BEST POSITIVE PSYCH – Page 14 – Senia Maymin, Ph.D.

Introducing … the Sharpbrains Blog!

Posted on Wednesday September 20, 2006Monday November 20, 2006 by Senia

Alvaro Fernandez has started a wonderful blog: the Sharpbrains blog, all about brain fitness! I posted once about the company that Alvaro runs, Sharpbrains, and the interesting articles on that website.

Here are some of my favorites from his posts so far:

The “It” in “Use It or Lose It”

Physical Fitness and Brain Fitness

The Brain and Mind Fitness Revolution is here with us

And today’s Sharpbrains post relates to both #2 mind-body and #3 decision-making: Mind/Body and the Role of Emotions in Decision-Making.

My favorite section of the sharpbrains blog is the brain exercises section. This section, which is updated with a new brain puzzles every few days, has you shuffle around different parts of your brain – sometime doing estimates and calculations, sometimes interesting word exercises, and my favorite is that Alvaro puts up many visual puzzles, such as the penny question, the Stroop test, and the classic old-lady/young-lady (see the post for an explanation of the below image):

So enjoy Alvaro’s blog! And he says that any questions you have on the brain to email him or to post comments on the blog.

In closing, here is the New Yorker’s recent update of the Old Lady / Young Lady discussion. :)

What have you done this week to make someone happy?

Posted on Friday September 15, 2006Monday November 20, 2006 by Senia

Question: What have you done today to make someone else happy?

This question comes from Lila. It was really good to see Lila a few days ago.
Ok, the first things I can think of are the ways that people have made me happy this week:

* A really good friend is coming to visit in October, and we haven’t seen each other in a long time; that’ll be so great! This made me super happy!
* Two great friends just moved really close to me – one hours away and one much closer! This made me very, very happy!
* Cherry pie!
* One friend agreeing to do something that we’d talked about before – and it’s something I think is really useful – that made me super happy.

So what are the things I did that probably made someone happy this week:

That was – all in all – a really good week.
Cool!

On Fridays, I post questions. If you feel like answering them, that would be wonderful! Have a great weekend.

When Is Intuition Different From a First Thought?

Posted on Wednesday September 13, 2006Monday November 20, 2006 by Senia

Have you had this happen to you? You’re writing a document and you get too caught up in the words when you go back to edit and revise. You start to think, “Well, maybe I should keep those words in there because that’s what my brain came up with so maybe there’s something to those things?”

Have you ever written an email with sensitive content, and gone back and forth to look over the words? And have you ever thought, “Hey, I put those words in initially – there must be some reason I did that. Maybe I shouldn’t change them.”

It’s a little bit as if the ego (the part of yourself that has an opinion and a viewpoint and a sense of pride) gets caught on a string of words, and doesn’t necessarily want to let that string go.

It might just be a first thought. It might not be intuition.
It might not be something you need to attach your thoughts to.

More on this topic later.
Have a great Wed,
Senia

Introducing … Dave Shearon

Posted on Thursday August 31, 2006Friday November 24, 2006 by Senia

Hello and welcome to a great new site. This is a classmate of mine from last year’s Master of Positive Psychology program, and he is a wonderful person. He has a super blog about positive psychology and applications to law and to education.

Here is Dave Shearon’s blog! I’m a big fan of Dave’s blog. It’s very descriptive and very detailed and very alive! Check it out yourself!

One of Dave’s last posts was a summary of Positive Psychology Books that he recommends. Great, great summary. I especially like Dave’s summaries of these two books, which are absolutely among my favorites:

The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt (2005) It’s not just intelligences that are multiple! Try multiple brains! Or, at least, multiple relatively independent systems in the brain. Haidt’s metaphor of the rider and the elephant is worth reading the book. Great writer. Sound insights.

The Paradox of Choice, Schwartz. Are you generally a “maximizer” or “satisficer”? Should you care? Good book not only for consumers, but for achievers. Since nothing’s ever “finished”, what does “do your best” mean?

And here is an absolutely delightful little entry called “Poof!” that I find myself recalling with a smile!

Here is a positive psychology study that Dave created for high school students along with two other classmates of ours: high school study.

And here is the positive psychology section of Dave’s blog that I really, really enjoy.

Just because I read him for the positive psychology, don’t think that you shouldn’t tune in for the education, how to run schools, and law discussions! Nice, nice insights. ENJOY!

—
p.s. I specifically meant to post this on August 30!

Change One Habit at a Time

Posted on Wednesday August 23, 2006Wednesday August 23, 2006 by Senia

A lot of the best lessons that I’ve learned about life, I’ve learned from rockclimbing. When I first got into indoor rock climbing, it was through six classes, meeting every Tuesday, at Planet Granite, and our instructor was Kris, in case she’s still teaching there. She is an incredible instructor. She’s a young rock climber, and she climbs wonderfully. Our class was six women, and the best part about it is that we worked on one new technique every week.

That’s it. One new technique. This means that we learned six new techniques. All those are still the basics of what I use to climb today. It is my favorite way to learn anything: one habit at a time.

You could try to learn two at a time, but then one of the things your mind becomes engaged in is monitoring the transitions, “Am I climbing close enough to the wall? Oh, I forgot – am I using quiet hands? Oh, close enough to the wall? … Quiet hands?” Just the mental switching from thought to thought can make you less effective in addressing either new habit.

Like I was telling a friend recently in an email, the best thing I can do for myself when I’m going for a run is to think only about the running (the running, my breathing, the road, but really only about the run itself). Once my mind starts to wander and think about work or friends, I physically find myself slowing down and sometimes stopping! One thing at a time.

Daniel Gilbert in his Stumbling on Happiness says a similar thing – the mind can either imagine something visually or it can observe something visually – it does not do both at the same time because the brain uses the same wiring to IMAGINE seeing as something as it uses in actually SEEING something. So, if you’re running, and start to picture an issue at work that you’re working on resolving, then your mind starts to IMAGINE the work issue in all its details, and STOPS SEEING IN YOUR MIND the road, seeing your lungs getting healthier, seeing your fast-paced stride.

The mind is a powerful motivator of the body. This is one of the benefits many people that meditate regularly give about their meditation – that just learning to focus on one thing is initially difficult and incredibly rewarding as a feeling.

Finally, Ben Franklin in his life worked on changing fifteen of his habits, including temperance (moderation in food and drink), laziness, organization, etc. Franklin addressed one habit per week. His goal was to be impeccable in that habit in that week, and to ignore the other habits during that week. he succeeded in going through all fifteen habits in fifteen weeks, and then he started them right up again for the following fifteen weeks. But again, one at a time. Focus.

One thing at a time. Simplicity. Making it easy. Making winning easy. If I were Mr. Miyagi, I would end this post with “wax on, wax off.”

Feynman’s Rainbow

Posted on Wednesday August 23, 2006Monday November 20, 2006 by Senia

This is a great book about Richard Feynman. It’s writted by Leonard Mlodinow, who was a young faculty member at Caltech while Feynman was a Nobel-prize-winning professor there. Mlodinow audio recorded several conversations with Feynman about life and about how and why Feynman did science. Mlodinow describes how years later he pulled the Radio Shack audio cassettes out of his basement and realized that he wanted to uncover Feynman’s thoughts and write them up.

Feynman’s Rainbow is written as a series of stories of Mlodinow himself figuring out how and why physics works and academia works interspersed with pages of direct quotes from Feynman.

Best parts of the book: Feynman talking about why he does science, Feynman describing his first love Arlene, Feynman scolding Mlodinow about Mlodinow’s reasons for choosing one research area over any other. It’s an active book. You hear the two characters Mlodinow and Feynman talking. It’s nice.

Surprising parts of the book: The string theory explanantion was surprisingly interesting. Also, just how much of a kid Feynman was – was surprisingly interesting. Just that he had to take everything apart and put it back together himself before believing it.

One of the best messages: Do what you love, man. Because otherwise, there could come a time when you’re looking at the ceiling and you have no reason for doing what you do. Avoid that, love it in the first place.
(Messages are personal, what a person gets out of a book is usually quite personal, so this is just one of the best messages).

Reading this book also made me go back to the library and immediately check out the two great books of stories that Feynman wrote about his own life: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character.

Happiness is Brighter Walls?

Posted on Friday August 18, 2006Monday November 20, 2006 by Senia

Here is a NY Times article, looking at whether coloring your rooms and your home in brighter colors can make you happier.

It describes how there is a larger interested in positive psychology, as seen in Harvard’s most popular course being on positive psychology. And it describes the forthcoming book “The Architecture of Happiness,” which talks about how buildings and environment affect our moods. The article also describes the strong new counter-point to the past view of elegance, which used to be white or beige walls.

Reading the article, it sounds like the interior decorators in this article are called in to make everything appear in their style of bright colors. It seems that the interior decorators don’t look particularly at each person, and what bright colors may work for that person, but that they look at their style, and apply it to the house. For example, that bright candystriped bedroom in the photo looks like it could belong in anyone’s home, and is not necessarily personal to that family. Caveat: I could be way wrong, and it could be that each such room is very, very personal to the people that live there.

What would seem wrong to me is having one-size-fits-all approach to bright colors. Maybe I’m reading into the article too much.

Colors are so personal. For example, I know a woman who has a yellow kitchen, and her place is WONDERFUL in yellow! It is just right for her and her family. It feels like her when you stand there: it feels energetic, young, and alive. I know a woman whose kitchen cupboards are eggplant purple – it’s wonderful (and dark as opposed to the bright colors advocated in this article), but it’s wonderful for her and her family! It feels deep and warm and homey. And that’s what make both these homes great: the personal touch, the personal liking of individual color choices and their fit to the homes.

I agree that what you look at every day matters. I agree that your environment has a big influence on you. I don’t believe that 1) other people can tell you that they know what’s best for you (yes, they can suggest, but not top-down tell you), and that 2) what is best for one person’s environment is best for another person’s environment (as long as there is significant variety in recommendations for different people).

One of the biggest points about happiness is that people have more happiness when they feel personal control. So if a decorator were to come in, and tell you that you should like bright colors (and this particular combination of bright colors) better, then that’s the opposite of personal control. Most decorators do personalize everything – just the way I read the article, I got the impression that bright colors were more important to these decorators than making the place fit the personality of the people hiring them. And that couldn’t be so; it wouldn’t make sense; they wouldn’t be in business. Since if not q then not p, then I must have been wrong that the decorators aren’t personalizing their bright color recommendations.

On Friendship

Posted on Thursday August 17, 2006Monday November 20, 2006 by Senia

I recently needed help with something just about in the middle of the night, and I called a friend. This made me think of these quotes. It is beautiful.

“I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with the roughest courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work, but the solidest thing we know.”
“A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.”
“A Friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The best mirror is an old friend.”
~ George Herbert

“When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves.”
~ William Arthur Ward

“Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.”
~ Mark Twain

“It is more shameful to distrust one’s friends than to be deceived by them.”
~ Duc de la Rochefoucauld

“Never injure a friend, even in jest.”
~ Cicero

” ‘Stay’ is a charming word in a friend’s vocabulary.”
~ Louisa Mary Alcott

“What is a friend? A single soul in two bodies.”
~ Aristotle

How to Diminish Effects of Stress on the Brain

Posted on Wednesday August 16, 2006Monday November 20, 2006 by Senia

Given this article Stress Can Shrink Your Brain that we talked about here, if stress may damage the brain, then how can people diminish the effects of stress on their brains?

EXERCISE! is mentioned frequently in the article as an important way to diminsh the effects of stress. Additionally, the Forbes article says, ‘ “Everything we already know about fighting off chronic disease, like getting sufficient sleep, staying active throughout life, and having a healthy diet” may stave off premature aging of the immune system….’

Also, please see this marvelous article by Marian Diamond that includes thoughts on exercise being great for the brain. Here are a few parts of the article:

The hippocampus deals with the processing of recent memory and visual spatial processing. As we age and our blood vessels become less efficient, it is very important to get the oxygen through the vascular system up to the hippocampus, as well as to the rest of the brain and body.”

So, to relieve stress, consider getting more oxygen to the brain.

Also, check out the Change or Die article that I mentioned a couple of days ago about the importance of lifestyle. This article takes the view that people should stop blaming genetics or thier environment, and in fact, should start diligently exercising and eating well.

Doing Can Be Easier Than Not Doing

Posted on Wednesday August 16, 2006Monday November 20, 2006 by Senia

I’m sitting on my couch reading a fiction book a friend of mine gave me when I look over at my plant and realize… it’s time to water it. I figure, well, ok, when I get up for a glass of water, or maybe just after I finish this chapter, or just later, or maybe tomorrow. After I read a little longer, I look back up – again, I remember the plant, and that it needs water right about now – today or tomorrow. So I tell myself I’ll water it for sure if not tonight then tomorrow. Then I get up to get something from the kitchen, and when I come back, I realize the plant is right there.

Finally, and only after reminding myself that “doing something can be easier than not doing!,” do I go into the kitchen, get some water and water the plant, and the one in the next room too.

When you recognize that something needs to be done, and then you put off doing it, you start to occupy the brain with an extra thought. Yes, you can write it down, and then you occupy the brain less. (You’ll only occupy the brain when you return to the list and see “water the plant” on it and then schedule that activity into your day.) But think about it! How long does it take to water the plant? How long does it take to write down “water the plant” and then schedule the time when you’ll do it? EXACTLY!!! :)

This is one of David Allen‘s biggest points: you want to get organized so that your brain has more free time! Less stress on the brain, less minute things to remember and to juggle.

This is like Dave Seah says in describing his father visiting him: “If you clean up after yourself constantly, you will have a clean house! When he walks around the house, he automatically sees things that need to be arranged better or cleaned.”

Maybe it’s starting to sound pretty appealing to just do something at the moment you think of doing it? Maybe it’s starting to sound like an easier way to live? …But what if you start an action (like going through your mail for example) and it turns into too big a project, and then you get behind on your other obligations? That’s a valid concern. David Allen suggests that if something is going to take two minutes – that’s right, two minutes – then do it now. If more, then write it down and plan it.

And the biggest reason to do things rather than putting them off? You can reduce stress on yourself. Trying to remember is occupying your brain. Trying to remember too much may be stressing your brain. In the latest Forbes issue is the article Stress Can Shrink Your Brain. There’s been research on rats that stress physically shrinks parts of the brain. So give your brain a break – don’t burden it with unnecessary stress! Do something rather than remember another ‘todo’ item.