Habits

Gretchen, you are indeed an accomplished author and I do enjoy your books. You achieve a lightness and self-discovery that many academic books lack, and yet you still root much of your work in the scientific findings that I value.

The world needs peace right now. The world needs you to increase your mindfulness. So, thank you for practicing and building your mindfulness muscle. When the alarm goes off tomorrow morning, take a slow and low cleansing breath and remember to express gratitude for another day to be alive.

No baby learned to walk by receiving a beating for its tumbles or taunts about the perfect stride. I have also learned that the best version of me is not one that is perfect, but one that is human, hopeful, fallible, energetic, and emotional.

From Paul Dolan’s talk about his new book, Happiness by Design, I gained 3 important insights to shape my thinking about happiness in the new year.

If you know that gratitude is good for you but it is still a struggle, how do you work on it?

We intuitively know that when we sleep poorly, we are drawn to snacking and overeating. We also know that nothing gets rid of a crappy mood faster than a good sweat and that lower stress levels contribute to a better night’s sleep. So why are so many programs treating sleep, food, mood, and exercise as if they were separate topics?

I’ve always loved the early mornings, although it hasn’t always made me popular with family and friends. So I was intrigued recently to find that getting up with the lark has proven scientific benefits, not just the emotional ones I enjoy. Here are five advantages to being an early bird that might entice you to try it.

How do I deal with this unhelpful little shadow, the fear of being valueless, and rebuild my identity? Seeing what it’s been up to and how it manifests is undoubtedly the first step. Stepping back and looking at it seems to take away much of its power.

Don’t sit there too long waiting for happiness to appear, or wondering whether now is the right time to do something. Why not take a different approach? Why not act now and reflect afterwards on whether it worked? If it wasn’t quite right, you can change it, and in the meantime you will have learned something about yourself. This way, you can act your way into a new way of being happy.

Welcome to the second episode of PPND TV. This is a companion to theinterview of Kathryn Britton that appeared earlier this month. The PPND TV interview series is an experiment inspired by TED talks. We want to bring our readers the crux of positive psychology in brief video interviews of researchers and practitioners.

Today’s guest is Senia Maymin, editor of PPND, coach, and author.

Many sources in the wellness industry erroneously treat the concepts of disease prevention and health promotion as if they were one and the same. That’s a big mistake, and not recognizing the inherent distinction between the two undoubtedly reduces our ability to implement our health intentions. Here’s why, and how to use each.

Over generations of survivors, humans developed thinking shortcuts which are still very pervasive today. Of these common shortcuts, 5 are very costly to our health. While it is unlikely that we’ll ever break free of their influence, increased mindfulness can alleviate their effects on our thought processes, behaviors, and wellness.

The desire to fit in is a powerful shaper of behavior. In some cases, social pressures serve us well. In other cases, social pressures are lagging behind their times. Here’s how to use social pressure to extinguish four unhealthy social norms.

This is another PPND tradition: to collect suggestions from authors about ways to start the New Year. Our authors have written about building habits, starting rituals, starting small and building on, goals, satisficing, moving to action quickly, and other approaches to making year-round healthy changes stick.

Since the holiday season is upon us, you can bet that New Year’s Resolutions aren’t far off. Yet only 8% of us consistently achieve our goals for the New Year. That’s not very encouraging, but it’s also no surprise, considering that most of us will just pick a resolution and hope to achieve it without much planning. But to reverse-paraphrase Einstein, if we go about it differently this year, we can get different results. Here are 4 ideas for effectively working toward health goals.

Based both on my PhD research and on my personal experiences publishing a book with Margaret Greenberg, here are my research-based suggestions for taking incremental steps to reach important goals.

We put together the Happiness Habits program and tested it with groups as diverse as refugee parents in an inner-city school, charity volunteers, and professionals working in health and education. After several iterations we settled on 8 habits of happiness delivered in 8 weekly sessions: habits because it takes practice to make these actions automatic and 8 weeks to allow adequate time for positive changes to occur.

In a 2012 Swiss study, researchers Friese, Messner, and Shaffner tested whether a brief period of meditation would lessen the depletion effects of self-control. Their experimental group showed less ego depletion than the control group. Why? How might mindfulness affect self-regulation?

There are places where people live longer, happier and healthier lives. They are mostly in remote places such as Okinawa in Japan. On average, those who live in such places live 10 or more years longer than the average, enjoying active lives well into their 90s. What can we learn from these healthy people? The most important lesson is that people living in these geographic areas do not achieve this in isolation. The healthy choice is “the way we do things around here.”

“What can we as a country do to significantly improve the life chances of millions of poor children?” This is the question that reporter Paul Tough asks us to tackle with him in How Children Succeed. This book is passionately written and soundly researched. If Paul Tough is right, and I hope that he is, medical professionals, social workers, educators, and parents can join one another to build communities that help all of our children succeed.