Wine & The Pleasurable Life

Legend has it that it was Dionysus who brought wine to Sicily – in Giardini Naxos, near Taormina. Since Bacchus or Dionysus, the God of wine, is associated with the pleasurable, hedonic life, it seemed almost necessary to experience wine as part of the quest for happiness.

That evening, once the kids went to sleep, I poured myself a nice glass of my parents’ home made organic wine and began to reflect on those questions. To what extent is happiness influenced by pleasure? What is the relationship between pain and pleasure? Where does temperance and abstinence fit in?

Even seeing the word pleasure brought a smile to my face. I knew it described mental states that are experienced as positive and enjoyable, but I wasn’t sure about the psychology around it.  Interestingly, I was very familiar with the psychology of pain, as it was a subject I had studied for my Masters and taught for many years, but my knowledge of the psychology of pleasure was sporadic and superficial. Not surprising perhaps, considering that most of psychology as a discipline has tended to focus on what’s wrong so we can attempt to fix it, rather than what’s working so that we make the most of this.

I had put a pile of papers and books in my suitcase related to the psychology of pleasure, including ‘Sex, Drugs and Chocolate: The Science of Pleasure’, ‘How Pleasure Works: why we like what we like’, ‘Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Junk Food, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, and Gambling Feel So Good’ and of course, Daniel Kahnman’s ‘Wellbeing: the foundations of hedonic psychology’. But an obvious quick start to the literature, was an electronic search of the term ‘pleasure’ on Google. In Wikepedia this described as ‘a broad class of mental states that humans and other animals experience as positive, enjoyable, or worth seeking. It includes more than specific mental states such as happiness, entertainment, enjoyment, ecstasy, and euphoria’.

Pleasure is individual, as different people will experience a different kinds of and amounts of pleasure in the same situation. Also, many pleasurable experiences are related to basic physical drives such as eating, sex, and exercise, but you can also derive pleasure from social drives. After all it is a pleasure to connect with other people as indeed we are social animals. And pleasure can be activated by experiencing accomplishment, recognition, or through artistic endeavors like music, art and dance.

As I took another sip of wine, I got so excited as I made the connection between the psychology of pleasure and the placebo effect. The word ‘placebo’ comes from the Latin word placere, meaning ‘I will please’.

In the case of wine or alcohol in general, when study participants are randomized to receive placebo alcohol may begin to display symptoms of intoxication. In other words, just thinking you are drinking an alcoholic drink can go to your head and we might feel merry, bubbly, or silly. It can also influence your enjoyment of the wine.

How? Largely through expectation, belief and knowledge.

Well, let’s think about the wine that I am drinking right now. What I know about this wine will influence my enjoyment of drinking this. What I know may include its origin, what I have read about it (e.g. in the back of the bottle or wine reviews), whether I have had this before and liked it. Let’s say I told you this was a New Zealand Pinot Noir. If you have watched the movie Sideways, your experience of the wine could also be influenced by this. This 2004 movie followed two men on their journey around Napa Valley in California tasting a variety of Pinot Noir. Otherwise known as the Sideways Effect, this movie became so popular that it a significant increased the sale of this particular wine¹. A very interesting neuroimaging study recently showed that the cost of the wine affected not just subjective experience and satisfaction with the wine, but activated the pleasure centre in the brain  when participants thought they were drinking a more expensive wine.

If I took a wine course or trained in mindfulness might also influence the extent to which I drink this slowly, paying attention to the smell and flavors, and effects on my body. The context in which I drink this will also probably also have an impact, as I might drink this quickly, perhaps distracted by stimulating conversation.

This experience is what marketing and advertising companies sell, as most of the western world capitalizes on the pursuit of pleasure as a key path to happiness. Pleasure can carry an expensive price tag, and what I discovered, is that the higher the price, the more likely we are to experience pleasure, believing that it must be really good! Even more amazing is that research has found that this is not simply a subjective experience. Our minds actually record an increased activation in the pleasure hotspots of the brain when we think that the wine we are tasting is more expensive!

Early Greek philosophers used wine to stimulate discussion at the Symposium, which literally means ‘drinking together’. Shakespeare wrote: “Good company, good wine, good welcome, can make good people.”  According to Benjamin Franklin “Wine makes daily living easier, less hurried, with fewer tensions and more tolerance.” Leonardo Da Vinci added that: “The discovery of a good wine is increasingly better for mankind than the discovery of a new star.”

I decided to have a second glass of wine. Part of me wanted to explore the pleasurable effects, but also the creative effects of alcohol. Many writers like James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Jack Kerouac used alcohol as a muse. Research on whether alcohol actually harnesses or hinders creativity is still mixed. Hemingway famously wrote: “Write drunk, edit sober”. In a recent study entitled: ‘ Uncorking the muse: Alcohol intoxication facilitates creative problem solving’ found that those who were randomized to getting moderately drunk were better at completing creative problem solving exercise and have sudden insights!

Louis Pasteur called wine ‘the most healthful and hygienic of beverages’, Hippocrates and Galen used wine as medicine and Paracelsus wisely argued: ‘wine is a food, a medicine and a poison; it’s just a matter of dose’. Certainly, it’s easier to express ourselves with a little wine, and the pleasurable effects are undeniable – until we go over board, or unless the wine is highly chemical, causing toxic effects.

I paused and thought about how the wine I was drinking had been made the previous summer by my parents. They had selected the grapes, and had them pressed, then went through the careful process that involved rolling the barrel to each other. There were no additives, no sulphites, no chemicals.

I felt incredibly lucky to be able to sip lovingly made chemical free wine, and with that thought, I went off to bed.

References

1. Cuellar S, Karnowsky D, Acosta F. The Sideways Effect: A test for changes in the demand for Merlot and Pinot Noir wines. In: Paper AW, editor. Economics: American Association of Wine Economists, 2008.

2. Jarosz et al. Uncorking the muse: alcohol intoxication facilitates creative problem solving. Conscious Cogn 21:487-93 (2012).

Happiness Sabbatical

When writing the story of your life, Don’t let anyone else hold the pen.  Life is wildly precious. At times, it can also be hard. And when the darkness descends, it’s easy to forget how lucky we are to be on this earth, how beautiful each moment can be, and how vital our friendships are. As a psychologist, I knew how understanding and fine-tuning our perception, our mind-set, and our emotional intelligence towards the Positive, were some of the keys to overcoming stumbling blocks and getting out of long dark tunnells, while staying resilient and even enjoying the adventure. In his beautiful poem Desiderata, Max Ehrmann, wrote: “With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy”.

This tuning-in of our inner minds and hearts is also what can help us feel more alive, awake, inspired, and more joyful, so that we can  live each day creating, embracing and cherishing precious moments and becoming centered, coherent and compassionate, even when faced with challenges. Now one sure way to wake up happy, and bring harmony, is to get clearer about our dreams, our life purpose, and move in that direction! When we do, amazing things can happen. Bob Marley wrote: “Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you riding through the ruts, don’t complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy. Don’t bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality. Wake up and live!”.

Positive Psychologists encourage writing down our goals and visualizing our best possible self to harness and sustain our positive emotions (Kennon & Lyubomirsky, 2006).

Sometimes, our dreams can be buried under a worried mind, and to access these, it can be helpful to turn towards images and words that we feel attracted towards. Over a year ago, I created a Vision Board with a group of friends. While this technique has not yet been researched, it intuitively felt more useful than writing down my goals. That evening, we shared magazines and cut out images and text which we glued on an A3 sheet of paper. I placed this on my bedroom wall (You can also do this using websites such as this: www.dreamitalive.com).

The Vision My dream was to spend more time with my children, who are now three and four years of age. I also wanted to embark on a new project that would take me out of my office, the increasing administrative roles and those endless board meetings, as I craved to work outdoors and be more in touch with nature. I wanted to take time to write about what I had been teaching and researching for many years at University level and share this with those curious to learn about the scientific evidence on ways to ignite and spread our inner joy and the incredible effects of doing so.

The Result? A few months later, I applied for an Academic Sabbatical. My application was successful. Being paid to work on a book on happiness anywhere in the world, is the closest thing to winning the lottery. Actually, I think it is even better than winning the lottery, as we know those who do, tend to return to their baseline levels of happiness a year after winning the jackpot. This blog is a way to recognize my appreciation for this gift, by sharing my reflections, musings and discoveries, in my journey to investigate the Paths to Happiness.

First stop, a small seaside town where I spent my childhood, in the North East of Sicily, just across from the Eolian Islands. The kids could spend a few hours in the local crèche to learn the language, they would see their grandparents  in the afternoon, and I would research the Pleasurable Life…

Kennon, S. & Lyubomirsky, S. (2006). How to increase and sustain positive emotion: The effects of expressing gratitude and visualizing best possible selves. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 1, 2.