BY: SCOTT BARRY KAUFMAN, PH.D.
4 THOUGHTS
1. The Good Life & the Good Breath
“Instead, the good life that I present, which is deeply grounded in the core principles of humanistic psychology and a realistic understanding of human needs, is about the healthy expression of needs in the service of discovering and expressing a self that works best for you.
The good life is not something you will ever achieve. It’s a way of living.”
I absolutely love this passage. It’s the perfect place to start this 411 because it succinctly represents what this book is about: living a deeply meaningful life in a way that is unique to you.
But for our purposes, this passage inspired me to create a modified version, which we can call “The Good Breath:”
The good breath is deeply grounded in the principles of human physiology and psychology, along with a realistic understanding of individual human differences. It’s about the healthy expression of your emotions and highest potential through breathing practices that work best for you.
The good breath isn’t something we try to achieve. It’s simply a way of breathing.
This means that the good breath will be different for each of us. It doesn’t matter which method, how long, or how many times a day. As long as we’re using it to become a better version of ourselves, we’re doing it right.
***
Related: The Deep Breath Hypothesis
2. Diverse Tactics & Breathing Hammers and Nails
“The integration of a wide variety of perspectives is necessary for a more complete understanding of the full depths of human potential, as too much focus on a single perspective runs the risk of giving a distorted view of human nature. As Maslow said, ‘I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.’”
Here’s another excellent reminder that we need a wide range of methods, in breathing and life, to become the best version of ourselves.
But specifically for the breath, if we only have one breathing hammer, we’ll assume every problem is a nail. Let’s be mixed-breathing artists instead.
***
P.S. Here’s another passage related to being unique and using a wide range of methods. This could also go with Thought #1, but it seemed slightly more appropriate here. “Maslow viewed the role of the teacher, therapist, and parent as horticulturists, whose task is to ‘enable people to become healthy and effective in their own style.’1 To Maslow, this meant that ‘we try to make a rose into a good rose, rather than seek to change roses into lilies. . . . It necessitates a pleasure in the self-actualization of a person who may be quite different from yourself. It even implies an ultimate respect and acknowledgement of the sacredness and uniqueness of each kind of person.’” I hope these 411s help you in this way : )
3. Why Coherence Fuels Purpose: Finding Internal & External Safety (and connection) for Growth
“The need for coherence is the form of meaning that is most strongly tied to the need for safety. Does my immediate environment make sense? Is there any predictability and comprehensibility in my life? Coherence is necessary to even get a chance to pursue one’s larger purpose or pursue various ways that one can matter in this world.”
Kaufman tells us to “pursue one’s larger purpose,” we need external coherence with our environment, which allows us to feel safe.
However, we also know that slow breathing (~5-6 breaths/min) provides internal coherence—a predictability in our nervous system that makes us feel safe.
And in my opinion, this internal type is even more potent because it’s always available, and our inner state determines how we relate to our external world.
So let’s breathe slowly, find some internal coherence (and maybe even external, too), and use this feeling of safety to pursue our bigger purpose.
***
P.S.: As you probably know by now, slow breathing also activates the vagus nerve and, with regular practice, increases vagal tone. This is critical to connection, as Kaufman also tells us: “Yet another key player in the connection system is the tenth cranial nerve, also known as the vagus nerve ... Those with higher vagal tone experience greater connection with others in their daily lives, and in turn, this greater connection increases vagal tone, causing ‘upward spirals of the heart.’43”
To pursue our bigger purpose, we’ll need connection. So, we could say: Breathe slowly, feel safe, and connect better with others.
4. Learned Helplessness to Learned Hope: The Power of the Breath (or any self-improvement tool)
“In their classic studies beginning in the late 1960s, psychologists Steven Maier and Martin Seligman found that, given enough repeated shocks, dogs eventually stop trying to escape from their situation even when they eventually are given the opportunity to do so.65 They just gave up … The researchers called the resulting state of defeat “learned helplessness” and came to see it as a major cause of depression.
In a recent review of the evidence …Maier and Seligman concluded that they actually had it completely backward.66 The latest research suggests that the passivity and feeling of lack of control is actually the default response in animals, an automatic, unlearned reaction to prolonged adversity. What must be learned is hope—the perception that one can control and harness the unpredictability in one’s environment.”
If you’re into self-improvement, you’ve likely heard of the learned helplessness experiments. But I didn’t know that recent research shows that helplessness isn’t actually learned: it’s our default reaction to prolonged adversity.
To beat it, we need learned hope: “the perception that [we] can control and harness the unpredictability in [our] environment.”
In my opinion, this is precisely why breathing techniques are so powerful. It’s not that some magical breathing method is going to fix us. It’s that once we’ve experienced our ability to control our body and emotions through the breath, we develop “learned hope.”
Then, when adversity hits, we feel empowered. Breathing shifts our mindset from helplessness into hope.
1 LIFE-CHANGING IDEA
It’s OK to Be Sick (In fact, Maybe We Should Be)
“Indeed, the hallmark characteristic of the self-actualizing person may be the ability to strive for a purpose that will make one unpopular with the neighboring environment, particularly if the environment is unhealthy, hostile, or dangerous.32 Maslow echoed this sentiment in the introduction to Toward a Psychology of Being:
‘Does sickness mean having symptoms? I maintain now that sickness might consist of not having symptoms when you should. Does health mean being symptom-free? I deny it. Which of the Nazis at Auschwitz or Dachau were healthy? Those with stricken conscience or those with a nice, clear, happy conscience? Was it possible for a profoundly human person not to feel conflict, suffering, depression, rage, etc.?33’”
Here's a life-changing thought: If you have no problems in today’s world, that might actually be a sign of sickness.
We spend almost all our time indoors in front of screens. We breathe polluted air. We use artificial light. We eat processed foods (even when we eat organic whole foods, they’ve somehow been treated with something terrible). And on & on.
How could we not be sick?
Of course, the goal of all our self-development is to mitigate the effects of our modern world. But I think it’s a disservice if we guilt people into believing they should never have any problems, and if they do, that it’s a sign of weakness.
We may never be “ok.” And that’s ok. Paradoxically, that’s more reason to keep doing what we’re doing. As Russ Harris tells us in The Confidence Gap, “Although we’ll never be perfect, we can keep on learning and growing until the day we die. … In other words, we can continually develop our psychological flexibility: the ability to take effective action, guided by values, with awareness, openness, and focus.”
So it's ok to be sick, and it's ok to keep trying to improve. Let's hold those dichotomies in parallel while we keep taking effective action toward the life we want.
1 STACK OF MEMORABLE QUOTES
“My research has convinced me that we all have extraordinary creative, humanitarian, and spiritual possibilities but are often alienated from them because we are so focused on a very narrow slice of who we are. As a result, we aren’t fulfilling our full potential.”
“Modern-day presentations of Maslow’s theory often leave out this critical notion of an integrated hierarchy and instead focus on the stage-like pyramid—even though in his published writings Maslow never actually created a pyramid to represent his hierarchy of needs.”
“The pyramid from the sixties told a story that Maslow never meant to tell; a story of achievement, of mastering level by level until you’ve “won” the game of life. But that is most definitely not the spirit of self-actualization that the humanistic psychologists emphasized. The human condition isn’t a competition; it’s an experience.”
“Yes, we are apes, but we are apes insatiably curious about personal identity, creative expression, meaning, and purpose. Humans have developed a capacity for growth unprecedented in the animal kingdom. We are truly unique in the long time scale of our goals and in the flexibility to choose which goals we most wish to prioritize, and therefore in the number of ways we can self-actualize.”
“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. ... There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!” . . . It is . . . an agonizing, hazardous undertaking thus to dig into oneself, to climb down roughly and directly into the tunnels of one’s being.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
“There seems to be no intrinsic reason why everyone shouldn’t be this way [self-actualizing]. Apparently, every baby has possibilities for self-actualization, but most all of them get it knocked out of them. . . . I think of the self-actualizing man not as an ordinary man with something added, but rather as the ordinary man with nothing taken away.” – Abraham Maslow
“Perhaps we can define happiness as experiencing real emotions over real problems and real tasks.” – Abraham Maslow
“The most fortunate are those who have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy.” – Abraham Maslow
“The great lesson from the true mystics—from the Zen monks, and now also from the Humanistic and Transpersonal psychologists—is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s back yard.” – Abraham Maslow