Cathexis

Ten Rules for a Good Life

1. Produce, do not procrastinate.

2. Manage your energy, not your time.

3. Perfection is merely a facade that steers you in the wrong direction.

4. Personal innovation is the key to any type of life success.

5. Thoughts precede actions, which precede change. Care + Commitment = Change. Commitment alone does not equal change. There is a personal component to all that we do.

6. Now is everything. Perseverance is power. Inspiration is everywhere.

7. All that needs to be known dwells inside your own heart. Tap into that knowledge within, and trust that knowledge. Be confident in yourself and your power to choose your own perspective. You have more power than you know what to do with in your life. Harness that potential, and your limits will know no bounds.

8. Invest in yourself. Personal knowledge and self-discovery are invaluable. Don’t limit your potential by limiting your personal treasury. You are your greatest ally and asset.

9. From a place of clarity, you can move forward with freedom and creativity. Within clarity, there is no such thing as “stuck.”

10. We all hunger for a fulfilling life — a life filled with meaning and purpose — for ourselves and for the people around us.

[I can't remember where I found this (I will put in the credit if I do).]

Interesting result about how people think they will be able to take risks in the future because they are unable to anticipate the emotions (fear, etc) that they will feel when the moment comes. Helping people to step into that future moment and feel some of those emotions helps people make much more accurate projections about their own courage in such situations. I’m sure the captain of the Costa Concordia would never have believed he would act this way if his ship ever hit a rock.

I’ve talked about the power of automatic thinking, which some call habits. Others, like this consultant writing in the Harvard Business Review, call them rituals.

He writes a great article, very much worth reading, but here is his ritual in a nutshell: Plan, focus, review.

Plan: Before you do anything, take five minutes to decide what will make this day highly successful

Refocus: Every hour, stop for one minute and look at what you have done or not done in the past hour, then recommit to what you will do in the next hour.

Review: At the end of the day, take five minutes to review what you accomplished, where you got distracted, and what you learned.

Getting more done: make it automatic

We live 90 percent of our lives on automatic pilot. Don’t believe it? It may be disconcerting to think that we are so unthinking about most of our activities. Perhaps it seems like you think about everything you do. But think about driving. Think about how difficult it was to learn to drive, when you had to consciously think about everything you were doing. Now you can drive and think about other things, hold a conversation, listen to the radio–all because the many tasks involved in driving have become automatic. They have become unconscious.

You might protest that driving is easy because you simply learned how to do it well. But even if you knew how to drive well but still had to consciously think through each action, had to think, “now I’m going to push on the accelerator until I reach exactly 30 miles and hour, now I let up but not too much, now I see a stop sign so I take my foot off the accelerator and push gently on the brake”—driving would be much more arduous. It’s because it’s automatic that it’s easy. (That’s one of the greatest frustrations of some people who have a stroke—not only having to relearn something, but having to consciously think about activities that were previously automatic).

Now think of all the things in your life that you do in the same automatic way throughout the day. Tying your shoes. Turning on your computer. Simply walking. Out of all the activities that we are involved daily, relatively few require conscious attention on our part.

We also have behaviors that we engage in automatically based on certain prompts. We stand and shake someone’s hand when they great us. We smile at someone when they smile at us. It hits noon and we think about lunch, usually whether we are hungry or not.

The reason for this is that our brains don’t have the capacity to pay conscious attention to much. We think that we are aware of everything going and making conscious decisions about everything we do because the brain fills in the gaps in our perception. In reality, our conscious activity is like a flashlight beam in a dark auditorium. We can only consciously focus on one little thing at a time. When we multitask we are usually switching our attention rapidly between two or more things.

One of the hallmarks of automatic tasks is that they feel easy. Even if the activity is fairly complicated, like driving a car, it feels like we can handle it (except, I have found when trying to swallow an ibuprofen without water while driving, and the pill gets stuck right on the “gag” button in the throat). So one key way to make it easier to get more done is to make more tasks automatic.

What does this mean in practice? It means:

• breaking tasks down into the key parts that can you can learn to perform without thinking about them.

• using specific cues to initiate tasks automatically. For instance, exercising immediately when you get up in the morning. Or running down the list of things you have to do today right after you turn on your car.

• making it automatic that you think about how to make it automatic—always be looking for things in your life that you can move from the conscious column to the unconscious column.

Beneficial, unconscious activities that we cultivate are not new. In fact, that’s really what habits are. But by understanding what is going on in the brain and seeing how dominant these behaviors are in our lives, we can really change how we live.

In fact, that is the true secret to how “The Secret” works, which I will get to in another post.

For a happier new year:

Be around happy people, avoid unhappy people. Studies of social networks support the idea that our health and happiness are deeply affected by the people we associate with.

Think about major turning points in your life and what might never have been. One common piece of advice about how to be happier is to count your blessings. And that works. But researchers have found that it is even more effective to think about how those good things in your life might never have happened if things had gone a little differently. How you might have never met your spouse, or how you might have never got that job opportunity.

You get what you give. Giving to other does make you happier. A three part study found that varied levels of personal spending is unrelated to happiness, but spending on others is associated with greater levels of happiness.

Find meaning, be compassionate. The “why” of things drives how we react emotionally. Think about how the irritation at a traffic jam is reframed when you find out it’s because a whole family died in a car accident. Or how you might feel if you are told you have to work weekends, but then discover that  the reason is that you are picking up slack for a coworker who has cancer. The world is not setting out to irritate us every day.

Think fast. Studies have found that people think an increase in positive mood when they thing quickly rather than slowly.

Smile. Researchers have show that engaging the muscles involved in smiling can increase positive mood. This is true not only when people make themselves smile, but is also true when the researchers use electrodes to make those muscles contract. The brain is an association machine. It associated happiness with smiling and smiling with happiness. It goes both ways.

How to make good experiences more pleasurable (and bad experiences less bad). People tend to take breaks during difficult tasks and want good experiences to be uninterrupted, but in many cases the opposite is the best approach. Studies have found that taking breaks during a pleasurable task like eating a good meal increases pleasure, while interrupting an unpleasant task makes the task more unpleasant.

Action this day! Procrastination results when we avoid the bad feelings associated with a task by avoiding the task.  Psychologists Dianne Tice and Ellen Bratslavsky call this “giving in to feeling good,” and point out that this short-term increase in happiness leads to increased unhappiness in the long term. Don’t make that mistake. Focus on the long term and the increased positive feelings that come from progress on the task. Even the process of taking action itself, instead sitting and stewing about it, will make you happier. Nike got it right: Just Do It.

See part I of happiness tips here.

As part of research I’m doing for a new book on how the brain works, I’ve picked up some interesting suggestions for improving your life in 2012. Here is one:

Understand where happiness really comes from

Everyone wants to be happier, but what is happiness?  Happiness actually results from different processes in the brain. Some of these sources of happiness can work against each other, so it’s important understand where the good feelings come from and how they are produced. Each researcher has their own scheme, but to me they boil down to two very separate sources of happiness:

• Pleasure

• Meaning

We as a culture put a lot of emphasis on the first, but less on the second. Pleasure at it’s most basic level can be the good feeling we get from eating good food, from sex, from drinking a tall glass of water on a hot day. It can come from music or a beautiful object. It can come from a big bonus at work or the sudden decrease in stress that comes with a vacation. The problem with focusing on pleasure as single road to happiness is that it usually results in a dead-end.

Researchers find that a more lasting happiness comes from finding meaning in what you do, from being part of something that is larger than yourself, from making sense of the world, from contributing to something that affects the well-being of others and may extend beyond your own lifetime. Creating meaning can be a difficult and sometimes unpleasant activity, but researchers have found that people end up with a longer lasting sense of happiness (and even pleasure).

One Stanford researcher split her class into two groups. The first she told to go out and “create happiness” in their lives. The second group she ordered to go out and “create meaning” in their lives.  People in the first group did things like eat at a favorite restaurant, buy something they have wanted for a while, give up work for the day so they could read. The second group did things like volunteer for a charity or reconnect with family members. After a few days, the two groups came back and were quizzed about their level of happiness. Which group do you think turned out to be happier? (Hint: it wasn’t number one.)

Martin Seligmann, the father of “positive psychology” has proposed that happiness comes from five factors that form the acronym PERMA:

Positive Emotion –which is really pleasure.

Engagement—being fully involved in an activity that is just challenging enough to create a sense of flow

Relationships—being part of a larger social network, whether a couple, a family or a society.

Meaning—what Joseph Campbell called “Understanding the world, its parts and our place in it.”  Having a reason for doing things that is greater than our own pleasure, and is sometimes very unpleasant (like dying for a cause). Sometimes this category might be thought of as “significance,” a recognition that you matter in the world.

Accomplishments—completing goals and doing things that extend to the wider world and into the future.

When Plato described happiness he used a word that can be translated as “flourishing.” For Plato, happiness was part not an end goal but the result of an ongoing process. True happiness comes from bringing all the sources of happiness into our lives, like combining the right measures of soil, water, sunlight and nutrients that allow a garden to flourish.