A Guide to Finding our Happy Place

January 30 2020

Life can be mentally brutal. You might even say this is one of the defining qualities of modern Western life.

Rote learning, binge study, menial and repetitive professional work. And, on top of that, possibly kids (not that I don’t love kids). Tasks that typically require our full mental attention to undertake competently, and often leave us exhausted and fatigued, and susceptible to irrational actions that we might later regret.

For all of these tasks, our directed attention is at play. This is the half of attention we employ consciously and with effort, and of which we have limited supplies. When it runs out, we get, for want of a better phrase, shitty with the world.

Luckily, it doesn’t always have to be like this. We can find refuge, both inside and outside of our minds.

Managing Ourselves

Most fundamentally and accessibly, we have internal practices that can help us navigate our day-to-day lives. Choose your mental medicine: from the more focused and defined process of meditation, to those more ambiguous ongoing processes of awareness and gratefulness that we might classify as mindfulness.

I won’t talk too much about these practices, because they aren’t my area of expertise… and, if i’m being honest, I don’t do them as much as I know I should. I have had profoundly calming and close to transcendent experiences meditating, and know I would feel better if I practiced it more, yet most days I still barely fit in a token 10–15 minutes in the morning, when I am thinking already about what I’m going to do next.

I will also chuck in a potentially controversial practice: prayer. Regardless of your religious or spiritual beliefs (even for atheists), prayer can be a powerful and practical method for shifting our mental state in a positive direction.

Then there are physical practices which — ranging from light stretching through to marathons — are also tools to re-orientate us internally. If you are like me, then you can try all the passive exercises in the world to make you feel better, but nothing will ever beat the high of a good sweaty workout.

For me, I find yoga to provide the best form of grounding throughout my daily life, likely because of its fairly unique ability to combine these mental and physical forms of self-management together.

In short: a combination of mental and physical practices, employed strategically across the course of a day, can and do help all of us just to cope.

Theoretically, then, using these tools, it may be possible to be so mindful, controlled and disciplined in our lives that we are able to negotiate challenging situations without adverse mental outcomes. Basically, floating through life in a constantly self-regulated state of moderation.

I’m not saying this is impossible, and if you have reached this state, then I ask you to teach me your ways. In reality, this state isn’t achievable for the majority of us. These processes aren’t easy, and take practice before they begin to take effect. Sometimes, they aren’t always available, or practical, or possible. Or enough.

Hence, we also have to understand and manage our external environments.

Managing our Environments

Let’s play another theoretical: where we live completely within compatible, comfortable environments — away from stressors, aggravations, annoyances; living without mental consequence. If only it was that easy, and we didn’t have to study, or work, or sacrifice. Or live?

While avoidance of challenging situations is unarguably necessary at times, we can probably agree that it isn’t a tactic to build a meaningful life around. We accept as a condition of our existence that we will put ourselves into situations where our mental faculties will be exhausted. At these times, when life becomes too much and we have had enough, we need to find our happy place.

What makes a happy place?

A key condition of our happy place is refuge: a place for escaping from the environments that brought us to a reduced mental state, where we might then employ our growing arsenal of mental and physical practices to greater effect.

But they are also more than that. These places are not just neutral — a contrast to the environments that we subject ourselves to for the majority of our waking hours — but are actively pleasant, interesting, and above all restorative.

And, crucially, accessible: we aren’t talking about a holiday to the Bahamas here (as nice as that would be). They have to be there when we need them, proximate to our everyday lives.

In technical terms, our happy places are fascinating.

Finding Fascination

Unlike directed attention, fascination happens unconsciously, engaging our minds and imaginations effortlessly. By doing this, it also allows for our depleted capacity for concentration, our directed attention, to recharge.

To be fascinated is to be happy, by default, at least temporarily: our minds are occupied with something at the expense of that which would otherwise (often unhappily) be there. But whether this momentary distraction can also bring about lasting and profound benefits depends on what the source of this fascination is. This requires understanding the different forms in which fascination — or entertainment — is offered to us.

This is important: fascinating things that entertain us easily are clearly not inherently positive. There is the danger that, in a state of complete mental exhaustion, we resort to the lowest common denominator of entertainment that engages our negative tendencies. We watch mindless TV, or we get lost on social media, or we engage in un-elevated conversations — sometimes all three at once.

Better are the conventional forms of entertainment we have available to us, and that are generally accepted to be positive (even if sometimes tenuously). Insert your preference here: for example sport, arts, or of course a good friggin’ book.

Such conventional entertainment offer a particular type of fascination: which can generally be classified as hard fascination. This means that it is entertaining to the extent that it can completely consume our minds, even removing the need for actual thinking! Yes please.

However, what distinguishes hard forms of fascination is that while engaging in the entertainment we are unable to use this mental respite to think deeply about the problems and predicaments that keep leading us to this place. Or, more broadly, to place our lives and all our seeming problems and predicaments in the ‘grand scheme of things’. That is: to reflect.

True mental restoration, a true happy place, allows us to both recover from fatigue whilst reflecting on what caused it and what we can do about it.

The above example obviously employs some amount of generalisation: it seems, for example, a bit harsh to group UFC and live heavy metal music (not that I haven’t partaken in both of these) with crosswords and Sudoku. In fact, we are probably better off classifying these latter processes as extension of our internal regulatory processes — a more directed form of mindfulness.

You can also reasonably argue that many conventional forms of entertainment are deliberately constructed to encourage us to reflect on our lives and the world around us. However, one could also offer the counter argument that these opportunities for reflection are provided in often narrow and manipulative ways, even acting as diversions from the real issues in our lives.

Finding Your Happy Place

The author’s happy place: Queens Gardens, Perth, Western Australia

So, where am I leading with this?

When I started my academic career, I was fortunate enough to work on a research project that required visiting over half the parks in my then home town of Perth: taking photos of them, observing people in them, and understanding the purpose they had been provided for. Fundamentally, I discovered through my own first hand experiences, they are provided as happy places.

Without going in the nitty gritty detail, I was in a difficult stage in my life, of great challenge and upheaval. Yet I found refuge in spending large amounts of my waking hours in these happy places (and being paid to do it, no less!). This inspired me to do a PhD into the role of parks and nature in the modern city.

During this period of Doctoral study— almost 6 years from start to finish — I was living not just in a city but in the middle of the city (albeit in Perth: not really a city as you mostly American folk experience). One of the only ways I survived it was by visiting regularly the park across the road from my apartment complex.

The crucial role of nature in my life was becoming a theme. As a result, I am now a firm advocate for parks, and I believe these uniquely attention-restoring resources are vastly under-utilised.

Now, to be clear: I AM NOT saying that sport, music and TV are the devil’s work and that you should all go to parks instead. Mainly, because I also like these things. Seriously: I dread knowing what proportion of my life I have spent playing or watching sport; while my love for music has, despite me knowing basically nothing about music in a formal sense, ended up in me co-editing a Medium music publication.

Plus, and I am aware of the paradox here: if everyone suddenly started going to parks, then the parks would become too crowded, which would confusingly defeat the original point.

But, it is not just me advocating for parks. My PhD revealed a large and growing base of academic research that indicates that nature is relatively unique in being sufficiently fascinating to engage us mentally, yet at the same time able to provide opportunities for reflection free from any underlying human agendas.

The ‘entertainment’ provided in such environments, natural entertainment one might say, is called soft fascination. Having the capacity to reflect holistically in this way can turn what might otherwise be temporary respite from the world into an experience that produces lasting and meaningful changes to our internal and external lives.

Of course, reflection isn’t always pleasant. It is potentially confronting, depending on one’s particular life circumstances. Maybe we want, need, to escape such introspection sometimes, hence why we consume so much of entertainment that provides us with mentally-engulfing hard fascination.

But if we are to engage in reflection, which we all inevitably must, then what better, more comforting, and life affirming way to do it then whilst watching ducklings learning to paddle furiously after their momma duck; a black swan freak out passing humans getting a bit too close to her goslings; perhaps even watching normally confined canines going nuts in a fenced off dog park; or, if all else fails, just finding a nice body of water to sit and stare at after a particularly brutal day?

Summary: Why Not Both?

Hopefully you managed to follow that. If not, see a handy shape-and-colour-coded flow chart below.

The chart finishes on an obvious question: why not both?

This is was what I tried to do — waking up, walking over the road to my happy place, and practicing yoga and meditating in the park. Then I got a bit self conscious about being one of those people (and also realised how much duck poo there was on the grass). So by the end, I tended more towards a quick jog, a gentle stretch and a moment of quiet contemplation (broken, often, by the un-restorative practice of taking photos of this restorative environment).

I wish I hadn’t been so self-conscious. Those folk ommmm-ing or doing a downward dog in a public park? I think they have already figured it out: that one of the best forms of self care we have available to us is to practice our version of mindfulness, our chosen form of physical re-orientation, in an environment that permits the simple yet profound act of watching the natural world on its own terms.

References

Meditation, Restoration, and the Management of Mental Fatigue. Stephen Kaplan, 2001: Environment and Behavior 33 (4): 480–506.

Reflection and Attentional Recovery as Distinctive Benefits of Restorative Environments. Thomas Herzog et al., 1997: Journal of Environmental Psychology, 17 (2), 165–170.

Natural Thinking: Investigating the link between the Natural Environment, Biodiversity and Mental Health. William Bird, 2007: Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.