Go inside the sweetness of life, catch the places where you genuinely were moved by or connected with life, and you'll find in there kind of a light that can direct you when the cacophony gets very noisy and you get confused and lost, that can direct you towards what you care about.

But this cheap-thrill version, this sort of ease definition, the feel-good definition of happiness is an empty promise. Unless we get wiser as to how to carry the difficulties of life in a way that's self-compassionate and empowering, we can create this kind of world in which we'd rather sort of plug into the matrix with whatever pills or escapist tendencies we can think of instead of walking through a process of living that's going to include loss. It's going to include limitations on function. We need to learn and teach our children how to do that.

There is a middle path between indulgence and suppression, but the culture has overwhelmed that in the cacophony that has been created in the modern world and the commercial encouragement of avoidance and indulgence on the one hand, or suppression and "just do it," treating yourself as an object on the other. We've got to find a way that's more compassionate, softer, that allows us to move forward towards the kind of lives that we really want to live.

In Scandinavia probably the most worker-supportive part of the planet, they have the highest rate of chronic pain and worker-related disability. So any kind of pain and difficulty is so much unwelcome that if you say that you're in pain, we're going to even pay you full salary to quit work because you're burned out, inside that what you're going to create is gigantic amounts of chronic pain syndrome. Scandinavians spend 15 percent of their gross national product on disability. 50 percent of the public health nurses are on disability. And that's where we're headed in the U.S. too.

The changes that we can make in the culture can be there for people that we will never meet, that will never know us, and that's what keeps me up at night. It's what excites me about science, that we can learn ways of being with each other. And the behavioral sciences have not been enough of a part of cultural development. The physical sciences have; the behavioral sciences have not. And I would like to see if we can bring some things into human culture that would humanize and soften and empower people.

Could we take anxiety to be something that may be of importance, may even be meaningful? And it says something about your history, and could we learn to sort of hold it in a way that's more compassionate, to sort of bring the frightened part of you close and treat it with some dignity, and keep focused instead on what kind of life you want to live connected to what kind of meaning and purpose. That's going to be a quicker, more self-compassionate and more certain journey forward inside things like panic disorder.

Processes of avoiding the world within in order to try to regulate your behavior, or becoming entangled in your thoughts interfering with your ability to take advantage of what's around you, or losing contact with your values for fear that you'll know more about the places where you hurt - those kinds of processes are just normal psychological processes. And if you take the mode of mind that works great in 95 percent of your life and apply it within, it then implodes. It starts creating barriers, and that's true at work, it's true in our culture, true in our politics.