Why clever people have poor mental health

 

Why doesn’t being clever make you happy? Raj Raghunathan, who is a professor in The University of Texas, wrestled with this question in his recent book, If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy? The conclusion that he came to was that while smart people are good at being successful and achieving, they make misjudgements about how that success will will translate into happiness. He found that a lot of the friends he went to school with were distracted and miserable.

This, of course, is not a huge surprise if you practice mindfulness. I’m an economist by profession and a big part of our job is creating models of how the world works. Those models can be very clever, very complicated - but if you feed the wrong assumptions and data into them it doesn’t matter how complex the methodology is, you’re going to get the wrong answer out the other side.

This is something that I experienced intensely when I was young. I was depressed, lonely and cut off; I couldn’t figure out why things had gotten so bad. Worse than that, I couldn’t switch off the constant analysis going round and around my head, trying to solve the puzzle and figure out how to change things which, of course, never led to anything useful.

So if the intellect goes off the rails when fed poor assumptions, what are the fallacies? Smart people get told from an early age that they need to achieve, need to maximise their potential if they want to be happy. This is not completely wrong - one of the things that contributes to our happiness is doing things we enjoy and work is a big part of that. But this can’t come at the cost of building human relationships and developing our own sense of being, our sense of being present. And it frequently does. When we’re analysing and working for future happiness we’re not in the only place we can be happy, which is here and now.

Another fundamental error is to see life as an optimisation problem, that can be solved. Unfortunately its not as analytical as that - happiness comes from living through our senses, letting go of the things we’re attached to, enjoying the world in front of us and  being aware of our thoughts without getting involved. This isn’t incompatible with being smart but smart people find it difficult to just be, to just sit there and enjoy sitting there. They’re more likely to be distracted by thought and to be swept away by those thoughts. They’re more likely to feel like they should be doing something.

So what's the answer? If you’re one of those gifted kids that turned into an overachieving adult, the one piece of advice I’d give you is to let go. Easier said than done - but letting go is something that you have to practice to master. You need to identify those things that get your brain moving, particularly anxieties and identify them, understand them and understand your attachment to them. Overthinking is driven by a faulty assumption that's been fed into the model of the world that exists inside your head. Seeing what you’re attached to - like a career or reputation, allows you to let go and ease your suffering.

And of course, practice stopping. Practice being still and watching your mind. You’ll be surprised how quiet it gets when you focus your awareness on it. Practice accepting your busy mind, smiling to it.