Positive Psychology Column for 4-11-04 By Tom Muha, Ph.D. Staying “Above the Line” If you see two people having lunch, one who’s overweight and one who’s slender, you might assume that one had better skills for taking care of himself than the other. You’d be wrong. You’d probably make the same assumption if one of them was smoking and the other wasn’t, or if one looked depressed while the other seemed happy. Most people assume that the person with an obvious problem has far fewer coping skills for dealing with life than the apparently “normal” individual.          But all these examples tell you is whether or not each person has the necessary number of self-management skills they need in order to be able to adequately govern their responses to their particular situation. When the problems of life begin to build, the threshold of need for having lots of good coping mechanisms goes up. You know how this works in your own life. Some days you sail along and feel like you’re in command. Because your skills are exceeding the demands being placed upon you, you are “above the line” and feeling in control. However, other times life demands a lot from you to be able to cope with all of the stressful situations that you are facing. You’ve only got so much energy. If you don’t have good skills for renewing your energy, you will drop “below the line” during those times. Some people have much larger challenges to face in life than others do. The net result of whether a person is managing their life well is a function of how much skill they have compared to how much they need. Because circumstances are always changing, the number of coping skills you need to be deploying is also fluctuating. In addition to the amount of external stress you are facing, you also have internal factors that contribute to the number of skills you require in order to keep yourself above the line. Your genetic background, for example, may give you a tendency to develop addictions or a temperament in which negative emotions are easily triggered. Or it’s possible that your previous experiences in life may not have created an internalized set of skills that automatically prompt appropriate responses to some situations. If your brain operated more like a computer, then you would logically respond to all of the problems for which you must find solutions. But that’s not how human brains are wired. At the core of your mind is a feeling brain that is designed to produce passionate responses when you are in stressful situations. When you reach your threshold of tolerance for stress - which sometimes occurs in a flash - your feeling brain will generate irrational responses, causing you to feel insatiably hungry, driven to drinking or drugging, compelled to buy something, or terminally unhappy. Your time perspective becomes so distorted that you’re convinced that you’ll be miserable forever. These deep-seated drives within your feeling brain push you to go to excess when you’re below the line. You become exceptionally vulnerable to excessive reactions when the gap between the number of coping skills you need becomes larger than the amount you have available. None of this means you have an excuse for allowing yourself to linger below the line. If you continue to make bad choices for how you deal with life, it becomes a habit. Your other alternative is to learn additional skills for coping with life. If you are living life below the line far too frequently, there is nothing wrong with you as a person. You aren’t weak, or stupid, or a failure. You are uneducated. Fortunately, you can always learn a lot more about how to take good care of yourself. But like any form of education, you must be willing to learn some new lessons and then be committed to doing your homework until you master the skills. After 35 years of experience in counseling people, I have come to believe there are some essential skills everyone must develop: (1) Creating a nurturing inner voice that keeps hope alive by setting aside your pains from the past and focuses instead on a fabulous future. (2) Cultivating each of the important elements of your life - mental, emotional, behavioral and spiritual - that regenerate the energy necessary to be resilient. (3) Lowering the threshold of need by simplifying life, enabling you to concentrate on doing what you value most instead reacting to what seems to be most urgent.   Tom Muha is a psychologist in Annapolis. He welcomes your comments and questions. To contact him call (443) 454-7274 or email him at tom@achievinghappiness.com.