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Visionary and Brilliant

September 4, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Dr. at the November 29, 2005 meeting of the NA...
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If everyone had the luxury to pursue a life of exactly what they love, we would all be ranked as visionary and brilliant. … If you got to spend every day of your life doing what you love, you can’t help but be the best in the world at that. And you get to smile every day for doing so. And you’ll be working at it almost to the exclusion of personal hygiene, and your friends are knocking on your door, saying, “Don’t you need a vacation?!,” and you don’t even know what the word “vacation” means because what you’re doing is what you want to do and a vacation from that is anything but a vacation – that’s the state of mind of somebody who’s doing what others might call visionary and brilliant. —Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Filed Under: Choice, Creating, Finding What You Want, Happiness, Living Tagged With: Doing what you love, Neil deGrasse Tyson

Music Will Save Me from Myself

August 28, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 6 Comments

Cosmo's Factory
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Having declared an intention to maintain my equanimity—and why didn’t I think of this before now?—I have been looking for ways to keep reminding myself that this is my intention and to assist me when situations arise where I’m in danger of losing it.

The last time something pushed one of my buttons, I remembered how powerfully music can affect mood and state of mind. So I created an Equanimity Playlist: 25 songs that make me feel good or lower my blood pressure—or both. They range from the ridiculous (or corny) to the (at least in my opinion) sublime. It’s much more satisfying to turn the music on than it is to throw a stapler across the room (not that I actually do that with any regularity…anymore).

Here’s my list:

For a Dancer (Jackson Browne)
Coming into Los Angeles (Arlo Gurthrie)
I Heard a Rumor (Bananarama)

When You Awake (the Band/Acoustic version by Rick Dank)

Sail On (The Commodores)
Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby (Counting Crows)
Lookin’ Out My Back Door (Creedence Clearwater Revival)
Save Tonight (Eagle Eye Cherry)
Uncle John’s Band (Grateful Dead)
Rise Up (Indigo Girls)
Mexico (James Taylor)
Take a Minute (K’naan)
What It Is (Mark Knopfler)
Peace Like a River (Paul Simon)
Half a World Away (R.E.M.)

All This Time (Sting)

I Want You (Bob Dylan)
Piper at the Gates of Dawn (Van Morrison)

Who Says (John Mayer)

Birdhouse in Your Soul (They Might Be Giants)
A Thousand Beautiful Things  (Annie Lennox)
High Tide or Low Tide (Bob Marley & The Wailers)
Human Nature (Michael Jackson)
Terra Nova (James Taylor)
Kathy’s Song (Eva Cassidy)

Many of these songs have been lifting me up for decades, from Michigan to California to New Mexico, and still do it for me today.

What songs would you put on your Equanimity Playlist?Enhanced by Zemanta

Filed Under: Consciousness, Happiness, Living, Meaning, Mind, Mindfulness Tagged With: Equanimity, Happiness, Living, Mindfulness, Music

To Wander or Not to Wander, Is That the Question?

April 14, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

daydream

A few years ago, a study by Daniel Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth made headlines—at least in the cognitive neuroscience world—by reporting two findings. One is that people tend to zone out nearly 50% of the time. The other is that “a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”

It should be noted that Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, specializes in affective forecasting—the ability to predict how people will feel in the future. He is the author of Stumbling on Happiness, which demonstrates that we actually have no idea how we’ll feel in the future, in spite of our firm convictions to the contrary.

Gilbert, then, is interested in studying what makes us happy. His research with Killingsworth consisted of interrupting people multiple times a day to ask them what they were doing and how happy they were when they were doing it. One of the things people reported being unhappy about was mind-wandering. (They reported being happiest when they were making love, exercising, or engaging in conversation.)

It seems that the most consistent response to this study, immediately following expressions of dismay, has been to try to get us to be more “in the moment”—in other words, to practice mindfulness. I’m a big fan of mindfulness, but I think there’s more to mind-wandering than whether or not it makes us happy. As I wrote about in an earlier post, people who pursue meaning in their lives rather than happiness aren’t necessarily happy, either. But they report being more satisfied.

As it turns out there are a few benefits associated with mind-wandering. One is that we can mentally escape from boring or unpleasant tasks or situations. An extreme example of mental escape was described by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning as to how some prisoners in the concentration camps were able to survive better than others:

Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature. …

The intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence, by letting him escape into the past. When given free rein, his imagination played with past events, often not important ones, but minor happenings and trifling things. His nostalgic memory glorified them and they assumed a strange character….

As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before. Under their influence he sometimes even forgot his own frightful circumstances.

Another benefit of mind-wandering is increased creativity. Neuroscientists have determined that our brains have a “default network” that is activated when our minds are free to wander. When our attention is focused on a task, on the other hand, our executive network is activated to oversee the operation. But sometimes when our minds are wandering both of these networks are active. Jonathan Schooler and Jonathan Smallwood, both of UC Santa Barbara, theorize that both networks are working on agendas beyond the immediate task—which could explain why people whose minds wander score higher on tests of creativity.

Eric Klinger, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota believes mind wandering “serves as a kind of reminder mechanism, thereby increasing the likelihood that other goal pursuits will remain intact and not get lost in the shuffle of pursuing many goals.” According to Dr. Klinger, our mind wandering gives us an evolutionary advantage.

So we probably shouldn’t rush to judgment and try to stop our minds from wandering in an attempt to make ourselves happier. Nor should we give our minds free rein to wander at will. Mind-wandering is something to be aware of. To appreciate. And to curb when it’s more appropriate to focus on the task at hand.

It isn’t as if we could put an end to our mind-wandering, anyway. We just need to learn when to go with the flow and when to direct the flow, which may be one more thing that is easier said than done.Enhanced by Zemanta

Filed Under: Beliefs, Consciousness, Finding What You Want, Happiness, Mind, Mindfulness Tagged With: Creativity, Daniel Gilbert, Happiness, Mind-wandering, Stumbling on Happiness, Viktor Frankl

More than Happy

March 31, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Happiness
Happiness (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Don’t Worry, Be Happy

Those who pursue happiness tend to focus on feeling good and getting what they want in the short-term (satisfying drives). Happy people report less stress or worry. Animals can be happy, too. It’s been said that what sets humans apart from the animals is the pursuit of meaning. People who are more focused on meaning than on happiness are invested in something outside themselves. They tend to experience more stress and anxiety than happy people do, but the rub is that even when they are suffering, the people who have created meaning in their lives report a higher level of satisfaction than those who don’t have meaning in their lives.

Whether we aim for short-term rewards or keep our eyes on the long-term prize, all of us have two different decision-making systems, both of which are involved each time we have to make a decision or choice. System 1, which is more primitive, is associated with immediate gratification. It responds to sensory stimuli and directly involves the limbic system and our basic emotions. System 2 involves the prefrontal cortex and is responsible for long-range thinking and planning.

The Rowdy Couple Downstairs

Think of the brain as a two-story bungalow. The bottom or first floor got built first and contains a young and rowdy couple. They play loud music, throw wild parties and are up at all hours. Later a second-story extension got built on top and an older and more practical couple moved in. They like to tend the garden and pay off their mortgage. At times, the two couples agree about how the household should be run but, with such differences in values, there are plenty of disagreements. –Piers Steel, Ph.D.

If you don’t have something meaningful on which you are focused, most of your decisions are likely to be in the hands of the rowdy couple on the first floor. Even if you decide there’s something you want that requires foregoing immediate gratification, you may struggle with following through.

The reality is that even though so many people are in pursuit of it—especially in places like the U.S.—happiness can be elusive. For one thing, happiness is an emotion, and by its nature, transient. For another pursuing personal happiness is associated with selfishness and being a “taker,” while pursuing or creating meaning is associated with being a “giver.”

If you focus on creating meaning in your life, you are likely to be more satisfied. Happiness may or may not be a byproduct. If you focus on pursuing happiness, you will presumably be happy, but less satisfied. If it’s the pursuit of meaning that makes us uniquely human, then pursing happiness doesn’t seem like the best path for humans to be on.

Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to “be happy.” –Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Filed Under: Happiness, Meaning Tagged With: Happiness, Limbic system, Meaning, Prefrontal cortex

Seeking the One Right and Perfect Choice

February 21, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

choices
choices (Photo credit: mRio)

It’s good to have options. It’s good to have choices. The more the better, right? But maybe we can actually have too many of them. Maybe having so many things to choose from complicates our lives rather than enhancing them. It’s been suggested that having so many options has two negative effects. The first is that it produces paralysis: we can’t decide which thing to choose, so we choose none. The second is that it escalates our expectations so that even if we do make a choice, we aren’t really satisfied with it. What if there was a better choice? What if we made the wrong choice?

A lot of the research in this area has been done in regard to product choices, but the principles apply to all kinds of choices. Maybe our choice-making behavior carries over from—or at least is reinforced by—our shopping experiences.

[I]t seems that as society grows wealthier and people become freer to do whatever they want, they get less happy. —Barry Schwartz, The Tyranny of Choice, Scientific American, December 2004

Maybe the abundance of choices we have impacts our ability to create meaning in our lives. How much time and mental energy do we spend trying to decide: what to do on our vacation, where to go for dinner, which item to select from the menu, what to wear to this or that event, whether or not to redecorate the kitchen (or bedroom or bath) and then what colors to use and which things to replace, whether to get this book (or CD or DVD) or that one, which movie to go to, what kind of car to buy, which area to major in in college, which job to apply for or accept, and—for many—what the heck to do with the rest of our lives.

Some of the choices we have to make are far weightier than others, but I wonder if we’ve become so bad at making day-to-day choices—so hung up on the process—that it’s impaired our choice-making ability. If it’s true that we have escalated expectations about the effect a particular brand of olive oil or car or kitchen appliance is going to have on our lives, imagine what our expectations are about the really significant things, such as who we choose to spend our lives with, whether or not we choose to have children, and what career path we choose for ourselves. How can reality meet those heightened expectations? The research says that it can’t and doesn’t.

The secret to happiness is low expectations. –Barry Schwartz

The grass is always greener somewhere else as long as we think there is one right and perfect choice and we need to find and select it from all the options available. How will we ever know whether or not we made that one right and perfect choice?  It’s not a game show where we’ll find out at the end that Door Number Three was the one with the biggest prize.

Filed Under: Beliefs, Finding What You Want, Happiness, Living, Meaning Tagged With: Barry Schwartz, Choices, Choosing, Happiness, The Tyranny of Choice

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