How I try to reconnect with my inner cavewoman to finally feel happy again
Okay, so obviously this dramatic title is a bit exaggerated for clickbait purposes, but only a little bit. Even though I’m not actually unhappy per se, I have been on a path of self-improvement for quite a while now, pretty much since my transplant (both lungs, in June of 2015). Around a year ago I finished my 3-year-long therapy — a combination of cognitive-behavioural and psychodynamic practices in order to deal with a whole lot of issues I’ve been carrying with me since my childhood. Long story short, I learned about my triggers and I realised that I suffer from anxiety being a result of childhood relational PTSD. It was huge to me, but in the context of how many people suffer from way more severe mental issues, I think I got off the hook pretty easily.
So last year I was done with my therapy, but not (and probably never really) done with self-improvement. Obviously a big part of that is still self education, getting to know my inner child and working on disarming my triggers. Another side of that though was me generally wanting to know how to be… well, happy and fulfilled. It’s probably a question that keeps a lot of you awake, so let’s try and dig into it together.
Happiness is essentially multi-leveled health
I started with identifying (still with my therapist) that from a psychological viewpoint, to lead a happy life one should be healthy on three levels — physical, mental and spiritual. Obviously the concept of happiness wasn’t created yesterday and a bunch of you will completely disagree with my definition. If you do, it’s probably best for you to stop reading this, because I will refer to this understanding of happiness in the rest of this post.
Through my transplant and the following treatment, I’ve come a very long way of improving my physical health. However I noticed that there still were things I could do without doctors’ recommendations. So I started working out. And it was the absolute worst.
Yea, I was never used to exercising. I grew up in the times when people thought that if one is battling a chronic disease, they should stay away from any physical activities as it might only make their condition worse. That obvious bullshit caused me to not only dislike working out, but to not really understand how it works. My comparatively weak body wasn’t able to keep up working out with other people and my anxiety only made it worse. There was a lot of self loathing and a decent chunk of self hatred.
Physical health is what you can do with your body and what you put in it (no, not in the dirty way)
I’m better now. Going off and on with different workout plans and doing a LOT of research I learned what type of physical activity would suit me the best. I also learned that one doesn’t become fit overnight, that it’s okay to have a little bit of belly even though being quite skinny and that I can in fact run and even enjoy it.
Another pillar of physical health was whatever I was putting into my body and with this phrase I mean both food and alcohol. As a whole lot of people with emotional issues, I’ve been actively distracting myself from life through partying. It was and still is an effort to re-learn socialising without, or with a very rare and limited portion of alcohol. I’m not saying that I was ever close to alcoholism, but I do remember being excited about both socialising and getting drunk. I realise now that some of my friends were in my life only because we felt so-called cheap intimacy while being drunk and I’m trying to avoid it now. Ironically I’m writing it after being at a party where I did have a few drinks, however I haven’t been hungover or emotionally out-of-control drunk for a really long time now.
I wanna mention the diet part too and this is where I will start referring to certain books I’ve been reading, so hopefully I won’t bore you to death. Now however you will finally see why I’m talking about my “inner cavewoman” in the title.
To follow the rules we need to know where they come from
I saw a friend of a friend reading a huge book titled “Sapiens: A brief history of humankind” and decided to give it a chance. Let me tell you, it was anything but brief. I usually am a fast reader but this chonker of a book took me weeks to get through. However I regret nothing and can definitely recommend it to you, especially if you need to read something interesting enough to stay hooked, but boring enough to be able to quickly fall asleep after a chapter or two.
You probably already know that even though our current world is far from the hunter-gatherer reality, our bodies and brains haven’t really changed that much since. Evolution is a slow process and to be happy and healthy, we should respect the reality of our ancestors. We are obviously not born to sit in front of the computers, eat McDonalds and rate strangers’ TikTok dances late at night instead of sleeping. Diet wise — we do all of those things however, because our brains prioritise things that were rarely available to our prehistoric ancestors, as the amount of them at that time was actually beneficial for our brains and bodies. I will reiterate later on the computers and social media.
The hunter-gatherers couldn’t easily stumble upon salt, fat or sugar — they had to work for it. According to the “Sapiens” book, our ancestors spent around 6 hours just scavenging around, searching or hunting for food. They were constantly moving and the food they could reach has become the best for them. Today, I deeply believe that in order to feel good and healthy, we need to reconnect with our inner “caveperson” and try and properly cater to their NEEDS, instead of their wants.
I’m not switching to the paleo diet (at least not yet, ask me again in 2 months haha), but I have been making extra effort to reduce the amount of fat and increase the amount of raw (important!) vegetables in my diet. I’ve switched out all sweets to fruit, all drinks to either unsweetened tea, water or coffee but also limited caffeine to only once a day. I know cavewomen probably didn’t drink coffee, but they also didn’t have to write Jest tests for Vue code in Typescript either, so I’m hoping that at least my fellow programmers will understand the struggle. I’m also trying to not only start my working days with at least 30–45min of a walk, but also to exercise around 5 times a week (excluding any active leisure on weekends), because our bodies need to move way more than we’re doing now, even though our brains are prioritising rest and conserving energy.
Mental stuff is central to everything… kinda
Alright, this text is already way longer than I intended it to be, but there is no way around it — if I want to share my thoughts in a proper manner, I have to elaborate. Let’s move on from the physical and talk briefly about the mental level of health/happiness.
I am a strong believer that every single person in the world has certain issues and could benefit from proper therapy. With that being said, I realise that not everyone can afford therapy, and that there’s also a certain stigma in most societies, that people who go to therapy are either “crazy” or just “weak” and can’t deal with their issues by themselves. Let’s not get into the obvious here and let me just state that I of course think it’s total bullshit.
Reducing alcohol was a big part of me working also on my mental health and it was a very intended choice. With the same intention I keep reading psychological books (but also just because it’s my personal interest) and try to work on my relationships. But mental health is a tricky bastard, because it’s also closely connected to the last pillar — the spiritual one.
At first I have been avoiding the spirituality topic altogether, because most of the content on the topic is either religious, mystical or just… weird. At the risk of offending anybody — I do not believe neither in any gods, nor in healing crystals or the law of attraction. For me all of the mentioned examples are of the same category — fairy tales that people tell themselves to feel better. And even though I probably sounded very condescending in that description, I am also really jealous of people who can just believe in stuff and through that, feel that their life has a purpose.
Spirituality is a complicated clusterfuck
According to “Sapiens”, humans have dominated all the other animals not because of their physical traits, but because of advanced abstract thinking. We are able to “collectively imagine” (as it is described in “Sapiens”) not only huge religions, but also laws, the concept of human rights, racial inequality or brands (there is a whole sub-genre of psychology combined with marketing, which exists to give brands “personalities” and recognisable traits). We can plan and predict our future, postpone gratification (which directly correlates with success in professional life, but that’s a topic for another day) and each one of us lives in this nearly quantum reality.
We can only experience our lives in the present, but in our minds, through our plans and memories we all at the same time exist now, in the past and in the future (big shout-out to the YouTube channel called “Better ideas” for this neat summary of our human experience). This explains why people can be jealous of their past partners, why we get anxious without actual danger and how we can become nearly (or actually) depressed just by imagining what we should be like, and comparing this image to reality.
The answer to this issue might be mindfulness. In ”Waking up. Searching spirituality without religion” Sam Harris states that in order to achieve it we don’t need to go through some complicated and strange, nearly occult practices. In fact we don’t even have to “meditate”, in the common understanding of this word. All we need to do is to realise that all we have is now and it’s our brain that is generating thoughts by itself and narrating our lives. We are actually not the impersonators of the narration — we are the perception. There is no “self”, we are not some sort of a Mechanical Chess machine with a mystical soul hiding inside. All we are is just a brain full of senses, that keeps talking to iself and producing images.
Because of that fact, as well as according to Buddhism, the closest we can spiritually get to happiness is nirvana — wrongly interpreted by the Western country as endless pleasure. In fact nirvana is a state of “no suffering”, which happens when the brain learns to live in the present and accept things as they happen — instead of comparing them to the imagined alternative reality and our imagined alternative selves.
Why modern distractions are like mental and spiritual fast-food
I know I got pretty confusing and philosophical here, but let me bind this all with my conclusions from the book I am currently finishing — “Digital minimalism” by Cal Newport. With the development of technology, we have started to stray further and further away from ever achieving nirvana. Before the era of smartphones, human brains used to experience way more solitude than now and according to Cal Newport (as well as multiple other writers), this solitude is crucial for our brains. Without ever being away from the external inputs, we can never actually process what is happening in our heads and interpret whether it is real or not.
Through the use of connected to the internet smartphones we have successfully divided ourselves from having breathers for self-reflection. Now, when we’re bored, all we do is scroll through social media, which are engineered more and more to work like dopamine-releasing slot machines.
Our hunter-gatherer brains find social acceptance and social interactions important and we obviously need them for our mental health. However what we do need is full-on conversations, feelings of achievement and appreciation by our tribes. Unfortunately our same hunter-gatherer brains happen to prioritise convenience and avoid, if possible, doing difficult stuff.
Clicking a “like” under a picture is easy. It makes us feel as if we’re staying in touch with whoever posted the picture. Sharing a picture that has been liked by multiple people is easy too. It makes us feel accepted in our tribe. Appreciated for what we produced. Meeting in person is difficult. Creating a beautiful piece of art, achieving something in our careers or even scoring a goal in a football match is difficult too. So we naturally start choosing the easy nuggets of instagram likes and follows instead of a salad-like social sport, travelling to our friends’ house for a dinner together or even making a phone call to a distant relative.
Kinda living, kinda not
I don’t know when exactly, but at some point — probably in the middle of the pandemic — I started feeling as if my life had become less real. It caused me to start searching for new exciting hobbies and to reach out to my friends more often. All of those things are great and now, reading “Digital minimalism” I am becoming more and more sure that this is the way to achieve happiness. As ironic as it must seem for you reading these words on my online blog, after you probably saw my Facebook story promoting this new post — I do in fact want to make an extra effort to live a more analog life.
This is not about quitting all technology and going all cavewoman. Rather, Cal Newport suggests to his readers to ask themselves questions every time they use technology. The questions should be: what is their reason to use it and whether there is a better way to meet the same goal.
For that matter — I would go and scroll through instagram stories both to be entertained, but also to feel as if I’m staying in touch with people I care about. Is that the best way to achieve those goals? Probably not — better would be calling a friend up and asking to go for a walk. Or painting something pretty for somebody — which would be both pleasant, entertaining and strengthening the relationship.
Writing a blog post however — which is a creative activity — and sharing these thoughts with a bigger audience is probably done best online, cause nobody really reads newspapers and this is not brilliant or elaborate enough to turn it into a book. Finding a recipe online, to make a delicious dinner is probably the best, since the Internet is full of knowledge. Listening to music on Spotify while we exercise is also better than just forcing ourselves in silence or trying to exercise at a concert of our favourite band.
Is that all there is to life?
Recently a friend of mine told me how she’s been experiencing this weird… almost disappointment and detachment from reality. First she would make a plan to do something, meet with someone and she would feel very excited about the plan, however once she was there, doing the thing, she wouldn’t feel that present and would kind of be disappointed. “Is that all I’ve been so excited to do? Is there no more to this?”.
I can relate to this “only kinda-living” and I’m hoping to break out of it by both increasing the quality of my leisure activities, going more analog and practising mindfulness. I encourage you to do this experiment with me. Try to just eat dinner without watching something or listening to music. Try having a walk in silence. Embrace the solitude to work through your feelings and misconceptions, but also focus on reality instead of distracting yourself by visions produced either by your own brain or by other people’s social media.
