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Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday features.

Positive Psychology in the news – Feb 28, 2007

Posted on by Senia

Positive Psychology has been in the news recently (full summary here at Positive Psychology News Daily).

  • EU citizens report themselves as 87% happy! From this Reuters news, the Eurobarometer survey asked social questions to nearly 27,000 people in the EU during Nov and Dec 06. While 87% of people on average considered themselves happy, Denmark led with 97% and Bulgaria (which joined the EU in January) was the lowest with 45%.
    FYI, Map of the EU here. FULL RESULTS of the Eurobarometer survey here.

    Conclusion? What’s the point then of happiness research – if it turns out people are pretty happy already? Depends – if you’re happy, do you still want to know how to get happier, more successful, and more productive? Or is generally happy the goal, and no higher? Maslow says self-actualization is one of the main needs of people – always becoming better at who we are. Is he right? I think so.

  • Scientific American writer calls for more historical-based research of happiness. I disagree. I don’t like historical research when your goal is to find out how a person feels or thinks. FYI, historical research consists of looking at old documents, diaries, newspaper clippings to try to evaluate the person’s mindset. A person could be very crotchety on the outside – sayings to friends, even diary – but could be wonderfully content and happy on the inside.

    I believe one of the VERY BEST THINGS ABOUT POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY is that it BELIEVES IN THE PERSON. Positive Psychology believes that a person knows best about himself or herself. There is no “objective measure” of happiness. In fact, the Ed Diener-created SWB (subjective well-being measure) is explicitly a measure of how the person believes he is.

    I do agree with the author that happiness can be time- and context-dependant. But I think the way to make positive psychology and happiness research more universal is not by going backwards, but by going forwards. George Vaillant has made a research life of studying the longitudinal Adult Grant Study. This is a study of people that were generally healthy people at ages 20, and what happens to them over their lives. He studies alcoholism, mature emotional defenses, happiness, success, and all because he had regular interviews and interesting follow-ups with the same people. (For more information, I recommend the immensely interesting read Aging Well.)

    Conclusion? We will get stronger and more interesting conclusions from positive psychology when we study it both in short-term studies and in logitudinal studies.

  • Dissertation of the Year is on Positive Psychology. Very interesting dissertation of the year. Kudos to Virigina Ambler! FULL TEXT of dissertation here, and summary here.

    Conclusions? 1) It’s a very interesting dissertation, and 2) while there so far only one Ph.D. program in Positive Psychology and only one Master’s program, there will likely be more universities offering both Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in the near future since there is an interest in further research in these fields.

Q: What’s your recent self-challenge?

Posted on by Senia

Welcome to Question Friday! We’ve been talking about self-regulation and about streeeetching yourself toward a challenge.

Where are you excitingly pushing yourself? Where are you going to grow? Where are you most alive? Where are you challenging yourself enough to create that “healthy stress” that I love so much – that combination of anticipation and what-if-ness.

Q: What’s your recent intense self-challenge?

I actually think today’s question may be too personal to post an answer as a comment (or you can always post anonymously and just use my email address for the required field – it’s in the upper right under “Email.” If you find it too personal to answer outloud, simply skip the comments section this Friday. Just ponder it for a moment.

Be well, great weekend,
S.

Little Eddie Builds a — What?

Posted on by Senia

I remember best by stories, so since today is Story Tuesday, I’ll tell a little story about David Armano’s new Ed experience diamond and what little Eddie is like as a pre-engineer on the hot beach.

Once there was a little boy named Eddie. Eddie was a curious, fingers-in-everything, seven-year-old boy with blond unkempt hair and usually bare feet.

Stimulate the Senses – Hot on the Toes, Charred Hamburger
He had bare feet. He was on the beach on an early Sunday morning with his Mom and younger brother and sister. But he was far away from them all playing on the hot, hot sand by the water. It was already hot enough on the sand that he could only comfortably walk by the water’s edge. On the hot sand, he had had to run on his tiptoes to not burn his feet. His Mom let him play on the shore by himself because he was the oldest. He had tiptoe-hopped off across the hot sand away from his brother and sister because he wanted to bring them something fun to play with. As he was hopping away on his toes and fast, he smelled the charring of the hamburgers from the concession stand and he thought he could almost smell the hot, wilting strawberries through the tupperware that his Mom had brought and had left lying on top of the sun-drenched cotton blanket.

Design for People – For His Brother and Sister
Eddie walked on the shore and saw the shells and smooth rocks. He stopped suddenly seeing two similar-sized flat, white shells. He looked very carefully to find any other white shells of the same size. And he did – he saw two others. He knew what he wanted to make. He stuck the four shells into the ground all parallel, two in front, two in back, and then he looked around carefully. He found what he was looking for. A dead horseshoe crab, or what was left. He set it on top of the other shells, and it looked like a car. Like a car!

Share Meaningful Stories – Horseshoe Crabs and Strawberries?
He picked all the pieces up, and ran toe after toe, hopping over the increasingly hot sand. Straight to their beach blanket. Then he said to his three-year-old sister and four-year-old brother, “Want to see what I got you!?” Yes, they both said. So he built it again – the four shells in the ground, and the fat, somewhat-chipped horseshoe crab on top. And he started telling his brother and sister stories. How the horseshoe crab was the king crab and that’s why the other shells carried him in such a royal way. How the car had traveled all over the beach, stopping at their blanket because not-living horseshoes like the smell of strawberries in tupperware. And other stories.

Built to Last – Building a Stronger Horseshoe Crab Car
Just before noon, Mom said that they were going home for a picnic in the backyard because she told Eddie that she didn’t want his brother and sister to burn. Eddie of course asked if he could take the horseshoe crab car. His Mom hesitated but then said, “Sure, as long as you keep it in the backyard.” That was fine for Eddie. Because he already knew that these four shells and horseshoe crab were just the model for some more elaborate, more interesting, maybe also horseshoe-crab-based car that he would have to make once he got home – a car that maybe rolled and looked ominous for his brother and sister and that probably liked sun-warmed strawberries in tupperware that he could tell stories about.

What’s your best organizing tip?

Posted on by Senia

Q: What’s your best tip for organizing? What do you do well in organizing that you think works great?

My answers:

  • My biggest new find is Backpack! Love it. The free, 5-list version works great. This is like a to-do list on drugs! It’s so easy and so useful to have everything laid out simply. A lot of people have raved about Backpack, including Kathy here and Dave here and Jeff Bezos here. I’m a new convert!
  • I plan the night before (mainly!) so that during the day I can spend time doing, not planning.
  • There are some things that I always do – there is no no-doing (a la Yoda). These are the constants – such as exercising a certain number of times per week and replying to emails within 24 hours and completing at least three important things every day. Because I have these rules for myself, it helps me organize everything else!
  • I use Dave Seah’s tools, especially the Emergent Task Tracker (Flash version) to do things faster within the day.

What are your best tips for organizing? Would love to hear them. The more tips, the better. This is Question Friday. Looking forward to reading your thoughts! Thanks and great weekend.

White Lies are Bad for the Soul

Posted on by Senia

“Whether you are a villain or a good person is for you and you alone to decide: you are worth precisely what you want.”
~ André Comte-Sponville

We talked earlier about how being good can be hard. And yet…. And yet…. At the same time as potentially being hard, being good can feel so right. As Will Smith says, “Think of yourself as two people, and one of them is inside of you, and he’s a scorekeeper. And he keeps score of your idea of the world. … And when you have a conflict with your scorekeeper, that’s unhappiness. Happiness is being completely in sync with your own perception of goodness.”

White lies are bad for the soul.

White lies can harm your soul. Every time we take an action, we strengthen the neural pathways for that action. Why would you want to strengthen the neural pathways of deceit?

Alvin talks here about how showing yourself personal commitment can strengthen your emotional core. While lies can be like worms. One won’t phase you, and you can just brush it off your pant leg. But a whole bunch of them can … well, you get the picture.

Imagine a seesaw. “One should see the world, and see himself as a scale with an equal balance of good and evil. When he does one good deed the scale is tipped to the good – he and the world is saved. When he does one evil deed the scale is tipped to the bad – he and the world is destroyed.” ~ Maimonides (from here. Related: this and this.)

Every time a person makes a white lie, a person’s inner scorekeeper says, “Huh?” We are people and we use some types of defense mechanisms, so our brains would need to give that “huh?” an answer. And the answer can be, “It’s ok that I white-lied – I need to / I was in rush / It doesn’t hurt anyone anyway.” Or the answer can be, “No, that’s wrong. I feel wrong about it, and I don’t want to feel wrong. I won’t white-lie next time.”

People are always doing things to be in sync with their beliefs about the goodness of themselves. Whether it’s rationalizing something away or belittling the importance of being good or just adopting an attitude of not-caring. And the simplest thing to do to be in sync with your own perception of goodness? The easiest thing to do is to be good.

How can you decide whether to white-lie or not?

You could decide very logically, “Is the worth of the white lie worth more than the harm of it?” Almost an economic approach. When has it been worth it to say to yourself, “No, I’m not a bad person?” Why would it ever be worth it to put yourself into a situation in which at the end of the situation, you have to reassure yourself that you actually weren’t being bad? …. If you have to reassure yourself (even it it takes a nanosecond and even if the thought is semi-automatic), then your mind already knew that you had done the wrong thing. Why would you ever take an action that embeds into your brain that you are ok with sometimes doing something that feels a little bit wrong?

Another way that you could decide whether to white-lie or not is that you could decide from a very principled stance, “Is that something I do?” Here’s where our earlier discussion of self-regulation and creating new habits resurfaces. Perhaps your self-regulation for yourself is that generally you do not white lie. It’s just not worth the thinking about it. It’s just not worth the questioning of your core principles. (I’d recommend putting the “generally” in there because on the extreme side if it’s a question of life-or-death vs. a white lie, of course you’d white-lie. An extreme position just makes it easier to fall later. I just had a talk with a friend about rarely using the words “always” and “never.”)

“Everyone tries to define this thing called Character. It’s not hard. Character is doing what’s right when nobody’s looking.”
~ Anonymous (from this set of quotes)

Best remedy for warding off a cold BEFORE it happens?

Posted on by Senia

Would really like to know.

Here are some things I’ve tried:
* Oil of Oregano – a tried and true favorite
* Airborne – the vitamins, electrolytes, and amino acids tablet that tastes like fanta when you put it in water
* Wellness vitamins/herbs/aminoacids
* Hyland’s homeopathic anti-flu tablets

Here are some things suggested online:
* Dress warmly when you go outside – cover hands, head (and nose?). And get as much sunlight as posisble to build your immune system.
* Gargle daily with water (just simply gargling once a day with water, and keeping hands washed regularly), some Japanese researchers show, but other researchers attribute the effect to placebo.
* Make sure to get outdoors for part of the day and get some sunlight (don’t spend all day indoors).
* Multivitamins are a good idea (many sources all over the web)
* Ginseng supplements may be a good idea
* Drink lots of fluids, gargle with saltwater to make the throat feel better, be in a place with more humidity, and (ta-ta!) chicken soup (I like this article)
* Most importantly, water, fluids, soups, liquids – to hydrate your body so that it can repair faster

Update (2-13-06):
* Lots of Vitamin C and chicken soup (also potentially cold-eeze and homeopathy)
* Suggestions from you guys: lots of sleep (Virginia), ginseng (Toby), ummm, bourbon (thanks, Scott). :)

What do you suggest?
Q: What’s your best remedy for warding off a cold BEFORE it happens?

Friday is Question Friday. Would love to know what you suggest! Thanks.

Q: What are the best web applications you’ve seen?

Posted on by Senia

That’s it. Since we talked about Web 2.0 briefly today, the question is:

What are the best web applications you’ve seen recently?

Some of my answers:
* www.nowthen.com – Collect your history starting from today by emailing the site cell phone pictures of yourself and short text messages.
* I like myspace for musicians.
* Blogs, blogs, and more blogs. I’m a fan of great blogs. Dave Seah, Kathy Sierra, Evelyn, Alvin, Chris, Dave Shearon, Anna, Seth, Logic+Emotion, ConsumingAmbitions, news at PPND, SharpBrains, Cognitive Daily, photo of the day.

What do you think?!?! :)

Create New Habits: Self-Regulation

Posted on by Senia

Welcome to February. Has your life changed since the New Year? Do you want it to?

What is the #1 habit you want to create right now? Do you want to eat healthier? Become more organized? Remember where you put your keys? Give up alcohol?

Here are some new results from Positive Psychology that could help you create new habits and break old behavior. Let’s look at the stories behind these new results to see whether they work for you.

Self-Regulation

Self-Regulation It turns out that one of the strongest things you can do for yourself to create a new habit is to exercise self-control in some area of your life. Roy Baumeister of Florida State University and his colleagues sum up three studies of self-control in a pre-publication.

The posture study: if you ask college students to watch their posture for two weeks – simply to improve it whenever possible – and then have the students take a self-control activity test, those who had been asked to work on their posture improved their self-control. Moms and ballet teachers all over the world must be celebrating this news.
Self-Regulation as a Muscle Self-control is often referred to as “self-regulation,” and the fascinating thesis of Baumeister and colleagues is that self-regulation can act as a muscle! What are some things that we know about muscles? 1) Muscles can be trained to get stronger over time, and 2) If weak, a muscle can be easily fatigued.

Baumeister postulates that the same two ideas can be applied to self-regulation. If a person is tempted multiple times, “Have a drink…. Come on, have a drink…. Have just one drink,” then each time, it becomes harder to say no. On the other hand, if a person trains his self-regulation, then it becomes easier to say no to temptations. How can you train your self-regulation? Self-regulation is your personality process to exert control over your thoughts, feelings, and actions.

Baumeister proposes an interesting result – if you do ANYTHING that requires self-regulation, then that makes it EASIER for you to have self-regulation in EVERYTHING.

Self-Regulation Improves Many Habits

Sounds strange, doesn’t it? Baumeister reports on two studies – the exercise study and the money study. In the exercise study, students were taught a cardio and weights exercise regimen and were told to follow it closely for two months. At the end of two months, not only did their self-regulation increase under test circumstances (link how do scientists measure self-regulation?), but also the exercisers had less junk food, cigarettes, alcohol, and caffeine. I know what you’re saying – those things are all related to getting healthier and exercising. True. But additionally, the students reported studying more, watching TV less, and doing more household chores like washing dishes. Why is it that if you start to exercise regularly, then that may result in you getting better grades or being a neater person?

Baumeister attributes it to a well-trained self-regulation muscle. In the money study, participants were asked to manage their finances for four months by following a specific system. Not only did the participants increase their average savings rate over four months from 8% to 38% of their income, but they also improved study habits and doing household chores and decreased cigarette use. Baumeister and colleagues use these results to say that self-regulation is not specific to one domain… being self-regulated in your money management leads to self-regulation in other areas. Does that mean that a person who develops great study habits may suddenly lose a lot of weight and become amazingly buff? Maybe, says Baumeister.

In the current issue of Health Psychology, Peter Hall of Ontario’s Waterloo University studies which part of the brain leads to good self-regulation. His answer is the strong executive function of the frontal lobes. Hall gives participants the Stroop test (try it here) in which the word GREEN may appear in red color. As one author describes, “to answer correctly you have to mentally override the impulse to read the word. The same effortful overriding—and the same underlying neuronal activity—is presumably needed to keep showing up at the gym, even when it hurts.”

STARTING Self-Regulation Today

What is something you can start doing today to put more self-regulation into your life? You can create more structure. Whether you decide that you will pre-pack your lunch so you don’t have something unhealthy at the local café. Or whether you schedule out exercise time for the remainder of the week. Or whether you clean your room. Or whether you decide to pay attention to posture. Or decide that you will open your email only every three hours – 9am, noon, 3pm, 6pm, 9pm – for no more than a half hour each time. Structure something concrete into your life. That’s the best way to develop self-regulation. Structure something simple into your life so it doesn’t turn everything in your life upside down but so that it does create some structure.

Start with a little bit of self-regulation – to get an effect across many habits.

This article is part of a series on creating new habits and behavior modification and originally appeared here.

Senia Maymin Senia Maymin, MBA, MAPP works in the financial industry and consults to corporations about Positive Psychology. Senia is the Editor of Positive Psychology News Daily, and runs a blog about positive psychology at Senia.com. Senia’s bio.

Senia writes on the first of each month, and her past articles are here.

Habits

Posted on by Senia

“Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”
~ Aristotle

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
~ Aristotle

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”
~ Anonymous

“The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, “I was wrong”. ”
~ Sydney J. Harris

“He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.”
~ Lao Tzu

“You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight.”
~ Jim Rohn

“Everyone tries to define this thing called Character. It’s not hard. Character is doing what’s right when nobody’s looking.”
~ Anonymous