Chris Unger has been a touring musician, producer, and writer for
the last 20 years.  He has done everything from national tours, to playing the
CMA's (Country Music Awards) in Nashville, to having his music featured in major
motion pictures/sountracks as well as reality series across
MTV/VH1



POH: How long have you been as musician?

CU: I received my first guitar when I was 9 years old, so roughly 22 years.

POH: What do you enjoy most about being a muscian?

CU: Music is a means to express myself.  It's a great outlet in addition to collaborating and working with other musicians.  Everyone has something to offer.  I really enjoy being able to walk away learning something new and sharing my experience and knowledge with others. 

POH: Have you ever had a time in your life where you've had to overcome adversity?

CU: With music?  Most definitely.  Essentially you are your own business.  There are thousands upon thousands of other musicians that are trying to do the same thing I'm trying to do.  You have to know how to network and market yourself better than the next guy.  If not, you're going to be stuck playing songs in your room.  Every opportunity you get is crucial, and you have to figure out how to capitalize on them the best you can.

POH: How do you think music is related to happiness? 

CU: I feel blessed for the opportunity to play music and I am extremely grateful for everything I've accomplished.  Those accomplishments have brought me a lot of happiness over the years.  That's how it relates to me.  As with any hobby, skill, or profession, I think most happiness comes from the ability to excel and grow beyond what you think you are capable of.  

POH: What would you say to all the people out there struggling to find their happiness?

CU: Basically, I guess the struggle for happiness is something that we all endure.  It occurs almost as frequently as our need to breathe.  There really isn't anything to say necessarily.  People who don't struggle aren't unique.  It's something we all do.  For those who have found happiness, it's something that I definitely envy of them...

POH: Got any upcoming projects?

CU:  I have a few.  One of my current projects  is Young Ones.  I'm playing with a bunch of really, really talented guys who have all seen the same struggles that I have seen over the years.  It's very therapeutic.  This particular endeavor is the first time in a long time that I have felt happy about the situation I'm in.  I have also been spending time in Nashville working with artists and writers on some songwriting/production stuff.


Pursuit of Happiness

Dr. Philip Zimbardo believes that males are on the downswing according to his latest blog post in the Psychology Today website. Suitcased. Finished.

He asserts - without providing actual longitudinal statistics which would of course be useful to evaluate for a claim like this - that more and more males are still living at home with their parents into their 20’s and 30’s while sitting around and playing video games, watching porn, and formulating "intricate but never-realized plans to get laid." Yes sir, males are now slackers and Namby Pambies and Mamsy Pamsies. You have no motivation, your fingers are stained by Cheetohs, but you can pull off headshots on Call of Duty like a champ.

I call foul.

While it makes for an interesting read, rising the emotions of a populace wont to buy into societal destruction at the hands of laziness, it’s not happening. Males have been just as lazy for the last four thousand years. This thing is not escalating. We are at baseline and we will continue to be at baseline for the foreseeable future. Our fortunes are not waning because of the evils of smartphones in our pockets.


Dr. Zimbardo cites as evidence of this decline that "Hollywood has caught on" making movies out of guys that "appear to be tragically hopeless." Couple points of contention.

One. Despite their shortcomings, the Hollywood goon balls do manage to scramble in movies like the recent Avengers movie where men have superpowers, are super-geniuses, and routinely can be found saving the world from certain doom. What about those? Do they not count? Avengers actually made money. Knocked Up and Failure to Launch made nothing and were systematically scorned by critics and moviegoers alike.

Two. OD-a-week Hollywood is hardly the authority on the state of societal norms. If we want to know the latest and greatest drugs, we’ll ask Hollywood. If we want real, meaningful, peer-reviewed research, citing Hollywood as your resource
lends as much credibility as asking a pack of wolves to howl to a psychic who will then interpret the results in a pool of chicken blood.

Who receives Dr. Zimbardo’s blame? The rise of technology.

Nonsense.

Technology creates the comforts and longevity of life that we enjoy today. It enables us to better stay in touch with friends and family members that previously would have been relegated to memory. Technology serves us and satiates our imagination in ways that sometimes we don’t always understand, but must continue to progress because it enables the progression of our race and brings us closer to the pursuit of happiness.

 Increasingly widening variety of stimuli - sponsored by our good friend technology - is contributing to the Flynn Effect, or the
methodical increase in IQ by 10 points per new generation. While indeed tech serves as a vice to some, it is those same who would have found a vice in spite of whatever era they happened to be born into. Would the same slacker of today be a whiskey guzzling outlaw 100 years ago?

Another wise guy made a similar error to Dr. Zimbardo’s nearly 2,500 years ago. Of the demise of children of the day it was said:

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
                    -Socrates

And the world didn’t end.


Pursuit of Happiness

Too many patients erroneously are receiving diagnoses of bipolar and ADHD. There are lots of reasons that a counselor or psychiatrist would liberally apply these diagnoses. Here’s one of the top reasons.
 
The insurance won’t pay without a diagnosis. 
 
It’s very sad, but this is a fact that we have to live with. A clinician may feel that a patient can use legitimate help, but due to constraints of their insurance, they won’t be able to receive any help unless the clinician ticks the right boxes. And more times than not, ADHD or bipolar are the right boxes. Take Texas Medicaid for example. For adults, Medicaid won’t pay for outpatient
services unless there is a diagnosis of Major Depression, Bipolar, or schizophrenia. So in order for clinicians to help people who legitimately need help, they are forced to shoehorn a diagnosis where something different may be more appropriate (and more clinically sound) in order to be reimbursed by the insurance company. 
 
For kids, in addition to the big three, they can also have ADHD. 

Is this fraud? Is this necessary to stay in business … rather than showing people who really need help the door? What’s more ethical: making sure people get help when they really truly need it, or giving the right diagnosis? These insurance shenanigans are one of the primary reasons that the position of Pursuit of Happiness is to not take any insurance other than for our foster care program. We want our clinicians to do what they feel is clinically sound, not what they think they can get paid for, and we don’t want to put ourselves in the position of having to make a decision between giving someone a diagnosis we are not
comfortable with or giving them no treatment at all.

So if you look at it this way, the clinician’s culpability isn’t alone in the rampant overdiagnosis of these disorders. Our current reimbursement model for everyone in mental health (and I would posit the larger healthcare system as well) is broken, and some of the blame has to be placed with insurance carriers as well.

To play devil’s advocate however, an insurance company must outline a threshold of criteria to adhere to. Otherwise shady clinics would bill them for all they’re worth and the insurance company would be out of business. 
 
Not all clinicians are created the same and not all clinicians are so well intentioned. Some play a numbers game with the insurance and purposely hand out diagnoses in order to run a shoddy practice where the focus is on quantity of patients rather than quality of care.

So it’s a balancing act, a game of cat and mouse between insurance company and provider. It really shouldn’t be this way but it is, and until something comes along to change it, it’s what we’re stuck with. 

So what is Bipolar?

In order to receive a proper diagnosis of bipolar, a patient must fulfill criteria for having had a major depressive episode, as well as a manic episode. Bipolar isn’t just sometimes I’m happy and sometimes I’m sad, like many think.  Bipolar is a real, debilitating, organic disorder that is not currently curable.
 
Due to the organic nature of the disorder, the symptomatology is not in response to anything that is going on in the environment. A bipolar patient’s mood is predominantly due to cycles of the brain. Some are more rapid cycling, at the low end cycling over the course of only a couple days, and some are more lengthy, occurring over several months. Contrary to what some may believe, Bipolar patients do not go through spells of major depression and mania all in the same day. While a bipolar patient can indeed be made happy or sad due to environmental stimuli just like anyone else, it is the baseline mood that we are
interested in for bipolar. 

Think of mood as a wave with the high end. In bipolar patients, the wave is much more exaggerated than in people without bipolar, and in fact exceeds what we would call a clinically significant threshold. The goal of therapy in this diagnosis is an attempt to force that wave as close to the middle as possible so that the swings are not nearly as severe and debilitating.

The following is the criteria for Bipolar Disorder. Note that a patient must have qualified for both manic and major depressive episodes at some point.

Manic Episode
A) A distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive or irritable mood, lasting at least 1 week (or any duration if hospitalization is necessary)
 
B) During the period of mood disturbance, three (or more) of the following symptoms have persisted (four if the mood is only irritable) and have been present to a significant degree:

    1) inflated self-esteem or grandiosity
    2) decreased need for sleep (e.g., feels rested after only 3 hours of sleep)
    3) more talkative than usual or pressure to keep talking
    4) flight of ideas or subjective experience that thoughts are racing
    5) distractibility (i.e., attention too easily drawn to unimportant or irrelevant external stimuli)
    6) increase in goal-directed activity (at work, at school, or sexually) or psychomotor agitation
    7) excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that have a high potential for painful consequences (e.g., engaging in unrestrained buying sprees, sexual indiscretions, or foolish business investments)
 
C) The symptoms do not meet criteria for a Mixed Episode
 
D) The mood disturbance is sufficiently severe to cause marked impairment in occupational functioning or in usual social activities or relationships with others, or to necessitate hospitalization to prevent harm to self or others, or there are psychotic features.
 
E) The symptoms are not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, a medication or other treatment) or a general medical condition (e.g., hyperthyroidism)
 

Major Depressive Episode

 A) Five (or more) of the following symptoms have been present during the same 2-week period and represent a change from previous functioning; at least one of the symptoms is either (1) depressed mood or (2) loss of interest or pleasure
 
Note:
Do not include symptoms that are clearly due to a general medical condition, or mood-incongruent delusions or hallucinations

    1) depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day, as indicated by either subjective report (e.g., feels sad or empty) or observation made by others (e.g., appears tearful). Note: In children and adolescents, can be irritable mood.
    2) markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day (as indicated by either subjective account or observation made by others)
    3) significant weight loss when not dieting or weight gain (e.g., a change of more than 5% of body weight in a month), or decrease or increase in appetite nearly every day. Note: In children, consider failure to make expected weight gains.
    4) insomnia or hypersomnia nearly every day
    5) psychomotor agitation or retardation nearly every day (observable by others, not merely subjective feelings of restlessness or being slowed down)
    6) fatigue or loss of energy nearly every day
    7) feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt (which may be delusional) nearly every day (not merely self-reproach or guilt about being sick)
    8) diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness, nearly every day (either by subjective account or as observed by others)
    9) recurrent thoughts of death (not just fear of dying), recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan, or a suicide attempt or a specific plan for committing suicide
 
B) The symptoms do not meet criteria for a Mixed Episode

C) The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
 
D) The symptoms are not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, a medication) or a general medical condition (e.g., hypothyroidism)

E) The symptoms are not better accounted for by Bereavement, i.e., after the loss of a loved one, the symptoms persist for longer than 2 months or are characterized by marked functional impairment, morbid preoccupation with worthlessness, suicidal ideation, psychotic symptoms, or psychomotor retardation. 
 

Note that for each, abusing substances automatically disqualifies you from this diagnosis. If you are abusing substances, your diagnosis is some type Substance Abuse, or Substance Dependence. If you read through these criteria and fail to ring up the proper criteria, you do not qualify. Also, if you feel sad because of something, your diagnosis is from the Adjustment Disorder
spectrum because you are having difficulty adjusting to a stimulus in your environment. 

 
Here is the DSM criteria for ADHD

A. Either (1) or (2):

(1) inattention: six (or more) of the following symptoms of inattention have persisted for at least 6 months to a degree that is maladaptive and inconsistent with developmental level:

    (a) often fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes in schoolwork, work, or other activities
    (b) often has difficulty sustaining attention in tasks or play activities
    (c) often does not seem to listen when spoken to directly
    (d) often does not follow through on instructions and fails to finish school work, chores, or duties in the workplace (not due to oppositional behavior or failure to understand instructions)
    (e) often has difficulty organizing tasks and activities
    (f) often avoids, dislikes, or is reluctant to engage in tasks that require sustained mental effort (such as schoolwork or homework)
    (g) often loses things necessary for tasks or activities (e.g., toys, school assignments, pencils, books, or tools)
    (h) is often easily distracted by extraneous stimuli
    (i) is often forgetful in daily activities

(2) hyperactivity-impulsivity: six (or more) of the following symptoms of hyperactivity-impulsivity have persisted for at least 6 months to a degree that is maladaptive and inconsistent with developmental level:

 Hyperactivity

(a) often fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in seat

(b) often leaves seat in classroom or in other situations in which remaining seated is expected

(c) often runs about or climbs excessively in situations in which it is inappropriate (in adolescents or adults, may be limited to subjective feelings of restlessness)

(d) often has difficulty playing or engaging in leisure activities quietly

(e) is often "on the go" or often acts as if "driven by a motor"

(f) often talks excessively

 Impulsivity

(g) often blurts out answers before questions have been completed

(h) often has difficulty awaiting turn

(i) often interrupts or intrudes on others (e.g., butts into conversations or games)

B. Some hyperactive-impulsive or inattentive symptoms that caused impairment were present before age 7 years.

C. Some impairment from the symptoms is present in two or more settings (e.g., at school [or work] and at home).

D. There must be clear evidence of clinically significant impairment in social, academic, or occupational functioning.

E. The symptoms do not occur exclusively during the course of a Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Schizophrenia, or other Psychotic Disorder and are not better accounted for by another mental disorder (e.g., Mood Disorder, Anxiety Disorder, Dissociative Disorders, or a Personality Disorder).


Let me draw your attention to a couple things. 

First, nowhere in this list you will find it say anything about these types of symptoms only occurring in one venue. So if your child only exhibits ADHD symptoms while at school, and there have been no problems at home, you aren’t looking at ADHD,
but rather, you are looking at our old friend the Adjustment Disorder spectrum. 
 
Secondly, note that it explicitly states that these symptoms should not be caused be oppositional defiance. In other words, if your kid is not paying attention because he’s too busy being bad, then this is not ADHD. Remember ADHD is organic, if a child is acting out because someone or something is upsetting him or her, this is not ADHD.

Third, and most important: for both of these diagnoses it states (in addition to stating this as a requirement for every diagnosable condition in the DSM) that “there must be clear evidence of clinically significant impairment in social, academic, or occupational functioning.” If the kid is making straight A’s, you don’t have ADHD. 

So take a look, consider the preponderance of evidence, and make an informed decision about your child’s mental healthcare. If you feel like one of the two above spectrums of disorders is a match for you, your child, or a loved one, Pursuit of Happiness, or any other mental health provider will be more than happy to help ameliorate the symptomatology. But please keep in mind that a proper diagnosis is a cornerstone to proper treatment. Just like you wouldn’t do chemotherapy on someone having a heart attack, it would be wildly inappropriate to treat someone for Bipolar or ADHD who is merely experiencing an Adjustment
Disorder. Our best advice is to choose a provider who will keep their patients best interest at heart, and not voluminously toss around diagnoses without careful consideration of the criteria.

Pursuit of Happiness

While I appreciate that there can be any number of calamities that can befall the trillions of neurons weaved together in our brain, sometimes I feel like we look too hard for problems, just because we are addicted to train wrecks.  I think that is absolutely true.  

Currently, our field vastly over commits diagnosis hysteria.  Kids get bipolar for “sometimes he’s happy and sometimes he’s sad.”  Drug addicts constantly receive bipolar diagnoses and get disability for that even though the DSM explicitly states that a diagnosis of bipolar cannot be given if the symptomatology cannot be better accounted for by another diagnosis, like drug dependency.  Kids who can intently focus on what I’m saying through an entire hour and a half assessment are constantly given ADHD diagnoses just because they don’t pay attention at school, when it might just be the case that they don’t like their teacher or the subject matter or some dastardly other student that bothers them. To summate, our propensity to diagnose is out of control as a field.  

When I came across this New York Times article chronicling a child psychopath, I couldn’t help but feel like, here we go again.  Listening to the author talk intently, as though this is some kind of alien organism trapped for trillions of years on a hurtling asteroid and now awakened onto our planet, about the child’s behaviors, while wild and erratic, I couldn’t help but think that this is an attempt to sensationalize something that isn’t real.  

What isn’t real you ask?  Monsters.  The Michael Myers, the Jason Vorhees, the Patrick Batemans, and Leatherfaces of the world aren’t real.  They are figments of our imaginations.  But since they anthropomorphically resemble us, their images hit close to home and we are more likely to believe that these monsters are possibly lurking about, in the shadows, maybe even embodied in a loved one that you don’t understand.  

Personality can be a highly variable thing.  We have bubbly personalities, quick-to-anger personalities, bland personalities, funny personalities, and everything not only in between but sometimes mixed into out-in-left-field combinations that still surprise us.  No two humans are alike.  No two brains are alike.  Even in the event of genetic clones, there is enough disparity in experience to rewire neurons, and thus personality, just enough to give us some degree of variation.

In the event of a kid with severe behavioral issues, we aren’t dealing with some monster with no soul, no feelings, wearing a mask of humanity with nothing “behind the wheel” but a morose, caricature of humanity that only cares about satisfying its own desires, regardless of the wake up bloodshed in the rearview. And despite the level of exasperation in these poor parents and the desperate need to find some kind of answer behind these most difficult children, we can’t as a society be telling these parents that their child is a psychopath and write lengthy articles in nationally recognized newspapers about them just to appease them and their yearning for answers.

What’s wrong with these kids is simply that they have a different type of personality base than the rest of us.  Their brains start with a different wiring of neurons and their neurotransmitters don’t flow the same way.  That combined with environmental factors, genetic factors, modeling behaviors, and experience over the lifetime combine to produce personality.  Don’t make the mistake of giving up on these kids and labeling them psychopaths and hauling them off to the institution just because you’re worn out.  If you are going to choose to have kids, you have to accept the fact that they may not turn out to be perfect angels.  And in fact, some of them will turn out to act terribly.  Any number of combinations can transpire when combining DNA.  Just like the kid’s father in the article, this kid, as well, has every shot of growing up to be a productive member of society.  Perhaps he’s not quite the self starter that others are, and perhaps he will need some (ok … maybe MORE than some) additional support while growing into an independent adult.

This is what is happening anytime we are dipping into the gene pool.  Same thing with pets, boxes of chocolates, or playing blackjack.  But no matter if you have a dog who has extra trouble tearing up your pillows, a cat who scratches up your furniture, a family member who struggles with despair, or even some type of malady, we must make every effort to ensure the proper development of whatever organism you have agreed to be caretaker of.  Life deserves the opportunity to grow, and if you choose to have children or pets or gardens then you must understand that you are running a risk of introducing a non-perfect lifeform into your habitat.  Of course you might wind up with a bundle or pure joy mixed with rainbows and banana splits.  Take care of your organism, whatever it is, because all life is precious.

Except snakes.  I hate snakes. 


Pursuit of Happiness

Cognitive-Behavioral can only go so far.  For the rest, for the pursuit of happiness, I think we must begin to introduce concepts into people lives that are associated with happiness.  So we must derive where people find happiness, and I believe that the following list serves as an excellent base for some of the components. 

1. Competition / Flow
2. Being a servant
3. Learning
4. Novel experiences
5. Exercise
6. Laughter
7. Place in the universe
8. Friends and family
9. Physical comfort
10. The arts

Internally, happiness is a matter all its own. 

In his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues the same case argued by Malcolm Gladwell in his pop-psych masterpiece, Blink.  The concept is the assumption that when someone is focused in on what they are doing, in the moment, then the outside world becomes tertiary, and thus cognitive allocation will give its full due force to the project at hand.

Living in the moment.  Focusing on right now.  Concentrating on what you are doing.  This is the way the mind becomes right, and through this proper allocation of attention, our conscious minds can achieve a state called “flow.”

You may have experienced flow before.  If you’ve ever been acutely focused in on an activity (and doing extremely well at it) then you’ve been in a state of flow.  Dirk Nowitzki, NBA superstar, felt it during the Maverick’s 2011 title run.  Phillip Humber, starting pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, felt it during his perfect game just last week.  John Milton, blind muse from the 1600’s, likely felt it during the construction of his masterpiece of prose Paradise Lost.  Albert Einstein felt it while writing General Theory of Relativity, and even went as far to postulate that he has, “never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves...”  

Flow is the highest state of operation the mind can achieve.  It is the definitive state of being un-destractable, of being able to completely block out the world and focus in on exactly what is happening in the moment.  It is the present moment, the slice of time that one is in, that is the most critical part of your life, because it is the only slice that one can do anything about.  The past is set, (barring time-travel), the future is merely a culmination of the decisions you and the rest of the conscious population, influenced as well by natural events, come together to make right now.  Now is the most important part of your existence.  Now is reality, set in motion by the physics and governing laws of the cosmos which directs the flow of the universe, and through that flow we must continually challenge ourselves, moment to moment to become a better version of yourself than you were in the moment before.

Focusing on the moment is the first step. 

Recognizing your role as a servant is the other. 

No matter your lot in life, whether you are a working at McDonald’s or the president of the United States, your role in life is as a servant.  Our best leaders are the ones who do not quest after power, but rather are called to it by others, and those who choose to serve recognize that they are servants of others, that the very best of what it means to be human is to serve your fellow man.

We are very lucky here in America.  Our great country came into existence through the ideas of the most legendary thinkers of our time.  Our framers recognized that not only are our governmental powers, held in the constitution, an extension of our roles as public servants through free elections, but that the dark heart of man lurks.  There are those of us who actively search for power, for the sake of power, and that through the unhappiness in their hearts they desire to remake the world in their vision.  Our framers recognized this propensity and put significant road blocks in place to prevent this type of person being able to wield too much power if it ever came to be that they came to power.  The darkest of us seeks power, while the best of us seeks to
serve.

No matter what paths your life has traveled, you can always seek to serve your fellow man, and through that servitude you will know joy.  Help someone.  Teach someone.  Praise someone.  This is the pursuit of happiness. 

Pursuit of Happiness

Being a bit of a rebel, I’ve always asked myself: How can I improve on things?  Being that conditions like depression and the like is what I do for a living, I’m always on the hunt for ways to improve my craft.  

Already at Pursuit of Happiness, we have created mental health checkups in an effort to prevent debilitating conditions from taking root.  This is a fantastic first step in combating a world of suffering.

Putting the brakes on suffering...

Already in the world of psychotherapy, we have Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy; the leading type of therapy that offers the best chance at making therapeutic gains in the least amount of time.  CBT aims to alter the way a person perceives the world.  It does this through mastery of thought, or conscious choice in controlling in which way thoughts are shaped.  Once control of these thoughts is exercised, it will profoundly influence the way someone feels, which in turn can influence behavior.  So:

Thoughts > Emotions > Behavior

As an example: Let’s say that I get up from typing this blog entry, trip over something and knock a tooth out of my head.  If I’ve been down on my luck, the thought that might pop into my noggin would be, “Why does this always happen to me?”  

Let’s take a moment to analyze what it means to make that statement.  The assumption is naturally emoted out of this question, and the assumption is that you are the kind of person that bad stuff happens to, and thus, you are a bad person yourself.  Of course this is a simplification of what is often a more complex issue.  But for our purposes this poses a sufficient base.

Now, if I allow myself to buy into the assumption that this sort of thing (in this case a tooth-rattling accident) always happens to me, this cognition will cause me to feel pretty bad about myself.  I may feel worthless, not good enough, and because of this I will likely become sad or angry.  Once I am sad or angry, my interactions with my friends and family will be much less expressive.  I will react to the stimuli in my world in an impoverished way, easily explained because I’m not feeling good, and if I’m no good I might as well act bad cause what does it matter anyway?  

Out of those three things, the one and only thing that is within our control is our thoughts.  We can’t just changed our behavior, because we feel bad, and anytime people feel like that there is a greater tendency to lash out.  We can’t just say to ourselves that we should just feel happy, because our poor mood is already established in the modus that we are a poor person, and obviously nobody enjoys being a poor person.  But we do have an ace in the hole in this triumvirate of human behavior.  We are expressly in control of the thoughts that we allow ourselves to buy into.  This freedom is granted to us through consciousness, one of the great philosophical, and some would argue cosmological, mysteries of our existence.  Consciousness, whether you choose to believe in it or not, allows that you are able to exert some control over the course of your life.  This is the key factor, the bedrock illuminator, the crux, of Cognitive-Behavioral therapy, the assertion that you are ultimately in control of the thoughts that comprise your condition. 

Pursuit of Happiness