I still felt overwhelmed, and my take-away note was just that, yes, we should try to strengthen our resiliency, but life can just be hard sometimes. TIME's "The Science of Happiness" did have a few things to add to my reservoir about resiliency: "Like the animal whose pulse returns quickly to normal once it has outrun a predator, resilient brains seem to shut off the stress response and return to baseline quickly.
The idea of trying to return quickly to a state of calm is an interesting one to me. I had already discovered, about myself, that I can do pretty well through a crisis, or even a series of crises, depending on their severity, of course, but I seemed to have almost routine trouble after the crisis had ended. That's when I'd have more trouble either in overreacting to others or in my own thoughts. I called it, in my own mind, the "denouement. Coming off of the adrenaline rush to a more calm state didn't go smoothly for me.
Or, as the TIME booklet phrased it, the "shut off the stress response and return to a baseline quickly. It was, in effect, reminding myself to calm down, "be at rest," reminding myself that the crisis was over "has been," and reminding myself to be grateful for all the little ways that I'd seen goodness through the ordeal, "for the Lord has been good to you. Another of TIME's quotes in this section: " The more we use this neuronal superhighway, the more efficient it grows, and this mode of thinking becomes our default.
But new research shows humans can train their brains to build and strengthen different connections that don't reinforce the fear circuit. Over time, if people use this new pathway enough, it can become the new response to stress. I'll note the recommended book, in case, in the future, I should ever want to find it: "Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges.
Although the Marines showed more biological ability to calm down after trauma than they had previously, interestingly, the Marines didn't feel more resilient. My take on it was that there was a difference in the way the Marines' bodies reacted, but their souls still felt unsettled. In the BMX study, the participants were told that the training could affect their brains, and afterwards they reported that they felt more resilient.
So, in effect, telling them that in advance biased them to feel differently. Although the article's author didn't spell it out as the placebo effect, I have to wonder.
Maybe such training can lower our biological responses to stress, which certainly would help greatly and is a great place to start. But, the Marines could still feel something was amiss. They didn't trust that they had healed from their experiences. And the BMX cyclists could feel differently because they had been told they would. In Time's "The Science of Happiness" chart on how different family structures affect happiness, they left out the category entirely of people who were single with no kids.
That seems, to me, to be a significant portion of the population! As well as overlooking some of my friends. In the article, "Jump for Joy," I liked the suggestion of "the act of savoring - mining pleasant moments for their joy - is proven to increase happiness. I found that in doing so, the moments of peace stretched longer and longer, until they began to blur together. The same article mentioned a study in which it was found that the more people went on Facebook, the more their life-satisfaction levels declined.
I had read a different, and I think, later study mentioned by Psychology Today that said that it depended on how one uses Facebook. Those that post and are affirmed by others actually are happier, but those that just scroll and read the postings of others, without posting themselves, are less happy, presumably because they are either envious of others' situations or not receiving the same level of affirmation, because they are not posting.
That study didn't mention those who post and are not affirmed for it. Another TIME quote: "Chatty commuters - introverts and extroverts alike - reported having the most pleasant commutes.
Some of the rest of this booklet seemed to be more geared towards extroverts, without considering that introverts might feel differently. Secondly, not all introverts think alike, either, and I suspect that some might find the silence, and the chance to process their workday more refreshing. In the section "Money Can't Buy Happiness," I liked the quote, "And perhaps most tellingly, they [happy people] aren't bothered by the successes of others They dare not to compare.
I thought that they did a pretty funny, but accurate synopsis of the Biblical ones - Abraham and David, among others - and ended up with a mixed bag of whether or not children make one happy.
I'm surprised they didn't add "Sons are a heritage from the Lord, children a reward from him. That's the past, though; today, many of the descendants of those flinty Protestants now preach the prosperity gospel. The prosperity gospel, I believe, in the long term leads only to disillusionment and discouragement, not happiness, as God does not fulfill promises He never made or promises that were taken out of context.
I was sad to hear that the Dalai Lama's book "The Art of Happiness" also fell down that path as well. Even if I don't agree with their philosophy, I would have at least agreed that the purpose of life is beyond our own gratification and pleasure.
Life can be such a beautiful mystery. Let's not degrade it by making it all about us. That goes back to hedonism that I mentioned at the beginning of this review. It was interesting to note the finding that religion often does not lead to happiness if one does not believe like the majority, whether that's atheism in the Netherlands or Christianity in the United States.
That study may not have investigated the extreme case of that, in which a minority religion is persecuted, but it makes me think of it. It's hard to be happy when one is being persecuted for beliefs, whatever those beliefs are, and there can be such a thing as verbal harassment and bullying, which are a slight form of persecution.
It reminded me of what the Apostle Paul said 1 Cor , speaking of persecution: "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.
He then went on to say what his hopes were. If we are to choose Christianity, we should choose it for reasons other than immediate happiness, although, yes, God often does grant peace and even joy. But those are not the same thing as happiness. I would've answered somewhat differently than C.
Lewis did in the article on happiness below. I would've said that while we have the legal right to pursue happiness which is different than the legal right to happiness itself - the government can't guarantee that , while we have this right to pursue happiness, not all pursuits of happiness are equally likely to end up in happiness, either in ourselves or others. I also would've said that the pursuit of happiness does involve more aspects than Lewis considered.
I would've added choice of a vocation, hobbies, and religion among them. But I still thought Lewis had some good thoughts. Article below. Sep 15, Jayne Elizabeth rated it really liked it.
A review of the topic. New information regarding diet. Great infographics and maps. More specific information regarding the happiness of residents of each state would have been helpful, since some individuals live in poverty. Sep 26, Sundhar Subramanian rated it it was amazing.
A collection of topics that a casual reader can use towards bettering themselves. Will definitely make a small progress in your search of happiness. Aug 11, Anita Mar rated it really liked it. Not enough depth It's an interesting material to read but I felt there was not enough depth. Most of the points mentioned were not new to me. Haley Dagenais rated it liked it Apr 01, Quinn Strickler rated it it was amazing Jan 25, Sina Dabiri rated it really liked it Sep 01, Cirrus Cluster rated it really liked it Feb 16, Dinesh rated it it was amazing Jan 25, Eliza Anne rated it really liked it Nov 24, Ed rated it liked it Aug 29, Teji Reve rated it it was amazing Oct 20, Tiffany rated it really liked it Jul 24, Jane rated it liked it Jan 02, Chantelle Wrubleski rated it really liked it Nov 09, Mental health, he reasoned, should be more than the absence of mental illness.
It should be something akin to a vibrant and muscular fitness of the human mind and spirit. Over the decades, a few psychological researchers had ventured out of the dark realm of mental illness into the sunny land of the mentally hale and hearty. Perhaps the most eager explorer of this terrain was University of Illinois psychologist Edward Diener, a.
For more than two decades, basically ever since he got tenure and could risk entering an unfashionable field, Diener had been examining what does and does not make people feel satisfied with life.
He also invited Hungarian-born psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi pronounced cheeks sent me high , best known for exploring a happy state of mind called flow, the feeling of complete engagement in a creative or playful activity familiar to athletes, musicians, video-game enthusiasts — almost anyone who loses himself in a favorite pursuit.
By the end of their week at the beach, the three had plans for the first-ever conference on positive psychology, to be held in Akumal a year later — it was to become an annual event — and a strategy for recruiting young talent to the nascent field. Within a few months, Seligman, who has a talent for popularizing and promoting his areas of interest, was approached by the Templeton Foundation in England, which proceeded to create lucrative awards for research in positive psych.
The result: an explosion of research on happiness, optimism, positive emotions and healthy character traits. Seldom has an academic field been brought so quickly and deliberately to life.
What Makes Us Happy So, what has science learned about what makes the human heart sing? Take wealth, for instance, and all the delightful things that money can buy. Research by Diener, among others, has shown that once your basic needs are met, additional income does little to raise your sense of satisfaction with life.
A good education? Sorry, Mom and Dad, neither education nor, for that matter, a high IQ paves the road to happiness. No, again. In fact, older people are more consistently satisfied with their lives than the young. A complicated picture: married people are generally happier than singles, but that may be because they were happier to begin with.
Sunny days? Nope, although a study showed that Midwesterners think folks living in balmy California are happier and that Californians incorrectly believe this about themselves too. A giant yes. Measuring Our Moods Of course, happiness is not a static state. And even the bluest have their moments of joy. That has presented a challenge to social scientists trying to measure happiness. That, along with the simple fact that happiness is inherently subjective.
To get around those challenges, researchers have devised several methods of assessment. Diener has created one of the most basic and widely used tools, the Satisfaction with Life Scale.
Though some scholars have questioned the validity of this simple, five-question survey, Diener has found that it squares well with other measures of happiness, such as impressions from friends and family, expression of positive emotion and low incidence of depression.
Researchers have devised other tools to look at more transient moods. Csikszentmihalyi pioneered a method of using beepers and, later, handheld computers to contact subjects at random intervals.
A pop-up screen presents an array of questions: What are you doing? How much are you enjoying it? Are you alone or interacting with someone else? The method, called experience sampling, is costly, intrusive and time consuming, but it provides an excellent picture of satisfaction and engagement at a specific time during a specific activity. Just last month, a team led by Nobel Prize—winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University unveiled a new tool for sizing up happiness: the day-reconstruction method.
Participants fill out a long diary and questionnaire detailing everything they did on the previous day and whom they were with at the time and rating a range of feelings during each episode happy, impatient, depressed, worried, tired, etc.
The method was tested on a group of women in Texas with some surprising results. It turned out that the five most positive activities for these women were in descending order sex, socializing, relaxing, praying or meditating, and eating. Exercising and watching TV were not far behind. That may seem surprising, given that people frequently cite their children as their biggest source of delight — which was a finding of a TIME poll on happiness conducted last month. The kids were such a pain!
The two are very different, and studies show they do not correlate well. Our overall happiness is not merely the sum of our happy moments minus the sum of our angry or sad ones. This is true whether you are looking at how satisfied you are with your life in general or with something more specific, such as your kids, your car, your job or your vacation.
Kahneman likes to distinguish between the experiencing self and the remembering self. His studies show that what you remember of an experience is particularly influenced by the emotional high and low points and by how it ends. So, if you were to randomly beep someone on vacation in Italy, you might catch that person waiting furiously for a slow-moving waiter to take an order or grousing about the high cost of the pottery. The power of endings has been demonstrated in some remarkable experiments by Kahneman.
One such study involved people undergoing a colonoscopy, an uncomfortable procedure in which a flexible scope is moved through the colon. While a control group had the standard procedure, half the subjects endured an extra 60 seconds during which the scope was held stationary; movement of the scope is typically the source of the discomfort. It turned out that members of the group that had the somewhat longer procedure with a benign ending found it less unpleasant than the control group, and they were more willing to have a repeat colonoscopy.
Seligman, in contrast, puts the emphasis on the remembering self. For him, studying moment-to-moment experiences puts too much emphasis on transient pleasures and displeasures. Happiness goes deeper than that, he argues in his book Authentic Happiness. It turns out that engagement and meaning are much more important. Can We Get Happier?
0コメント