Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

You may have encountered this cryptic question at some point. It is a koan, or riddle, devised by the 18th-century Zen Buddhist master Hakuin Ekaku. Such paradoxical questions have been used for centuries to train young monks, who were instructed to meditate on and debate them. This was intended to be taxing work that could induce maddening frustration—but there was a method to it too. The novitiates were not meant to articulate tidy answers; they were supposed to acquire, through mental struggle, a deeper understanding of the question itself—for this was the path to enlightenment.

You don’t have to be training to become a Buddhist monk to realize the value of hard questions without clear answers. Wrestling with a koan of your own—such as Why am I alive? or For what would I give my life?—can be a way to improve your emotional health and grow as a person. You might resist doing so because life’s fundamental riddles are uncomfortable to contemplate, and the world gives you every opportunity to avoid them. But when you enter the mysterious world of unanswerable questions, you will surely grow as a person and change for the better.

[Read: Why so many Americans are turning to Buddhism]

The questions that matter most to us are typically those least likely to have clear answers. If you ask me, “Why do you love your wife?” I will struggle to answer convincingly. I know I do, but the reasons seem impossible to articulate. Anything I say (“Because she is good to me”) will utterly miss the point and trivialize the relationship. Indeed, the fact that fairly trivial questions are easy to answer with clarity is no coincidence. (“How do I get to the supermarket?” Two right turns, then a left.) The celebrated psychotherapist Carl Jung considered this ease-of-answering test a way of understanding what matters most. “The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble,” he wrote in 1931.

We might call life’s unanswerable riddles “right-brain questions.” Neuroscientists interested in the hemispheric lateralization of the brain—how each side undertakes different functions—have shown that when people use deep understanding and intuition, as opposed to analytical method, to gain insight into problems, a burst of high-frequency, or gamma-band, activity appears in the right temporal lobe, corresponding with a change of blood flow in the right anterior superior temporal gyrus. This observation is consistent with the hypothesis of the British neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, who has argued that people primarily use the right side of the brain when they ponder questions about life’s meaning.

We generally resist the work involved with this kind of right-brain insight because confronting big problems that are difficult to resolve is uncomfortable. As some research shows, knotty life questions without clear answers can evoke a dark mood without any clear biological explanation. This can be particularly difficult for adolescents, pondering for the first time big questions about fate and death, emptiness and meaninglessness, guilt and condemnation.

You might conclude that, for the sake of your well-being, you should steer clear of such contemplation. But you’d be mistaken, in much the same way as you’d be mistaken in avoiding exercise because working out involves bodily discomfort. To begin with, sitting with issues of life, death, and love requires us to admit the limits of our understanding—to say “I don’t know.” Researchers have demonstrated in experiments that people are highly averse to giving this response, but doing so is a sign of cognitive health. It seems reasonable to extrapolate that learning to make this admission more easily could be a good way to improve your cognitive health.

Even an “I don’t know” response can lead to a deeper, if unstated, understanding—with important benefits. In 2012, for example, two psychologists asked a sample of young adults how often they considered questions such as “Do you ever reflect on your purpose in life?” and “Do you ever think about the human spirit or what happens to life after death?” They found that the people who spent more time on these questions tended to score higher than their peers on a variety of measures defined as spiritual intelligence, critical existential thinking, sense of life’s meaning, curiosity, and well-being. That certainly sounds like cognitive health to me.

[From the June 1963 issue: “The Riddle,” by Albert Camus]

Taking the evidence all together, I’d propose a hypothesis that, as a society, we have become spiritually flabby and psychically out of shape because we haven’t been getting in the reps on challenging existential questions. As much research has documented, anxiety and depression have been exploding in the United States, especially among young adults. I believe that this is not because we’re thinking too much about the hard questions of life, but too little. As I’ve discussed previously, we pass our hours and days hypnotized by the trivia injected into our lives via our tech devices, and are less willing to delve into deeper matters. The elevated levels of sadness and fear are, I believe, at least in part the result of our philosophically sedentary lifestyle. Like the benefits of hard exercise, the short-term discomfort of big questions is necessary to avoid the long-term ill-health that comes from avoiding these questions.

To address this problem, I’d like to see a revolution in existential thinking, a craze for pondering life’s mysteries. Social entrepreneurs could establish reading rooms and debating clubs in every city. Philosophers could become as popular as the hottest fitness influencers. That’s my fantasy, anyway. But short of its becoming a reality, I can suggest a routine you can follow.

1. Schedule your mental workout.
If you go to the gym, you probably do so at a planned time, involving particular exercises. And there are certain things you don’t do while working out—eating pizza, taking a nap. You can use similar principles for your mental fitness. Choose a period of time each day—say, 30 minutes—that you can dedicate to weighing tough questions of real importance. First, ban all devices and allow no distractions; then figure out in advance what existential or spiritual challenges you plan to consider. You can use a paragraph or two of philosophy or scripture to focus your mind on a specific question, break it down, and improve your understanding.

In Tibetan Buddhism, this method is called analytical meditation, and similar practices exist in other traditions. As you may find in your initial weeks at the gym, the exercise is hard at first and tempting to abandon. But with discipline, the habit becomes easier, then pleasant, then indispensable. For many years, I have actually combined the two practices: Right after my morning hour in the gym, I’ll spend the next half-hour (usually 6:30–7 a.m.) in meditation. At this point, I can’t imagine starting my day any other way.

2. Go for a long walk.
For some people, a good alternative is a long walk alone, without devices, as a way to give room to your right-brain questions. Philosophers have long advocated this technique—Immanuel Kant was reputedly such a regular walker, to aid his deep thinking, that neighbors set their watches by his passing. Research has shown that walking naturally stimulates creative thinking and facilitates the ability to focus without being distracted. I like to prescribe this practice—again, ideally in the early morning—to my students, especially if they have been feeling a sense of meaninglessness.

3. Invite boredom.
One effect of our screen-centered culture is that we’re never truly bored. This might sound great, like a quality-of-life enhancement. But it isn’t. Experiencing boredom is crucial for abstract reasoning and insight, because it helps stimulate the brain’s default-mode network, the set of brain regions that becomes active when the outside world does not impinge on our mind’s attention. Neuroscientists have shown that such activity is vital for accessing high-level meaning. For this reason, building periods of boredom into our life really matters, because they no longer occur spontaneously. A good way to do this is to run errands and make short trips without taking your phone. At first, you will still feel the reflex to reach for it every few seconds. But fairly quickly, you will start to experience your default-mode network sparking up again, perhaps for the first time in a long time. In a deep cognitive sense, boredom is productive.

[Arthur C. Brooks: To get out of your head, get out of your house]

A decade ago, after a lengthy trip to India, I took a series of long walks to ponder unanswerable questions. Among other ones, I considered the question posed by the koan that opened this essay: What is the sound of one hand clapping? I aimed not to find an answer, but to gain a greater understanding of the question—which I hoped might help explain other mysteries of my life.

Over a few weeks, I came to comprehend that the sound of one hand clapping is an illusion. The hand’s movement mimics clapping, but the only way to make the illusion a reality is to add a second hand. The sound of one hand clapping can be imagined, but the clap doesn’t exist until another hand is present. With that realization, I recognized the koan’s question as a way to understand the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness (śūnyavāda in Sanskrit), which says that no individual thing or person has any intrinsic existence, but exists only relationally, dependent on everything else. The concept of an individual nature is, like one hand clapping, an illusion.

On further reflection, this illuminated for me another ineffable mystery, one that I mentioned earlier: why I love my wife. By myself, I am the one hand clapping, an illusion of a human. I come fully into personhood only when I am completed by the presence of my mate. She is for me the other hand, creating the sound that is our life.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.

“If [X candidate I hate] wins this election, I will leave the country” is a sentiment we’ve heard from a few politically outspoken celebrities in recent presidential-election cycles. They never seem to follow through on the promise, though. That’s because it probably isn’t really a promise, but rather a defense against an emotion that humans truly hate: disappointment. They are soothing themselves with a strategy to neutralize anticipated feelings of impotence and frustration if the dreaded event comes to pass.

So if your preferred candidate lost on Tuesday night, you might be enduring that terrible emotion. Some people suffer from the malady so badly that they may be diagnosed with a condition popularly known as “post-election stress disorder.”

Even if all of this seems exaggerated, you probably do dread some source of disappointment in your life. Perhaps it involves your career, your education, or your romantic relationship. If so, you are very likely acting in a way that protects you from this deep and painful emotion; some research has found that disappointment can be associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. Understanding this phenomenon can help lower the fear of your own emotions, however, and help you make decisions leading to better outcomes. That may even help you avoid making a silly public promise to leave America.

[Read: What to watch if you need a distraction this week]

As two scholars described it recently in the Annual Review of Anthropology, disappointment is “the messy, friction-filled, and unsatisfying gap between lived experiences and expectations that have not come to pass.” The feeling is similar to regret, in that it involves a past event that didn’t turn out the way you had hoped. But whereas regret involves wishing you had done something differently, disappointment does not necessarily involve your decision-making agency. Because of this distinction, psychologists writing in the journal Cognition and Emotion find that regret more often leads to self-reproach, in contrast with the usual unhappiness associated with disappointment, which comes from a sense of powerlessness.

For example, you might vote for a candidate and regret it (that is, reproach yourself for doing so). But if the candidate for whom you voted loses, that can also give you a sense that you have no say over how you are governed—that’s where the powerlessness comes in.

The above research casts additional light on the psychological dimension of this difference between regret and disappointment. If a person disappoints you, that typically results in your feeling anger. But if an outcome is the disappointment, that is usually accompanied more by sadness.

Such findings tend to focus on what psychologists call “disconfirmed expectancies,” meaning a difference between what you think will or should happen and what actually happens. This involves the neuromodulator dopamine, which governs both rewards and the anticipation of rewards in our brains.

How this works: Imagine that at about 11 a.m., your stomach growls and you think about lunch. Your mind goes to a turkey sandwich you enjoyed last week from a local deli, which gives you a response from dopamine neurons to elicit anticipation and make you form a plan to go there at noon. If, when you arrive and get the sandwich, it is just what you expected, you get no additional dopamine response. But if the sandwich is even more delicious than you remembered, you will get an extra neurochemical spritz, which teaches you to come back again. But if the deli is closed, God forbid, your dopamine response will drop, making you feel mildly depressed—or, in a word, disappointed.

The mechanism no doubt evolved to teach us the most efficient way to accumulate rewards such as food and mates, and avoid wasting time and energy on fruitless activities. In ancient times, this reward system would keep you coming back again and again to a water hole where prey was easy to find. But if those animals caught on and stopped showing up, you would have a couple of disappointments and lose interest.

The most psychologically painful disappointments are those in which the hope of reward contrasts most sharply with the actual outcome. The closed deli involves a minor dopamine dip from which you’ll probably recover in minutes. But if, say, you truly expect your beloved to propose marriage and instead they skip town on you, the dopamine deficit will be a lot more severe and harder to endure—perhaps leading to a period of anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure that is characteristic of dysregulated dopamine levels and clinical depression.

Disappointment is especially severe for optimists: They predict outcomes that are above average, and much better than any negative occurrence. This means that they tend to have bigger “disconfirmed expectancies” than non-optimists. Writing in the journal Emotion in 2010, two psychologists studied how students felt before and after receiving exam results. They found that people with more optimistic expectations did not feel better than their peers beforehand, but did on average feel worse after learning their scores, because the optimists tended to be further from reality.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Schopenhauer’s advice on how to achieve great things]

Our lives are filled with uncertain outcomes, often involving the things we care about most deeply. To have any positive expectations means that disappointment is part of life. This has led some thinkers to conclude that the only answer is pessimism. The 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer famously made this case when he argued that “we generally find pleasure to be not nearly so pleasant as we expected, and pain very much more painful.” One conclusion from that: Expect nothing good ever, or even expect the worst, and you will never be disappointed.

Then again, Schopenhauer was well known for being a miserable person, so that may not be the best strategy. Better, I believe, to maintain hope amid life’s uncertainties—but to distinguish hope from optimism. Many people use the terms almost interchangeably, but they are different. Optimism involves an element of prediction—as we just saw, expecting a good outcome in a way that may be borderline delusional. Hope involves a belief that even if a disappointing result to a situation occurs, you can do something to improve that outcome—in the words of one team of researchers on the subject, “having the will and finding the way.” Because of this, as I have written, hope is far superior to optimism where happiness is concerned.

Hope does not require that you make any prediction at all about what might happen. It simply asks that you believe that whatever happens, you will have the ability to make circumstances better and you can give some thought to what that action might be.

In an odd way, this is halfway what people are doing when they announce a plan to leave America if the wrong candidate wins the election. But the contemplated action—leaving home and going into exile—is foolish and extreme; much better would be to say, “If the bad guy wins, I will be disappointed, but regardless of the disappointment, I will work as much as I can to make things around me better.” The same is true for other letdowns in life. If you’re yearning for a big promotion, don’t predict whether you will or won’t get it. Just be honest with yourself that you hope for the reward, and think logically about what constructive action you can take if, in fact, you are passed over.

In addition, because disappointment is part of the useful neurobiological learning process that you’ve inherited for your evolutionary fitness, look for the valuable lessons of a setback. The psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that when we are disappointed, we can actually choose between bitterness and wisdom—the latter being “the comforter in all psychic suffering.”

The problem with the leave-the-country approach is that it succumbs to bitterness instead of looking to learn. The same goes for a disappointment such as a bad breakup. The bitter response is “I’ll never date again.” A wise response is to figure out how to avoid getting entangled in future with a person who shares your ex’s problematic traits (that jerk).

[Arthur C. Brooks: Jung’s five pillars of a good life]

I wrote this column to soothe anyone who might be suffering from postelection disappointment, and to provide a better way to cope. But perhaps you aren’t disappointed: Maybe your candidate won, and you’re elated right now. That can also be an opportunity for wisdom—if you choose to take it.

Today you taste victory, but remember: Defeat is just around the corner, because that’s how life works. Reflect on this truth, and take the opportunity to show some grace to the neighbors and family members whose candidate lost and who are disappointed—because they’re feeling today the way you will surely feel tomorrow. Think of this as a chance to time travel, and bring a bit of kindness to comfort your future disappointed self.