dalai, he just steals all the press) or have some killer ass genes priming you for full zen of the blocks, your head will likely be roaring with thoughts after the five minutes are up.

By that time you will have come up with seven things that you really really have to do right now, and on top of that started worrying about ten others that you realized that you should already have done in order for your life not to be the chaos it is.

Or maybe, just maybe you are not even there yet, I was not for sure, so you might be thinking about stuff without really even getting to notice that you are thinking about stuff, and all you notice is a growing sense of seemingly unattributable restlessness and worry about the whole deal.

Whatever happens, as long as you just sat there for the five minutes, good job! — You did it the right way.

If you sit down like this for five minutes a day, each day, you will eventually start to perceive how much stuff is actually going on within your consciousness, and in this way, you will slowly but surely get better at the art of observing all these things.

This very skill of just observing is exactly what you will need to spot the obsessive thoughts and your negative self-talk before they spiral and you find yourself in panic or any other shitty state. Getting out of the bad places in your mind once down there is usually much harder work than staying clear of them in the first place, so this is key.

Let's get to the Carpentry, shall we?

To offer an analogy I think learning CBT is kind of like giving a visually impaired person a hammer. Sounds like quite a weird analogy I know, but stick with me:

This made-up person has a problem with constantly walking into tiny little nails that are sticking up from their floorboards in the house that they live. Once they get the hammer, they can use it to smack down those little suckers. The hammer is, of course of great use because if the poor person never got it, she or he might spend a lifetime walking into the same nail over and over again which would kind of suck big time.

Giving the hammer to this person would be super useful because every once and a while the person will walk straight into a nail and hurt themselves, and once located in this way, they will be able to smack it down - success, right?

Well, you should be able to see where this still gets a bit frustrating, without learning how to spot the tiny nails before they hit them, it would still be kind of shitty because there could be a lot of nails, and still more might creep up during the person's life. So, some other kind of solution could be useful here - this solution, as you might have guessed, would be meditation, which you can think of as a pair of glasses in this case.

With the glasses, the person would be able how to spot these tiny nails in front of them, and in doing so be able to make use of the hammer before they get hurt in the first place!

A nifty thing with the analogy is that you should also be able to see the value of the glasses without the hammer. Since the glasses would give the “small” extra benefit of literally seeing everything a whole lot clearer, which is basically what meditation can do, as alluded to by paraphrasing Harris at the start. Therefore, while I personally would definitely recommend anyone spending some time on learning CBT, I myself put way more emphasis and time on practicing meditation.

With that all being said tho, I still, after looking for nails more or less every day for the last five years, walk into one every once and a while. But the number of times I do so, compared to the number of times I used to continues to amaze me enough to get me to take a few hours out of my day to write this.

Put simply, if practiced, meditation coupled with CBT has the power to make your life less shitty.

P.S Life will still be shitty at times no matter how much you meditate, it is far from a panacea, but it will be less shitty — You have my word!