I'm a dilettante in psychology and I want to propose a concept that I haven't found much prior research on. This may be due to my insufficient research or a genuine gap in the field.

I'm interested in the psychology of self-improvement, and in particular a process that I call "method." Method is when you use a mantra to change your state of mind to achieve a goal. A common example is when athletes use method to clinch games. They repeat a phrase quietly to themselves, "come on, you got this, you're the best, win this, come on, you got this," and that spurs them on to victory. It motivates them, focuses their energy, and otherwise makes them play better. Why does this happen? It seems like magic. These are positive, encouraging thoughts, and much has been written about the power of positive thinking, but how come you can't use method all the time? Why can't you "pump yourself up" throughout the entire game? My experience with method is that it operates almost like a turbo, wherein you can activate it for a few minutes, then it runs out, and it takes some time to recharge.

Method is the cornerstone of the experience of self-improvement, and usually it springs forth from an epiphany that the user experiences.

For example, take a segment from Tony Robbins' Awaken the Giant: "My answer is simple: I learned to harness the principle I now call concentration of power. Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all of our resources on mastering a single area of our lives. Controlled focus is like a laser beam that can cut through anything that seems to be stopping you. When we focus consistently on improvement in any area, we develop unique distinctions on how to make that area better."

Or look at this segment from Rick Warren's Purpose-Driven Life: "The power of focusing can be seen in light. Diffused light has little power or impact, but you can concentrate its energy by focusing it. With a magnifying glass, the rays of the sun can be focused to set grass or paper on fire. When light is focused even more as a laser beam, it can cut through steel. There is nothing quite as potent as a focused life, one lived on purpose."

When the typical reader reads those passages, he or she is immediately is struck with an epiphany. He thinks to himself, "this is it, this is how I will conquer X" where X is some problem or barrier he thinks he's holding him back. He will form a vision of himself behaving like a laser beam, as if he were moving faster than normal and conquering his destiny. This positive visualization gives him energy and enthusiasm, and very likely he may immediately make some significant steps toward his goal after setting aside the book. If, for example, his goal was to lose weight, he may go to his fridge and throw out all of his ice cream. He may go online and sign up for a membership at the gym. He may even go out for a run right then and there.

That initial burst will further reinforce the method in a positive feedback loop such that he may be charged for an entire day, maybe an entire week, fixating his attention on the idea that he is a personified laser beam. Every time he thinks about the beam, it spurs him into positive action toward his goal.

This is great until the strength of the method fades away. He reaches a point where mentioning the laser beam creates no emotional reaction in him.

The implications of method, in my opinion, are vast. I believe that the popularity of self-improvement and religion is based on principles of method. There may also be an art to delivering method such that you can sidestep the come-down. Or maybe there's something to be learned from looking at its darkside, in the case of false epiphanies, or people who are addicted to self-empowerment seminars.

I believe that if we study and understand method, we will understand a lot about discipline, motivation, self-improvement, and the nature of personal change.

I have an idea that relates to the clinical definition of "Pure obsession" (or "Pure O" as its called), which is a type of OCD where you just can't stop thinking.

The clearest symptom to ask the patient about is: "do you have loud, repetitive thoughts?" That is pretty much the hallmark of a neurotic, obsessive mind.

What is the opposite of that? To me it's "quiet, organic thoughts." This is the kind of thinking that neurotypicals do when they go on a long drive. The flow of scenery stimulates their mind, but the focus on the task of driving keeps them from collapsing inward, allowing new ideas to just emerge and pop into their heads without much stress or agony.

I call this process "indirect thinking." And I believe this is the primary benefit from reading Tarot cards, I-Ching, augury, astrology, etc. When you interpret Tarot cards, there's an infinite number of ways to read it, but a handful seem to emerge, and the same cards and combinations will read differently each time you go through them. As a result, your Tarot interpretation gives you a chance to access the issues in your life without obsessing over them. It's like using the cards as sunscreen lotion, so that your issues don't damage you, while allowing salient and useful aspects to be revealed.

I've been trying a technique recently to shift me away from "loud, repetitive" direct thinking into more "quiet, organic" indirect thinking. Instead of using Tarot cards, I just look at my surroundings, and I try to read them like I would Tarot cards. If I see the tiles on my floor, maybe that makes me think of a grid, or a prison fence, and that maybe the decisions I've been making lately are chaining me. Or if I see a small insect crawling across the floor, I might think of humility, and the difficulty of trying to be a single person traversing a vast expanse of life's choices.

I find this to be a good compromise between thought-cessation and over-thinking. Whenever people and books have urged me to stop thinking so much, I have trouble obeying because thinking works. If I think through something, I find answers. Does my old ways of thinking hurt my brain and agitate me? Absolutely.

Indirect thinking allows me to spread my attention outwards while still making progress on internal struggles. Watching movies, listening to music, these too also allow your mind to stretch and re-form without too much work on your part.

Whenever I'm boosted up by some new self-help book I'm reading or having just a general enthusiasm for life, I get this weird negative side effect. It seems to happen when I have long-stretches of positive experiences. For example, my friend and I had this one day that we called "Epic Sunday," where over an eight-hour stretch of time we jumped from one interesting place to the other in the city. It was a pure heroin-like spontaneity feeling like an ascending line of peak experiences. The next day, when I was alone, I felt really tired and down. Another example is when I'm in a coding fury late into the night, if someone were observing me they'd say I looked actually sickly and weak. And they'd be right: while I'd feel this internal gushing positive sensation, I also wouldn't be smiling.

In these cases, there's a negative undercurrent to the positive experiences. It's much like Newton's Third Law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I believe that the same happens with feeling good. For any boost we get, I think there's a natural tendency within us to pull back toward a set point of happiness. (Also, when we feel down, there's a tendency to pull ourselves back up).

I've re-purposed the term "undertow" to refer to that vague negative sensation you get when you are going through high positive experiences. It helps to remind me that the goal is not only to increase positive experiences, but to also decrease negative experiences. As a result, no matter how great my day is going, the "undertow" is still something I want to avoid.

I believe that this probably has to do with the fact that almost anything your body "does" takes energy, and your energy sources need replenishing. Or maybe it has to do with neurotransmitters in our brains: any time you go through a positive experience, you're a little less receptive to positivity immediately thereafter. Maybe that's why these "epic days" crop up from time-to-time. In order to keep getting high after the initial boost, you have to seek ever more amazing things.

Do these studies mean we shouldn't make more money? And by extension, does that mean success itself doesn't matter?

According self-actualization theory, No. Maslow suggested we have a "will to self-actualization" or an innate desire to manifest our potentials into reality. So if you're outperforming your co-workers because you're more talented, but you get passed up for promotions because you don't "step up to the plate" enough, are you going to be happy being the underpaid but overtalented tool for the company?

While there are studies showing that more money doesn't buy happiness, there are also studies that show that having meaningful goals makes people happy. I'd argue that the hungry pursuit of money and achievement creates more happiness than having no ambition whatsoever. Sure, when the ambitious actually get money they won't be any happier, but that's just because they're finished, and they're in the same spot as the people who have no money but also no ambition.

When immigrants come to the US, I guarantee you that their pursuit of riches and the process of moving up social classes makes them happy. Once they've obtained those goals, though, if they don't have other meaningful goals to latch onto, then yes, they'll be like the bored rich.

There are many studies that also show that people who suffer significant debilitating injuries don't have their happiness change that much from their set point. Often these people get a renewed sense of purpose in life.

So does that mean we should injure ourselves willy-nilly? No, of course not. The process of being a reckless individual when in fact you care about safety will make you feel tons of self-doubt and self-loathing. When you actually do break your leg, you'll feel enormous guilt and regret for your very bad behavior.

Behaving in harmony with our values and beliefs makes us happy. For some kinds of people, that means getting a big house with a white picket fence. For others that means working minimum wage but pursuing their artistic talents. And for others, this is a vague, "behaving in harmony with God's path for me."

I was reading in Julia Cameron's The Right to Write that when you label something, you gain power over it. So by extension, when you label something in yourself, don't you become empowered?

I think for the longest time, I've felt insecure about how interested I was in social activities. I've always viewed myself in the false dichotomy of loner vs. nonloner. When I think to myself, "I have friends, but just a few," the "few" part implies that there is a normal number of friends you're supposed to have. When I tell myself, "I'm not anti-social, I just like light social contact," light is relative to some mythical social norm.

This book obliterates all that by just throwing example after example of loners and their wonderful lives. One of the most interesting things to read is about how nuns often have rich love lives. Or the revealing perspective of how our media secretly worships loners. It made me realize that there was a big difference between having few friends and no friends, between having no social contact and limited social contact. The world of loners seems like a rich and long spectrum that while reading this book, you start to believe nonloners are the aberration and exception.

And then I started to feel less weird about myself. I started to feel more self-confident. I started to feel like I could measure myself by my own standards and less by some presumed other-standard floating in the societal consciousness.

And I believe this is one of the principle benefits of self-help literature. It's what I referred to as "kinship" in my unifying theory of self-help. When you think you're the only one with a certain trait or event happening in your life, you can feel all sorts of weird things. You can have an over-grandiose sense of self, or you can feel insecure and deny what you are experiencing. But when someone tells you they're going through the same thing, or that "they know what you mean," it flips a switch in your brain. The keyword is validation.

Psychologically, validation works like this:

Sonja Lyubomirsky, in The How of Happiness, makes a strong case for the set point theory early on in the book. She cites a handful of studies, and the most compelling ones are about twins separated-at-birth who remain nearly equal in happiness.

But what does this set point mean? What is the set point made of? A happiness set point is most closely related to the concept of homeostasis, which, in the case of body temperature, means our body has a tendency to reach a stable equilibrium. However, homeostasis always requires some sort of regulators. If we have a happiness set point, what's regulating it? Is it our inherited balance of neurotransmitters? Or is it our inherited temperament? For example, my mom is anxious and fidgety, and I seem to have inherited that.

But what if there aren't any internal regulators? What if we have inherited behavioral tendencies that keep our happiness at certain levels. For example, I inherited a propensity for risk-taking from both my parents, and as a result, I do better in America, the "land of opportunity," and am therefore happier. Or let's say I inherited a weakness in making judgments of other people. As a result, I always end up in unhappy relationships.

If this were the case, the research data would appear the same. We'd still have happiness set points, but we wouldn't know whether they were internally caused, like our internal body temperature, or externally caused.

Reptiles don't have regulated internal body temperatures. They have to go in and out of sun in order to maintain a temperature. By doing so, they can still exhibit a body temperature set point. We could genetically modify the reptile to spend more time in the sun and therefore observe a higher body temperature.

Sonja's right, there are definitely set points. We all know somebody that always seems happy no matter what. But is his happiness really that durable? What if this Mr. Pleasant got into an abusive relationship? When I discuss this hypothetically with my friends, we come to the same conclusion that, "Well, he wouldn't get into that situation in the first place."

Overall, I've been having good results with Shamu techniques, but I've also seen many many cases where it doesn't apply. In the case of this one friend, my silence or non-response actually encourages his unwanted responses. This guy is wired to rile people up, and if you don't respond, he just doubles-down. And then later on, he brings up, "how come you're not responding to X?" which creates a situation where I have to respond. If I feign distractedness ("what did you say?"), it reinforces his attempts.

Of course, Sutherland included a good catch-all exceptional principle, "know your species." which probably works in this case.

Anyway, thought it'd be nice to mention that to those of you working through that book.

20th Century philosopher Robert Nozick discussed in The Examined Life the "brain-in-the-vat" problem as it relates to happiness. The problem is basically, "Why wouldn't you want to be just a brain in a vat who lives in an virtual Garden of Eden?" Nozick makes the case for the "reality principle" in that it's not just the felt qualities of happiness that matter to us, but the actual reality of happiness. The source of our happiness is just as important as being happy itself. If we believe that we're just getting an artificial high that makes us feel happy, smile a lot, etc., that may not really matter to us.

My personal experience corroborates this. After reading Martin Seligman's Authentic Happiness in 2004, I launched myself on my own personal happiness project. The first thing I did was get over my hang ups about happiness. I told myself that, "No, happiness IS important, and make that a top priority." And then I measured my happiness levels every week, making all sorts of charts and line graphs from the data, methodically working to raise my scores. I changed my life completely in order to support the project, changing my work, my love life, etc. But I got to the point where my scores on paper were really high, but I hated the whole thing and myself. At the end of two months, I said, "Screw happiness, this stinks!" And I just ditched the whole thing.

I know that if I meditated more, I would be happier. But I would soon stop. Because the benefits to my well-being from meditation don't matter to me. I should know because I've disciplined myself to meditate and I do notice the lift, but I also notice my apathy toward the process.

Anyway, I should really wait till I finish the rest of The How of Happiness before I make a full comment on it—research is research and is hard to dispute. Sonja also emphasizes that it's important to tailor your own happiness program to suit your personality and temperament.