Essay · 23 November 2005 (051123) · originally published on nilstrom.cc

Finding Joy in the Various Guises of Today – Living in the Present

Smile at the world and it will smile at you

Surely you are not going to go about with a forced smile on a day when you feel that life is at rock bottom and the taste of sour regurgitations is what you feel in your throat. You should look the way you feel. Positive thinking gives you the creeps. Exemplified by the insistent door-to-door salesman who, with a rictus smile, wants to close the deal on the Kirby vacuum cleaner at full throttle. Think positive!

Of course it is much more pleasant to be met by a smile than an insipid, borderline sour face. What message do you want to send? If I have decided that today I am happy, then that is what I shall be. The Law of Jante shall not take it from me.

There is, however, another, not quite so saccharine truth behind these trains of thought. Namely that it works. If I get out of bed and take a quick, somewhat cold shower whilst telling myself that this day will be good, it usually is. Waking up on the wrong side is mostly a matter of an attitude to the new day. You tell yourself that everything today will go wrong, and so you remember the day's bad moments. Perhaps the day was bad, but what if you had started telling yourself that the day would be good instead? Then perhaps the focus lands on the positive experiences and not so much on the negative ones. The core of the self-fulfilling prophecy is precisely to speak out what you want to happen, and it will come to pass.

Do what you prioritise, do not do the rest

At work you are met by a pile of tasks, a project manager demanding results, plus a long list of emails that have arrived since you last checked. There are also uncollected messages in your voicemail and a number of missed calls on your work phone.

We are often very service-minded, which is good in most cases. Here is an attempt at prioritisation:

Forget the missed calls; they will ring again.
Set aside half an hour directly every morning when you listen to your voice messages and answer email. Then close the inbox so it does not disturb you. Look in again just before you leave for the day and check the email. Then only deal with letters from important senders.
Call your project manager and ask how the land lies, and talk a little about this and that. Feed in any changes among the tasks. Keep the initiative.
Arrange the pile of tasks into a list; choose and prioritise the most important task you can solve or achieve a result with right now. Forget the others. Start working.
Be reachable but not constantly; show other colleagues that you mean business in a meeting by turning off your mobile phone before the meeting. That shows you are available and prioritising the present.
Book recurring administrative tasks, e.g. invoicing, follow-up etc., in your calendar as meetings with yourself.

Stress and the built-in autopilot

When it comes to stress we are very different as individuals; moreover there are different forms of stress depending on what is causing the stress and what the situation looks like. In a situation when we are stressed, more thought connections are handled via an autopilot in our head. One can describe it as certain things being done by us automatically because the main part of our concentration is directed elsewhere. Most often we behave irrationally in these situations. We rush on through the day and people around us can perceive us precisely as stressed; above all we do not feel present in the now. When the stress does not culminate in physical work it can get stuck in the head in the form of various thoughts that churn; we do not get rid of the thoughts, they become, as it were, reasoning in the head. This thought-fatigue tires us extra, and over time a tired person becomes even more sensitive to stress. Stress should never be a basic state in us. Stress is an extraordinary state.

Many simple mistakes are committed in stressed states, e.g. running red lights, forgetfulness, fits of rage, thought errors (insufficient analysis), etc.

We have stress at different levels; a staircase of stress can be said to connect the levels, but somewhere there is a ridge. Over time we move between the levels. Different events can make us either increase the stress or reduce it. Bereavement, divorce, childbirth, “a lot at work”, illness can be causes of steps upward. Holiday, relaxation, rest can give us peace to come down. The stress ridge lies at different levels for different individuals. If you touch the ridge, various anxiety phenomena appear. For me it consisted of a feeling of pressure in the chest. If you break through the ridge you enter panic anxiety; escape mechanisms are triggered, intense palpitations, paralysis of the ankles, or a feeling of not being able to get air. If you live with these phenomena you should contact your health centre.

Sleep is a measure of your well-being

In periods when I feel good, I sleep well. The same applies to the stress level. When I am stressed I sleep much worse; I wake earlier and experience being more easily disturbed in my sleep.

If you commit simple mistakes and sleep badly, you are probably at a higher stress level than usual.

Pavlov's dog and green ticks

I think about nothing but work the whole time; I am never present in the now when I am at home... One tip is to try thinking the same thought incredibly fast many times. Then you tell the brain that now it has been fully thought. One way I have tried myself (on recommendation) is to have a rubber band around one wrist and snap it when a thought gets stuck and starts spinning in the head. Then in the end it becomes as with Pavlov's dog. One snap equals thought-stop! The brain learns through conditioning. The change does not come immediately, but after just 20 days you can have reached your goal!

Do you notice that you over-analyse various situations you have been in during the day, e.g. in the evening or the next day? Do you feel a sense of worry in these contexts, and do you ask yourself the questions: did I do right? Did I say the right thing? How was it perceived?

Note which types of situations you feed further. In the end you learn in which contexts these situations arise. Then you can, directly after a situation has ended, with the memory clear and neat, directly ask the question: how did that go? The feeling you get then you should analyse. Is it a good feeling? Yes, most often it is. Then keep that Yes, that feeling, and tie it mentally to the situation; visualise the situation in your memory and draw in a green tick. The extra mental effort you put in with the situation in fresh memory means you will not need to re-process the situation again. Yet again, practice makes perfect. We cannot control our feelings, but we can control our thoughts.

Your Otium and your Negotium

The Romans spoke of their otium and their negotium. Otium was everything to do with free choice, that which felt unforced and free. Work and demands belonged to that which was negotium. What makes you feel happy? Perhaps a moment of relaxation with good music in your earphones, or perhaps you enjoy reading an exciting book. Perhaps you enjoy singing for a while or playing the piano. Do you paint, or do you tinker with cars? Do you like taking a long walk entirely alone. Do you take a car ride for no reason at all now and then? Do you renovate your house in your spare time? Whatever it is that makes you happy, it is your Otium. If working makes you happy, that too is part of your otium.

To our negotium belong the demands placed on us. Work tasks, demands and conflicts of interest in private life, a series of oughts and musts that are entirely natural for people in today's Sweden.

The balance between our otium and our negotium is very important for our self-perception and our subjective experience of happiness or unhappiness. You must analyse your inner goals and your experienced happiness in order to long-term feel that you are living in a way that is sustainable. One day you are old; one day your bodily resources are no longer what they are today. What do you want to experience and achieve in your life? You must put those questions to yourself. What do you answer? That you will get round to it, but not today?

Do you want children deep down? Many women today live as if they could be fertile without reservation well past the age of 40.

What is your relationship to your parents?

What is your relationship to your siblings? Are they important to you deep down? How much time do you give them today?

One day one or more of these people who mean something to you will no longer exist. Death is the only thing that is certain for us humans.

A religious conviction can give a fundamental security, especially regarding death and the life thereafter. Yet we are still human. A religious conviction does not make us superhuman; we are still feeling creatures exposed to all the noise in the world. Moreover, it is natural to doubt the existence of God and to question the commandments that are given. Even as a Christian one will confront stress, anxiety, illness and finally death. Unfortunately, a religious conviction can sometimes add to the burden of stress by giving one further demands to live up to. The question one must ask oneself is: is my faith a faith project or a moral project? If it is about a moral project, one should have a good think.

When the time of Christmas cards comes one realises that one sends Christmas cards to many people who mean a great deal to one. But what do the relationships actually look like? We give ourselves a very bad conscience precisely at Christmas. Unfortunately, the reality is that time makes relationships change. We move on, sometimes with family and children, sometimes we move to another town. This development is entirely natural. Of course we have the choice whether to send Christmas cards or not. I choose to send them again this year!

“Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is neither young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul. And to say that the season for studying philosophy has not yet come, or that it is past and gone, is like saying that the season for happiness is not yet or that it is now no more. Therefore, both old and young alike ought to seek wisdom, the former in order that, as age comes over him, he may be young in good things because of the grace of what has been, and the latter in order that, while he is young, he may at the same time be old, because he has no fear of the things which are to come. So we must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed towards attaining it.” —Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus

Fredrik Nilströmer

Email: Fredrik@nilstrom.cc (2005; contact me via fredrik@nilstromab.se)

Note 2025: The text was originally published on nilstrom.cc, my website before nilstromab.se. The rubber band worked, by the way. The stress ridge and the “feeling of pressure in the chest” I describe today as the most important warning I have learned to recognise. The Epicurus quote on the final page is taken from the Letter to Menoeceus and is still the best answer I know to the question of when one should begin to philosophise.