Recent research shows that mothers who hold their stillborn babies report that the experience had overall positive long-term effects on their grieving. According to researchers, mothers who had contact with their stillborn babies reported that they “had time to process what happened, to build memories, and to ‘say goodbye’, often sharing the experience with partners and other family members … [T]he majority of mothers felt satisfied with their decision to spend time with their stillborn baby.” (BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth, Mothers’ Experience of their Contact With Their Stillborn Infant: An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis, Kirsty Rykinks, Cara Roberts-Collins, Kirstie McKenzie-McHarg, Antje Horsch). For this reason, medical professionals would do well to consider ways to suggest affirmatively that mothers have physical contact with their babies, while also providing ongoing necessary support.

This finding resonates with me on a visceral level. In December of 2005, I gave birth to a stillborn son. As I was being medically induced in order to deliver him, I remember being sideswiped by this question: would you like to hold your baby?

I can remember only dimly how shattering and painful I found this question as it echoed and morphed into language to which I could hardly bear to attach meaning.  The beginning had transformed itself into the end. I was filled with anguish and dread and love and abject panic.

Some mothers who were interviewed for this study indicated that they had been fearful of seeing their baby owing to physical damage or decomposition. It is worth noting that those medical professionals who spend time talking to bereaved mothers about their expectations enabled these mothers to have a more positive experience in the long term.  

This is no easy feat. Medical professionals are not necessarily trained to discuss this aspect of birth with their patients.  I remember pleading with my OB to tell me what had happened to my son in a physical sense.  As a very experienced doctor, I remember her gently, kindly and expertly, telling me.  She was both compassionate and informative.  For example, I was told to expect bruising around my son’s head and so when I noted this I was not shocked.  This information was strangely empowering because it prepared me to make the one choice I could make in that grim setting.  As a result of my doctor’s careful words, I was as well prepared for the shock of holding him, as it was possible to be. I moved instantly beyond it to the place of seeing the beauty in him that all parents see in their children upon presentation just after birth. 

I was reminded that the scale of suffering in a stillbirth labor and delivery room stands in such sharp contrast to the rest of the floor, that additional information can’t really make it worse.  Families who face this don’t get do-overs, and decisions made in these rooms are final.  They are stunned as they face death, with babies on a floor accustomed to ecstatic balloon bouquets and stuffed animals heralding new life. In spending the time with me that my doctor did, she was setting the stage for me to have an experience with my son that was as positive and profound as it was possible to be.

According to the study: “Nevertheless, even in cases where mothers experienced intense distress during the contact with their stillborn baby, they still described that having had this contact was important and that in hindsight they felt they had taken the right decision. These findings indicate a need for giving parents an informed choice by engaging in discussions about the possible benefits and risks of seeing their stillborn baby, rather than rigidly following perinatal bereavement protocols and guidelines.”

Researchers underscore that dissociation may occur in stillbirth, and it is for this reason that physical connection with the baby may have positive effects in the long term. I found dissociation to be a large factor in my son’s stillbirth although not an absolute. I do not remember every moment because of the merciful tricks the mind plays in trauma. Still. I did hold my baby. When he emerged into this world, we did create memories.  These are the footholds of him now.  They are how I have tried to understand his death. These are the things that we have of him.  They are not the memories we intended, but they are powerfully validating even years after the fact.  And I feel grateful to have them.

I have stayed away from speculations about Robin William’s suicide. I don’t know what pushed him over and neither do you. The autopsy showed that he had not been drinking or using illegal drugs, but he was taking prescription drugs. And what were they? It is important to take note that two of these prescription drugs were antidepressants. And he began taking Seroquel a week before he committed suicide. This is very suspicious. Antidepressants have been implicated in suicides by children and by adolescents. It is already established that that they embolden people to act on suicidal tendencies. The black box warning has been avoided in adults, but it is only a matter of time.

      Antidepressants numb and harden people and make them not feel. This sometimes makes it seem like they are not depressed, because it numbs them from feeling. I wrote about this in “Add Tony Scott to the list of suicides on antidepressants”. Also see “To recover from the Numbing and Addictive Effects of Antidepressants”, as well as many other blogs. And I’ll reiterate that its not so simple to just stop them. They are habituating and generate very disturbing and frightening side effects. Stopping antidepressants should be done slowly with careful supervision.

      I can only wish that Robin Williams was in a good psychotherapy. His loss is such a great tragedy.         

 Robert A. Berezin, MD is the author of “Psychotherapy of Character, the Play of Consciousness in the Theater of the Brain"

 www.robertberezin.com

Whenever you think to yourself, “This is the last straw; now I’m really going to blow my stack,” take a minute to breathe.  The philosopher who once said “Silence is golden,” probably had overheard an exchange of angry words.  We talk so much about anger in our society that few of us realize how damaging it can be. 

Anger is a reaction, an emotion.  We cannot really control our emotions.  We feel what we feel.  However, we can control our actions and reactions. Oftentimes when we are angry, we simply lash out.  Sometimes were say what is on our minds to the person who made us angry.  Or sometimes it’s the next person who comes along who becomes the recipient of our angry words. 

Redford D. Williams, MD, at the Division of Behavioral Medicine, Duke University, has long been a proponent of taming anger and has written extensively about this. (1)

How to be heard:

If you want others to hear you rather than react to you, you need to be careful about what you say.  When we are angry with someone, it is often because they have hurt us.  Frequently the person with whom we are angry feels none of the internal conflict or turmoil that we feel.  That person may not even know that we are angry.

Instead of reacting when you are angry, take a few minutes to ask yourself:

- What feelings do I personally associate with the person who created this situation – the hurt, disappointment, embarrassment?

- What is it that I want the person to hear me say?

- What kind of response do I want from the other person?

- How can I confront without being confrontational?

Essentially you want the person who angered you to know how you really feel.  If you feel disappointed or let down you don’t need to drag up a litany of offenses, by saying, “You always do this.”  Those words set up a defense-offense scenario that can escalate into a serious confrontation. 

It is enough to simply state what you feel and suggest that you hope the situation does not occur again.  And if this is a pattern, point it out then leave it alone. 

Face-to-face or email?

With lovers or family face-to-face is generally advisable.  In work situations, if isn’t in print – it didn’t happen.  Here again state the problem. Then either present a solution or if there was an agreed upon solution earlier between the two of you and executive management, remind the person that he or she is ignoring policy.

What’s next?  Let the forgiveness factor kick in. What to do with anger has been talked about since Biblical days.  We are admonished to forgive, forgive, forgive. (2)

Our grandmother’s advice has proven to be consistent with the advice of health experts, psychiatrists, and religious philosophers such as Emmet Fox.  (3) He has said of anger: “When you hold resentment against anyone, you are bound to that person by a mental chain.  You are tied by a cosmic tie to the thing you hate.  By forgiveness you set yourself free.”

 (Adapted from the Art of Decision Making, Rita E. Watson, LowellHouse)

 References:

1.) Williams, Redford D., MD, Anger Kills, Random House, 20121)

2.) Enright, Robert D.,PhD,  The Forgiving Life: A Pathway to Overcoming Resentment and Creating a Legacy of Love,  APA Lifetools, American Psychological Association, 2012 

2) Williams, Redford D., MD, Anger Kills, Random House, 2012

Copyright 2014 Rita Watson

Other articles on Decision-Making include:

•  For Lovers or Employees, Documentation Improves Skills
• The Little Miss Sunshine Mask Must Go
• If Only: Dealing with Unexpected Situations
• Ask for What You Wish
• Deciding to Go or Stay When Infidelity Tarnishes Marriage
• 35 Questions and Thoughts Before You Say, "It's Over"

For the many years that I lived by myself it always used to annoy me that most food in packages, from loaves of sliced bread to four-packs of apples or peppers, were too much for a single person to use and would go bad before being consumed. One could always freeze meat or prepared food but cheese that went moldy before being finished? Packages of crackers that went stale? It seemed that the world of food consumption just assumed two person or more households. Let’s not even go into the looks of derision one received as a single restaurant patron.

Recently things have improved for unattached people. There are restaurants with communal tables or at the counter seating, and groceries do occasionally sell packaged goods in smaller sized portions. I think many of these single portion items are designed to go into lunch boxes, but no one knows who might be eating them as their dinner in front of the TV.

Pejorative words like “spinster” have thankfully disappeared now that more than one quarter of all U.S. households are single person and the number is growing all the time. So how many of those who are living alone like it that way, do you suppose?

While some of those living alone are widowed or newly divorced, alone not by their own choice, many others do so with a huge sigh of relief at not having to battle over bathroom usage or dishes left in the sink. If you are a single person who is not entirely sure you do enjoy it, how can you get to that of state of contentment?

First of all, carefully enumerate the positives. Your habits are your own and not up for scrutiny by anyone else. Wet towels on the floor, unmade bed, a breakfast of cold pizza? No one has to know. There is an enormous sense of relief in this, especially if you have recently moved out from under your parents’ or housemate's roof into a place of your own.

Second, you can express your tastes by painting the walls chartreuse or playing loud 1950’s doo-wop music. There is no need to compromise in these matters with self-expression..

Third, building laws permitting, you can have the pet of your choice without concern for anyone else’s animal prejudices or allergies and he or she can share your bed with impunity if you so desire.

Fourth, speaking of sharing your bed, you can whenever and with whomever you wish with no embarrassment or explanation.

Last of all, know that you do have a choice. No matter the size of your digs you can find a housemate easily or move with someone to larger space. There are no lack of folks of all ages looking to share rooms for financial or companionship purposes and it’s quite common these days to find men and women sharing housing in roommate arrangements. If you don’t like your situation change it!

Whenever parents seek advice about helping their children adjust to the fallout of divorce, they are, more often then not, instructed about what not to do rather than provided with useful ideas about how to behave in a positive manner to the benefit of their children. They are typically told: “Don’t put your children in the middle of conflict between you and your ex”; or, “Don’t badmouth the other parent.” Although such advice has its place, it nevertheless assumes a deficit perspective in relation to divorcing parents, and overlooks parents’ good faith efforts and capacity to do the best for their children, given a little support. Many such prescriptions also fall short in regard to offering concrete, practical steps that parents can take to enable their children to not only cope with the divorce, but flourish in its aftermath.

The following principles are offered in the spirit that parents have the strengths, capacities and abilities to help children through the difficult transitions attendant to divorce, and will be able do the best for their children with concrete, practical support. It is the responsibility of service providers and support networks to support parents in their quest to address their children’s needs during and after divorce. What we expect of others, they endeavor to provide: if we expect divorcing parents to be responsible and act in their children’s best interests, and provide the supports to enable them to do so, they will act accordingly; if we expect them to fail, they will fail.

Although there is no “typical divorce” and no “magic formula” for ensuring positive child and family outcomes, and every child and family are unique, there are some general principles for successful co-parenting that apply to most, if not all, divorcing families:

1. Be there for your children, both physically and emotionally. Quantity of time matters; quality relationships are not possible without sufficient routine time to develop and sustain those relationships. But although quantity of parental time is necessary for successful child outcomes, it is not sufficient: children also need their parents to be emotionally present, engaged and attuned, taking an interest in all aspects of their lives and actively involved in their day-to-day routines.

2. Talk with your children about the divorce. Above all, children need to know that they will not be abandoned, physically or emotionally, by either of their parents. Reassure them by first of all creating a safe environment for the discussion, and a safe way to express their feelings of shock and confusion, self-blame, fear, grief and sadness, anger, or guilt. Recognize that divorce is a long-term process for children, not a one-time event, and be prepared to have several such talks. If possible, talk with your children together as parents, reassuring them that you will cooperate in the future.

3. Let children be children. Don’t involve children in adult problems; rather, maintain continuity in their existing routines and relationships, and shelter them from the struggles that are properly the responsibility of their parents.

4. Support the other parent’s role and relationship with your children. The idea is to maximize and optimize the time that your children can spend with each of their parents. It is extremely difficult for parents to be at their best when having to parent under duress, and when having to deal with a co-parent who is less than supportive of their role and relationship with their children. You can support each other as parents by keeping to the co-parenting schedule, remaining flexible in accommodating each other wherever possible, and moving from a place of conflict and antagonism toward that of cooperation as parents. A big part of this is to separate your previous hostilities as a couple from your ongoing co-parenting responsibilities.

5. Speak about and act in a respectful manner toward the other parent, especially in front of your children. Conveying an attitude of respect toward your co-parent is vital to children’s well-being, and shielding children from conflict is essential. There are few things more damaging to a child than witnessing conflict between parents, and ongoing conflict cuts to the heart of a child’s well-being, as a children see themselves as essentially half their mother and half their father. Keep this at the forefront of all interactions between you and the other parent in front of the child.

6. Wherever possible, maintain open communication channels with the other parent. Open and regular communication is the key to cooperative parenting. If this is not possible, then phone calls, emails, or stockpiling concerns to be discussed at periodic “co-parenting meetings,” with or without a third party present, are good alternatives. If you are unable to communicate without resorting to conflict and recriminations, a parallel parenting plan in which co-parenting arrangements are spelled out in a detailed agreed-upon schedule, is another effective option.

7. Maintain your child’s community of support. Essential to children is the security of maintaining existing relationships and routines with extended family members, friends, school and other activities. This adds to children’s sense of stability, continuity, and predictability in their lives.

8. Educate yourself about children’s needs, co-parenting options, and community resources. Shared parenting offers parents an almost infinite variety of co-parenting scheduling possibilities commensurate with children’s ages and stages of development, and can be tailor-made to children’s and families’ unique circumstances. There are a variety of web-, print-, and community-based resources (including divorce education programs) for parents to access.

9. Seek out formal and informal sources of co-parenting support. Family members, friends and informal support networks are vital in helping parents work through difficult feelings, including anger management, and the multiple challenges and transitions attendant to divorce. More formal sources of support also span a wide array: therapeutic family mediation focused on the development and implementation of co-parenting plans, divorce coaching and parenting coordination in high conflict situations.

10. Maintain your own health and well-being as a priority. Taking care of yourself is essential not only for your own but your children’s well-being. Your children depend on you, and you owe it to them to prioritize your own physical, emotional and mental health. For parents struggling in the face of systemic barriers to co-parenting: never, never give up.

Above all, it is critical to keep in mind that the two most important factors in children’s successful adjustment to the consequences of divorce are the maintenance of a meaningful routine relationship with each of their parents, and to be shielded from ongoing parental conflict. The challenge for parents is to develop and maintain a co-parenting relationship that ensures that both of these essential needs are met. The challenge for both professional service providers and informal support networks is to support (and not undermine) parents in the fulfillment of their responsibilities in regard to these needs of children in particular.

How convenient that the acronym for Seasonal Affective Disorder reflects the feeling people get as the dark crowds in on us. With daylight savings time accelerating the sensation, many of us get the feeling we should hunker down, make soup and bread, find ways to bring light into our lives using candles and fireplaces and we start feeling like we can hardly wait for spring already.

Seasonal Affective Disorder is much different though. It is not just "I hate the cold" crabbiness. Take the above description and multiply by 10. When people have an abnormal response to the shortened days, they feel depressed. They hunker down by not getting out of bed without tremendous motivation. They don't just decide to bake bread for its pleasant aroma, but they crave pasta, potatoes and sweets in preference to almost everything else. They need light - usually full spectrum, right in the face for a couple of hours - and this is just to feel okay in the face of fading light.

What is going on here? Your brain makes melatonin which it needs for adjusting your physical responses to light and dark. Even in this highly techno world, your brain still is reacting to natural light. Your eyes are the window into response to the rhythm of light and dark. When the world starts to darken into shorter days, if your brain is not manufacturing sufficient melatonin, getting drowsy and waking up becomes a challenge. Too drowsy and not energetic are the hallmarks of SAD. If you have a brain that does not make enough melatonin or that does not respond easily to the circadian rhythm you may have the biology that creates SAD.

The good news is that if you know this, you can make adjustments. Below are a couple of tips you might consider to help you take control and manage your SAD.

1. Get natural light

   You are the person who should seriously take a vacation in the south during the dark months. You can tell your boss I recommended it! But in lieu of vacation, get outside for 30 minutes in the middle of the day and take a walk. It helps activate your brain and you will feel more energetic, not less, if you get outside.  Natural light always trumps artificial light and even on a cloudy day you will get a fair amount of the right kind of light to wake up your brain. But getting a full spectrum light and using it daily can make a positive change in your mood and you can set it up at work or at home for your convenience.

2. Watch what you eat and take vitamins to enhance your mood

   Seriously, don't give in to the heavy carb craving if you can. You will gain weight, which will make you more depressed. You are probably not needing to hang on to body weight to survive the cold as your DNA ancestors did. Additionally, the carbs don't help your brain build melatonin. Taking melatonin is not really what is necessary; rather the building blocks of brain neurotransmitters: Proteins, B vitamins in vegetables and taking vitamins or supplements like Omega-3 or SAMe might be good choices.

3. Exercise- get out and be social!

   Even though the weather is not its best, don't give up on exercise. This is the time of year to get as much as you can. Exercise is probably the single best anti-depressant I can think of. Try being creative about it though: dance, play a running game with a child, join a walk-in-the-mall group for social exercise. Adding the pleasure of sociability to the exercise will boost your mood with smiles and the joy of human contact - even if your SAD makes you feel like other people are a bother.

4. Consider medication

   If all this fails, don't hesitate to consider medication. Some of the SSRIs have shown to improve SAD considerably. Taking medication even when you would prefer to avoid it is better than suffering through this serious seasonal malady. 

    

   The biggest curse of SAD is the way it robs you of joy in daily life and robs you of motivation to take part during this time of year when people want to celebrate with each other. Regardless of your religious conviction, starting with preparation for Thanksgiving and culminating with New Year's parties, parades and football, there are a lot of opportunities to feel like you are the odd one out with your unhappiness. This year, don't wait to see if it gets bad. Taking care of SAD as soon as you suspect you feel it may keep you more prepared to participate and thus put into effect a self-reinforcing circle of participation-feeling better-more participation that by itself will help reverse SAD.

For the last twenty-plus years, we’ve studied the most influential and respected employees in more than 50 companies across dozens of industries. As we observed these people clamoring to climb the corporate ladder, we discovered a few startling trends. One of the most disconcerting: 87 percent of the employees we surveyed said they have bosses who have prevented them from getting the pay, promotions or other opportunities they wanted because of a concern they’ve had about their performance. Conversely, managers are equally frustrated. More than half say they have employees who are stuck at performance levels that are below their potential.

As we compiled our research for our book "Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success," we uncovered some ways to help managers take a career that’s stuck or off the rails and get it back on track.

As the research reveals, employees who face performance problems have both a knowing problem and an influence problem. In fact, 70 percent of employees who were aware that their boss was unhappy with their performance, couldn't tell you what they were doing wrong or how they were going to change it.

The Change Anything approach empowers employees to take control of their own career path by teaching them the knowledge and tools to change their behavior and improve their performance.

Solving the Knowing Problem

In our study of top performers we asked thousands of employees (including managers) to give us the names of the three people in their organizations whose opinions, work habits and abilities they most admired. We were looking for the “go-to” people.

Next, we closely observed these highly valued individuals. We analyzed the behaviors they routinely practiced that made them so valued and found that top performers practice the same three vital behaviors: they know their stuff, focus on the right stuff and build a reputation for being helpful.

1. Know their stuff. Top performers put regular effort into ensuring they are good at the technical aspects of their jobs. They work hard at honing their craft.

2. Focus on the right stuff. In addition to performing their craft well, top performers contribute to tasks that are essential to the organization’s success. Top performers work on their skill set and their access to critical tasks the company values.

3. Build a reputation for being helpful. Top employees are widely known and respected by others not because of their frequent contact, charm or likability, but because they help others solve their problems.

Solving the Influence Problem

While the behaviors are straightforward, employees won’t necessarily be able to adopt them. That’s what we call the influence problem. Knowing what behaviors are required to get a career back on track is only the first step, next comes implementation.

The mistake we often make is we put far too many eggs in the willpower basket. We say to ourselves, “I’ll just do it!” as if we could bend our entire universe with the force of our will. It turns out there is an exponentially more successful approach to influence change.

Apply Six-Source Strategies

There are six sources of influence that explain why we make the choices we do.

Employees will never have enough willpower to change because so many other sources of influence are stacked against them. If employees don’t understand how additional sources of influence, such as the environment and their social circles, affect their behavior, then the sources will work against them—combating their best efforts to change.

However, if the six sources of influence can get us to behave in dysfunctional and ineffective ways, it is also true that we can marshal these same sources of influence to make positive habits inevitable. Below are powerful strategies within the six sources of influence.

1. Flash forward to the future. When you hit a motivational wall while changing your work habits, motivate yourself by visiting your default future — the life you’ll have if you are repeatedly passed up for promotion. Think of the money you’ll lose and opportunities you’ll miss.

2. Invest in professional development. New habits always require new skills. Actively develop the skills you need to be viewed as a top performer. Then apply your new skills and seek feedback from an expert.

3. Hang with the hard-workers. The bad attitudes and habits that keep you back are likely being enabled, tolerated or encouraged by others. Use positive peer pressure by surrounding yourself with hard-working friends who share your career goals. Distance yourself from the office slackers and water cooler conversations.

4. Find a mentor. Changing habits requires help. Find a trusted mentor to encourage your progression and help you navigate the career development opportunities that exist within the organization.

5. Put skin in the game. Reward yourself for reaching short-term goals by placing money at risk. For example, if you reach your goal in your next performance review you can purchase a reward with the money you set aside. However, if you fall short, the money goes to support the political party you oppose.

6. Control your workspace. Make your new habits easier by enlisting the power of your surroundings. If you’d benefit from close association with another team, ask to move offices. When possible, turn off electronic interruptions that keep you from being as productive as you need to be to move ahead.

How to Change Anything

From our research we discovered once employees know what they should do to improve their career and understand how to influence change through engaging all six sources of influence, they are ten times more successful. In contrast to many studies that show modest differences of 10 to 20 percent when using various interventions, this study revealed the physics of human change. When your strategy is informed by good science, the differences in effectiveness are not incremental, they are exponential.

The truth is training managers can help employees get their careers on track simply by understanding how behavior works and helping employees create a multifaceted change plan. When we escape the willpower trap and develop competence in engaging all six sources of influence, we can change ourselves and influence others for good.

“They’re rude.”

That’s what my daughter’s friend said to me last week as she glanced over my shoulder at the  newspaper.  On the cover was a photograph of someone, a senator I think, newly victorious in his quest for re-election.

I looked up at my daughter’s friend.  I’d known her since she was five years old and I don’t think she’s ever missed a “please” or a “thank you”. She holds the door open for me when I’m walking behind her with groceries, and she never misses the opportunity to ask how I’m doing.

In other words, this girl knows manners. She inherently appreciates the benefits of civility.  Now, judging from her bluntly stated opinion, it asppears that she knows the other side of the coin as well. 

“What do you mean?” I asked her.

“I heard them talking on the radio while my parents were driving.”

“Who’s them?” I continued.  “There’s just one guy in the photograph here.”

“He’s one of them,” my daughter’s friend said.  “I don’t know who he is.  I just know he’s a…a politician.”

Then she paused and gathered her thoughts.

“If I talked at school like how they talk to each other, I’d be sent to the principal’s office.”  She even looked a little bit flushed now, like she was enjoying the image of an adult sitting shamefully in those little chairs reserved for school kids who transgress. 

“What do they do, anyway…the politicians…besides yell at each other?”

I don’t know if my daughter’s friend got these opinions from her parents or if she came to them on her own, but I know this much: kids are very much aware of the level of rancor that has come to characterize American politics.  As I thought about her observations, I recognized that I had grown unfortunately immune to the bickering and chafing that our elected leaders seem intent on pursuing.  I also know that negative political tone wins votes, so I have little business telling these leaders to avoid their negativity.  After all, if they’re in it to win, then they need to go negative.  That’s been shown time and time again.

But, I do have a responsibility, as an expert in child development, to at least make our leaders aware of the fact that our youngsters are paying attention.  The ability to detect civility (or the lack thereof) starts early.  After all, how often do you say “what do you say” when your child is handed something special.  For goodness sakes, we just muscled through Halloween.  I must have said “what do you say” about a million times.  Every time a kid got some candy there was a chorus of parents on the sidewalk reminding every child to pay proper respect. 

Kids know polite and kids know rude.  They know it on the playground and they know it when their parents have arguments and they know it when they hear it on television shows.  This has perhaps gotten even worse with the advent of reality TV.  In chasing the fifteen minutes of fame that reality TV affords, I’ve seen some downright nastiness on shows with deceptively innocuous names like “Cupcake Wars.”

As I said, kids know rude.  But they also are for the most part able to separate the rude they see on TV from the rude they’d really rather not see among the adults in their lives.  It’s this latter issue – that adults in positions of power are increasingly rude – that has me worried.  The polarization that is indicative of our current political discourse is so intense that it plays directly into the developmentally regressed state to which we are all prone but from which our kids look to us for ways to avoid.

Think about it. 

Until adolescence, the developing brain is particularly drawn to a binary view of the world.  There is good and there is bad.  There are rules and there are punishments for breaking the rules.  It isn’t until adolescence that children begin to be comfortable playing around with opposing ideas.  School-aged kids?  They want people to behave.

And then my friend’s daughter hears our leaders, adults important enough in her estimation to have made it onto the front page of newspapers, and it strikes her in a wonderfully un-nuanced way that the adults she’s being told to respect are anything but nuanced. 

How does she know this? 

Well, schools have entire curricula devoted to teaching children how to disagree amiably.  We know, as a matter of fact, that the willingness to hold fast to what you believe in and at the same time remain civil is associated with healthy development and admirable self esteem.

Our politicians, however, sound like school children in the absence of the principal’s office.  I know this sounds old fashioned, even alarmist, but I’ll predict right now that if we continue unabated towards a land without compromise, then we will create a generation of adults who refuse to cooperate.  Can you imagine another fifty years of gridlock?

I can’t see the climate in politics changing anytime soon. I can’t see reality TV going away.  And it feels a bit like the efforts of the proverbial ostrich, head buried in darkened sand, if we decide to protect our children from our culture by not letting them know of our faults.  In other words, you can turn off the TV and the radio, you can hide the newspaper, you can avoid the headlines altogether, but kids are naturally programmed to soak in the ambient milieu.  They’re going to know that we’re increasingly rude even if we try and hide it.

We’ve got talk about it.  That’s really our only hope. 

“Tell me what’s rude about that person,” you can ask.

“Well,” your child might say, “he sounds mean.”

“But what if he disagrees with the person he’s talking to?” you might innocently continue.

And there your child will hopefully just stare at you.  What a silly question!  Just because you disagree doesn’t mean you have to be jerk about it.  That’s the entire substance what they learn at school.

Maybe our politicians need to go to the principal’s office.  

H.L. Mencken wrote that “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins.” Good advice as it is very effective. However, it tends to lend itself to one particular party: the right-wing.

In psychology, we study this under this under several terms, just as Terror Management Theory, System Justification Theory and Ecological Fitness. As Janoff-Bulman (2009) describes it, a conservative mindset is protective or avoidance based, designed to protect a group from threats or dangers. Makes sense why the military is very conservative as the two just fit.

Now if you want to get a group of people to vote conservatively, it is best if they are born with a high sense that the world is a dangerous place. As Jost et al. (2007) wrote, “uncertainty avoidance (e.g., need for order, intolerance of ambiguity, and lack of openness to experience) and threat management (e.g., death anxiety, system threat, and perceptions of a dangerous world) each contributes independently to conservatism (vs. liberalism)” (p. 989).

And as a close second, if they aren’t born with these predilections, make them fearful. Repeatedly, we find that having people exposed to threats, making them think about their mortality, creating fear makes people more conservative. Its why the 9/11 terrorist attacks have been credited with moving American politics towards conservative values (Hetherington, & Suhay, 2011; Huddy & Feldmen, 2011; Murphy, Gordon, & Mullen, 2004).

Unbelievable, given this really well established connection, the democrats decided it would be a great idea to initiate Ebola as a campaign issue, with Senator Mark Pryor using Ebola responsiveness to critique his Republican competitor, Tom Cotton. It didn’t take long for the conservatives to thank them for the reminder and soon Ebola and ISIS, described as the “the two horsemen of the present American apocalypse,” dominated the political discussion (yes, above crumbling infrastructure, education and energy). Where the Center for Disease Control reports that the yearly flu will kill a few thousands if not tens of thousands, the number of Ebola cases (not deaths, just cases) in the U.S. is four.   

The result was a disastrous midterm election for the liberals and Mark Pryor entered the history books as becoming the “the first U.S. Senator in history to lose a general election coming off a victory in which he faced no major party opponent on the ballot.” And now that Ebola has served its purpose, it all but immediately dissappeared from the news cycle.

If you get this, well consider yourself ahead of the curve. I’m writing a paper on national culture and how it changes (hence all the references as I had them handy) and thought the pragmatic use of Ebola by conservative interests would make a great example. And aside from an oblique reference by our own Dr.Daryl R. Van Tongeren, there wasn’t a single person or post making the connection between Terror Management Theory or System Justification Theory and The Ebola Midterm Elections. Not one. Whether they are formally making the connection or not, I think the conservative party has got the principle locked down, so they can be excused. On the other hand, perhaps the liberal party, who seem to have mastered other basic psychological principles like implementation intentions, have some remedial homework to do. You don't need me to tell you got a failing mark. The left-wing strategy here wasn't even within sight of good. 

Hetherington, M., & Suhay, E. (2011). Authoritarianism, threat, and Americans’ support for the war on terror. American Journal of Political Science, 55(3), 546-560

Huddy, L., & Feldman, S. (2011). Americans respond politically to 9/11: Understanding the impact of the terrorist attacks and their aftermath. American Psychologist, 66(6), 455-467.

Janoff-Bulman, R. (2009). To provide or protect: Motivational bases of political liberalism and conservatism. Psychological Inquiry, 20(2-3), 120-128.

Jost, J. T., Napier, J. L., Thorisdottir, H., Gosling, S. D., Palfai, T. P., & Ostafin, B. (2007). Are needs to manage uncertainty and threat associated with political conservatism or ideological extremity? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33(7), 989–1007.

Murphy, E., Gordon, J., & Mullen, A. (2004). A preliminary study exploring the value changes taking place in the US since the September 11, 2001terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York. Journal of Business Ethics, 50(1), 81-96.

If you have a pulse, you have probably struggled with low self-esteem from time to time. You want to feel like a good person, but no matter what you try, you just can’t seem to find any lasting satisfaction with who you are. You accomplish something or receive praise from someone you admire and you feel good for a while, but it’s not long before you’re feeling like a schmuck again.

You spend countless hours wishing you could fix yourself because you think you are the problem. My thighs are too fat. I’m lazy. I’ll never measure up. You beat up on yourself or hide the parts of yourself you don’t like. You walk around convinced that you aren’t worthy of your friends or perhaps your job. At times you feel better, but it’s not long before you’re back to square one: schmuck.

But what if you have the problem all wrong? What if the problem isn’t you? What if the problem is how you relate to yourself? The way you buy into those negative thoughts? I’m not saying you’re flawless, and some amount of constructive criticism is a good thing, but how do you know those negative thoughts are true anyway? Have you ever had a thought that you were sure was true, but realized later that you were totally wrong? Has your mind ever been wrong about anything?

Like a machine, our minds are constantly pumping out thoughts. That’s their job. All day long we evaluate our surroundings, other people, and ourselves. But a lot of our thoughts, including thoughts about ourselves, are incomplete or even untrue. Like the meditation teacher, Sharon Salzberg, notes in Faith, our personal view of things can be like “Looking at the sky through a straw.” Our thoughts about ourselves may not appreciate the full reality of who we are. 

If you’ve tried to fix your self-esteem and it hasn’t worked, why not try something different? Rather than indulging your negative thoughts about yourself, acknowledge them as just thoughts, which may or may not be true. One technique for seeing thought as just thoughts is to add I’m having the thought that___before whatever negative thought you’re having about yourself. Take a moment to try this with one of your negative thought about yourself. Close your eyes and really notice how you feel when you say the original thought versus when you add I’m having the thought that___. Most people tell me this practice helps them take their thoughts less seriously. It’s not a cure, but it illustrates the kind of shift we need to make in order to stop fighting low self-esteem and start overcoming it.

You may think that being hard on yourself is good for you, but research suggests that self-compassion is a better way of relating to yourself. Self-compassion is an aspect of mindfulness and a way of acknowledging your struggles while relating to yourself with kindness. It’s treating yourself like you would a loved one who’s having a hard time. According to the self-compassion researcher, Kristin Neff, highly self-critical people are more likely to be depressed and anxious and to have lower self-confidence. Dr. Neff points out that being harsh is not conducive to achieving goals. The challenges of life require a lot of emotional resources and self-criticism can deplete those resources. Her research has shown that self-compassionate people are actually more likely than highly self-critical people to stick with healthy goals like exercise and to keep trying if they fail. They are also better at facing and responding to past mistakes.

You may be convinced that being hard on yourself will make you a better person or that you deserve to feel bad about who you are, but remember that those are just thoughts too and there is no guarantee that any thought we have is based in wisdom. Rather than struggling with low self-esteem, spend your energy learning how to stop buying into it and see if you can bring more self-compassion to your life. Building new habits like these takes time and practice, but real freedom is worth the effort and you may find that the benefits will stretch far beyond your self-esteem.

© 2014 Christa Smith 

There is a day that racks up more sales than Black Friday and Cyber Monday taken together. During the 2014 celebration, it took just 17 minutes and 58 seconds for sales to reach $1 billion. What could be the inspiration for this incredible consumer and business bonanza? The good news? It is single people. The bad news? Single people were just the starting point for the event; now, with regard to this celebration, they don't seem to matter in any special way.

I'm talking about China's Singles Day, celebrated on November 11 because that can be symbolized by four ones, 1111, two for November and two for the 11^th.  Chinese people treat themselves to four fried dough sticks to celebrate. But mostly they shop online in massive numbers, the way Americans do on Cyber Monday. Last year, Chinese sales doubled those from America's Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.

The Day started out as a self-pitying lark. Single men in college began the tradition in the 90s. It was called Bachelor Day at the time and the men spent it "lamenting their single status with a drink." Now that Alibaba, China's hugest e-commerce site, has taken over, the origins are just an historical curiosity and everyone – regardless of marital status – flocks to the participating merchants to snag the best deals.

Here in the U.S., Karen Reed spearheaded an American version of Singles Day, which launched for the first time on January 11, 2014 as an in-person (rather than online) celebration of single people (see here and here). The January date allows for three ones. (November 11 would be inappropriate since it is Veterans Day.) Bargains for consumers and sales for businesses are part of the package, but – fortunately – the event also includes components of education, awareness, and advocacy. Last year, Thomas Coleman, the wonderful singles advocate who made Singles Week happen, was the keynote speaker, and Karen read from a post that has been very popular here at Psych Today, about the 16 reasons we need Singles Week. (I've republished it below.) The inaugural event took place in West Hollywood, but Karen Reed's goal is to see it spread across the land.

Susan Berfield, a reporter from Business Week, called to ask me about the Chinese and American versions of Singles Day, and whether I would be disappointed if the U.S. Singles Day gets totally commercialized and ends up as nothing but a shopping extravaganza. I care most about advocacy, awareness, education, and social justice – the kinds of goals that are at the heart of Singles Week. I don't like the "poor-me, I'm single" origins of the Chinese version of Singles Day. But if the American version does go totally commercial, I will enjoy some wisps of gratitude if, every time Singles Day rolls around, a number of media stories include discussions of the nobler origins of the American version. I guess I'll take some awareness and education wherever I can get it. Plus, single people so often get the short end of the stick in the marketplace, as when they subsidize all the deals available only to couples and families by paying full price, that I don't mind if merchants get the bright idea that maybe they should offer deals to single people, too. (Berfield's story should be out in a few days and I'll add a link here when it is.)

National Singles Week: 16 Reasons Why We Need It

Celebrating single life, not escaping it

Published on September 15, 2013 by Bella DePaulo, Ph.D. in Living Single

Today is the start of National Singles Week, September 15-21 (sometimes called National Unmarried and Single Americans Week), but don't expect to find any greeting cards to celebrate it. That's okay about the cards - I don't care about them. But I do care about increasing awareness of the truth about single life. We need National Singles Week because we need consciousness-raising.

1. We need it because living single is how we spend the better part of our adult lives. Americans now spend more years unmarried than married. But even if we spent only a sliver of our lives single, we should be able to use that sliver to pick any door or puncture any myth.

2. We need it because what it means to live single has changed dramatically over the past half-century, but our perceptions have been left in the dust. Bogus stereotypes rule, and they need to be dethroned.

3. We need it because fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, if you are a plastic Barbie or Ken doll or you play one on TV. If you are a real person, you are no more likely to live happily ever after if you get married than you were when you were single. We need to know that.

4. We need it because the media has grabbed onto the Marriage Myth Express and taken it for a long and silly ride. I don't just mean the dopey shows like The Bachelor or The Bachelorette. The press does us wrong even in reporting the news. As I've been documenting in my blogs and my books, media descriptions of the latest scientific studies consistently add a little glitter to the any results that look good for married people, while batting away any promising findings about single people.

5. We need it because our educational institutions - those colleges and universities that should be at the leading edge of scholarship and critical thinking - have been just as smitten by the marital mythology as the rest of society. Those bastions of higher learning are filled with courses, degree programs, textbooks, journals, endowed chairs, research funding and all the other components of the intellectual industry that is the study of marriage. As for the other 44% of the adult population, we're still waiting for the scholarly spotlight to shine as brightly on us.

6. We need it because we are shorted on the 1,136 federal benefits, protections, and privileges that are available only to people who are legally married. We need it because there is housing discrimination and there are tax penalties and pay disparities linked to marital status.

7. We need it not just for the privileges and protections but also for the opportunities to give and to care. Because I am single and don't have any children, no one can take time off under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to care for me if I fall ill. That's a missing protection. But I also can't take time off under the same Act to care for a person who is important to me, such as a sibling, a nephew, or a close friend.

8. We need it because there are now 103 million of us, and even without any of the opportunities offered to married people by policies such as FMLA, we are doing more than our share. In some significant ways, more of the work of holding together our networks, families, and communities,  sustaining intergenerational ties, and caring for people who cannot care for themselves is done by single people than by married people.

9. We need it because we have untapped political potential. We don't vote as often as married people do. If that changed, so would some of the most regressive policies in the nation.

10. We need it because if single life were taken more seriously, then the relationship life of all people, single and married and everyone in between or on the side or undecided, would be expanded and enriched. Follow the finger of married people as they point to an important person in their life and you will end up staring at a spouse. Follow the finger of a single person and you may find yourself gazing at a close friend or a sibling or cousin or a mentor or a neighbor. Look more closely at that person and maybe you will newly appreciate the importance of the entire category that person represents. Friends are hardly "just friends."

11. We need it because single people who live solo can show us that living alone is not the same as feeling alone. They remind us of something that is too seldom acknowledged in a society that so celebrates the buzz of social life, something that people of all marital statuses can appreciate - that solitude can be sweet.

12. We need it because the de-stigmatizing of single life does not undermine marriage, it strengthens it. When single people can live their lives with all of the same respect, benefits, protections, and opportunities as people who are married, then those who want to marry are free. They can pursue marriage for the right reasons - not to run away from the stigma of being single, but to embrace the attractions of being married.

13. We need it because, when it comes to kids, love is the answer. Single parents can give quite a lot of that. Add all the other important people in the lives of single parents and their kids, and then you truly have a whole lot of love.

14. We need National Singles Week to change the default setting for the meaning of the word “single,” so that the next time you type it into your search engine, the first result to appear on your screen is not“Top 10 Dating Sites.”

15. We need it because the rise of single people, and of people living alone, is an unprecedented demographic revolution that is changing the way we live, the way we love, the way we vote, the way we do business, the way we age, and the way we think about what constitutes a meaningful life. A week for taking these trends seriously hardly seems like enough.

16. We need to value single people because that's what progressive nations do. They look for the people who have been marginalized and diminished, and invite them into the center of society. That way, we can all live happily ever after.

What purpose drugs might be serving in the lives of addicts? The short answer is: they are painkillers for treating psychological pain, at least in the short term. Addiction is both a solution and consequence of the psychological pains.

Theories of addiction help us better understand the motivations for drug use. The self-medication theory of addiction suggests that individuals with deficits in emotion-regulation skills (i.e., skills relevant for modifying emotional reactions and to tolerate negative emotions) use drugs in an attempt to manage negative or distressing affective states.  For instance, individuals with histories of exposure to adverse childhood environments (e.g., physical and sexual abuse) tend to have diminished capacity to regulate negative emotions and cope effectively with stress.

This view of addiction emphasizes that psychological pain is at the heart of addictive behavior and that vulnerable individuals resort to their addiction because they discover that the addictive substance or behavior gives short-term relief and comfort from their distress. Drugs are more appealing for those who have suffered major traumatic experiences. In other words, addiction problems are less about pleasure seeking behavior than they are about human psychological pain and deficits in internal sources of self-soothing. 

In the initial stage of addiction, drug use can successfully lead to reductions in the negative affect. In low to moderate doses, depressants (alcohol) can relieve states of anxiety or tension associated with depression. But, in the longer period, chronic use contributes to neurobiological changes in the brain. These changes may underlie the transition from the use motivated primarily for achieving a high or relief to use that is motivated for regaining a sense of normalcy. The end result of such a process is that the individual begins to engage in compulsive drug use. They are no longer in volitional control of their drug use.

For those with a penchant to suffer a range of psychiatric disorders (depression or anxiety), repeated uses of drug become a way of life. Relief is momentary, but in the long-term drug use becomes an end in itself. The addiction problem prevents the user from understanding about her distress, as well as the development of emotional capacity to self-soothe. In essence, addicts substitute a misery that is vague and confusing with a misery that is caused by a drug use.

The theory of self-medication emphasizes that addictive drugs are not equally appealing. Although a person might experiment with various drugs, they discover that they are drawn toward a certain drug (e.g., stimulants, depressants) because of what it does for them. For example, many cocaine abusers attempt to regulate inner emptiness, boredom, and fight depression. Stimulants help to overcome feelings of low energy fatigue, and low self-esteem problems associated with depression. Alcohol is frequently used as a way of coping with social anxiety. The drinking removes, at least temporarily, the stress of anxiety. Thus, the drug of choice reveals psychological problems that are painful for that person. 

A study that followed over 1200 children from birth found that individuals with depression in adolescence were at significantly greater risk of later developing nicotine dependence. Using nicotine relives the distress of major depression and less severe depressive symptoms. On a large scale, when communism collapsed, alcohol drinking increased significantly in Russia. About 25% of Russian men die before age 55 mostly due to the alcohol use, particularly vodka. Causes of death include liver disease and alcohol poisoning, and aggressive behavior. The sense of hopelessness in concerning self and future life increased alcohol use to cope with emotional distress.

The self-medication theory of addiction provides a useful tool for the understanding and treatment of addiction. This theory explains that addiction develop in context. That is, the psychological distress and suffering increases addictive vulnerability. In the short-term, they can better endure their distress and cope with the realities that can otherwise feel so unbearable. This theory provides a humanistic psychological understanding for addictive behavior, one which sees people with addiction as a fundamentally vulnerable population. Effective treatment, like self-medication theory, is based on the implied notion that the intention of drug use is not pleasure, but to find a relief from unendurable suffering and pain in the absence of alternatives.

Can you believe that the holiday season is upon us already?

One of the biggest complaints my sex therapy clients have at this time of the year is that it’s impossible to have any semblance of a sex life. Between all the stress, traveling, overindulgent eating and drinking, family dynamics, and financial worries, it’s hard to find the energy - much less the desire - to have sex.

The idea of going almost two full months without intimacy is a tough pill to swallow for most couples, so today I’m here to share my favorite tips for preserving your sex life during the holiday season.

Create your own traditions as a new couple

If you’re a newly-married couple, this is a good opportunity to be mindful about what you want out of the holidays. You don’t have to go along with tradition - you can make your own decisions. How much time do you want to spend with family? How do you really want to celebrate New Year’s Eve?

Brainstorm together and come up with a special new ritual that the two of you can start celebrating every year. Perhaps you love decorating the house together. Maybe you could go away on a romantic vacation the weekend before Thanksgiving, or take an extra day off work to recover after New Years.

Prioritize alone time

Make an active effort to spend more quality time together during the holidays. If you know that you have a lot of travel and family time ahead of you, try to focus on being together as much as possible now. Say no to the holiday parties that don’t really interest you. Sit down with your schedules, and put date nights into the calendar.

Be sneaky if you have to!

Having quality time can be a little tricky during the holidays if you’re traveling or have guests, but you can be creative about getting your partner alone. Turn in to bed before you’re actually tired, and make time to talk about your days. Arrange for side-trips away from your family, or send guests off on special outings without you. Steal kisses from each other when no one is looking. Create a code word or gesture that means “meet me in the bedroom.” Sneak out of your parent’s house to go make out behind the shed. There can even be an illicit thrill to having sex in your childhood bed, especially if you have to go slow enough to prevent the springs from squeaking!

Have sex first

Make time to be intimate before going out to company work parties or celebratory dinners. Most people get too full (or intoxicated) to have sex after big events, so it’s a good idea to do it before! Plus, it will be so much more fun to go to your holiday functions with this sexy secret between the two of you.

Treat yourselves

Agree that your holidays gifts to each other will involve quality time or intimacy. Book yourselves a couples massage. Splurge on dinner at a fancy restaurant. Buy lingerie, nice sheets, or high-quality sex toys. 

Communicate

The holidays are really stressful for most people, so it’s important to keep communicating with your partner. Remember that you’re a team, and talk about your expectations for the holiday season. Try to brainstorm ways to decrease stress together. Agree on a time to have a weekly (or even daily!) check-in about how things are going.

Don’t ignore sexual tension - revel in it

If you find yourself sexually frustrated during the holidays, see if you can actually enjoy the tension. Think about how exciting it will be once all the guests are gone and you have your partner all to yourself again. Send each other sexy texts or emails, describing what you’re going to do to each other when you get a second alone!

Happy holidays everyone!

The findings of a recent study from the American Psychological Association are right on target:  “Given the prevalence of childhood psychological abuse and the severity of harm to young victims, it should be at the forefront of mental health.” The study confirms that childhood psychological abuse has lasting, significant damage, equal to or exceeding the long-term consequences of physical abuse.

Psychological abuse is less visible than the examples of physical abuse that often appear in the media.  That can keep one’s awareness of it under the radar, but there are many forms of psychological abuse that parents subject their children to. Among them are:

• Indifference -- to the child’s needs or temperament, which may be different from his or her siblings.

• Humiliation– when the child fails at a task or misunderstands instructions.

• Denigration– negative description of something the child achieves or expresses interest in.

• Neglect – failing to provide essential emotional support or recognition of the child’s needs.

• Unrelenting pressure -- to serve parental expectations, often accompanied by negative comparisons of the child to others who “follow the program.”

Any of the forms of psychological abuse may be fueled by the parent’s own self-hatred, jealousy, narcissism or other pathology. Some illustrations:

The child runs to the parent, saying, “Look at my new drawing!” or “See what I did for this school project!” and receives a curt, dismissive, “Don’t bother me now. I’m working on something important.” Failure to take a brief moment’s interruption for the child, will have negative emotional impact, and can accumulate.

The parent who consistently and vocally praises one child, while ignoring or criticizing the child’s sibling. For example “Wow, what you did is amazing! You are so talented!” But to the child’s sibling, regarding something similar, perhaps a flat “That’s nice.”  And sometimes the parent may give both responses in the presence of the both siblings. An observer could see the crestfallen expression in the face of the second child.

The parent who never complements the child, alive in the memory of a grown man who, for example, vividly recalls that when he proudly dressed up for his school prom as a teenager, he received a look-over from one of his parents, who offered just one comment: “Your pants cuffs are too short.”

And then there are the classics:

“You’ll never amount to anything!” You’re worthless!

“You’re nothing but trouble! I wish you were never born!

“Why can’t you be more like your (sister/brother/a neighbor’s child).

I’ve heard them all and more, from the life experiences of men and women seeking to heal the early damage; and sometimes directly from parents who describe and reflect upon their ways of parenting, as they confront the damage that mounts in their children’s lives. All forms of psychological abuse damage the child’s sense of him/herself, as well as the subsequent adult that emerges from it.

Psychological abuse has a very long shelf life, as the APA report confirms. It found that“Children who are emotionally abused and neglected face similar and sometimes worse mental health problems as children who are physically or sexually abused, yet psychological abuse is rarely addressed in prevention programs or in treating victims.”

The report pointed out that children who had been psychologically abused suffered from anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, symptoms of post-traumatic stress and suicidality at the same rate and, in some cases, at a greater rate than children who were physically or sexually abused. Psychological abuse was most strongly associated with depression, general anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, attachment problems and substance abuse.

Also, psychological abuse that occurred with physical or sexual abuse was associated with significantly more severe and far-ranging negative outcomes than when children were sexually and physically abused, but not psychologically abused. That finding links with another that finding, that  psychological abuse creates a greater tendency towards physical illness as well, in adulthood. This  UCLA study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined the effects of abuse and corresponding lack of parental affection across the body’s entire regulatory system. It found strong links between negative early life experiences and health, across the board.

We are, after all, one bio-social-psychological organism. The effects of all forms of abuse permeate one’s entire system, as these studies confirm.

dlabier@CenterProgressive.org

Center for Progressive Development

Blog: Progressive Impact

© 2014 Douglas LaBier

MIT economist, Jonathan Gruber, admitted that he helped bamboozle the Congressional Budget Office about The Affordable Care Act (Obama Care). He spoke of how he helped pull the wool over the eyes of American voters whom he described as stupid.  The admission was on video. The video went viral. You can Google it.  If you are interested, here is a site I picked at random to watch the video. Click on Gruber .  

As I watched the video, I saw Jonathan Gruber giving himself credit for getting The Affordable Care Act passed.  He admitted that without deception, there would have been too much public opposition and that would have killed the bill. He rationalized that he had to deceive to help get the bill passed. Rather than appear contrite about this deception, Gruber appeared impressed with himself. He showed little in the way of empathy for the people whom he called stupid.

Based on this video segment, I viewed Gruber as: (1) self-oriented, (2) having an excessive “I know better than you” view, (3) ignoring the probable negative impact on people who were deceived, (4) overgeneralizing about a nation of people with a broad range of abilities.  This latter point is important. By falsely degrading others, he falsely elevates himself.  

Was I observing a business-as-usual approach to getting bills passed—a glimpse into insider thinking?   Does this matter? Gruber said enough to give insight into how he views most people like you and me. His views are more important than a label.

Gruber's motivations and characteristics are his. Different people deceive for different reasons. However, it can be instructive to look at thinking styles.

True Believers

The video inspired me to dust off an old book and look for connections between Gruber and true believers. In The True Believer, Longshoreman Eric Hoffer shares insights about people who are part of fixed belief movements—people who believe they are in the right and anyone with a different view is wrong. True believers tend to be intolerant of others with different views. I see this intolerance in Gruber’s video.

People who hold extreme positions are typically impervious to information that can challenge or disconfirm their views. However, not all members of a group fall into that extreme mental trap.

Hoffer rightly cautions us to look at the variations among people within the same group. They may share a similar belief system in one or more areas. While some will be inflexible in their beliefs, others are more open to different views and willing to yield (perhaps begrudgingly) to facts. We'll have to see if Gruber recants some of the positions he has taken in this matter.

Hoffer’s advice is important when it comes to avoiding jumping to conclusions about any group member who shares some of the same beliefs with others in a group. However, that doesn’t mean that you must not assess the results of a group's actions or the actions of an individual member. It's in human nature to attribute causes to results. Hoffer would go along with that view.

There is a difference between acts, and patterns. In this case, does Gruber impress you as flexible and open to experience with regard to The Affordable Care Act? Does he impress you as operating with a fixed agenda where he believes that the ends justify the means? In the video, he gives you an answer. The answer is yes about his means-end approach to fooling people into thinking they were getting healthcare for less or for nothing.  Is Gruber’s “means-ends” approach acceptable to you?

Gruber may believe that it’s easy to pull the wool over the eyes of people with oversight responsibilities and the public. That doesn’t have to be in your case. You may have see through the subterfuge.

There is power in questions that probe for specific answers.  By asking questions of your elected officials, and insisting on verifiable answers, you are less likely to fall into the helplessness trap where you are uncertain about what is going on and end up getting information from people with stakes in an outcome.  To ask meaningful questions may require that you educate yourself on prime issues that affect you, and on how to form non-threatening but probing questions.  However, this proactive approach can have a quicker payoff than waiting for the next election.

Photo, The Empty Mill House, by Dale Jarvis, AreaOne Art and Design, Fayetteville NC

Reference

Hoffer, E. 1951. The True Believer. New York. Harper & Row Publishers.

© Dr. Bill Knaus

Helping and giving are character strengths as far as I’m concerned. But sometimes our helpful intentions give way to dysfunctional helping and giving. The solution isn’t to stop helping altogether; it’s to set helping boundaries once telltale signs of unhealthy helping appear. I call these signs the “Twelve Red Flags of Dysfunctional Helping and Giving.”

Red Flag 1:  It’s increasingly obvious that your help and giving fosters dependence, irresponsibility, incompetence, or poor character. Sometimes we have to face the fact that our good intentions have gone bad. Continuing to help and give under these conditions is a waste of our resources and isn’t really helpful. Remember healthy helping promotes other people’s growth, independence, and the development of their positive potential. Unhealthy (dysfunctional) helping does the opposite. Use your helping energies and resources to help people and causes that will truly benefit from your help.

Red Flag 2: The other has violated numerous agreements, required many bailouts, and hasn’t used the help to do as promised. At this point, it’s time to stop believing them and giving them chances, at least for now (once you get strong evidence that they are ready to use your help to progress in life, you might try helping them again). When people use your help to escape responsibility over and over again, it’s best to summon the strength to terminate your helping. Continuing to give to people who don’t uphold their end of the deal is a waste of your time and resources. If you continue, you’ll become increasingly angry and resentful.

Red Flag 3: The help or giving helps someone to stagnate, or become stuck in an age-inappropriate earlier stage of development, or prevents them from developing needed life or professional skills. You can be too helpful and in the process create people that can’t take care of themselves or do their jobs well. Unhealthy helping can doom others to be less than they’re capable of. Healthy helping promotes others’ independence and life progress; it doesn’t retard it.

Red Flag 4: Your helping or giving requires your dishonesty or somehow compromises your integrity. For example, making bogus excuses for another or covering for another, are almost never forms of healthy helping and giving. Healthy helping doesn’t typically involve deception, secrets, nor does it require that we violate our moral code.

Red Flag 5: You have the distinct impression you’re being manipulated into helping or giving. Sometimes it’s obvious, such as when the other says things to trigger your guilt feelings, and then conveniently offers a giving opportunity that will reduce your guilt. Sometimes it’s only a feeling in your gut warning you that someone and their requests for your assistance are “off.” Manipulation is a sign of someone who is willing to be deceitful and take advantage of others and you should pay attention to your early warning system (your gut). The odds of your giving being short-term and having a positive outcome are probably close to zero.

Red Flag 6: Your help is increasingly unsustainable given your resources. Look for that positive helping sweet spot where you can help without sacrificing your own physical or mental health, your self-respect, or your financial wellbeing. Be willing to back out of negative helping arrangements that sap your resources. Decline rescuing and helping opportunities you really can’t afford. Healthy helping means helping within your means.

Red Flag 7: Since helping or giving to someone, the relationship with them has deteriorated due to bad feelings having to do with the helping or giving relationship. Healthy helping and giving have long-lasting positive effects on a relationship. Unlike unhealthy helping and giving, it strengthens a relationship and isn’t fraught with relationship imbalance, conflict, hurt, and resentment.

Red Flag 8: Your helpful accommodations make it easier for someone to remain physically unhealthy, put off getting professional help, avoid taking their medication or working their program, etc. Admit when someone’s problems or challenges are bigger than you and require professional assistance. Withdraw help and giving that makes it easier for someone to avoid empowering themselves and managing their own condition. Recognize when your help sands down another’s discomfort just enough that they’re unmotivated to seek the professional help they really need. Instead, help by connecting them to relevant resources and appropriate professionals, and supporting their going into treatment, working their treatment program, doing their physical therapy exercises, sticking to their medically prescribed diet, taking their medication, using the strategies they have been taught to manage their condition, etc. However, accept that they might not manage their condition as you think they should and that this is their choice and their life.

Red Flag 9: Your help or giving in a group setting fails to inspire a cooperative group culture where everyone helps one another; instead, it leads others to slack and leaves you feeling taken advantage of. When you see this, pleasantly announce that you are pulling back and making room for others to step up, assist with skill development (show them how to do things they may not have learned due to your helpfulness), and then get out of the way.

Red Flag 10:  You find that what you intended as a one-time, modest offer of help or giving has morphed into an unintended long-term obligation that you resent or find burdensome. This is a sign of helping and giving entrapment. Remind yourself that your past helping does not serve as a commitment to help forever. You didn’t commit to this. Had you known it was going to go this way, you would not have agreed, so you are not violating your commitment or being a bad person if you back out.

Red Flag 11: You’re in a self-sacrificing relationship that reeks of “codependence.” It’s one-sided and closeness is based on one person being a giver and the other an under-functioning taker. Much of the love and intimacy in the relationship is experienced in the context of the one person’s distress or poor functioning and the other’s rescuing or enabling. Or the relationship is mostly about one person’s excessive giving and the other person’s excessive taking.

Red Flag 12: You’re willing to overlook the ill effects of your helping and giving because it makes you feel or look like a “good” person. You should pull back from “helping” that isn’t truly helpful to the recipient and is more about you proving to yourself or others what a good person or family member you are, how selfless you are, or how nice you are. 

Excerpted from the upcoming book "Beyond Declarations of Codependence: The Psychology of Dysfunctional Helping & Giving" by Shawn Meghan Burn, PhD

Art by Kane Lynch kanelynch.com

Social media touches every part of our lives, including our romantic relationships, parenting, work life, communication habits, and entertainment. Do you have a question about how social media is affecting your life or how to handle it? Send it! I'll answer one or two questions every Monday on this topic.

Dear Dr. Jen,

Please help me settle a debate. Last month, I had my first baby. He is beautiful but I feel awful - fat, exhausted, and worn out. I changed my Facebook profile to a picture of my son. I love him and he is who I am right now! My best friend told me this was annoying and that I should have a picture of myself.  Who is right?

-New Mom

Dear New Mom,

First, congratulations on the birth of your son! I hope you and he are both doing well.

As for this debate, I'm with your friend. Your Facebook profile is your online identity. I think it is critical that mom's not lose their own identity as they take on the new role of parent. Yes, you are a mom now and you are spending a LOT of time taking care of your baby. But you are still your own person, with a life and interests the go beyond that baby.

You may not feel like you look your best, but you are probably missing how beautiful, young, and happy you seem to others. Here's my advice. When your baby is napping, spend a quick 5 minutes fixing your hair and putting on basic makeup (just do the front of your hair if you feel really short on time). Then, find a spot in your house with good light, and take a few hundred pictures of yourself with your phone. I recommend using the burst feature. You will be sure to find one where you aren't blinking and you're making a good face. If you really want your son represented, try getting a good picture of yourself with him while he's napping on your shoulder.

If you feel like you still look tired or unpolished in these photos, there are some great apps out there to help. FaceTune is one. For $3.99, it will take your picture and smooth your skin tone, bring out your eyes, whiten your teeth, etc. If you're not ready to drop money on it, try Visage Lab. It is similar, and it's free.

A little bit of digital editing will bring out the version of you that you don't see shining through right now. Put that up on Facebook and remember that your friends love you. They might love your son as well, but your identity is important to them. They will love seeing your beautiful face.

-Jen

Got a social media advice question? Submit it to us (anonymously!) at http://goo.gl/forms/ER4pC6klKa

Image Credit  Kaushal Vaidya

One of the best parts of reporting and writing about science is the gee whiz factor. As a regular part of my day, I stumble across facts and stories that make me say, “wow, I didn’t know that.” Sometimes I am surprised by how much of what I learn has been right under my nose all along.

Take the question of perception. Our eyes, ears, skin, nose and mouth are all receptors. Everything that comes into the brain enters through one of these doors. Because most of us take the world in through our senses effortlessly, we don’t give much thought or attention to how we do this.

Even scientists were guilty of underappreciating the complexity of the senses. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when computers were in their infancy, the thinking was that it would take a decade or so to build “perceiving machines” that could respond to sight, sound, touch and so on as well as a human being. Such a machine still doesn’t exist.

Lose a sense, however, and you will quickly appreciate what is missing. I know because that’s what happened to me when I found out my son was deaf. There was so much to learn about the way hearing works and the role of sound in the brain that I wrote a whole book about it. That was the long version.

I thought it would be interesting to do something similar in short form for all five senses with a series of posts taking a tour behind the scenes of hearing, vision, touch, taste, and smell. What has to happen to put on the show that is our awareness of our environment? The short answer is an awful lot.

Before I get to the individual senses, I’m going to look at the big picture.  Neuroscientists have recently done some radical rethinking about the very nature of perception.

“Historically, the way we intuitively think about all perception is that we’re like a passive recording device with detectors that are specialized for certain things, like a retina for seeing, a cochlea for hearing, and so forth,” says David Poeppel,  a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University and a director of the newly established Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. “We’re kind of a camera or microphone that gets encoded somehow and then magically makes contact with the stuff in your head.”

At the same time, many of the big thinkers who pondered perception, as far back as the 19^th century German physician Hermann von Helmholtz, knew that couldn’t be quite right. If we reached for a glass or listened to a sentence, didn’t it help to be able to anticipate what might come next?

In the mid-to-late twentieth century, a handful of prominent researchers proposed models of perception that suggested that we engaged in “active sensing,” seeking out what was possible as we went along. Such ideas didn’t gain much traction until the past decade, when they suddenly became a hot topic in the study of cognition. What everyone is talking about today is the brain’s power of prediction.

On one level, prediction is just common sense, which may be one reason it didn’t get much scientific respect for so long. If you see your doctor in the doctor’s office, you recognize her quickly. If you see her in the grocery store dressed in jeans, you’ll be slower to realize you know her.

Predictable events are easy for the brain; unpredictable events require more effort. “Our expectations for what we’re going to perceive seem to be a critical part of the process,” says Greg Hickok, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine. “It allows the system to make guesses as to what it might be seeing and to use computational shortcuts.”

In the old view of perception, a cascade of responses flows from the ear or the eye through the brain and ends with the ability to follow a complicated sentence or pick out the one person you are looking for in a crowded theater. That is known as bottom up processing. It starts with basic input to any sense—raw data—and ends with such higher-level skills as reasoning and judgment and critical thinking—in other words, our expectations and knowledge.

But that is only half the story. Neuroscientists now believe that the process is also happening in reverse, that the cascade flows both ways, with information being prepared, treated, and converted in both directions simultaneously, from the bottom up and the top down.

This holds for simple responses as well as for complex thinking about philosophy or physics. If a sound is uncomfortably loud, for instance, it is the cortex that registers that fact and sends a message all the way back to the cochlea to stiffen hair cells as a protective measure. The same is true of the retina, adjusting for the amount of light available. It’s not your eye or ear doing that, it’s your brain. 

Imagine someone beating rhythmically on a table with a pencil: tap, tap, tap, tap. By the third beat, you have anticipated the timing. By the fourth, scientists like Poeppel and Hickok could see activity in the brain that represents that prediction. 

Perception then is an active process of constructing a reality, a conversation between the senses and the cortex that balances new information from the outside world with predictions from the interior world of our brain.

Did you know that? I didn’t.

Coming Next: Hearing (predictably)

Parts of this post originally appeared in I Can Hear You Whisper: An Intimate Journey through the Science of Sound and Language (Dutton 2014).

So-called morning sickness is often the first (sometimes doubly unwelcome) sign of conception. Bleeding resembling weak menstruation can occur during early pregnancy, so a woman may experience daytime queasiness before she has any other reason to suspect conception. Mild to pronounced nausea, typically lasting six weeks, affects three-quarters of women in early pregnancy. In two-thirds of them nausea is severe enough to provoke actual vomiting.

What is “morning sickness”?

Queasiness during pregnancy is not confined to mornings, so the household name is misleading. The official name is Nausea and Vomiting of Pregnancy (NVP), but I prefer “Bilious All-day Recurring Feelings” (BARF). A careful study of daily records from 160 pregnant women by Renée Lacroix and colleagues in Canada found nausea restricted to mornings in less than 2% and occurring throughout the day in 80%.

Other features that occur mainly during early pregnancy are cravings for unusual food or drink and aversions to previously palatable dietary items. Both occur in 50-60% of women. Most frequently craved items are fruits or juices, chocolates, other sweets, biscuits and desserts. Aversions are most commonly triggered by beverages containing caffeine, spicy or highly-flavoured foods and animal foods such as poultry, red meat, eggs and fish.

A hormonal basis for BARF?

BARF and aversions/cravings have traditionally been interpreted as side-effects of marked hormonal changes during pregnancy. Indeed, this is still a standard explanation in online guidance to “morning sickness”. However, no direct link between nausea and hormones has been established. Curiously, steroid hormones, notably oestrogens, are most often emphasized, partly because nausea sometimes accompanies Pill use. But levels of oestrogens and progesterone actually rise continuously throughout pregnancy, peaking in late pregnancy when BARF, aversions and cravings are all relatively rare. Moreover, steroid levels apparently do not differ significantly between women with or without symptoms.

By contrast, production of the pregnancy-specific hormone hCG (human chorionic gonadotropin) rises and falls, peaking at about the same time as BARF. Moreover, some studies have indicated that hCG levels are higher in women with pronounced pregnancy sickness. Intriguingly, BARF is prevalent with hydatiform mole  —  an over-large placenta with no embryo. Diagnosis of this condition includes high hCG levels.

Alternative explanations for BARF

Taking an entirely different approach, in 1988 author Margie Profet proposed that an increased tendency to vomit is a biological adaptation predisposing mothers to eliminate ingested toxins threatening embryonic/fetal development. Embryos and early fetal stages are likely to be susceptible to toxins as major organs such as the brain develop. In two guidance books for mothers-to-be published in 1995 and 1997 Profet particularly emphasized potential toxins in plant-based foods: strong-tasting vegetables, alcohol and caffeine-containing beverages. But this “veggie hypothesis” specifically linking defensive plant toxins to birth defects was fiercely attacked by some authors. Most notably, taking new data for more than 500 women, epidemiologist Judith Brown and colleagues analysed relationships between BARF, pregnancy outcome and intake of supposedly noxious vegetables. They found no statistical association between suspect vegetables and nausea or vomiting in early pregnancy. More importantly, no correlation was found between pungent-tasting vegetables and adverse pregnancy outcomes.

Animal products rather than plant foods

In 2000, neurobiologists Samuel Flaxman and Paul Sherman presented evidence for a modified interpretation that morning sickness serves to protect both the mother and the developing baby from ingested toxins of animal origin. They reinforced Profet’s claim that women afflicted with BARF are significantly less likely to miscarry than women who do not, stating that fewer miscarriages occur with actual vomiting than with nausea alone.

Flaxman and Sherman showed that, although many pregnant women abruptly dislike alcohol, caffeine-containing beverages and strong-tasting vegetables, it is animal products  —  poultry, other meats, fish and eggs  —  that provoke the greatest aversions. They reported results from a cross-cultural study covering twenty traditional societies for which BARF had been recorded and seven for which it had never been noted. Animal products were not major dietary items in any society without BARF, while plants, most notably corn, were significantly more likely to be staples.

Connecting BARF to hCG

Neither Profet nor Flaxman and Sherman explicitly discussed how hCG might be involved in BARF. In fact, pregnancy poses a basic challenge because a developing embryo is effectively a foreign body with many proteins differing from the mother’s. So her immune response must be temporarily down-regulated to reduce rejection risk. As a result, pregnant women and their developing offspring are more exposed to serious infections. In fact, hCG plays a key rôle in regulating immunological interactions between the mother and her embryo/fetus by promoting local tolerance, particularly during the first third of pregnancy. So it is easy to imagine a compensatory adaptation with hCG enhancing the mother’s ability to detect and avoid dietary toxins by provoking nausea and aversions.

But there is another problem: BARF is seemingly unique to humans. Nausea or unusual dietary aversions/cravings during early pregnancy have not been reported for other mammals, even for our closest primate relatives. Why should such adaptations in early pregnancy occur only in our own species? One possibility is that they arose as a novel development during human evolution because our diet moved away from the typical primate focus on fruits, becoming very flexible and often including various animal foods.

At first sight, the take-home message regarding BARF seems to be: “Don’t fight it, it’s good for the baby.” Because BARF is so widespread, it certainly seems likely that it serves to protect, but it is crucial to avoid alarming mothers-to-be with hasty conclusions. For instance, it might be thought that any attempt to alleviate BARF might reduce protection of the embryo/fetus. More insidiously, a pregnant woman who does not suffer from BARF might fear that her infant is more likely to be born with a birth defect. But in fact available evidence does not warrant those conclusions. In the first place  —  as revealed by a comprehensive literature survey by Roger Gadsby and Tony Barnie-Adshead  —  no connection between BARF and birth defects has been established. Additionally, the unstated assumption that miscarriage occurs because of developmental defects has not been tested. Yet again, correlation does not necessarily reflect causation. (See my July 12, 2013 post: The Stork-and-Baby Trap.) We simply do not know whether BARF reduces the likelihood of developmental defects in the embryo or early fetus.

I robustly support the founding principle of Darwinian medicine: Proper understanding of human disease requires knowledge of evolutionary biology. But the principal rôle of evolutionary thinking is surely to generate serious investigation in new directions, not facile “explanations” of medical conditions. So what we need is more research into underlying causes of BARF and possible ways of mitigating associated problems. For instance, might avoidance of animal products and caffeinated beverages during early pregnancy ward off BARF?

References

Brown, J.E., Kahn, E.S. & Hartman, T.J. (1997) Profet, profits, and proof: do nausea and vomiting of early pregnancy protect women from 'harmful' vegetables? Am. J. Obstet. Gynecol. 176:179-181.

Chan, R.L., Olshan, A.F., Savitz, D.A., Herring, A.H., Daniels, J.L., Peterson, H.B. & Martin, S.L. (2010) Severity and duration of nausea and vomiting symptoms in pregnancy and spontaneous abortion. Hum. Reprod.25:2907-2912.

Czeizel, A.E., Puho, E., Acs, N. & Banhidy, F. (2006) Inverse association between severe nausea and vomiting in pregnancy and some congenital abnormalities. Am. J. Med. Genet. 140A:453-462.

Einarson, T.R., Piwko, C. & Koren, G. (2013) Quantifying the global rates of nausea and vomiting of pregnancy: A meta analysis. J. Popul. Ther. Clin. Pharmacol.20:e171-183.

Fessler, D.M.T. (2002) Reproductive immunosuppression and diet. An evolutionary perspective on pregnancy sickness and meat consumption. Curr. Anthropol. 43:19-61. [An excellent overview.]

Flaxman, S.M. & Sherman, P.W. (2000) Morning sickness: a mechanism for protecting mother and embryo. Quart. Rev. Biol. 75:113-148.

Flaxman, S.M. & Sherman, P.W. (2008) Morning sickness: Adaptive cause or nonadaptive consequence of embryo viability? Am. Nat. 172:54-62.

Gadsby, R. &  Barnie-Adshead, A  (last updated in 2011) Nausea and Vomiting of Pregnancy: A Literature Review.https://www.pregnancysicknesssupport.org.uk/documents/NVP-lit-review.pdf

Kaupilla, A., Huhtaniemi, I. & Ylikorkala, O. (1979) Raised serum human chorionic gonadotrophin concentrations in hyperemesis gravidarum. Brit. Med. J.I:1670-1671.

Lacroix, R., Eason, E. & Melzack, R. (2000) Nausea and vomiting of pregnancy: A prospective study of its frequency, intensity and patterns of change. Am. J. Obstet. Gynecol.182:931-937.

Profet, M. (1988) The evolution of pregnancy sickness as protection to the embryo against Pleistocene teratogens. Evol. Theory 8:177-190.

Profet, M. (1995) Protecting Your Baby-to-be: Preventing Birth Defects in the First Trimester. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Profet, M. (1997) Pregnancy Sickness: Using Your Body's Natural Defenses to Protect your Baby-to-Be. Reading, MA: Perseus.

Tortora, G. & Derrickson, B. (2009) Principles of Anatomy & Physiology, 12th Edition. New York: John Wiley.

Is there a simple way to become and stay happy? Perhaps not, but if you want to be part of number one happy nation in the world, hurry up, pack your bags and make a move across the ocean to Denmark. Despite being "cold, dreary [and] unspectacular",[1] Denmark rates higher than any other country in the world on the happiness scale. Sun and exotic beaches apparently don't suffice for happiness.

The Happiest Place on Earth

What makes the Danes happier than all other nations? Christine Skelbæk Karsberg, a HR Business Partner, suggests that the Danes rate themselves highest on the happiness scale in part because of the country's extensive social network and good health care system. "Danes have a good social network for students, elderly and unemployed", says Karsberg, "and while virtually everyone likes to complain about our health care system, access to good medical care is an important factor". A further contributing element is the fact that Denmark is a free country. "People are allowed to be different without fearing exclusion", she adds.

The suggestion that access to good health care and a good social network contribute to happiness is also the conclusion of University of Leicester psychologist Adrian White's meta-analysis of the previous happiness surveys.[1] The meta-analysis analyzed data published by UNESCO, the CIA, the New Economics Foundation, the WHO, the Veenhoven Database, the Latinbarometer, the Afrobarometer, and the UNHDR.

In the original studies participants were asked to rate their own happiness and satisfaction with life. The meta-analysis looks at further factors, including health, wealth, access to education and the effects of war, famine, and national success on happiness. The meta-analysis indicates that a nation's level of happiness is closely correlated with health levels (correlation of 0.62), wealth (0.52), and access to education (0.51).

However, health, wealth and access to education cannot be the full explanation of why the Danes describe themselves as happier than other nations. Health levels and access to education are quite similar in most of the Scandinavian countries, but other Scandinavian countries do not rate quite as high on the happiness scale. Sweden is number 7 and Norway is number 19 of 178 countries rated for happiness.[1]

One thing that sets Denmark apart from Sweden and Norway is a greater overall population density. While everyone can feel alone even in the most crowded city, it is difficult to be truly isolated in a country with five and half million people covering only 43.098 square kilometers. According to Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, how happy we are is determined by our social networks.[2] Their research shows that within a social network, happiness spreads among people up to three degrees of separation. 

Happiness Negatively Defined

White's meta-analysis of the original happiness surveys suggests that happiness partially consists in the lack of negative factors, for example, a lack of hunger, untreatable disease, loneliness and isolation.

These conclusions are consistent with recent brain research. Richard Davidson from the University of Wisconsin suggests that happiness arises when there is a relatively low activation of the fear center in the emotional brain (the amygdala) and the right pre-frontal cortex, and high activation of the left prefrontal cortex, which is associated with reasoning, decision-making and logical thought.[3]

Constant worries about how to get food on the table, how to find money for expensive health care and whether one has a job tomorrow make it practically impossible to feel happy. Fear and happiness are contrary feelings. But a lack of fear does not suffice for feeling happy. To feel happy we must also have a sense of self-worth and purpose. Access to good education and plenty of social interaction can give us a sense of uniqueness and meaningfulness.

Acceptance as a Way to Happiness

Social factors are often beyond our voluntary control. But what if we are still unhappy despite being in social circumstances that are perfectly in order? Our unhappiness may be due to suppressed painful emotions. According to positive psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, a former Harvard professor, whose happiness courses were attended by some 800 people, the first thing to do to become happier is to accept painful emotions, "to accept them as part of being alive".[4] Acceptance, he adds, is a way to happiness. When we are unhappy, there are things we wish were better in our lives. We wish we earned as much money as our ambitious colleague, that the woman who left us for another man is going to return, that our disabled child were like other children. In some cases we can change the world to fit our wishes. But in far the most cases the only thing we can do is accept how things are. Only once we learn to accept that there are things that are beyond our voluntary control and learn to accept them the way they are can we be truly happy.

The Impact of Love and Marriage on Happiness

We all instinctively know that love can have a huge impact on our happiness and stress level. But not all kinds of love have this sort of positive influence. The beginning phases of love relationships in fact have the opposite effect. "When in love, individuals describe odd combinations of pleasure and pain, rapture and grief, ecstasy and disappointment. Love seems to provide a shuttle service that operates between only two destinations: heaven and hell", says Frank Tallis, author of Love Sick: Love as a Mental Illness.[5]

During the early honey phases of a relationship, our brains act chemically as if we are under great distress. The fear center of the emotional brain fires intensely, whereas the left pre-frontal cortex responsible for rational decision-making is on hold. The same unhealthy brain patterns can be seen in sufferers from verbally and physically abuse and in people whose obsessive love is not reciprocated. 

The kinds of love that have the greatest impact on our happiness are the more compassionate forms of love, the sort of love we feel for our friends, children or long-term romantic partners. Unlike the unhealthy heaven-and-hell kinds of love, the more compassionate forms of love can have a positive impact on our happiness because they can make us feel needed and can contribute to our sense of purpose.

Turning to statistics, it is well known that marriage can have a positive impact on happiness. "Married people are on average happier than single people but that may not be a causal effect, just correlational; and the effect is not particularly strong", says Anna Alexandrova, a philosophy professor at the University of Missouri, Saint Louis. "Getting married or starting a relationship just on the basis of these statistical results isn't a good idea, since your own individual factors are likely to be far more important for the success of the relationship".

Alexandrova suggests that more solid statistical evidence comes from the studies of lost love. "People hardly ever manage to adapt after they lose their spouse to death or disease, whereas they do adapt to changes in money, health, physical characteristics but again this hardly argues against trying to find happiness in a relationship."

"So, we are back to the good old individual deliberation: does this particular person make me happy? Will this keep steady through thick and thin? Is it worth persevering given our particular circumstances? These questions are unlikely to be answered at the general statistical level", Alexandrova says.

References

[1] World map of happiness: Denmark on top [http://www.peterhorn.dk/ExecutiveMagazine/Stoppress/061031_world_map_of_happiness_denmark_on_top.asp]

[2] “People who post smiley photos on Facebook/Frowners attract happy friends”; Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler; Nature; 2008.

[3] Lab for Affective Neuroscience [http://psyphz.psych.wisc.edu/]

[4] Five Ways to Become Happier Today [http://bigthink.com/ideas/16660]

[5] Love Sick: Love as a Mental Illness; Frank Tallis; 2005.

Photo Credits

The photo is from Wikipedia's public domain.