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| Emotions give us invaluable data about how we need to navigate our lives |
Discomfort, illness, and unease commonly show up in people's lives these days, expressions of a malaise whose cause is difficult to identify. The massive numbers of people facing this complication have given rise to the post-Christian era boom of the wellness industry.
As Sam Blum reports:
The wellness industry is vast—a McKinsey report last year estimated its total global value at US$1.5 trillion, “with annual growth of 5%–10%”—and purveyors of wellness products and services hawk everything from crystals that promise cardiovascular health to purportedly miraculous weight-loss teas that can leave the body dehydrated and depleted.
People show themselves willing to pay to clutch hold of any support in the face of whatever aspect of the widespread social dis-ease that affects them. As we will see, the flimsy nature of what is on offer involves participants in practices that can be comical but also there are tragic outcomes, as in the case of a New Zealand woman who committed suicide while in the care of an American mentor, "spiritual healer" Ed Strachar, to whom she had paid about US$16,000.
The Blum article continues:
Wellness is a nebulous and sticky term, according to Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist and a researcher at Australia’s University of Wollongong. “There’s no real definition of wellness,” he explained to HR Brew. “When you read about wellness in the news…it refers to some kind of vaguely scientific or pseudoscientific thing.”
Interviews with wellness chiefs in the medical field and wellness consultants in other industries suggest that any advice should be backed by science and never treated as a recipe for instant success. “It’s not a magic bullet,” Peter Bond, chief wellness officer at the consultancy Bond Wellness Company, explained.
The World Health Organization includes mental health in its definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”.
Training in resilience and mindfulness is foremost in the approaches taken by the consultants that businesses call in. In the past, such characteristics would have fostered within a Christian family in the way of developing self-control, and by gaining meaning and purpose in each person's life through a close relationship with God, who becomes the individual's "ground of being", providing certainty and security, and insight into the value of a other-oriented moral life.
Wellness training does not have a great success rate, as Blum reveals:
Though some research has seen modest short-term improvements to health behaviors, the overall long term efficacy of wellness programs has been unclear at times. Writing in the Washington Post last year, researchers Katherine Baicker and Zirui Song explained that after comparing 25 workplaces with wellness programs to 135 that didn’t, there weren’t “any substantial effects on employment outcomes (such as fewer sick days), health-care spending, or objective health measures” for workers who participated in wellness initiatives over a three year period.
Nevertheless, employee well-being could become a primary metric for gauging employee success in the coming years, according to Gartner’s Seven Predictions for the Future of Total Rewards report, which anticipates that “business leaders will increasingly focus on well-being metrics as a leading indicator of their employees’ engagement, satisfaction, and productivity”.
And according to a 2021 Kaiser Family Foundation survey of 1686 non-federal public and private employers, wellness programs are common, with “42% of small firms and 69% of large firms offer[ing] programs to help workers stop smoking or using tobacco, 44% of small firms and 63% of large firms offer[ing] programs to help workers lose weight, and 48% of small firms and 71% of large firms offer[ing] some other lifestyle or behavioral coaching program”.
Observers can often see in the general population the breakdown of behaviour that rises above instant gratification. This pleasure-seeking focus in people's life is part of the oft-cited evidence (see here and here) that people who believe in God, or who have a religious foundation to their life, are happier than those who do not. That's why the atheist Sam Harris draws on tested Buddhist teaching in his mindfulness meditation app (at $100/$500).
The wellness claim of being able to effectively “end suffering” and rid a person of negative emotions is a big one. On Lewis Howes' "Greatness Coaching" website, it is said that in a discussion with Howes, [Sam Harris] "shares that when he experiences emotions like anger to sadness, he becomes interested in the emotion. He observes his body’s reaction and tries to distance himself from the feelings. ... So get ready to learn how mindfulness can end suffering on Episode 824."
The science that underpins a lot of the wellness coaching and business consultancy activity is suspect. Of course, Harris has a background in neuroscience, but his ideologically bound scientism undermines the value of his discourse.
Therefore, when these "mind coaches'/"spiritual healers" go on about why we should or how to control our emotions they are likely to be talking nonsense - or stating the obvious. As Oliver Burkeman, a frequent commentator on the psychological sciences, has written:
[There is a] "dirty secret at the heart of the study of emotions. They don’t discuss it in interviews. But get chatting to a psychologist on his or her third whiskey, at a lonely bar on the outskirts of town near closing time, and you might finally hear the truth, which is that no one really has a damned clue what an emotion is."
Burkeman does a thought experiment:
If you doubt this, recall a recent time you felt sad or frightened or angry or anxious, and ask yourself: what was that? Clearly, an emotion must be more than a mere thought: it’s easy to think about something that’s theoretically scary without feeling scared. And it must be more than a physical sensation: when I’m anxious, my stomach tightens – but my stomach tightens when I’ve eaten bad seafood, too, and that’s not anxiety.
Yet, when you subtract both the thought and the sensation, nothing seems to be left, as William James noticed back in 1884. Can you imagine the emotion of rage, say, while imagining “no flushing of the face, no dilation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face?” James wrote in his essay "What Is An Emotion?". “The present writer, for one, certainly cannot.” Somehow, the emotion itself, as distinct from thoughts or sensations, has gone missing in action. And despite vast strides in psychology and neuroscience since then, it’s never quite been located.
For this reason, in his conclusion, Burkeman comes back to the hollowness of the wellness industry:
It’s a bit unnerving: we spend millions trying to fix our emotions – via therapy, books, medications and more – yet it’s not remotely clear what we’re trying to fix. Or perhaps, to adopt a perspective echoing Buddhist psychology, it’s not unnerving but deeply reassuring? After all, if there’s nothing to emotions except sensations plus thinking, it follows that nothing you could ever experience in life, no matter how terrible, will ever be anything more than a bunch of thoughts, plus a few physical sensations. And you can probably handle that.
Emotions, often referred to as passions, are part of our psyche and are neither good nor bad. It is the wilful action flowing from them that has moral weight. We need to learn how to apply our reason and free will to our emotions.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
The passions are natural components of the human psyche; they form the passageway and ensure the connection between the life of the senses and the life of the mind. Our Lord called man's heart the source from which the passions spring.[1764]
It’s clear from this teaching that our emotions are a created, ordered part of us. It makes sense, then, that “passions are neither good nor evil” as stated by section 1767, which goes onto say, “they are morally qualified only to the extent that they effectively engage reason and will”.
Emotions help us connect our senses to our mind. The six primary emotions are sadness, anger, guilt, fear, love, and joy. Anger has a bodily response of heat, joy produces a lightness of spirit, and so on.
Clinical psychologist Matthew McCall offers advice that captures the Church's long history of dealing with emotions/passions:
Society rewards people for calm, controlled, rational decision-making, not for genuine expressions of emotions and feelings. It’s important to remember that there is a time and place for both; our tendency is to always see rational thoughts as “good” and emotional feelings as “bad”.
The reality is that we have emotions for a reason. They are a gift from God to help guide us through our lives. Emotions can tell us about ourselves, communicate experiences with others, and motivate us to virtuous action.
Emotions give us invaluable data about what we like and don’t like, what hurts us, what we want, what we need, and how we want to navigate our lives.
They also help us communicate this information about ourselves to other people. In fact, all of our core emotions have distinct facial expressions that are recognizable across all known cultures. This means they are relational and help us to express ourselves in a deep and powerful way.
And, finally, emotions function as our motors in life, giving us drive, energy, and vitality. Every core feeling comes with an impulse, something the feeling makes you want to do. For example, anger makes you want to fight and defend yourself when someone hurts you while sadness encourages you to draw close to a loved one to find support after a loss.
Once you understand the true definition and purpose of human emotions, you can appreciate why God gave them to us. They are powerful tools designed to help us understand ourselves, others, and ultimately, God better and more completely.
In that short account we can learn more about how to thrive as a person before God than by spending a lot of money on lessons in wellness that tend to promote little more than a self-centred life focused on the rich and famous. Common sense and guidance by morally upright people can deliver much more of value, with Jesus' words ringing in our ears: "I come to bring life, and life in all its fullness".
Here, we can point out that mindfulness, as awareness of ourselves as part of God's plan in the present moment, is a development of the practices of the ancient Greeks, who meditated with the goal of "Know yourself". Mindfulness, also known by Christians as centering, is not prayer in itself, but it certainly is a useful aid to prayer and in achieving the purpose of Christian life, an ever-closer relationship with God.
We have to be guided in forming our conscience in order to comply with the order God has created in our nature, but we are not just creatures of reason and will. As the Catechism states:
The perfection of the moral good consists of a person's being moved to the good by their will but also by their "heart".
Ω See Christian meditation app here
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