Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization

Writing about a topic that triggers strong emotions for just fifteen to twenty minutes a day has been shown to help people create meaning from their stressful experiences and better express both their positive and negative emotions.

The person who behaves badly behaves so because of hurt, actual and expected, and lashes out in self-defense, as a cornered animal might.

Within the humanistic psychology framework, the healthy personality is considered one that constantly moves toward freedom, responsibility, self-awareness, meaning, commitment, personal growth, maturity, integration, and change, rather than one that predominantly strives for status, achievement, or even happiness.7

when people consistently move in the direction of growth, feelings of happiness and life satisfaction tend to come along for the ride as an epiphenomenon of growth.

It is precisely when the foundational structure of the self is shaken that we are in the best position to pursue new opportunities in our lives.

Some people—those with high levels of neuroticism, need for closure, and obsessive-compulsive disorder—find uncertainty particularly aversive. Neuroticism is a personality trait characterized by a pattern of negative affect, anxiety, fear, and rumination. When people high in neuroticism are exposed to uncertain feedback compared to negative feedback, the nervous system delivers an outsize emotion-laden response.17 As psychologists Jacob Hirsh and Michael Inzlicht note, people scoring high in neuroticism “prefer the devil they know over the devil they do not know.” The implications of neuroticism for mental health are tremendous, with some researchers going so far as to argue that neuroticism is the common core of all forms of psychopathology!

So let me state this as clearly as possible: you may not be entitled to shine, but you have the right to shine, because you are a worthy human being. Changing your self-limiting narratives about your worthiness, asserting needs in a healthy way, overcoming your avoidance of fearful experiences, and taking responsibility for your behaviors—these actions strengthen and stabilize the vulnerable self.

In other words, the best route to happiness and life satisfaction is through transcending your egoistic insecurities, becoming the best version of yourself, and making a positive contribution to the world around you.

Maslow believed that if people are inwardly free, they will more often than not choose wisely, in a healthy and growth-oriented direction.4 To Maslow, this is how the psychology of being and the psychology of becoming can be reconciled. Just by being yourself and shedding your defenses and fears and anxieties, you move forward and grow.

exploration, love, and purpose. I believe that these three

we tend to rely on a particular set of beliefs and assumptions about the benevolence and controllability of the world, and traumatic events typically shatter that worldview as we become shaken from our ordinary perceptions and are left to rebuild ourselves and our worlds.

Enhanced empathic accuracy may promote behavioral prediction and management of external social forces and help individuals exert control over their life,

Within the humanistic psychology framework

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the more our judgment of self-worth becomes internalized, the less the power of others has to completely sway how we see ourselves.

[Knowledge and understanding make] the person bigger, wiser, richer, stronger, more evolved, more mature. [They represent] the actualization of a human potentiality, the fulfillment of that human destiny foreshadowed by human possibilities. —Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (1962)

Two “fairly sure” historical figures were Abraham Lincoln (“in his last years”) and Thomas Jefferson. Seven “highly probable public and historical figures” included Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Addams, William James, Albert Schweitzer, Aldous Huxley, and Baruch Spinoza.

My research has convinced me that we all have extraordinary creative, humanitarian, and spiritual possibilities but are often alienated from them because we are so focused on a very narrow slice of who we are.

Exploration is the desire to seek out and make sense of novel, challenging, and uncertain events.33 While security is primarily concerned with defense and protection, exploration is primarily motivated by curiosity, discovery, openness, expansion, understanding, and the creation of new opportunities for growth and development. The other needs that comprise growth—love and purpose—can build on the fundamental need for exploration to reach higher levels of integration within oneself and to contribute something meaningful to the world.

To be sure, at times reality can feel unbearable, and despite the general satisfaction most people feel with their lives, mental illness is actually a lot more common than people realize. In fact, most people develop a diagnosable mental illness at some point in their lives.41 Nevertheless, most people report being fairly happy in life, show positive developmental change across their life-spans, and display extraordinary capacities for resilience, dignity, and grace.

Humans not only have a need for belonging and connection, but also have a need to feel as though they are having a positive impact in the lives of other people.

Human beings, like every other living organism on the planet, are cybernetic systems—simply put, we are goal-directed systems.37 As such, humans have multiple, often conflicting goals, some of which are conscious, many of which are not. Each of our goals has its own imagined future of what the world would look like with the goal completed,

Heaven, so to speak, lies waiting for us through life, ready to step into for a time and to enjoy before we have to come back to our ordinary life of striving. And once we have been in it, we can remember it forever, and feed ourselves on this memory and be sustained in times of stress.

Those who employ a problem-focus coping style attempt to deal with stressful situations by changing the source of the stress.