ERIC WENNINGER

Category: Health

Look Away from Happiness

May 9, 2025

Flexbox Centered Text
Doc Hudson – Image via Fandom

Anyone who grew up driving in Wisconsin, or any other part of the world destined for slippery streets in winter, knows that sometimes you have to turn right to go left.

It follows, then, that anyone who grew up driving in Wisconsin wasn’t surprised by what Doc Hudson said to Lightening McQueen in the Pixar movie Cars: “I’ll put it simple. If you’re going hard enough left, you’ll find yourself turning right.”

But Lightening McQueen didn’t grow up in Wisconsin and he doesn’t get it. He’s too focused on turning left that he can’t do it. A prideful McQueen fails to see that to reach his desired goal, he has to change his way of doing things. Ultimately, he has to look outside of himself and adapt to his environment.

Turn right to go left, from Pixar’s movie Cars

Sometimes, to reach our desired goal, we have to take action that is unexpected, even counterintuitive to what our initial game plan might’ve been. Focusing too hard on the goal, it turns out, can actually blind us to the steps we need to take and prevent us from getting to where we want to go.

In the wake of Gene Hackman’s death, I read an article that quoted him as having once said:

I don’t like to look real deep at what I do with my characters. It is that strange fear that if you look at something too closely, it goes away.

Hackman was an outstanding actor who I imagine worked very hard at his craft, so what did he mean? Maybe great actors bring their characters to life by focusing on something other than the end result. His words started me thinking about certain areas of expertise or states of being that can only be achieved indirectly. If you shoot for them directly, you’re bound to miss the mark.

For example, considering knowledge of the soul, Virginia Woolf (via The Marginalian) writes:

One can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.

In 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman writes about what happens when we focus on using time well:

There’s another sense in which treating time as something that we own and get to control seems to make life worse. Inevitably, we become obsessed with “using it well,” whereupon we discover an unfortunate truth: the more you focus on using time well, the more each day begins to feel like something you have to get through, en route to some calmer, better, more fulfilling point in the future, which never actually arrives.

And, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig writes about the “meh” feeling that arises after visiting a popular natural attraction:

[We] see the Crater Lake with a feeling of ‘Well, there it is,’ just as the pictures show. I watch the other tourists, all of whom seem to have out-of-place looks too. I have no resentment at this, just a feeling that it’s all unreal and that the quality of the lake is smothered by the fact that it’s so pointed to.

These examples remind me of how important it is to focus on something other than the destination. My wife recently pointed out that the hardest part of running a half marathon is the last half mile, because you’re so preoccupied with being finished. By contrast, if you’re running a full marathon, mile 13 feels just like the others because you’re still focused on the journey.

This past week, I was “playing” a game of cribbage with my friend Matt. After two hours, we had only progressed through one hand. The journey of conversation, it would seem, was more important than the game’s destination.

Cribs progress after 2 hours – “It’s the journey, not the destination.”

Matt and I were happy to be engaged in good conversation, without any preoccupation of it leading to any grand accomplishment or revelation.

Many people struggle with figuring out how to be happy. It’s another one of those elusive states of being that can really only be achieved indirectly. In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes:

Yet we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. ‘Ask yourself whether you are happy,’ said J.S. Mill, ‘and you cease to be so.’ It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.

He goes on to quote Viktor Frankl, who links success with happiness as two things that cannot be pursued directly:

Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, summarized it beautifully in the preface to his book Man’s Search for Meaning: ‘Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue… as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.’

According to Csikszentmihalyi, happiness is the byproduct of living an active and cognitively engaged life. By focusing on key elements of the journey, happiness—or better yet, deep enjoyment in life—is a destination that can be reached.

Csikszentmihalyi calls the journey “flow,” or the ability to experience so much enjoyment in doing something that you have the positive feeling of losing yourself in the process. If you’re in flow, you’re fully in the moment, without worry or concern for how you’ll obtain happiness. Happiness becomes an afterthought because you’re literally living a journey of self-induced fulfillment.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Another way of understanding flow is as the space between anxiety and boredom. For any activity, we can either further develop our skills or adjust the challenge level to stay in flow. But the important thing to realize is that we’re in control.

Csikszentmihalyi describes the difficult emotions and mental states we experience in life as psychic entropy, or the disorder of consciousness. Without structure, the mind can be a chaotic place, leading to all sorts of woes and ruminations. It needs a sense of order for us to feel secure and satisfied. Flow is what restores that sense of order.

So instead of focusing on the vague end goal of enjoying life, we might look closer at how to bring more flow activities into it. According to Csikszentmihalyi, these are activities that provide us with a sense of control over how we perform and that we have a chance of actually completing. They have clear goals that require concentration to reach, and provide us with feedback on how we’re doing.

In the end, it’s quite simple: flow activities require us to work. Most things worthwhile in life do. The work is the journey to focus on. In the case of flow, it’s involving yourself in activities that increase the complexity of your mind, thereby reducing psychic entropy, and allowing you to experience growth of the self and a deeper enjoyment of life as a result.

Look away from happiness, and instead toward creating quality experiences in life, making the most of what you already have. You might be surprised at how much happier you start to feel.
Flex Your Thought Muscle

April 25, 2025

Local artwork featured at Whitewater Music Hall in Wausau, Wisconsin

Who doesn’t face difficulty in life? Difficult decisions, for starters, are part of being human. Each day presents us with countless choices—some big, some small.

But what about difficult internal experiences? At some point, we all have experienced things like negative emotions, unwanted thoughts, or intrusive memories. We may even be engaged in an ongoing battle with depression or anxiety, or avoid situations that would lead to a more fulfilling life because of an unspoken fear holding us back.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT (pronounced like the word “act”) is an evidence-based tool that can help you accept your difficult internal experiences and commit to taking action that brings you fulfillment in life. In other words, it’s a way of choosing to act according to your values rather than allowing your difficult internal experiences to dictate how you live.

One of my favorite quotes about choice comes from the Austrian neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he writes:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

ACT takes a similarly empowering view of choice in response to human suffering. In Reclaim Your Life: Acceptance & Commitment Therapy in 7 Weeks, psychologist Carissa Gustafson describes how the mindfulness components of ACT help you make the choice to live out your values despite the difficult experiences you may face. She writes:

They allow you to pay attention to difficult experiences like thoughts, feelings, memories, sensations, and urges without immediately reacting to them. Instead, you make a conscious decision as to how you want to respond to any given situation based on your values.

Many of our internal struggles are the result of the storytelling mind, something that makes us uniquely human. While our ability to tell stories allows us to do many wonderful things, it can also lead us to believe things about ourselves and our world that are untrue or unhelpful. In fact, oftentimes the stories we tell ourselves make our internal suffering worse. ACT helps us overcome this trouble through gaining psychological flexibility. Just like performing exercises to increase our body’s flexibility, we can also use strategies to increase our mind’s flexibility.

There are six core processes of ACT that can be used to increase psychological flexibility. In his book Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Dr. Steven C. Hayes calls them “the ACT hexaflex.”

The ACT hexaflex (via Rising Sun Counseling)

Let’s break it down:

1. Acceptance

Essentially, the “acceptance” part of ACT entails welcoming any experience, whether positive or negative, into your life without judgement. In his poem “The Guest House,” 13th-century Persian poet Rumi encourages us to welcome every kind of guest into our home. “Entertain them all!” he says.

The negative spaces are part of life and we should accept them too. I like how Henry Miller describes acceptance in The Wisdom of the Heart:

The act of living is based on rhythm—on give and take, ebb and flow, light and dark, life and death. By acceptance of all aspects of life, good and bad, right and wrong, yours and mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are content with, is converted into a dance, “the dance of life,” metamorphosis. One can dance to sorrow or to joy.

It’s through acceptance that we give up the fight to control the uncontrollable, and can begin to take action toward what we value.

2. Cognitive defusion

You are not your thoughts. This idea is central to the process of cognitive defusion. We sometimes get “fused,” or attached to a negative thought, which can end up clouding our view of reality and dictating how we experience life. But if we can get some distance from the thought, or separate ourselves from it, then we gain the clarity needed to understand that it’s just a thought, and our thoughts don’t define us. It’s our choices and our actions that define us.

Cognitive defusion (via Reclaim Your Life)

In his book The Creative Act, Rick Rubin describes the act of noticing the culture without feeling obligated to be a part of it:

It’s helpful to view currents in the culture without feeling obligated to follow the direction of their flow. Instead, notice them in the same connected, detached way you might notice a warm wind. Let yourself move within it, yet not be of it.

The same could be said for noticing thoughts or emotions. If we imagine them floating by us like the currents of a river, we can more easily see that they are fleeting and they are not really part of who we are. This is the power of cognitive defusion.

3. Being present

The present moment is all we have. ACT incorporates many mindfulness strategies, but perhaps none as direct as those focused on being present in the moment. In “The Haunted Mind,” Nathaniel Hawthorne writes:

Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space.

It’s in this intermediate space that we have the power to act. Or, take Jamie xx’s song “Breather,” which features audio of a yoga teacher speaking calming words over the DJ’s backing rhythms:

Breathe
Be grateful for this present moment
The only moment that truly exists
‘Cause the past is gone
And the future is uncertain
But what we know right now is this moment

Making contact with your present-moment experience—whether it’s your external environment or your internal condition—rather than resisting it, is an essential component of ACT. Again, psychologist Carissa Gustafson describes it like this:

The point is not simply to be present, but to help increase your ability to attend to your present-moment experience so that you can respond rather than react reflexively through old habits that may not be serving you.

The only place that change can happen, after all, is in the present.

4. Self as context

This process is also referred to as the “observer self.” When our storytelling mind is in high gear we are locked into the “thinking self.” Similar to cognitive defusion, shifting into the observer self helps us gain some distance from our thoughts, or our thinking self. It’s basically the ability to view what you’re experiencing from an outside perspective instead of an inside one. We can do this through the simple act of noticing our own experience. If we can direct our attention to what we’re experiencing and name it, then we become aware of it, and it’s through that awareness that we’re able to confront it in service of living out our values.

5. Values

Once we unhinge ourselves from all the things holding us back, we become empowered to move in the direction of our values. But in order to do that, we need to know what we value. In ACT’s terms, values differ from goals, which are things that can be accomplished. Values, on the other hand, are more ongoing and provide us with direction in life.

6. Commitment

This process is also known as committed ACTion. Clever, huh? Once we’ve identified our values, the logical next step is to commit to living them out. Taken together with the other processes of ACT, we are freed to live according to our values instead of our unwanted thoughts and fears. Living like this may very well mean entering uncomfortable situations, but we do so willingly, knowing that they represent something we value. Isn’t that a much better and fulfilling way to live?

So, if you ever find yourself struggling internally with difficult thoughts or unwanted emotions, remember ACT’s hexaflex. Go ahead and flex that thought muscle! Get out of your head and move toward living out your values.

Image via the Mind Muscle Project
Recycled Hope

February 24, 2025

Jellyfish made of recycled plastic water bottles at the Monkey Bar

At the very beginning of 2025, I wrote a newsletter about letting go to welcome in. The Spanish put this idea into action beautifully during Las Fallas de Valencia. Artists create beautiful monuments called fallas in the main plaza of the city that serve as a commentary on current social issues. Then, on the final day of the festival, they set the fallas ablaze in an event called La Cremà (see pictures here)—a symbolic cleansing and renewal of society. I like the idea of letting something go to create space for something new.

Las Fallas will be in full swing soon. The festival takes place each year from the 1st to 19th of March in Valencia, Spain. You can check out this year’s festival map and explore the festival website to learn more about what makes this such a special event (also refer to Rosetta Stone’s guide and this article from Move to Traveling). The following video gives a good idea of the esthetic and emotion involved with Las Fallas.

We tend to welcome in the new year with so much hope for the future. As winter wears on in the colder parts of the world—and as administrations change—that hope can quickly diminish. February, after all, is the worst month of the year. It would seem to make sense, then, that Las Fallas takes place in the spring—a season of rebirth and renewal. Maybe there are some things that we’d all like to see burn and go away right about now.

In Grenada, recycling plastics is difficult. But there’s a group here that’s working hard to change that—they’ve organized a plastics drop-off that happens once a month. We save any plastic recyclables we accumulate throughout the month and when the next drop-off date arrives, we load them up and make the trip. The Monkey Bar also helps alleviate the plastics issue—they repurpose plastic bottles in many of their art installations (see the jellyfish featured above).

Instead of burning away the bad to make space for the good, I wonder if we might just remember the good we’ve forgotten—recycle it and bring it back. Can we recycle our hope once we’ve lost it?

Last Sunday, Angie and I hiked out to Hog Island. Right now, it’s the dry season in Grenada and our trek felt strangely similar to what we’d experience on a very nice autumn’s day in Wisconsin. The leaves are changing colors, ever so slightly—light yellows and browns—and some are even falling off their trees. The temperature has calmed down a bit and the sun hits you at just the right angle so as to create the golden, breezy feel of fall.

Trees were all around us and I was thinking about hope. Sarah Vos, of the Dead Horses, has a song called “Swinger in the Trees” (see full lyrics), that is based, in part, on a Robert Frost poem called “Birches” (see reference). The song ends like this:

All these strangers
Passing by me
But we choose not to see,
Yeah we choose not to see (I wanna be)
Oh, we choose not to see

There is always hope,
There is always hope.
There is always hope (I wanna be)
A swinger in the trees

There is always hope, folks. Choose to see it. Recycle it and reuse it. And, watch Sarah Vos sing about it here:
Food of the Gods

September 26, 2024

Earlier this month we visited the House of Chocolate, a small museum in St. George’s that specializes in, you guessed it, chocolate. Grenada is a big producer of chocolate, and the folks at the museum offer a nice little demonstration of chocolate production on the island, from the cacao tree all the way to the wide array of chocolate delicacies available for purchase at the museum’s store.

So far we’ve seen and tasted Jouvay Chocolate (you can also visit their factory which I look forward to doing) and The Grenada Chocolate Company. Both offer a variety of dark chocolates (70% or higher raw chocolate content with the other 30% being additional ingredients like milk, sugar, etc.). My favorite “other” ingredients are nibs, or crushed pieces of cacao beans. I was also interested to learn that the higher the raw chocolate content, the less the chocolate melts in the hot Caribbean weather. And it tastes better!

If you’re not one to appreciate the complexity and depth of bitter flavors, not to worry. The museum highlights some other reasons why you should eat dark chocolate. Here are some of my favorites:

Sun protection – London researchers recently tested chocolate flavanols’ sun-protecting prowess. After 3 months eating chocolate with high levels of flavanols, their study subjects’ skin took twice as long to develop that reddening effect that indicates the beginning of a burn.

Contains anti-depressant agents – Eating a delicious piece of dark chocolate can reduce stress levels. It works by stimulating the production of endorphins that may give rise to a happy feeling. Dark chocolate also contains stimulants such as theobromine and caffeine.

Increases your IQ – Next time you’re under pressure on a work project, don’t feel so guilty about grabbing a dark chocolate bar from the vending machine. Not only will it help your body ward off the effects of stress but will boost your brain power when you really need it. A University of Nottingham researcher found that drinking cocoa rich in flavanols boosts blood flow to key parts of the brain for 2 to 3 hours which could improve performance and alertness in the short term.

Pucker power – Research has shown that allowing chocolate to melt in your mouth produces brain and heart rate activity that was similar to, and even stronger than, that produced with passionate kissing.

What other reasons for eating dark chocolate can you see?
The Benefactor

September 21, 2024

I am not one for astrology, but sometimes the movement of energy around us surprises me. In my life I value humility above all else. It’s a quality I strive for because of how positively it shapes your ability to learn, and the way you interact with the people and the world around you. Humility leads me to believe in a higher power. Whether you call this higher power “God” or “The Universe” or “Mother Nature,” there are times its movement can inspire a deep sense of awe in you. And I believe, as imperfect humans, we are meant to be in awe. There are things in this world that we do not know or understand, and being in awe is an appropriate response, even as we put forth great efforts to understand them.

Last night, Angie and I took a much needed break and went to the local brewery to play cribbage.

Our cribbage board as we approach the finish. I wonder who won?

Angie had brought The Intuition Oracle – 52 Cards & Guidebook to Help Access Your Inner Wisdom, and we each drew a card. As higher powers would have it, I drew “The Benefactor,” which came with the following affirmation written on the backside:

I enjoy life now as I take steps to realize my new tomorrow.

Having stepped out of my professional career this past summer so I could be a support to my wife as she starts medical school in Grenada, this seemed like an affirmation I needed to hear. I have struggled with finding my purpose in this beautiful, yet oftentimes challenging place. The word “benefactor” also immediately resonated with me, I think because I’m stepping into a more supportive role toward Angie, and in many ways, I’m a benefactor of her being a student here at SGU.

The Benefactor

For each card, there is a corresponding section in the guidebook that contains two parts: The Art of the Matter, which describes the image on the card, and The Heart of the Matter, which gets into its meaning for you. After considering my card and its affirmation, Angie had me look up “The Benefactor” in the guidebook and read what it said out loud.

The Art of the Matter

There is a lot going on in the card’s image, but the following parts are the ones that really spoke to me in my current state of transitioning to something new. The following is a summary of what I read.

The winged Egyptian figure in the center is an angelic messenger to tell you that:

you are on the right path and will have the opportunity to attain the goal you desire sooner, perhaps, than you thought you could.

The strange form of the angel is to remind you that opportunities also come in many forms. You need to:

allow your higher self to use its infinite creativity to bring you your goal in its own way and time.

The angel is carrying jewels in her basket. Just like jewels take time to form within the earth, so:

the goal you seek requires patience over time.

The scarab beetles in the border represent Khepera, the Egyptian Sun god:

who was so powerful that he rolled the ball of the Sun across the sky the way beetles rolled balls of dirt across the ground.

At the top of the card there is a bridge that is connecting the two moons, representing the passage of time within a month. They two symbols under the bridge are known as the Eye of Horus:

They are a strong reminder to do good deeds, for the quality of your reward will depend on the energy you put out now.

These images were powerful to me because they helped me to clearly visualize some of the negative emotions and mental blocks I’ve been feeling since coming to Grenada, and they also revealed a path for overcoming them. They helped confirm for me the need to put in daily effort to reach my goals, which are valid. These goals will come to fruition over time if I remain dedicated and patient—and I have time here to see them through, time I didn’t have in the past.

A very bright moon in Grenada—a constant reminder of the movement of time

The Heart of the Matter

This section sums up some ideas to reflect on moving forward. The following is a summary of what I read for my card:

Sometimes everything is going just as it should be, even if it doesn’t appear that way on the surface and some of the problems you may be experiencing are really there for your own good.
(…)
Your greatest challenge now is to maintain a positive attitude when things do not appear to be going the way you want them to. All you must do is follow your heart, taking small steps forward on your path, and do what you know is right. Allow your intuition to work unfettered by the false belief that it is realistic to doubt yourself and your right to live a life of quality and meaning as you define it.

Again, there’s struggling for a positive attitude and the patience to see a thing through. By the time I had finished reading, I was weeping. Just full on weeping at a brewery in front of a cribbage board and my wife, as if I had just lost the game, which I had. In the whole stack of 52 cards, I don’t think I could have picked a card that better spoke to my current emotional state than “The Benefactor” card. I realized that I had been holding onto so many built-up insecurities and doubts inside of me. It was a cathartic moment and I’m humbly grateful to the higher power that brought it to me.