Joel Wade

We are all familiar with the basic guidelines for good health: exercise, eat right – more fruits and veggies, less red meat, more fish, fewer calories, more fiber, less sugar- don’t smoke, don’t abuse alcohol or drugs.  If we follow these guidelines and maintain an optimal weight, many health problems would be greatly diminished.

But there is another dimension to our health. How we think and feel, how we interact with others, and the kind of activities we spend our time doing can have a huge impact on our physical health.

We can assess these different habits and behaviors by how they affect our happiness, our relationships, and our resilience. Which helps us to function better? Which helps us to enjoy the company of family and friends? Which helps us to be more effective and to live a better life?

Fortunately, over the years there has been a great deal of very good research that is beginning to show some clear and consistent guidelines for how to practice psychological health, and live a happier and more fulfilling life.

It’s also shown some practices that can lead to a physically healthier life.

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Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics called it akrasia – a weakness of will, acting in a way contrary to our consciously held moral values. It’s the quality that most distinguishes criminals from the rest of us; and the quality that most distinguishes less successful people from those who are more successful.

The ability to resist our short-term impulses and desires, and to focus instead on our long-term values and goals is the most important capacity for living well.

In the late 1960’s, Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University, conducted one of the most important experiments in psychology. It’s now called The Marshmallow Test, but marshmallows were only one of a variety of treats used to tempt young limbic systems to indulge in their immediate desires.

Children from age three on up were left alone in a room with treats – luscious marshmallows, yummy cookies… the children got to decide which treats they’d be tantalized by. They were given two options: ring a bell to call the experimenter back in the room, at which point they could eat one of the indulgences; or wait until the experimenter came back some twenty minutes later, and get to eat two of the treats.

This was a test of the ability to delay gratification. Following up in the decades since, Mischel and his colleagues have found that those children who were able to wait longer also were more successful in many crucial ways as time went on.

As teenagers, they scored an average of 210 points higher on their SAT scores. As adults, they were better able to pursue and reach long term goals, including reaching higher educational levels; they were less likely to use drugs, had a significantly lower body mass index, were better able to deal well with challenges in work and maintain close relationships.

Later, when brain imagery technology was used to study these now grown children, those who had maintained a high level of self-control over the course of their lives showed more activity in their prefrontal cortex – the area that integrates the higher functions of motivation and control.

Those who were less able to delay showed more activity in the more primitive ventral striatum – which involves desire, pleasure, and addiction.

The children who were able to resist the siren song of immediate treats went on to lead more disciplined and successful lives than those who were not. This could lead us to think there’s something inborn, a fixed trait of self-control present from early childhood, that would allow some people to flourish and succeed, while others were doomed to a life of self-indulgence and failure.

That’s the message a lot of people have taken from a superficial look at these experiments, but they’ve missed the point entirely…

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A marriage, a friendship, a close family relationship… all of our important relationships are built on countless moments, innumerable interactions that either build qualities of trust, joy, and respect – or undermine those qualities.

Today I want to show you what is arguably the most important moment for building a trusting, satisfying, loving relationship.

We can often think that what makes a difference in a romantic relationship, or our relationship with our kids, or other friends and relatives, are the big things; the romantic getaway for the weekend, or the great gift that we buy.

…but there is a moment that packs more leverage, more meaning, and more potential for doing good – or harm – than almost any other: the moment when someone we care about asks for our attention.

Changing how we respond in that moment can enliven the entire atmosphere of our relationships. To understand why, we must first look at what happens to us when we’re ignored.

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Believe it or not, you have a powerful resource inside your head, one that can provide a reservoir of joy, strength and perseverance.   Once you recognize it – and practice tapping into it – you can use it not just to boost your day but to improve the quality of your entire life.  Best of all, it’s as straightforward as hanging a picture on the wall …

Think about the photographs you have displayed in your home.  Are they pictures of the miserable times, the disappointments, the conflicts, the traumas? Did you set things up so you are constantly reminded of the events and people who hurt you most?

Of course not. We’ve all had those times, of course. It’s part of life. But when we put pictures on the wall of our home, we choose pictures of the people we love, the peak moments. We want to be reminded of how adorable our kids were at that age, or the great trip we took that summer, or a favorite quality of someone we love.

We do this because it affects the entire atmosphere of our home. It’s part of what makes our house feel like a home. We may have boxes of pictures stored away that cover a wider range of experience, but what we want to see every day are the images that warm us, comfort us, inspire us.

In a similar way, we have images we reflect on in our mind’s eye; memories of times past, of people and events. We don’t regularly reflect on that many images; probably about as many as the pictures we have hanging on our wall.

And just as the pictures on our wall create a mood in our home, the pictures we reflect on in our minds create an atmosphere within ourselves. What many of us don’t realize is that we have the same ability to choose those internal images as we do to choose the pictures on the wall.

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We have a wonderful deli/bakery nearby that has great, healthy food, and very yummy, not-so-healthy treats – cookies, éclairs, pastries… very tempting stuff. Every once in awhile I’m seduced by these delicacies, and when I am, I almost always notice something afterwards: I don’t feel as good as I did before.

It’s not a severely bad feeling, and I can easily ignore it if I want to. But if I pay attention to the sensations in my body, there’s a clearly different feeling from my insides; it’s not as pleasant as it was before I had eaten the sugar and fat filled morsel.

This is the key to making our fight against bad habits a fair fight.

About 80 percent of the nerves connected to our viscera are afferent – meaning they send signals to our brain from our organs. These are sensory nerves, designed to give feedback about what’s happening within our bodies.

Until recently medical texts claimed that there was little or no sensory information coming from our organs. We now know that’s not true; there are well understood pathways from a part of our vagus nerve that send these sensory signals. Interestingly, Charles Darwin wrote about this over 100 years ago, but it never became widely appreciated until now.

But it’s also extremely common for us as we grow and deal with our challenges and goals – and peer pressure, and impatience of our fellow humans – to learn to ignore much of what these signals are telling us.

By ignoring the sensations of our bodies, we effectively deprive ourselves of one of our great strengths to overcome short term temptation…

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Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
–          TS Eliot, Burnt Norton

Time is a continuous, objectively measurable forward movement. We measure it with the rotation of the earth, the orbit of the earth about the sun, and the tilt of her axis relative to that sun as we make our way about it, seen through the changing seasons.

While the mechanics of time in a basic way are well understood, our experience of time and our relationship to time is complex, and can hold the key to our experience of life itself.

Phil Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Stanford and author of “The Time Cure,” (famous also for the Stanford Prison Experiment, a classic study in our susceptibility to the abuse of power), describes 6 different time orientations:

• Past-positive – you’re happy about the past events of your life, focusing on the positive
• Past-negative – you regret, dwell on and exaggerate the painful events of your past
• Present hedonism – you enjoy and seek pleasure in the present
• Present fatalism – you’re passive about the present, feeling that events are not in your control
• Goal-oriented future – make plans and seek to actively accomplish things to better your life
• Transcendental future – you seek to be good in this life seeking to be rewarded after death

Our happiness is dependent to a large degree on our relationship to these 6 different time orientations.

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