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ADDICTIONS | OUR FEATURED TOPIC
Addicted to Healing,
Body, Mind & Soul
by Deepak Chopra
IIt's been 30 years since doctors
figured out how to make Americans the healthiest people in the world. In three areas
-- diet, exercise and stress -- the average person was advised to make simple changes.
The average diet needed to be reduced to 30 percent fat intake. Exercise needed to
rise to five sessions a week of fairly vigorous activity lasting about half an hour.
And overall stress needed to be brought down to provide relief from constant deadlines,
work overload and a lack of relaxed leisure -- all the symptoms of leading life at
a frantic pace.
Some or all of these changes should have taken place, but they didn't. The national
diet still hovers at 40 percent fat intake; fewer than a tenth of the adult population
engages in regular vigorous exercise (leading to the highest level of obesity in
history) and stress continues to rise, as witness the fact that Americans work longer
hours and accumulate more debt than ever before.
Does this prove that we are self-destructive and heedless of our
own health?
I don't think so. It proves instead that we stubbornly cling to
our old habits and outworn images. The population grows older and
less active, but you'd never suspect that fact from those Nike ads
on television. In the fantasy world of beautiful bodies sweating
to win the next tennis match, we just do it. In reality, we just
watch someone else do it.
Behind the false front of fitness and glamour, Americans have turned into secretly
addicted people. I'm not referring to alcohol or other drugs. Rather, our addictive
behavior is the most widespread cause of shortened life and lifestyle diseases such
as hypertension, diabetes, heart attacks and stroke.
Do you see some of the following addictions in yourself?
-- Addiction to control. This involves trying to live up to a perfect image of yourself
and feeling defeated when you can't. It involves being a perfectionist and hypercritical
of others. Obsession with work is a prime symptom, but so too is the false belief
that you can control the outcome of your life by constantly working harder or trying
to live up to someone else's standards.
-- Addiction to adrenaline. We all complain that modern life is crazy, meaning that
too many stressful situations come our way. A dozen things trigger the body's fight-or-flight
mechanism every day: traffic snarls, bad-tempered sales people, impersonal officials
and callous interactions at work. The human body was designed to shoot a charge of
adrenalin into the bloodstream no more than once a day (it takes several hours to
completely restore hormone levels back to their normal state after a burst of adrenalin)
so this is a serious overload.
Yet, instead of stepping out of situations that raise our blood pressure, we dive
into them, assuming that a couple weeks vacation or a few cocktails every night or
some "quality time" at home will solve our addiction to stress. It never
does. Living on the edge has become an obsession, and adrenaline junkies are more
prevalent than heroin addicts ever could be.
-- Addiction to anxiety. It has been pointed out ever since Freud that anxiety is
the most difficult emotion for the psyche to bear. Yet, our entire lives are fraught
with fearful situations, from high-speed traffic and jet flight to corporate downsizing
and the tumbling stock market. People assume that these are inescapable conditions.
Ads bombard us with the thrill of living on the edge, but in reality this is just
addiction to fear.
Another symptom of this is the need for constant melodrama in your life. Those who
take too many risks, who gamble with their money or who enter into relationships
with constant emotional swings usually have some need for anxiety in their lives
-- they feel bored without that edge.
-- Addiction to crisis. Television networks learned long ago that you couldn't make
money delivering good news. What sells is crisis. The worse the supposed threat from
terrorism, plane crashes, economic collapse and crime, the more people will be glued
to their sets. In reality, only the smallest percentage of people is going to suffer
from terrorism, midair plane collisions, homicide or even highway fatalities. If
you look at statistics, life is safer than ever. But you would never know this from
the evening news.
These addictive behaviors have several things in common: they pump
us with false images, they keep us on the run, they make us hyper-vigilant
to threat and they distract us from our real opportunities. A new
era of health
and well-being would arise if we became as addicted to healing as
we are to stress and fake images.
Notice that I haven't mentioned anything about lowering the fat in your diet or jogging
six times a week. These external changes are not possible if you are stuck in your
addictive behavior. Nor are they even that worthwhile. Here are some of the key ingredients
that make people live the longest, healthiest lives:
• Adapting well to accidents and
catastrophes, rebounding emotionally from setbacks. This is far more important than
lowering the external stress in your life.
• Eating moderately without obsessing over the diet. This is more important than
taking any amount of vitamin and mineral supplements.
• Acceptance of self and others. This means avoiding the temptation to criticize
and control.
• Basic faith in life, trust in a higher power. It isn't necessary
to be religious, but the healthiest people have a deep trust that
things will work out in the end.
We all need to pay attention to these facts. In Finland, there was
a famous study of long-term heart patients that covered several
decades. The Finns suffer from one of the worst heart-attack rates
in the world, and it is definitely related to high-fat diets, smoking
and the lack of exercise among middle-aged men.
Researchers selected a group of men who showed all the bad signs
and divided them in half. One half was allowed to live their lives
as before but with regular visits to a doctor who handed out the
usual advice about diet, exercise and smoking. The other half were
intensely monitored in all these areas and pushed to change. When
the study was over, whom do you think fared better? As it happens,
the intensely studied group not only lived shorter lives, but statistically
they even had more heart attacks.
To me, this result makes perfect sense, because having a doctor
constant poking into your life, warning you that you will die unless
you change your ways, is so stressful that it can outweigh the benefit
of reduced cholesterol in the diet and a run around the park.
Another long-term study involving graduates of Harvard tried to
assess why certain men died of premature heart attacks, cancer and
strokes while others survived the danger period from age 40 to 60.
The answers did include exercise and lower blood cholesterol, but
another correlation was much stronger: The men who escaped premature
death tended to face their emotional problems in their 20s and worked
hard to solve them. Those who died youngest disregarded that aspect
of their lives.
So it is psychological and spiritual health
-- the very opposite of addictive behavior -- that seems to be the
key. Behavior modification based on fear doesn't work. The Helsinki
study helped to prove that. Adding more stress and strain to your
life also doesn't work, even if you are straining to do all the
right things. You must change your behavior through a journey of
self-discovery that you enjoy. Trying to change because you are
afraid of having a heart attack will not suffice -- not in the long
run. Workshops that are based on spiritual change, or that create
joy in place of anxiety, are much more successful.
There's only one guarantee about the future of your health:
Your commitment to change is much more important than any miracle
drug. Becoming addicted to your own healing. That is the secret
-- and the only one.
Deepak
Chopra is the founder of the Chopra Center for Well Being in La
Jolla, Calif. He is the author of 25 books, including the best-sellers:
Perfect Health;
Ageless Body, Timeless Mind; The Return of Merlin, and The Path
to Love. His most recent book is called How to Know God: The Soul's
Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries. He is the author of more
than 100 audio, video and CD ROM titles and has worked regularly
with PBS, producing a number of television and video programs. He
is the former chief of staff at the Boston Regional Medical Center,
and, in the 1980s, had a thriving endocrinology practice. Contact
the Chopra Center for Well Being toll-free at (888) 424-6772 or
by email.
Copyright © Deepak Chopra
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