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Habits and Strategies

Jul 25
Love1

The Most Important Moment

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

 

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.

One of the most severe punishments for a prisoner is solitary confinement; one of the most hurtful things kids do on a playground is to ditch another kid; one of the most frustrating and hurtful things that friends can do to each other is “the silent treatment.” These are all experiences of social isolation; and social isolation is the strongest psychological risk factor for disease. More than stress, more than anything else.

Of course the moments I’m talking about are not as severe as total social isolation, but they are threads of the same cloth. Research shows how even mild experiences can have a huge effect:

Pedestrians who walked past a stranger without getting any acknowledgment from that stranger reported a substantially lower sense of connection to other people – just from that one moment.

People riding an elevator who were completely ignored by the stranger next to them moved from feelings of happiness toward feelings of hurt.

In a computer simulation of a game of catch, when people were not thrown the ball for just 5 minutes, they felt more sadness, despair and hostility, and less self-esteem, sense of belonging, sense of control, and meaning in life… in 5 minutes. With a stranger. Even with a stranger they were told they would not like.

Imagine how much more intense it is for us to be ignored by somebody we know and care about.

And yet most of us are unaware of how often we do this.

It is so easy to get caught up in whatever it is that we’re doing, and miss these moments of contact – the moments when the people we care about ask for our attention. We usually think that it will be just fine to respond a little later when we’re done with our task. We do this not because we’re rotten people, or because we don’t care about our partner or children or friends, but because these moments can be easy to miss, and we don’t realize the power that’s contained in them.

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Jul 12
Love1

How to Redecorate Your Mind

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

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.

What images do you think of often? Do they warm you? Comfort you? Inspire you? Or do they remind you of regrets, disappointments, or painful events?

We can choose our internal mental images, but it’s not as simple as replacing pictures on the wall. We can tell ourselves to stop thinking of a certain memory, or we can distract ourselves from thinking about it, and that can have some effect. But there’s a better way that’s a little less direct.

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Jul 04
Love1

Finding the Edge to Build Better Habits

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

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… including the cravings for sugar and refined carbohydrates that have been fueling the alarming rise in obesity in recent decades.

In Walter Mischel’s “Marshmallow Experiment,” Young children were presented with a marshmallow (or cookie or other treat – they were given some options from which to choose), then given the opportunity to earn a second treat if they could wait for the experimenter to return – about 15-20 minutes later.

A lot of kids had a very hard time doing this, until they were told a very simple secret: they could imagine the treat as though it were only a picture of a treat. This turned the sensory stimulation of that immediately seductive treat into an abstract thought; and this very simple shift in attitude allowed children – who had zero resistance before – to now almost miraculously resist temptation.

By turning the immediate temptation into an abstraction, it lost its seductive power.

What does this have to do with body sensations, afferent nerves, and obesity?

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Jun 26
Love1

Time Well Spent

By Habits and Strategies, Happiness

 

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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Jun 20
Love1

Mastering Entropy

By Habits and Strategies

Entropy is a term from physics that describes the tendency for matter to move from order into disorder. Life can be seen as a process that is deliberately working against entropy.

If you ever watched the old Get Smart TV show, or the more recent movie, the good guys were called “Control,” and the bad guys were “Chaos.” For living creatures like us, that pretty well describes the situation. Chaos is where entropy draws everything naturally; control is the conscious ordering, the structure that we have to impose on ourselves and our environment in order to survive and flourish.

For most living creatures, instincts take charge of a lot of the necessary ordering which life requires; finding food, mating, sleep cycles, protective behavior, etc. The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger in his book, “What is Life,” proposed a molecule that directed these processes to counter entropy with “negative entropy,” and his hypothesis became an inspiration for Watson and Crick’s search for and discovery of DNA.

But we humans are different in a fundamental way: our basic survival tool is our mind, and unlike instinctual animals, we can choose to use our basic tool of survival… or not.

With our minds, we train our own brains to hold the structure of our lives. The habits that we practice daily, weekly, monthly; they are all based on neural pathways that we have established in our brain that make it easy and natural for us to follow these routines. These habits – if they are good ones – help us to resist entropy and have a sense of meaning, purpose and direction.

…and research is beginning to show the effects of our habits on genetic expression – which means that through our conscious choices and actions, we may actually be able to influence, to some degree, how our own DNA will direct us in the future.

The trouble is, many of the habits we develop are habits that we acquired by default – the routines that our family valued and practiced, or that our schools valued and practiced, or that any other influential people in our history have valued and practiced.

Or the habits that we ourselves developed in response to our environment growing up; the things we did that seemed to work then.

This can be wonderful if the people we learned from all had really good habits, great values, and were able to help us learn and practice the habits that would serve us the best; or if we happened to stumble along good habits while we wrestled with life’s challenges growing up.

It can be awful if the habits that we learned or developed are awful habits – whether we learn these directly through mimicking them, if we developed them in reaction to bad or hurtful events, or if we made and continued in bad choices along the way.

But even in the best of circumstances – a loving family, a supportive community, great opportunities for learning, responsibility, and growth – the habits that come easily to us may not be the best ones for our developing lives.

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Jun 15
Love1

Turning a Wish into a Triumph

By Habits and Strategies

Have you ever watched the downhill skiers in the Winter Olympics before a race, visualizing the run, moving and swaying their bodies as though they’re on the run itself? They all do this now, because the visualization is a powerfully effective strategy for bringing out their best.

But they aren’t picturing themselves with the gold medal and the national anthem playing. They’re crouched down in a skiing stance, imagining how they’ll negotiate the challenges of the run, practicing the specific skills that will get them to that gold medal.

Much is made these days of having a compelling future vision. Picturing yourself on the winner’s block, or with that book published, or that wonderful relationship; imagining a future that you can step into… The pop psychology literature is chock full of advice for seeing yourself having accomplished your goals.

But the pop psychology literature on this is wrong.

When we imagine having already achieved our goals, part of what happens is we feel like we’ve already achieved our goals; and because we feel the reward of the accomplishment already, our motivation to do the inevitable hard work required for any meaningful goal fades.

Dreams that matter are not easy; they take time and considerable effort.

Imagine you have a big goal that means a lot to you, you’re willing and expect to work very hard for it. Let’s imagine for fun that it’s a mountain that you want to summit. You’ve trained, you’ve prepared, and you’ve struggled physically and mentally to finally make it to the top.

Hooray! You’ve done it!

Now, how would you feel if having felt this amazing achievement, you suddenly discover you’ve only just started the climb, and you still have a very long ways to go?

I think most of us would feel disheartened, disappointed, let down. We also would have a hard time gathering up the same intensity of desire and focus that we initially had. We may still get there, but it would be more of a hard slog at that point, and less of an invigorating triumph.

This is exactly what we do to ourselves psychologically when we spend time just imagining what it will be like when we’ve already reached our goals. It saps our energy, and undermines our motivation.

But it is relaxing and comforting in the moment; which is why we do it… and why all those pop psychology authors have advised it.

When Gabriele Oettingen, professor of psychology at New York University and The University of Hamburg, and author of Rethinking Positive Thinking first discovered this, she was disappointed. She had hoped that dreaming about success could help people who were struggling to more easily reach their goals. Finding that it did the opposite made it hard for her to continue to study such fantasies.

Then she asked the interesting question:

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May 31
Love1

How to Have an Accurate Assessment of Yourself

By Habits and Strategies

 

If you know that who you are, what you do, and how you think about things are all changeable and accessible to your own intervention and effort—What Carol Dweck, author of Mindset calls a “growth” mindset—your assessment of yourself will also tend to be very accurate.

In contrast, if you believe that who you are, what you do, and how you think about things are all fixed and unchangeable—a “fixed-trait” mindset—you will then believe that you are at the mercy of forces outside of yourself, and your assessment of yourself will be predictably and dramatically inaccurate.

In order to make accurate assessments, we have to have accurate data. If we are faced with a poor assessment, and our belief is that we are powerless to change, then the only way to salvage any emotional hope is to skew the data, to trick ourselves into discounting it. In this case, the necessary self-reflection will feel threatening to us, containing blows to our self-concept, rather than feeling like useful information. This can lead to incredible suffering and bad results, and can lead us to avoid challenges or difficult feedback—the very things we need in order to grow.

Here’s the challenge:

Notice how you respond to feedback. Do you tend to reject negative feedback, become defensive, change the subject? Or do you hear it, feel the predictable emotions (nobody likes negative feedback; I wouldn’t expect you to feel happy about it), and then look for what there is to learn from it?

If you tend to reject it, chances are you are operating, in that particular area at least, within a fixed-trait mindset. If you can identify this, that’s very good news… because you can change it! By understanding that this is a fixed-trait mindset, you can choose to change it toward a growth mindset. Look for your assumptions about yourself that are fixed and immoveable, and dispute them. Sometimes this is all it takes; sometimes it’s more complicated and it’s important to get some help with it.

Now for an even trickier challenge: Pay attention to how you give yourself feedback, and how you take it.

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May 23
Love1

If You Want to Change Something, Measure It

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Habits and Strategies, MasteringHappiness

Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.
― H. James Harrington

 

Our ability to learn is based on feedback.

If I bump my head on a cabinet, the pain lets me know to duck next time… or to change the layout of my cabinets! If a conversation sparks my interest, that spark lets me know to pay closer attention. If I feel awful whenever I spend time with a particular acquaintance, that awful feeling tells me to search for the cause of the trouble and address it, or to reconsider spending more time with him.

There is a whole field of study of psychophysiology and biofeedback that is dedicated to helping people learn to control aspects of their physiology, including certain brainwaves, in order to achieve greater relaxation, lowered blood pressure, and other psychological and health benefits.

But we don’t need that level of sophistication in order to make use of biofeedback. Our own bodies, and many common devices, give us plenty to go on… if we pay attention. This holds the key to taking charge of much more of our psychological and physiological existence than many of us know.

For example, how do you know when you’re angry? The common answer is, “Well, because I feel angry!”

But there’s something else that happens besides the emotion or reaction of anger. We have physical sensations – our muscles tighten, our heart rate climbs, our breathing changes, our teeth clench… The specifics will vary to some degree for different people, but the more aware we can be of the physical sensations that accompany feeling angry, the easier it will be for us to sense that emotion coming on, and the better able we will be to catch it before we feel too consumed with emotion or overwhelmed by our fight system to think straight.

Panic attacks are often preceded by a shift in breathing as much as forty-five minutes before most people are aware of any feelings of panic. Becoming more aware of our breathing can help us catch those shifts and gently deepen our breathing long before our shallower breathing would have triggered a panic attack.

Situational awareness is noticing what’s going on around us, paying attention to our perceptions. When we tune in to our surroundings, we can more easily notice signs of potential danger. We might be driving and notice a car that’s weaving ever so slightly, and know to keep some extra distance in case they’re texting, or they’ve been drinking – or they’re maybe just a rotten driver.

When we don’t pay attention to our own physical sensations or perceptions, we can be easily blindsided – by our own emotions or reactions, or by external threats that seem to come out of nowhere.

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May 16
Love1

Using Hope Effectively

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Habits and Strategies, MasteringHappiness

 

When we think of emotions that can be dangerous, particularly for managing money and investing, we usually think of things like greed and fear. But there are other emotions that can get us into big trouble. Including hope.

But there’s a way to manage hope so that we’re able to have our dreams for the future, and then make them happen in the real world – if that’s possible.

Greed is a kind of hunger for things in themselves, disconnected from any genuine well-being, and regardless of the consequences. Fear speaks to the need for security – including that deep primal need for survival we talked about an earlier column.

Hope speaks to wishes for potential future flourishing.

A significant portion of our psyche leans toward the future. Our self-concept holds an evolving image of the person we want to be – always a bit better than we are now. Hope is the emotion that draws us toward that image, and the vision of the life we want to lead.

Hope lies at the heart of our aspirations and ambitions; our dreams and wishes. It fuels us to strive for goals and achievements.

It can also lead us to wish for things we cannot have, aspire to achievements we cannot reach, and fantasize dreams that we cannot fulfill.

To the degree that hope is integrated with reality, it can serve our greatest potential. To the degree that it is disconnected from reality, it can undermine that potential; keeping us floating helplessly in fantasy, unable to find traction and gain fulfillment in our lives.

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May 09
Love1

A Simple Tool for Managing Emotions

By Habits and Strategies, MasteringHappiness

Getting overwhelmed or misled by our emotions can be a source of significant trouble. Emotions are not simple, but sometimes there are simple actions we can take to manage complex things. Today let’s look at a simple way to avoid getting overwhelmed by your emotions.

  • When people were treated for phobias, practicing this simple skill lowered their fear by over 18%, and their psychological reactivity by over 27%. They also were less constricted generally, shifting from feeling a sense of threat to a sense of opportunity.
  • When feeling stress, using this technique led to people having 40% fewer alcoholic drinks when they went to a bar or party than those who did not use this technique.
  • When feeling angry with someone, those using this technique were 40% less verbally and physically aggressive than those who did not.
  • Rejection brings with it actual pain. When feeling rejected those using this technique showed less activity in the parts of the brain connected to physical and emotional pain.

Using this simple tool can help us to deal with emotionally upsetting situations with a greater sense of calm and competence.

Okay, enough buildup, here’s the skill:

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