Understanding Grief

By Jane E. Brody
January 15, 2018

Although many of us are able to speak frankly about death, we still have a lot to learn about dealing wisely with its aftermath: grief, the natural reaction to loss of a loved one.

Relatively few of us know what to say or do that can be truly helpful to a relative, friend or acquaintance who is grieving. In fact, relatively few who have suffered a painful loss know how to be most helpful to themselves.

Two new books by psychotherapists who have worked extensively in the field of loss and grief are replete with stories and guidance that can help both those in mourning and the people they encounter avoid many of the common pitfalls and misunderstandings associated with grief. Both books attempt to correct false assumptions about how and how long grief might be experienced.

One book, “It’s OK That You’re Not OK,” by Megan Devine of Portland, Ore., has the telling subtitle “Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand.” It grew out of the tragic loss of her beloved partner, who drowned at age 39 while the couple was on vacation. The other book, especially illuminating in its coverage of how people cope with different kinds of losses, is “Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death and Surviving,” by Julia Samuel, who works with bereaved families both in private practice and at England’s National Health Service, at St. Mary’s hospital, Paddington.

The books share a most telling message: As Ms. Samuel put it, “There is no right or wrong in grief; we need to accept whatever form it takes, both in ourselves and in others.” Recognizing loss as a universal experience, Ms. Devine hopes that “if we can start to understand the true nature of grief, we can have a more helpful, loving, supportive culture.”

Both authors emphasize that grief is not a problem to be solved or resolved. Rather, it’s a process to be tended and lived through in whatever form and however long it may take.

“The process cannot be hurried by friends and family,” however well meaning their desire to relieve the griever’s anguish, Ms. Samuel wrote. “Recovery and adjustment can take much longer than most people realize. We need to accept whatever form it takes, both in ourselves and in others.”

We can all benefit from learning how to respond to grief in ways that don’t prolong, intensify or dismiss the pain. Likewise, those trying to help need to know that grief cannot be fit into a preordained time frame or form of expression. Too often people who experience a loss are disparaged because their mourning persists longer than others think reasonable or because they remain self-contained and seem not to mourn at all.

I imagine, for example, that some adults thought my stoical response to my mother’s premature death when I was 16 was “unnatural.” In truth, after tending to her for a year as she suffered through an unstoppable cancer, her death was a relief. It took a year for me to shed my armor and openly mourn the incalculable loss. But 60 years later, I still treasure her most important legacy: To live each day as if it could be my last but with an eye on the future in case it’s not.

Likewise, I was relieved when my husband’s suffering ended six weeks after diagnosis of an incurable cancer. Though I missed him terribly, I seemed to go on with my life as if little had changed. Few outside of the immediate family knew that I was honoring his dying wish that I continue to live fully for my own sake and that of our children and grandchildren.

Just as we all love others in our own unique ways, so do we mourn their loss in ways that cannot be fit into a single mold or even a dozen different molds. Last month, James G. Robinson, director of global analytics for The New York Times, described a 37-day, 6,150-mile therapeutic road trip he took with his family following the death of his 5-year-old son, collecting commemorative objects along the way and giving each member of the family a chance to express anger and sadness about the untimely loss.

Ms. Devine maintains that most grief support offered by professionals and others takes the wrong approach by encouraging mourners to move through the pain. While family and friends naturally want you to feel better, “pain that is not allowed to be spoken or expressed turns in on itself, and creates more problems,” she wrote. “Unacknowledged and unheard pain doesn’t go away. The way to survive grief is by allowing pain to exist, not in trying to cover it up or rush through it.”

As a bereaved mother told Ms. Samuel, “You never ‘get over it,’ you ‘get on with it,’ and you never ‘move on,’ but you ‘move forward.’”

Ms. Devine agrees that being “encouraged to ‘get over it’ is one of the biggest causes of suffering inside grief.” Rather than trying to “cure” pain, the goal should be to minimize suffering, which she said “comes when we feel dismissed or unsupported in our pain, with being told there is something wrong with what you feel.”

She explains that pain cannot be “fixed,” that companionship, not correction, is the best way to deal with grief. She encourages those who want to be helpful to “bear witness,” to offer friendship without probing questions or unsolicited advice, help if it is needed and wanted, and a listening ear no matter how often mourners wish to tell their story.

To those who grieve, she suggests finding a nondestructive way to express it. “If you can’t tell your story to another human, find another way: journal, paint, make your grief into a graphic novel with a very dark story line. Or go out to the woods and tell the trees. It is an immense relief to be able to tell your story without someone trying to fix it.”

She also suggests keeping a journal that records situations that either intensify or relieve suffering. “Are there times you feel more stable, more grounded, more able to breathe inside your loss? Does anything — a person, a place, an activity — add to your energy bank account? Conversely, are there activities or environments that absolutely make things worse?”

Whenever possible, to decrease suffering choose to engage in things that help and avoid those that don’t.
 

Content from here.

Breaking Bad Habits - Why It's So Hard to Change

If you know something’s bad for you, why can’t you just stop? About 70% of smokers say they would like to quit. Drug and alcohol abusers struggle to give up addictions that hurt their bodies and tear apart families and friendships. And many of us have unhealthy excess weight that we could lose if only we would eat right and exercise more. So why don’t we do it?

NIH-funded scientists have been searching for answers. They’ve studied what happens in our brains as habits form. They’ve found clues to why bad habits, once established, are so difficult to kick. And they’re developing strategies to help us make the changes we’d like to make.

“Habits play an important role in our health,” says Dr. Nora Volkow, director of NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse. “Understanding the biology of how we develop routines that may be harmful to us, and how to break those routines and embrace new ones, could help us change our lifestyles and adopt healthier behaviors.”

Habits can arise through repetition. They are a normal part of life, and are often helpful. “We wake up every morning, shower, comb our hair or brush our teeth without being aware of it,” Volkow says. We can drive along familiar routes on mental auto-pilot without really thinking about the directions. “When behaviors become automatic, it gives us an advantage, because the brain does not have to use conscious thought to perform the activity,” Volkow says. This frees up our brains to focus on different things.

Habits can also develop when good or enjoyable events trigger the brain’s “reward” centers. This can set up potentially harmful routines, such as overeating, smoking, drug or alcohol abuse, gambling and even compulsive use of computers and social media.

“The general machinery by which we build both kinds of habits are the same, whether it’s a habit for overeating or a habit for getting to work without really thinking about the details,” says Dr. Russell Poldrack, a neurobiologist at the University of Texas at Austin. Both types of habits are based on the same types of brain mechanisms.

“But there’s one important difference,” Poldrack says. And this difference makes the pleasure-based habits so much harder to break. Enjoyable behaviors can prompt your brain to release a chemical called dopamine. “If you do something over and over, and dopamine is there when you’re doing it, that strengthens the habit even more. When you’re not doing those things, dopamine creates the craving to do it again,” Poldrack says. “This explains why some people crave drugs, even if the drug no longer makes them feel particularly good once they take it.”

In a sense, then, parts of our brains are working against us when we try to overcome bad habits. “These routines can become hardwired in our brains,” Volkow says. And the brain’s reward centers keep us craving the things we’re trying so hard to resist.

The good news is, humans are not simply creatures of habit. We have many more brain regions to help us do what’s best for our health.

“Humans are much better than any other animal at changing and orienting our behavior toward long-term goals, or long-term benefits,” says Dr. Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State University. His studies on decision-making and willpower have led him to conclude that “self-control is like a muscle. Once you’ve exerted some self-control, like a muscle it gets tired.”

After successfully resisting a temptation, Baumeister’s research shows, willpower can be temporarily drained, which can make it harder to stand firm the next time around. In recent years, though, he’s found evidence that regularly practicing different types of self-control—such as sitting up straight or keeping a food diary—can strengthen your resolve.

“We’ve found that you can improve your self-control by doing exercises over time,” Baumeister says. “Any regular act of self-control will gradually exercise your ‘muscle’ and make you stronger.”

Volkow notes that there’s no single effective way to break bad habits. “It’s not one size fits all,” she says.

One approach is to focus on becoming more aware of your unhealthy habits. Then develop strategies to counteract them. For example, habits can be linked in our minds to certain places and activities. You could develop a plan, say, to avoid walking down the hall where there’s a candy machine. Resolve to avoid going places where you’ve usually smoked. Stay away from friends and situations linked to problem drinking or drug use.

Another helpful technique is to visualize yourself in a tempting situation. “Mentally practice the good behavior over the bad,” Poldrack says. “If you’ll be at a party and want to eat vegetables instead of fattening foods, then mentally visualize yourself doing that. It’s not guaranteed to work, but it certainly can help.”

One way to kick bad habits is to actively replace unhealthy routines with new, healthy ones. Some people find they can replace a bad habit, even drug addiction, with another behavior, like exercising. “It doesn’t work for everyone,” Volkow says. “But certain groups of patients who have a history of serious addictions can engage in certain behaviors that are ritualistic and in a way compulsive—such as marathon running—and it helps them stay away from drugs. These alternative behaviors can counteract the urges to repeat a behavior to take a drug.”

Another thing that makes habits especially hard to break is that replacing a first-learned habit with a new one doesn’t erase the original behavior. Rather, both remain in your brain. But you can take steps to strengthen the new one and suppress the original one. In ongoing research, Poldrack and his colleagues are using brain imaging to study the differences between first-learned and later-learned behaviors. “We’d like to find a way to train people to improve their ability to maintain these behavioral changes,” Poldrack says.

Some NIH-funded research is exploring whether certain medications can help to disrupt hard-wired automatic behaviors in the brain and make it easier to form new memories and behaviors. Other scientific teams are searching for genes that might allow some people to easily form and others to readily suppress habits.

Bad habits may be hard to change, but it can be done. Enlist the help of friends, co-workers and family for some extra support.

Break Bad Habits

• Avoid tempting situations. If you always stop for a donut on your way to work, try a different route. Keep fatty foods, cigarettes, alcohol and other tempting items out of your home.
• Replace unhealthy behaviors with healthy ones. Try exercise, a favorite hobby or spending time with family.
• Prepare mentally. If you can’t avoid a tempting situation, prepare yourself in advance. Think about how you want to handle it and mentally practice what you plan.
• Enlist support. Ask friends, family and co-workers to support your efforts to change.
• Reward yourself for small steps. Give yourself a healthy treat when you’ve achieved a small goal or milestone.

Content from here.

How Habits Work

From the appendix to The Power of Habit:

The difficult thing about studying the science of habits is that most people, when they hear about this field of research, want to know the secret formula for quickly changing any habit. If scientists have discovered how these patterns work, then it stands to reason that they must have also found a recipe for rapid change, right?

If only it were that easy.

It’s not that formulas don’t exist. The problem is that there isn’t one formula for changing habits. There are thousands.

Individuals and habits are all different, and so the specifics of diagnosing and changing the patterns in our lives differ from person to person and behavior to behavior. Giving up cigarettes is different than curbing overeating, which is different from changing how you communicate with your spouse, which is different from how you prioritize tasks at work. What’s more, each person’s habits are driven by different cravings.

As a result, this book doesn’t contain one prescription. Rather, I hoped to deliver something else: a framework for understanding how habits work and a guide to experimenting with how they might change. Some habits yield easily to analysis and influence. Others are more complex and obstinate, and require prolonged study. And for others, change is a process that never fully concludes.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t occur. Each chapter in this book explains a different aspect of why habits exist and how they function. The framework described in this appendix is an attempt to distill, in a very basic way, the tactics that researchers have found for diagnosing and shaping habits within our own lives. This isn’t meant to be comprehensive. This is merely a practical guide, a place to start. And paired with deeper lessons from this book’s chapters, it’s a manual for where to go next.

Change might not be fast and it isn’t always easy. But with time and effort, almost any habit can be reshaped.

THE FRAMEWORK:

Identify the routine
Experiment with rewards
Isolate the cue
Have a plan

Step One: Identify the Routine

The MIT researchers in Chapter One discovered a simple neurological loop at the core of every habit, a loop that consists of three parts: A cue, a routine and a reward.
 
To understand your own habits, you need to identify the components of your loops. Once you have diagnosed the habit loop of a particular behavior, you can look for ways to supplant old vices with new routines.

As an example, let’s say you have a bad habit, like I did when I started researching this book, of going to the cafeteria and buying a chocolate chip cookie every afternoon. Let’s say this habit has caused you to gain a few pounds. In fact, let’s say this habit has caused you to gain exactly 8 pounds, and that your wife has made a few pointed comments. You’ve tried to force yourself to stop – you even went so far as to put a post-it on your computer that reads “NO MORE COOKIES”.

But every afternoon you manage to ignore that note, get up, wander towards the cafeteria, buy a cookie and, while chatting with colleagues around the cash register, eat it. It feels good, and then it feels bad. Tomorrow, you promise yourself, you’ll muster the willpower to resist. Tomorrow will be different.

But tomorrow, the habit takes hold again.

How do you start diagnosing and then changing this behavior? By figuring out the habit loop. And the first step is to identify the routine. In this cookie scenario – as with most habits – the routine is the most obvious aspect: it’s the behavior you want to change. Your routine is that you get up from your desk in the afternoon, walk to the cafeteria, buy a chocolate chip cookie and eat it while chatting with friends. So that’s what you put into the loop:
 
Next, some less obvious questions: What’s the cue for this routine? Is it hunger? Boredom? Low blood sugar? That you need a break before plunging into another task?

And what’s the reward? The cookie itself? The change of scenery? The temporary distraction? Socializing with colleagues? Or the burst of energy that comes from that blast of sugar?

To figure this out, you’ll need to do a little experimentation.

Step Two: Experiment with Rewards

Rewards are powerful because they satisfying cravings. But we’re often not conscious of the cravings that drive our behaviors. When the Febreze marketing team discovered that consumers desired a fresh scent at the end of a cleaning ritual, for example, they had found a craving that no one even knew existed. It was hiding in plain sight. Most cravings are like this: obvious in retrospect, but incredibly hard to see when we are under their sway.

To figure out which cravings are driving particular habits, it’s useful to experiment with different rewards. This might take a few days, or a week, or longer. During that period, you shouldn’t feel any pressure to make a real change – think of yourself as a scientist in the data collection stage.

On the first day of your experiment, when you feel the urge to go to the cafeteria and buy a cookie, adjust your routine so it delivers a different reward. For instance, instead of walking to the cafeteria, go outside, walk around the block, and then go back to your desk without eating anything. The next day, go to the cafeteria and buy a donut, or a candy bar, and eat it at your desk. The next day, go to the cafeteria, buy an apple, and eat it while chatting with your friends. Then, try a cup of coffee. Then, instead of going to the cafeteria, walk over to your friend’s office and gossip for a few minutes and go back to your desk.

You get the idea. What you choose to do instead of buying a cookie isn’t important. The point is to test different hypotheses to determine which craving is driving your routine. Are you craving the cookie itself, or a break from work? If it’s the cookie, is it because you’re hungry? (In which case the apple should work just as well.) Or is it because you want the burst of energy the cookie provides? (And so the coffee should suffice.) Or, are you wandering up to the cafeteria as an excuse to socialize, and the cookie is just a convenient excuse? (If so, walking to someone’s desk and gossiping for a few minutes should satisfy the urge.)

As you test four or five different rewards, you can use an old trick to look for patterns: After each activity, jot down on a piece of paper the first three things that come to mind when you get back to your desk. They can be emotions, random thoughts, reflections on how you’re feeling, or just the first three words that pop into your head.

Then, set an alarm on your watch or computer for 15 minutes. When it goes off, ask yourself: do you still feel the urge for that cookie?

The reason why it’s important to write down three things – even if they are meaningless words – is twofold. First, it forces a momentary awareness of what you are thinking or feeling. Just as Mandy, the nail biter in Chapter 3, carried around a note card filled with hash marks to force her into awareness of her habitual urges, so writing three words forces a moment of attention. What’s more, studies show that writing down a few words helps in later recalling what you were thinking at that moment. At the end of the experiment, when you review your notes, it will be much easier to remember what you were thinking and feeling at that precise instant, because your scribbled words will trigger a wave of recollection.

And why the 15-minute alarm? Because the point of these tests is to determine the reward you’re craving. If, fifteen minutes after eating a donuts, you still feel an urge to get up and go to the cafeteria, then your habit isn’t motivated by a sugar craving. If, after gossiping at a colleague’s desk, you still want a cookie, then the need for human contact isn’t what’s driving your behavior.

On the other hand, if fifteen minutes after chatting with a friend, you find it easy to get back to work, then you’ve identified the reward – temporary distraction and socialization – that your habit sought to satisfy.

By experimenting with different rewards, you can isolate what you are actually craving, which is essential in redesigning the habit.
Once you’ve figured out the routine and the reward, what remains is identifying the cue.

Step Three: Isolate the Cue

About a decade ago, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario tried to answer a question that had bewildered social scientists for years: Why do some eyewitnesses of crimes misremember what they see, while other recall events accurately?

The recollections of eyewitnesses, of course, are incredibly important. And yet studies indicate that eyewitnesses often misremember what they observe. They insist that the thief was a man, for instance, when she was wearing a skirt; or that the crime occurred at dusk, even though police reports say it happened at 2:00 in the afternoon. Other eyewitnesses, on the other hand, can remember the crimes they’ve seen with near-perfect recall.

Dozens of studies have examined this phenomena, trying to determine why some people are better eyewitnesses than others. Researchers theorized that some people simply have better memories, or that a crime that occurs in a familiar place is easier to recall. But those theories didn’t test out – people with strong and weak memories, or more and less familiarity with the scene of a crime, were equally liable to misremember what took place.

The psychologist at the University of Western Ontario took a different approach. She wondered if researchers were making a mistake by focusing on what questioners and witnesses had said, rather than how they were saying it. She suspected there were subtle cues that were influencing the questioning process. But when she watched videotape after videotape of witness interviews, looking for these cues, she couldn’t see anything. There was so much activity in each interview – all the facial expressions, the different ways the questions were posed, the fluctuating emotions – that she couldn’t detect any patterns.

So she came up with an idea: She made a list of a few elements she would focus on – the questioners’ tone, the facial expressions of the witness, and how close the witness and the questioner were sitting to each other. Then, she removed any information that would distract her from those elements. She turned down the volume on the television so, instead of hearing words, all she could detect was the tone of the questioner’s voice. She taped a sheet of paper over the questioner’s face, so all she could see was the witnesses’ expressions. She held a tape measure to the screen to measure their distance from each other.

And once she started studying these specific elements, patterns leapt out. She saw that witnesses who misremembered facts usually were questioned by cops who used a gentle, friendly tone. When witnesses smiled more, or sat closer to the person asking the questions, they were more likely to misremember.

In other words, when environmental cues said “we are friends” – a gentle tone, a smiling face – the witnesses were more likely to misremember what had occurred. Perhaps it was because, subconsciously, those friendship cues triggered a habit to please the questioner.

But the importance of this experiment is that those same tapes had been watched by dozens of other researchers. Lots of smart people had seen the same patterns, but no one had recognized them before. Because there was too muchinformation in each tape to see a subtle cue.

Once the psychologist decided to focus on only three categories of behavior, however, and eliminate the extraneous information, the patterns leapt out.

Our lives are the same way. The reason why it is so hard to identify the cues that trigger our habits is because there is too much information bombarding us as our behaviors unfold. Ask yourself, do you eat breakfast at a certain time each day because you are hungry? Or because the clock says 7:30? Or because your kids have started eating? Or because you’re dressed, and that’s when the breakfast habit kicks in?

When you automatically turn your car left while driving to work, what triggers that behavior? A street sign? A particular tree? The knowledge that this is, in fact, the correct route? All of them together? When you’re driving your kid to school, and you find that you’ve absentmindedly started taking the route to work – rather than to the school – what caused the mistake? What was the cue that caused the ‘drive to work’ habit to kick in, rather than the ‘drive to school’ pattern?

To identify a cue amid the noise, we can use the same system as the psychologist: Identify categories of behaviors ahead of time to scrutinize in order to see patterns. Luckily, science offers some help in this regard. Experiments have shown that almost all habitual cues fit into one of five categories:

• Location
• Time
• Emotional State
• Other People
• Immediately preceding action

So, if you’re trying to figure out the cue for the ‘going to the cafeteria and buying a chocolate chip cookie’ habit, you write down five things the moment the urge hits (these are my actual notes from when I was trying to diagnose my habit):

• Where are you? (sitting at my desk)
• What time is it? (3:36 pm)
• What’s your emotional state? (bored)
• Who else is around? (no one)
• What action preceded the urge? (answered an email)

The next day:

• Where are you? (walking back from the copier)
• What time is it? (3:18 pm)
• What’s your emotional state? (happy)
• Who else is around? (Jim from Sports)
• What action preceded the urge? (made a photocopy)

The third day:

• Where are you? (conference room)
• What time is it? (3:41 pm)
• What’s your emotional state? (tired, excited about the project I’m working on)
• Who else is around? (editors who are coming to this meeting)
• What action preceded the urge? (I sat down because the meeting is about to start)

Three days in, it was pretty clear which cue was triggering my cookie habit – I felt an urge to get a snack at a certain time of day. I had already figured out, in step two, that it wasn’t hunger driving my behavior. The reward I was seeking was a temporary distraction – the kind that comes from gossiping with a friend. And the habit, I now knew, was triggered between 3:00 and 4:00.

Step Four: Have a Plan

Once you’ve figured out your habit loop – you’ve identified the reward driving your behavior, the cue triggering it, and the routine itself – you can begin to shift the behavior. You can change to a better routine by planning for the cue, and choosing a behavior that delivers the reward you are craving. What you need is a plan.

In the prologue, we learned that a habit is a choice that we deliberately make at some point, and then stop thinking about, but continue doing, often every day.

Put another way, a habit is a formula our brain automatically follows: When I see CUE, I will do ROUTINE in order to get a REWARD.

To re-engineer that formula, we need to begin making choices again. And the easiest way to do this, according to study after study, is to have a plan. Within  psychology, these plans are known as ‘implementation intentions.’

Take, for instance, my cookie-in-the-afternoon habit. By using this framework, I learned that my cue was roughly 3:30 in the afternoon. I knew that my routine was to go to the cafeteria, buy a cookie and chat with friends. And, through experimentation, I had learned that it wasn’t really the cookie I craved – rather, it was a moment of distraction and the opportunity to socialize.

So, I wrote a plan:

At 3:30, every day, I will walk to a friend’s desk and talk for 10 minutes.
To make sure I remembered to do this, I set the alarm on my watch for 3:30.

It didn’t work immediately. There were some days I was too busy and ignored the alarm, and then fell off the wagon. Other times it seemed like too much work to find a friend willing to chat – it was easier to get a cookie, and so I gave in to the urge. But on those day that I abided by my plan – when my alarm went off, I forced myself to walk to a friend’s desk and chat for 10 minutes – I found that I ended the workday feeling better. I hadn’t gone to the cafeteria, I hadn’t eat a cookie, and I felt fine. Eventually, it got be automatic: when the alarm rang, I found a friend, and ended the day feeling a small, but real, sense of accomplishment. After a few weeks, I hardly thought about the routine anymore. And when I couldn’t find anyone to chat with, I went to the cafeteria and bought tea and drank it with friends.

That all happened about six months ago. I don’t have my watch anymore – I lost it at some point. But at about 3:30 everyday, I absentmindedly stand up, look around the newsroom for someone to talk to, spend 10 minutes gossiping about the news, and then go back to my desk. It occurs almost without me thinking about it. It has become a habit.
 
Obviously, changing some habits can be more difficult. But this framework is a place to start. Sometimes change takes a long time. Sometimes it requires repeated experiments and failures. But once you understand how a habit operates – once you diagnose the cue, the routine and the reward – you gain power over it.

Content from here.

If You're Too Busy for These 5 Things, Your Life is More Off-Course Than You Think

By Benjamin P. Hardy
February 27, 2017

It's really easy to stray from the path. Like airplanes, we constantly need to make course-corrections.

Despite turbulence and other conditions keeping airplanes off-course 90 percent of flight time, most flights arrive at the correct destination at the intended time.

The reason for this phenomenon is quite simple -- through air traffic control and the inertial navigation system, pilots are constantly course-correcting. When immediately addressed, these course corrections are not hard to manage. When these course corrections don't regularly happen, catastrophe can result.

For example, in 1979, a passenger jet with 257 people on board left New Zealand for a sightseeing flight to Antarctica and back. However, the pilots were unaware that someone had altered the flight coordinates by a measly two degrees, putting them 28 miles east of where they assumed to be.

Approaching Antarctica, the pilots descended to give the passengers a view of the brilliant landscapes. Sadly, the incorrect coordinates had placed them directly in the path of an active volcano, Mount Erebus.

The snow on the volcano blended with the clouds above, deceiving the pilots into thinking they were flying above flat ground. When the instruments sounded a warning of the quickly rising ground, it was too late. The plane crashed into the volcano and everyone on board died.

An error of only a couple of degrees brought about an enormous tragedy.

Small things -- if not corrected -- become big things, always.

This flight is an analogy of our lives. Even seemingly inconsequential aspects of our lives can create ripples and waves of consequence -- for better or worse.

• How are you piloting your life?
• What feedback are you receiving to correct your course?
• How often do you check your navigation system? Do you even have a navigation system?
• Where is your destination?
• When are you going to get there?
• Are you currently off-course? How long have you been off-course?
• How would you know if you are on the right course?
• How can you minimize the turbulence and other conditions altering your path?

1. Organizing Your Life

I don't think I'm alone in being slightly scattered and sloppy about certain areas of my life.

Life is busy.

It's hard to keep everything organized and tidy. And maybe you don't want to have an organized life. But moving forward will require far less energy if you remove the excessive baggage and tension. Everything in your life is energy. If you're carrying too much -- whether that's physical or emotional -- your progress will be hampered.

In his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey explains that some things are important, and some things are urgent. Most people spend their life prioritizing urgent and "shallow" activity (e.g., answering emails, putting out proverbial fires, and just day-to-day stuff).

Very few people have organized their lives to prioritize almost exclusively important and "deep" activity (e.g., learning, health, relationships, travel, and goals).

No one cares about your success more than you do. If you're not a meticulous accountant about the important details of your life then you aren't responsible enough to have what you say you want.

So how do you organize your life?

Environmental Energy

• Is your living space cluttered and messy, or simple and neat?
• Do you keep stuff (like clothes) you no longer use?
• If you have a car, is it clean, or just another place to keep your clutter and garbage?
• Does your environment facilitate the emotions you consistently want to experience?
• Does your environment drain or improve your energy?

Financial Energy

• Do you have unnecessary debt?
• Do you know how many dollars you spend each month?
• Do you know how many dollars you make each month?
• Are you making as much money as you'd like to be?
• What's holding you back from creating more value in other people's lives?

Most people don't track their expenses. But if they did, they'd be shocked how much money they waste on stuff like eating out.

I'll be honest, as a creative and right-brained person, administrative and logistical details bog me down. I procrastinate and avoid them. But this lackluster behavior is holding me back from the very goals I'm trying to accomplish.

Until I can hone in on my finances, I won't have a healthier financial life, regardless of my income. Until I take complete responsibility of my finances, I'll always be a slave to money.

And so will you.

Relational Energy

• Are your relationships the most meaningful and enjoyable part of your life?
• Do you spend enough time nurturing the relationships that really matter?
• Do you maintain toxic relationships that no longer serve you?
• Are you authentic and honest in your relationships?

Like money, most people's relationships are not organized in a conscious manner. But with something so critical, we should take better stock of our relationships.

Health Energy

• Do you eat with the end in mind?
• Are you conscious of and in control of the foods you put in your body?
• Does the food you eat improve or worsen the other areas of your life?
• Does your body reflect your highest ideals?
• Is your body as strong and fit as you want it to be?
• Are you healthier now than you were three months ago?

Health is wealth. If you're bed-ridden, who cares how organized the other areas of your life are? It's so easy to put our health on the side -- like foregoing sleep, over-consuming stimulants, and making poor eating habits.

But little things become big things. And eventually, everything catches up.

Spiritual Energy

• Do you have a sense of purpose in life?
• Have you come to terms with life and death in a way you resonate with?
• How much power do you have in designing your future?

Death, it turns out, is not your greatest fear. Actually, your greatest fear is reaching death and having never truly lived.

When you organize your spiritual life, you become clear on what your life is about. You become clear on what you stand for, and how you want to spend each day. You develop conviction for what really matters to you, and what is a "distraction."

No matter whether or not it's well-defined, everyone has a moral system governing his or her behavior. Most people believe in being honest and good people. But until you organize your spiritual life, you'll experience internal conflict when acting contrary to your values and vision.

Time

• How much of your time do you feel in complete control of?
• Is your time being wasted on things you don't intrinsically enjoy?
• Are the activities you spend your time on moving you toward your ideal future?
• Are you spending most of your time furthering your own agenda or someone else's?
• What activities should you remove from your life?
• How much time do you waste each day?
• What would your ideal day look like?
• What activities that take up your time could you outsource or automate?

Until you organize your time, it will disappear and move quickly. Before you know it, you'll wonder where all the time went.

Once you organize your time, it will slow down. You'll be able to live more in the present. You'll be able to experience time as you want to. You'll control your time, rather than the other way around.

Stop What You're Doing and Get Organized

Getting organized and conscious of your present circumstances (e.g., your environment, finances, relationships, purpose, and time) puts you in a position to build toward the future you want.

The fastest way to move forward in life is not doing more. It starts with stopping the behaviors holding you back.

If you want to get in shape, you'll make more progress by stopping your negative behaviors than starting good ones. So, before you start exercising, purge the junk food from your diet. Until you stop the damage, you'll always be taking one step forward and one step back.

Before you focus on making more money, reduce your spending. Detach yourself from needing more and become content with what you have. Until you do this, it doesn't matter how much money you make. You'll always spend what you have (or more).

This is a matter of stewardship. Rather than wanting more, more, more, take proper care of what you currently have. Organize yourself. Dial it in. Your life is a garden. What good is planting if you don't prepare the soil and remove the weeds?

Why do most people stay stuck? They never organize. They try adding more activities, or being more productive, or taking a different approach. So before you "hustle," get organized.

2. Plan and Invest in Your Future

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."  -- Chinese Proverb

Taking these foundational areas of life and organizing them is essential to creating your ideal future.

Very few people consciously plan and design their life. It's actually startling how few Americans are investing in their future.

But you have complete power over the details of your life the moment you decide you're worthy of that power. That decision is manifest in tangible behaviors, like fixing or removing troubled relationships and saying "no" to activities that are nothing more than a waste of your time.

You get to decide right now.

"If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!"  -- Benjamin Franklin

Your vision should be based on your why, not so much your what.

Your why is your reason, your what is how that is manifest. And your what can happen in a ton of different ways. For example, my why is to help people get clarity on the life they want to live, and to help them achieve their goals as quickly as possible. My what could be blogging, parenting, being a student, going out to dinner, and several other things.

Too many people think creating a vision is about nailing down exactly what they want in the next 20 years. The problem with this mega-long-term approach to goal setting is that it actually slows your potential.

Instead of having a pre-set plan of what he wants to do, Tim Ferriss executes on three to six month experiments that he's currently excited about. He told Darren Hardy in an interview that he has no clue what the outcome of his experiments might be. So there's no point in making long-term plans. He has no clue what doors will open up, and he wants to be open to the best possibilities.

But his why never changes.

Invest in Your Future

When you choose to forego momentary gratification in order to have an enhanced future, you are investing in your future. Most people fail to do this successfully.

Most people don't purposefully invest in their finances, relationships, health, and time. But when you invest in yourself -- and in your future -- you ensure your future present moments will continue to get richer and more enjoyable.

Thus, your life will continue getting better and more in-line with your ideal vision.

3. Tracking Important Metrics

"When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates."  -- Thomas Monson

Getting organized and investing in your future are futile if you're not tracking. In regard to the most important areas of your life, you need to be on top of what's going on.

Tracking is difficult. If you've tried it before, chances are, you quit within a few days.

Research has repeatedly found that when behavior is tracked and evaluated, it improves drastically.

If you're not tracking the key areas of your life, than you're probably more off-course than you think. If you were to be honest with yourself, you'd be stunned how out of control things have become. As J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, has said, "The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it."

The cool part is, once you get organized, make a plan, and start tracking, desired change happens quickly.

The areas I'm personally tracking are (like goals, there shouldn't be too many):

• My income/expenses
• Health (i.e., strength on certain exercises and blood pressure/heart rate)
• Key metrics in my business (e.g., email subscribers)
• My time (by using my journal in the mornings and evenings)
• Key relationships and how they are doing.

You can track whatever priorities you have. But I can absolutely promise you that once you do, your conscious awareness of these things will increase. You're ability to control these things will be enhanced. Your confidence will wax strong. And your life will become simpler.

You'll be living a simple, yet organized and refined, life. You'll be responsible, which, put another way, is freedom.

4. Prayer and/or Meditation to Reduce Noise

"I have so much to do today that I'm going to need to spend three hours in prayer in order to be able to get it all done."  -- Martin Luther

There's a lot of emphasis on hustle these days.

Hustle, hustle, hustle.

But all the hustle in the wrong direction isn't going to help you. Yes, by hustling you can fail often, fail fast, and fail forward. However, as Thomas Merton said, "People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall."

This happens way too often. We get caught in the thick of thin things. Far too late do we realize that in our mad rush, we were pursuing someone else's goals instead of our own.

But spending a large chuck of time in prayer and/or meditation does more than provide clarity to what you're doing. These things open your mind up to possibilities you can't get while busy.

For example, a few days ago I spent the entire morning praying, thinking deeply, listening to inspirational music, and writing in my journal. A few hours into this process, an idea came to me that is absolute gold.

I also got insights regarding important relationships during that time, and when those insights came in, I immediately sent out emails or texts to those people. Amazing collaborations and mentorships were the resultant outcome.

But there's more.

Your thoughts are incredibly powerful. They actually govern not only you but those around you. Think about it, if you think positively about the people you're around, their lives are better. This is why people "send positive energy" or pray for other people. It actually makes a difference.

Your thoughts create endless ripples -- even waves -- of consequence all around you.

While praying and/or meditating for a large portion of time, the level of your thoughts will elevate. And interesting things will begin happening. If you're uncomfortable with the idea of miracles, you can think of it as luck.

Whatever you call it, when you spend large portions of time every day in deep reflection mode, luck strikes. Stuff happens that is completely outside of your control for your benefit.

For instance, during my deep dive into my mind and soul, one of my favorite authors came across my blog. He retweeted one of my articles and reached out to me. Now we're friends and have spent several hours on the phone together.

If you're skeptical of these ideas, give them a try. Why do you think the majority of the world's most successful people have rituals such as these? There is a higher realm you can tap into that unlocks limitless possibilities.

The only thing holding you back from those things is your mind.

5. Move Toward Your Goals Every Single Day

How many days go by in which you did nothing to move toward your big goals?

Probably too many.

Life is busy.

If you don't purposefully carve time out every day to progress and improve, without question, your time will get lost in the vacuum of our increasingly crowded lives. Before you know it, you'll be old and withered, wondering where all that time went.

As Harold Hill said: "You pile up enough tomorrows, and you'll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays."

After you've gotten yourself organized, made plans, started tracking, and gotten into the habit of prayer/meditation, taking action and hustling will be automatic.

It's good practice to do these kinds of things at the beginning of your day, before your will-power depletes.

If you don't, they simply will not get done. By the end of your day, you'll be exhausted. You'll be fried. There will be a million reasons to just start tomorrow. And you will start tomorrow -- which is never.

So your mantra becomes: The worst comes first. Do that thing you've been needing to do. Then do it again tomorrow.

If you take just one step toward your big goals every day, you'll realize those goals weren't really far away.

Conclusion

It's really easy to get off-course in life. Like airplanes, we constantly need to make course-corrections.

But we can ensure we get where we want in life by organizing ourselves, planning for our future, tracking our progress, heightening our mindset, and hustling.

Do this long enough, and you'll be shocked.

Go!

Content from here.

Be Kinder to Yourself

Self-esteem is a wonderful but delicate thing. When our self-esteem is high, we feel more resilient, we're less vulnerable to anxiety and rejection, and less cortisol, or the stress hormone, is released into our bloodstream.

The positives are obvious, but actually improving our self-esteem can be challenging, especially if we've experienced setbacks in the past. In a blog post on TED, psychologist Guy Winch — who has 20 years experience working with patients — explains that the problem is our self-esteem is rather unstable anyway, as it can fluctuate daily, even hourly.

Another complication is how our careers shape our own worth. For example, a chef will more likely be offended if you don't like the meal they cooked for you than someone who doesn't cook for a living. Winch says this is because cooking is a significant aspect of their identity.

He outlined five ways to help improve your self-esteem, and how to better deal with the blows we experience nearly every day.

1. Use positive affirmations in the right way.

Positive affirmations are a method of practicing "you are what you think." The idea is you fill your mind with positive thoughts until you start to believe them.

It's a popular way of going about building your self-esteem because it's simple, but Winch says there's one major problem — positive affirmations tend to make people with low self-worth feel even worse, because anything that's said as an affirmation — such as "I am beautiful," or "I will be successful," can often be too contrary to our own existing beliefs, such as feeling ugly or lazy.

Winch suggests changing "I'm going to be successful" to something more manageable like "I will persevere until I succeed!"

2. Identify what you're good at.

Winch says self-esteem grows when we demonstrate real ability and achievements in the areas of our lives that matter to us. Maybe you're good at running — sign up to some local races and train for them. Keen on cooking? Throw more dinner parties.

The key, he says, is to figure out your core skills and talents and find opportunities — and even careers — that emphasise them.

3. Learn how to accept compliments.

When we feel bad about ourselves, it's hard for anyone else to drag us out of that rut. Winch says we tend to be more resistant to compliments at these times, even though this is when we need them the most.

He says instead of shrugging off compliments as lies, you should set yourself the goal of tolerating compliments when you receive them. Even if you feel uncomfortable — and you probably will — it'll be worth it in the long run.

The best way to stop yourself batting compliments away, he says, is to prepare set responses to certain things, and force yourself to use them until it's automatic. These responses could be simply things like "thank you" or "how kind of you to say."

The impulse to laugh off compliments will eventually fade, which will be a sign it's working and you're starting to believe the nice things people say about you.

4. Don't criticize yourself.

Don't kick yourself when you're already down.

Unfortunately, Winch says this is what we're likely to do. When our self-esteem is low, we tend to damage it even further by being self-critical.

Winch says we should combat this with self-compassion. When you feel your inner self starting to criticize, ask yourself whether you'd say these things to a close friend. Probably not, right?

As a rule, we tend to be much more compassionate to friends than we are to ourselves, so think twice next time you start telling yourself all the things you do wrong. Winch says doing this will help avoid damaging your self-esteem further, allowing you time to focus on building yourself up instead.

5. Remind yourself of your real worth.

If your confidence sustains a blow, Winch says this is the best way to revive it.

If you get rejected by someone you've been dating, make a list of qualities you have that make you a great partner, such as being loyal or emotionally available. If you didn't get the promotion you were after at work, jot down everything that makes you a valuable employee, such as being reliable or being dedicated.

Write a brief paragraph or two about why the quality is important, and why other people would appreciate it. Winch says to do this exercise every day for a week or whenever you feel you need a pick-me-up.

Building up self-esteem isn't easy, and it requires a bit of work, but Winch says the return is invaluable if you do it correctly. You'll find yourself developing healthier emotional habits, and you'll bounce back easier when you suffer knocks in the future.

Content from here.
 

Lessons for Life: Diver Drowns with Full Tank of Air

By Eric Douglas
September 6, 2015

Minor Issues, Major Consequences
A diver panics and drowns with a tank full of air.

Ann and Bill were really getting into scuba diving. It was everything they had imagined it would be, and more. They were diving at a local quarry, and conditions were good overall. When they reached the platform 60 feet down, Ann noticed Bill was having trouble with his weight belt and moved in to help him out. She didn’t expect it to be a problem. Fighting with the belt and his gear, Bill twisted to one side and knocked Ann’s regulator from her mouth. Things went downhill from there.

The Divers

A new diver, 24-year-old Ann was in good health. She had made 15 dives total, including four from her initial certification seven months earlier. She tried to get to the local quarry every month to keep practicing with her dive buddy, Bill, whom she met in dive class. They had become fast friends, and Ann was happy to have a dive buddy with a similar experience level and interests. They were both excited about dive-travel opportunities and taking additional training. Both divers were using a mixture of rented and personal gear. They were buying pieces as they could afford it.

The Dive

Conditions that morning were comparable to what they had learned in. The water was cool — typical for the end of the dive season — and Ann and Bill were able to wear their normal wetsuits.

They planned to make a fairly typical dive for the quarry. They were going to swim out to a marker buoy on the surface and then descend to a platform 60 feet down. From there, they planned to work their way into shallower water, exploring some of the sunken attractions in the quarry. They had made the same basic dive several times before.

The Accident

When Ann and Bill arrived at the platform, Ann noticed Bill was having trouble with his weight belt. He immediately kneeled on the platform, trying to get things under control. After watching Bill struggle for a minute, Ann moved in close to try to help him out. She was getting cold from sitting still on the platform and wanted to move the dive along.

Bill’s BC was loose and moving out of place as he tried to get his weight belt buckled. Ann approached Bill just as he twisted to the side, slinging his BC around. The sudden movement knocked Ann’s regulator from her mouth. Realizing what had happened, Bill immediately tried to help Ann recover her regulator. In the process of helping her, his weight belt came loose and dropped to the swim platform behind him. Bill immediately began floating toward the surface, and his weight belt was out of reach before he realized it. He began struggling to get back to the bottom, but in the process, Bill lost a fin and his tank came loose from his BC. He ascended all the way to the surface and was unable to descend again. When he realized Ann wasn’t right behind him, he signaled to the shore for help. Two nearby divers responded quickly, but they didn’t find Ann for 15 minutes. When they finally located her, she was unconscious and her regulator was still out of her mouth.

On the surface, the rescuers began resuscitation efforts, but they were unsuccessful. Ann’s autopsy indicated she had drowned.

Analysis

On the face of it, some might suggest that this dive accident was caused by dive equipment. In reality, the accident was caused by the failure to properly use the equipment and respond to the problem. In the book Scuba Diving Safety, Dan Orr and I quoted Dr. George Harpur, medical director of the Tobermory Hyperbaric Facility in Ontario, Canada. He said, “We are not able to document a single case in which equipment failure directly caused a diver’s death or injury. It has been the diver’s response to the problem that results in the pathology.”

Every diver has had a problem with a piece of equipment at one time or another. As the saying goes, “If you haven’t had a problem, you aren’t diving enough.” The key to problem management is to respond quickly and calmly, and then move on. Losing control is the key to making a simple problem escalate into a bigger one. Bill was growing frustrated with his weight belt, and probably a little nervous. He was so fixated on his problem that he didn’t see Ann coming toward him. When she tried to help, his jerky movements knocked her regulator from her mouth. At this point, both divers were having problems, but neither problem was insurmountable. Ann could have moved back, recovered her regulator and then signaled Bill to stop so she could help him. That didn’t happen.

A recurring theme in this column is the human reaction of panic. When panic sets in, so do perceptual narrowing and tunnel vision. This limits your reactions, keeping you from calmly thinking through a problem. Ann and Bill both panicked. Ann failed to recover her regulator (something every diver learns to do), and then failed to make an emergency ascent to the surface. Instead, she simply froze on the bottom and drowned with a mostly full supply of air on her back. Bill panicked when he lost his weight belt, and his efforts to get back down to the bottom grew more and more erratic, causing him to lose a fin and dislodge his tank.

Many divers never practice the emergency skills they learned during their initial training. They don’t review recovering a lost regulator or removing and replacing their weight belts. Both of these basic skills could have saved the dive, allowing both divers to continue on after a brief interruption. It easily could have turned out as something to laugh about later — just a minor blip.

It is possible that Ann and Bill were using unfamiliar equipment, because some of their gear was rented. When that’s the case, it is even more important to take a few minutes at the beginning of the dive to review your equipment — and your buddy’s — to make sure you know where everything is located and how it works.

Ann drowned on the bottom of the quarry, with plenty of air in her scuba tank. Drowning does not always mean the person inhaled large quantities of water; often the drowning victim only inhales a teaspoon of water. This causes the larynx to spasm and close, and that involuntary reaction causes suffocation.

The autopsy didn’t include detailed information on Ann’s lungs, but it is possible that in her panic she inhaled a splash of water and then lost consciousness. If she’d had a laryngospasm, it would have made it almost impossible for her to take a breath.

Lessons For Life

1. Practice emergency skills.

Take the time to practice emergency skills regularly. This includes mask removal and replacement and regulator recovery. These basic skills can turn a potential disaster into a minor problem that won’t end a dive.

2. Be familiar with your equipment.

Whether you are diving with something new or with rented gear, be familiar with your equipment, and your buddy’s. Know where the weight buckles are, and how to adjust and release them.

3. Take a breath.

When a problem arises, stop for a moment and take a breath. Think about how to handle the problem, and then act. It could save your life.

Content from here.

How to Improve Resilience in Midlife

By Tara Parker-Pope
July 25, 2017

 “There is a naturally learnable set of behaviors that contribute to resilience,” said Dr. Grant, who, with Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, wrote the book “Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy.” “Those are the behaviors that we gravitate to more and more as we age.”

Scientists who study stress and resilience say it’s important to think of resilience as an emotional muscle that can be strengthened at any time. While it’s useful to build up resilience before a big or small crisis hits, there still are active steps you can take during and after a crisis to speed your emotional recovery. 

Last year Dr. Dennis Charney, a resilience researcher and dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, was leaving a deli when he was shot by a disgruntled former employee. Dr. Charney spent five days in intensive care and faced a challenging recovery.

“After 25 years of studying resilience, I had to be resilient myself,” said Dr. Charney, co-author of the book “Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges.” “It’s good to be prepared for it, but it’s not too late once you’ve been traumatized to build the capability to move forward in a resilient way.”

Here are some of the ways you can build your resilience in middle age.

Practice Optimism

Optimism is part genetic, part learned. So if you were born into a family of Eeyores, you can still find your inner Tigger.

Optimism doesn’t mean ignoring the reality of a dire situation. After a job loss, for instance, many people may feel defeated and think, “I’ll never recover from this.” An optimist would acknowledge the challenge in a more hopeful way, saying, “This is going to be difficult, but it’s a chance to rethink my life goals and find work that truly makes me happy.”

While it sounds trivial, thinking positive thoughts and surrounding yourself with positive people really does help. Dr. Steven Southwick, a psychiatry professor at Yale Medical School and Dr. Charney’s co-author, notes that optimism, like pessimism, can be infectious. His advice: “Hang out with optimistic people.”

Rewrite Your Story

When Dr. Charney was recovering from the shooting, he knew that his life was forever changed, but he reframed the situation, focusing on the opportunity the setback presented. “Once you are a trauma victim it stays with you,” he said. “But I knew I could be a role model. I have thousands of students watching my recovery. This gives me a chance to utilize what I’ve learned.”

Study after study has shown that we can benefit from reframing the personal narrative that shapes our view of the world and ourselves. In expressive writing studies, college students taught to reframe their college struggles as a growth opportunity got better grades and were less likely to drop out. A Harvard study found that people who viewed stress as a way to fuel better performance did better on tests and managed their stress better physiologically than those taught to ignore stress.

“It’s about learning to recognize the explanatory story you tend to use in your life,” Dr. Southwick said. “Observe what you are saying to yourself and question it. It’s not easy. It takes practice.”

Don’t Personalize It

We have a tendency to blame ourselves for life’s setbacks and to ruminate about what we should have done differently. In the moment, a difficult situation feels as if it will never end. To bolster your resilience, remind yourself that even if you made a mistake, a number of factors most likely contributed to the problem and shift your focus to the next steps you should take.

 “Telling yourself that a situation is not personal, pervasive or permanent can be extremely useful,” Dr. Grant said. “There is almost no failure that is totally personal.

Remember Your Comebacks

When times are tough, we often remind ourselves that other people — like war refugees or a friend with cancer — have it worse. While that may be true, you will get a bigger resilience boost by reminding yourself of the challenges you personally have overcome.

“It’s easier to relate to your former self than someone in another country,” said Dr. Grant. “Look back and say, ‘I’ve gone through something worse in the past. This is not the most horrible thing I have ever faced or will ever face. I know I can deal with it.’”

Sallie Krawcheck, a former Wall Street executive, said that after a very public firing, she reminded herself how fortunate she still was to have a healthy family and a financial cushion. While she has never studied resilience, she believes early challenges — like being bullied in middle school (“It was brutal,” she said) and going through a painful divorce — helped her bounce back in her career as well. “I just believe in comebacks,” said Ms. Krawcheck, who recently founded Ellevest, an online investment platform for women. “I see these setbacks as part of a journey and not a career-ending failure. There was nothing they could do to me on Wall Street that was as bad as seventh grade.”

Support Others

Resilience studies show that people are more resilient when they have strong support networks of friends and family to help them cope with a crisis. But you can get an even bigger resilience boost by giving support.

In a 2017 study of psychological resilience among American military veterans, higher levels of gratitude, altruism and a sense of purpose predicted resiliency.

“Any way you can reach out and help other people is a way of moving outside of yourself, and this is an important way to enhance your own strength,” said Dr. Southwick. “Part of resilience is taking responsibility for your life, and for creating a life that you consider meaningful and purposeful. It doesn’t have to be a big mission — it could be your family. As long as what you’re involved in has meaning to you, that can push you through all sorts of adversity.”

Take Stress Breaks

Times of manageable stress present an opportunity to build your resilience. “You have to change the way you look at stress,” said Jack Groppel, co-founder of the Johnson & Johnson Human Performance Institute, which recently began offering a course on resilience. “You have to invite stress into your life. A human being needs stress; the body and the mind want stress.”

The key, Dr. Groppel said, is to recognize that you will never eliminate stress from your life. Instead create regular opportunities for the body to recover from stress — just as you would rest your muscles between weight lifting repetitions. Taking a walk break, spending five minutes to meditate or having lunch with a good friend are ways to give your mind and body a break from stress.

“Stress is the stimulus for growth, and recovery is when the growth occurs,” said Dr. Groppel. “That’s how we build the resilience muscle.”

Go Out of Your Comfort Zone

Resilience doesn’t just come from negative experience. You can build your resilience by putting yourself in challenging situations. Dr. Groppel is planning to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with his son. Take an adventure vacation. Run a triathlon. Share your secret poetry skills with strangers at a poetry slam.

“There is a biology to this,” said Dr. Charney. “Your stress hormone systems will become less responsive to stress so you can handle stress better. Live your life in a way that you get the skills that enable you to handle stress.”

Content from here.
 

Positive Emotions and Your Health - Developing a Brighter Outlook

Do you tend to look on the sunny side, or do you see a future filled with dark, stormy skies? A growing body of research suggests that having a positive outlook can benefit your physical health. NIH-funded scientists are working to better understand the links between your attitude and your body. They’re finding some evidence that emotional wellness can be improved by developing certain skills.

Having a positive outlook doesn’t mean you never feel negative emotions, such as sadness or anger, says Dr. Barbara L. Fredrickson, a psychologist and expert on emotional wellness at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “All emotions—whether positive or negative—are adaptive in the right circumstances. The key seems to be finding a balance between the two,” she says.

“Positive emotions expand our awareness and open us up to new ideas, so we can grow and add to our toolkit for survival,” Fredrickson explains. “But people need negative emotions to move through difficult situations and respond to them appropriately in the short term. Negative emotions can get us into trouble, though, if they’re based on too much rumination about the past or excessive worry about the future, and they’re not really related to what’s happening in the here and now.”

People who are emotionally well, experts say, have fewer negative emotions and are able to bounce back from difficulties faster. This quality is called resilience. Another sign of emotional wellness is being able to hold onto positive emotions longer and appreciate the good times. Developing a sense of meaning and purpose in life—and focusing on what’s important to you—also contributes to emotional wellness.

Research has found a link between an upbeat mental state and improved health, including lower blood pressure, reduced risk for heart disease, healthier weight, better blood sugar levels, and longer life. But many studies can’t determine whether positive emotions lead to better health, if being healthy causes positive emotions, or if other factors are involved.

“While earlier research suggests an association between positive emotions and health, it doesn’t reveal the underlying mechanisms,” says Dr. Richard J. Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “To understand the mechanisms, I think it will be crucial to understand the underlying brain circuits.”

By using brain imaging, Davidson and others have found that positive emotions can trigger “reward” pathways located deep within the brain, including in an area known as the ventral striatum.

“Individuals who are able to savor positive emotions have lasting activation in the ventral striatum,” Davidson says. “The longer the activation lasts, the greater his or her feelings of well-being.” Continued activation of this part of the brain has been linked to healthful changes in the body, including lower levels of a stress hormone.

Negative emotions, in contrast, can activate a brain region known as the amygdala, which plays a role in fear and anxiety. “We’ve shown that there are big differences among people in how rapidly or slowly the amygdala recovers following a threat,” Davidson says. “Those who recover more slowly may be more at risk for a variety of health conditions compared to those who recover more quickly.”

Among those who appear more resilient and better able to hold on to positive emotions are people who’ve practiced various forms of meditation. In fact, growing evidence suggests that several techniques—including meditation, cognitive therapy (a type of psychotherapy), and self-reflection (thinking about the things you find important)—can help people develop the skills needed to make positive, healthful changes.

“Research points to the importance of certain kinds of training that can alter brain circuits in a way that will promote positive responses,” Davidson says. “It’s led us to conclude that well-being can be considered as a life skill. If you practice, you can actually get better at it.”

In one study, Davidson and his colleagues found changes in reward-related brain circuits after people had 2 weeks of training in a simple form of meditation that focuses on compassion and kindness. These changes, in turn, were linked to an increase in positive social behaviors, such as increased generosity.

Fredrickson and her colleagues are also studying meditation. They found that after 6 weeks of training in compassion and kindness meditation, people reported increased positive emotions and social connectedness compared to an untrained group. The meditation group also had improved functioning in a nerve that helps to control heart rate. “The results suggest that taking time to learn the skills to self-generate positive emotions can help us become healthier, more social, more resilient versions of ourselves,” Fredrickson says.

Dr. Emily Falk, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, is taking a different approach. Falk is exploring how self-affirmation—that is, thinking about what’s most important to you—can affect your brain and lead to positive, healthful behaviors. Her team found that when people are asked to think about things that they find meaningful, a brain region that recognizes personally relevant information becomes activated. This brain activity can change how people respond to health advice.

“In general, if you tell people that they sit too much and they need to change their behavior, they can become defensive. They’ll come up with reasons why the message doesn’t apply to them,” Falk says. But if people reflect on the things they value before the health message, the brain’s reward pathways are activated.

This type of self-affirmation, Falk’s research shows, can help physically inactive “couch potatoes” get more active. In a recent study, inactive adults received typical health advice about the importance of moving more and sitting less. But before the advice, about half of the participants were asked to think about things that they value most.

The “self-affirmation” group became more physically active during the month-long study period that followed compared to the group that hadn’t engaged in self-affirmation. “The study shows one way that we can open the brain to positive change and help people achieve their goals,” Falk says.

Being open to positive change is a key to emotional wellness. “Sometimes people think that emotions just happen, kind of like the weather,” Fredrickson says. “But research suggests that we can have some control over which emotions we experience.” As mounting research suggests, having a positive mindset might help to improve your physical health as well.

References: 
Compassion training alters altruism and neural responses to suffering. Weng HY, Fox AS, Shackman AJ, Stodola DE, et al. Psychol Sci. 2013 Jul 1; 24(7):1171-80. doi: 10.1177/0956797612469537. Epub 2013 May 21. PMID: 23696200.

Mind of the meditator. Ricard M, Lutz A, Davidson RJ. Sci Am. 2014 Nov;311(5):38-45. PMID: 25508292.

How positive emotions build physical health: perceived positive social connections account for the upward spiral between positive emotions and vagal tone. Kok BE, Coffey KA, Cohn MA, Catalino LI, et al. Psychol Sci. 2013 Jul 1;24(7):1123-32. doi: 10.1177/0956797612470827. Epub 2013 May 6. PMID: 23649562.

Happiness unpacked: positive emotions increase life satisfaction by building resilience. Cohn MA, Fredrickson BL, Brown SL, Mikels JA, Conway AM. Emotion. 2009 Jun;9(3):361-8. doi: 10.1037/a0015952. PMID: 19485613.

Self-affirmation alters the brain's response to health messages and subsequent behavior change. Falk EB, O'Donnell MB, Cascio CN, Tinney F, et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2015 Feb 17;112(7):1977-82. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1500247112. Epub 2015 Feb 2. PMID: 25646442.

Beyond Brain Mapping: Using Neural Measures to Predict Real-World Outcomes. Berkman ET, Falk EB. Curr Dir Psychol Sci. 2013 Feb;22(1):45-50. PMID: 24478540.

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