Oct. 17, 2016 "In search of happiness": Today I found this article by Liane Faulder in the Edmonton Journal:
Neil Pasricha doesn’t waste a moment. The author of the new self-help guide, The Happiness Equation, is doing this interview by cellphone while walking up Toronto’s Yonge Street on a golden October day, on his way to several other activities.
“I’m hoping to get a 10-kilometre walk in over my next three or four meetings,” says Pasricha, upbeat and focused. “I find it helps my thinking when I’m literally moving, and then I also end up getting lots of exercise.”
Excellent tip. Perhaps not strictly practical for people who aren’t an enormously successful, one-man-band who can conduct meetings in whatever way they choose because they are Neil Pasricha, Harvard grad, author of the million-seller Book of Awesome series, and headliner at this year’s LitFest Alberta.
But still, I take his point, and that of his new, internationally best-selling book, The Happiness Equation.
The point is — you can do it. Yes. You can uncomplicate your life, free up your brain, plan your time more effectively and exercise to boot.
You can turn your biggest fear into your biggest success.
You can be happy. But, if you are like me and can’t remember anything unless it’s written on a yellow sticky and placed on the bathroom mirror, you’ll need guidance along the way. That’s where the book comes in.
“I could never find a guidebook,” says Pasricha, when asked why he wrote The Happiness Equation. “I found inspirational stories, I found scientific studies, but I never found a how-to manual.”
Pasricha actually penned the book for his son, as yet unborn at the time of writing. He wanted to make sure his son would know how to be happy if Pasricha were to pass away before passing on valuable life lessons.
(This strikes me as unbelievably organized. Before my children were born, all I could do was worry about labour pain and having something to wear afterwards that had an elastic waist.)
So he began to research happiness, and to develop a framework based on the thoughts, advice and practises of people as wise and wonderful as Ghandi and the citizens of Okinawa (who don’t retire, by the way).
In doing so, Pasricha discovered lessons that can work for everybody, and carefully organized them in an easy-to-digest series of nine Secrets. I asked Pasricha for his personal, favourite secrets in The Happiness Equation. Here’s what he said:
Secret No. 1: The First Thing You Must Do Before You Can Be Happy
People think they need to work hard to be successful, and only then can they be happy. Pasricha says that’s backwards.
“It’s happiness that leads to great work, which leads to success,” he says. “It’s a paradigm shift.”
Of course, being happy from the get-go is hard for many people (hence the book). Long story short; if you want to be happy,
simply make the best of everything,
be grateful,
unplug every so often
and walk three times a week for 30 minutes. There you have it.
Secret No. 2: Do This and Criticism Can’t Touch You
When Pasricha first became famous after creating The Book of Awesome (which started as an award-winning blog), he found himself on a bit of a treadmill. He set many goals, including raising his blog stats and making sure his book was a best-seller.
But having achieved his goals, Pasricha didn’t feel like a better person, which made him realize that intrinsic motivators were the only things that worked.
In other words, if you want to be happy, make sure you do what you are doing because it works for you, and not for others.
“I got obsessed with the extrinsic motivators, the things I couldn’t control, such as other people’s view of my book,” says Pasricha.
“That’s when I went deep into the research, and found that internal motivation works, and external motivators don’t. So do it for you.”
Secret No. 6: The Secret to Never Being Too Busy Again
“Choice, time and access — if you can remove these things, it increases space in your life, space for exercise, happiness and family time,” says Pasricha.
Consider choice. We live in a busy culture, with many options available to us. Pasricha says one way to create more time is to spend less time making decisions.
Limit your own options, so as not to be distracted by the trivial. U.S. President Barack Obama eliminates choice by only wearing grey or blue suits, thereby focusing his attention on the things that matter.
Similarly, time wasters such as people who blather on at meetings are the scourge of the wanna-be-happy person.
And leaving too much time to complete a task is also not good, as the task expands to fill the time. Be stingy with your time.
Access is another problem. There are too many ways to get into our brains — through e-mail, texting, phoning. This leads to scattered minds and wasted time. Reduce the number of people and technologies that have access to your brain and you’ll be happier.
Apr. 3, 2017 "A sunny outlook may be good for health" (8 skills to be happy): Today I found this article by Jane E. Brody in the Globe and Mail:
Researchers find HIV and diabetes patients who have taken positive-emotions training do measurably better at dealing with disease
‘Look on the sunny side of life.”
“Turn your face toward the sun, and the shadows will fall behind you.”
“Every day may not be good, but there is something good in every day.”
“See the glass as half-full, not half-empty.”
Researchers are finding that thoughts such as these, the hallmarks of people sometimes called “cockeyed optimists,” can do far more than raise one’s spirits. They may improve health and extend life.
There is no doubt that what happens in the brain influences what happens in the body.
When facing a health crisis, actively cultivating positive emotions can boost the immune system and counter depression.
Studies have shown an indisputable link between having a positive outlook and health benefits such as lower blood pressure, less heart disease, better weight control and healthier blood sugar levels.
Even when faced with an incurable illness, positive feelings and thoughts can greatly improve one’s quality of life. Dr. Wendy Schlessel Harpham, a Dallas based author of several books for people facing cancer, including Happiness in a Storm, was a practicing internist when she learned she had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system, 27 years ago.
During the next 15 years of treatments for eight relapses of her cancer, she set the stage for happiness and hope, she says,
by such measures as surrounding herself with people who lift her spirits,
keeping a daily gratitude journal,
doing something good for someone else
and watching funny, uplifting movies.
Her cancer has been in remission now for 12 years.
“Fostering positive emotions helped make my life the best it could be,” Harpham said.
“They made the tough times easier, even though they didn’t make any difference in my cancer cells.”
While Harpham may have a natural disposition to see the hopeful side of life even when the outlook is bleak, new research shows that people can learn skills that help them experience more positive emotions when faced with the severe stress of a life-threatening illness.
Judith Moskowitz, a professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, developed a set of eight skills to help foster positive emotions.
In earlier research at the University of California, San Francisco, she and colleagues found people with new diagnoses of HIV infection who practiced these skills carried a lower load of the virus, were more likely to take their medication correctly and were less likely to need antidepressants.
The researchers studied 159 people who had recently learned they had HIV and randomly assigned them to either a five-session positive emotions training course or five sessions of general support.
Fifteen months past their HIV diagnosis, those trained in the eight skills maintained higher levels of positive feelings and fewer negative thoughts related to their infection.
An important goal of the training is to help people feel happy, calm and satisfied in the midst of a health crisis. Improvements in their health and longevity are a bonus. Each participant is encouraged to learn at least three of the eight skills and practice one or more each day.
The eight skills are:
Recognize a positive event each day;
Savour that event and log it in a journal or tell someone about it;
Start a daily gratitude journal;
List a personal strength and note how you used it;
Set an attainable goal and note your progress;
Report a relatively minor stress and list ways to reappraise the event positively;
Recognize and practice small acts of kindness daily;
Practise mindfulness, focusing on the here and now rather than the past or future.
Moskowitz said she was inspired by observations that people with AIDS, Type 2 diabetes and other chronic illnesses lived longer if they demonstrated positive emotions.
She explained, “The next step was to see if teaching people skills that foster positive emotions can have an impact on how well they cope with stress and their physical health down the line.”
She listed as the goals improving patients’ quality of life,
enhancing adherence to medication,
fostering healthy behaviours
and building personal resources that result in increased social support and broader attention to the good things in life.
Gregg De Meza, a 56-year-old architect in San Francisco who learned he was infected with HIV four years ago, told me that learning “positivity” skills turned his life around.
He said he felt “stupid and careless” about becoming infected and had initially kept his diagnosis a secret.
“When I entered the study, I felt like my entire world was completely unravelling,” he said. “The training reminded me to rely on my social network, and I decided to be honest with my friends.
I realized that to show your real strength is to show your weakness. No pun intended, it made me more positive, more compassionate and I’m now healthier than I’ve ever been.”
In another study among 49 patients with Type 2 diabetes, an online version of the positive emotions skills training course was effective in enhancing positivity and reducing negative emotions and feelings of stress.
Prior studies showed that, for people with diabetes, positive feelings were associated with better control of blood sugar, an increase in physical activity and healthy eating, less use of tobacco and a lower risk of dying.
In a pilot study of 39 women with advanced breast cancer, Moskowitz said an online version of the skills training decreased depression among them. The same was true with caregivers of dementia patients.
“None of this is rocket science,” Moskowitz said. “I’m just putting these skills together and testing them in a scientific fashion.”
In a related study of more than 4,000 people 50 and older published last year in the Journal of Gerontology, Becca Levy and Avni Bavishi at the Yale School of Public Health demonstrated that having a positive view of aging can have a beneficial influence on health outcomes and longevity. Levy said two possible mechanisms account for the findings.
Psychologically, a positive view can enhance belief in one’s abilities, decrease perceived stress and foster healthful behaviours.
Physiologically, people with positive views of aging had lower levels of C-reactive protein, a marker of stress-related inflammation associated with heart disease and other illnesses, even after accounting for possible influences such as age, health status, sex, race and education than those with a negative outlook. They also lived significantly longer.
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