The Book of Joy

of your tummy, the anger. I mean, you just get more angry, and after a
while you are going to develop ulcers in the stomach from the fact that
you got annoyed at sitting in a traffic jam.”
Taking a “God’s-eye perspective,” as the Archbishop might say,
allows us to transcend our limited identity and limited self-interest. One
does not have to believe in God to experience this mind-altering shift in
perspective. The famous Overview Effect is perhaps the most profound
example. Many astronauts have reported that once they glimpsed Earth
from space—a small blue ball floating in the vast expanse, lacking our
human-made borders—they never looked at their personal or national
interests in quite the same way again. They saw the oneness of terrestrial
life and the preciousness of our planetary home.
Fundamentally, the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop were trying to
shift our perspective from focusing on I and me and mine to we and us
and ours. Earlier in the week the Dalai Lama had referenced a classic
study that suggested the constant use of personal pronouns leads to a
greater risk of heart attack. In a multicenter prospective study of coronary
heart disease, health researcher Larry Scherwitz found that people who
more frequently said I, me, or mine had a higher risk of having a heart
attack and had a higher risk of their heart attack being fatal. Scherwitz
found that this so-called “self-involvement” was a better predictor of
death than smoking, high cholesterol levels, or high blood pressure. A
more recent study conducted by researcher Johannes Zimmerman found
that people who more often use first-person singular words—I and me—
are more likely to be depressed than people who more often use first-
person plural—we and us. This was interesting evidence that being too
self-regarding really does make us unhappy.
When we have a wider perspective, we are also less likely to spend
our time lost in self-referential thoughts, ruminating. Jinpa offered
another thought experiment designed to take us out of our self-
absorption, one that the Archbishop described using when he was in the
hospital being treated for prostate cancer, and that the Dalai Lama used
when he was doubled over in pain from a gallbladder infection: Think
about where you are suffering in your life and then think about all the