3 Simple Things That Will Make you 10% happier

Dear Parents,

This post further supports the reasoning behind the introduction of mindfulness each day at school. We have already witnessed and heard about many positive outcomes and we are only in week 3 of the school year. In this blog post from Barking up the Wrong Tree there are numerous links that you can follow that will further illustrate how a few minutes of mindfulness each day will help this generation of ISHCMC students be better skilled and equipped (EMPOWERED) to face their lives as adults in the work place.

Perhaps it is time for you to try for yourselves,

Yours
Adrian

Ever been really stressed? So stressed you nearly freak out?

This happened to Dan Harris… in front of 5 million people.

On June 7th, 2004, Dan was a news correspondent on ABC and he had a panic attack on air while reading the news:

He knew he had to do something. His career was in jeopardy.

By coincidence, he was soon assigned to cover stories about religion. This set Dan on a multi-year quest talking to people of faith — and total quacks.

But it ended up introducing him to something that helped him get his head straight and, as he likes to say, made him 10% happier.

What was it? Meditation.

Feeling skeptical yet? Thinking of hippies, beads and chanting? Actually, that’s how Dan felt too.

But it turns out his discovery wasn’t the least bit mystic — in fact it was quite scientific.

I gave Dan a call and we talked about meditation and the book he wrote about his journey: 10% Happier.

And here’s how the neuroscience behind a 2500 year old ritual can help all of us become 10% happier.

You Don’t Have To Be A Hippie And Live In A Yurt

Dan’s now the co-anchor of Nightline and Good Morning America.

What’s the first thing this Emmy-award winning journalist has to say about meditation? It has a huge PR problem.

Via 10% Happier:

Meditation suffers from a towering PR problem, largely because its most prominent proponents talk as if they have a perpetual pan flute accompaniment. If you can get past the cultural baggage, though, what you’ll find is that meditation is simply exercise for your brain. It’s a proven technique for preventing the voice in your head from leading you around by the nose… There’s even science to back this up.

So what is science learning about meditation? A lot. Here’s Dan:

There are actually tons and tons of studies on meditation. But you can find one-off studies that show almost anything, right?

So what happened when the Journal of American Medicinerecently looked at more then 18,000 citations on the subject?

Meditation demonstrated clear results in helping people with anxiety, depression and pain.

Other studies are showing it can help with decision-making, compassion — and it might even reduce your cravings for chocolate.

And Dan’s not the only one who’s realized this:

1. The SuperBowl winning Seattle Seahawks meditate.
2. Google has someone in charge of teaching meditation.
3. 12 minutes a day of meditation makes US Marines more resilient in war zones.

Looking at the research a while back, I said meditation is one of the ten things people should do every day to improve their lives.

(For more on the science of meditation, click here.)

I know some of you are saying, “Great. But what does it do, really?”

Meditation and mindfulness are two things we hear about constantly but few of us can really define what they are and what they do. That’s about to change.

No Robes And Chanting Necessary

We all have that voice in our head. Our internal narrator. And he’s usually a jerk.

A nonstop running commentary of wants and needs, second-guessing, regretting the past and worrying about the future.

Dan explains:

The voice comes braying in as soon as we open our eyes in the morning, and then heckles us all day long with an air horn. It’s a fever swamp of urges, desires, and judgments. It’s fixated on the past and the future, to the detriment of the here and now. It’s what has us reaching into the fridge when we’re not hungry, losing our temper when we know it’s not really in our best interest, and pruning our inboxes when we’re ostensibly engaged in conversation with other human beings.

Harvard professor and author of Stumbling on Happiness, Dan Gilbert, has shown that this sort of mind-wandering makes us miserable.

In fact, a recent study showed men would rather get electric shocks than be alone with their thoughts. Yeah, really.

This is where meditation comes in.

It’s not some magic incantation; it’s a bicep curl for your brain that can tame the thoughts in your head.

By teaching your brain to focus it can allow you to not get yanked around by your emotions, to be able to respond rather than react.

And the results are real:

A 2012 Harvard study showed:

In the mindful attention group, the after-training brain scans showed a decrease in activation in the right amygdala in response to all images, supporting the hypothesis that meditation can improve emotional stability and response to stress.

And after 8 weeks of regular meditation these changes were visible even when the subjects weren’t meditating.

A 2011 Yale study showed:

Experienced meditators seem to switch off areas of the brain associated with wandering thoughts, anxiety and some psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia.Researchers used fMRI scans to determine how meditators’ brains differed from subjects who were not meditating. The areas shaded in blue highlight areas of decreased activity in the brains of meditators.

(For more things scientifically proven to make you happier, click here.)

Some people don’t like my fancy brain pictures. They’re still saying, “That wouldn’t work for me.” You’re wrong. Here’s why.

Excuses, Excuses, Excuses

People give tons of excuses why they can’t meditate. Dan has heard them all by now and most don’t hold water.

1) “I’m too busy to meditate.”

You can see results in 5 minutes a day. You don’t have five minutes? And how long have you been reading this post for, Mr. Busy?

2) “It won’t work for me. My mind is too crazy.”

Ah, “the fallacy of uniqueness.” Dan says he had the attention span of a 6 month old Golden Labrador. It’s worked for him and many many others.

3) “I’m not a Buddhist.”

I asked Dan about this when we chatted. Mindfulness meditation is secular:

The form of mindfulness meditation that has been studied in labs is completely secular. It’s called mindfulness-based stress reductionand you don’t have to join anything, you don’t have to wear any special outfits or believe in anything. It’s secular and scientifically validated.

4) “I need my anxiety. It drives me crazy but it’s the reason I get things done.”

I was curious about this one, too (you think someone who writes blog posts like this doesn’t have a voice in his head? C’mon.)

Dan always lived by the motto, “The price of security is insecurity.1”Worrying kept him on his game. But it also made him miserable.

But then Dan asked his meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, what he thought of worrying.

Here’s Dan:

He said “Yes, you have to worry because that makes sense in order to function effectively. However, on the 17th time when you’re worrying about that same thing, maybe ask yourself one simple question: ‘Is it useful?’“2

At some point, you have thought it through sufficiently and it’s time to move on. What I have learned how to do as a result of meditation is to draw the line between what I call “constructive anguish” and “unconstructive rumination” and that’s made me a lot happier.

You won’t lose your edge. You can still worry a bit. But when it gets out of hand ask yourself, “Is this useful?”

(For more lifehacks from ancient times that will make you happier, click here.)

At this point many of you are saying, “Okay, okay, meditation is good. But how do I actually do it?”

That’s up next. And it’s crazy simple — but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

How To Meditate

And here’s how he explained it to me:

It really involves three extremely simple steps.

One: Sit with your eyes closed and your back straight.

Two: Notice what it feels like when your breath comes in and when your breath goes out, try to bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out.

Third step is the biggie. Every time you try to do this, your mind is going to go crazy. You are going to start thinking about all sorts of stupid things like if you need a haircut, why you said that dumb thing to your boss, what’s for lunch, etc. Every time you notice that your mind is wandering, bring your attention back to your breath and begin again. This is going to happen over and over and over again and that is meditation.

Personally, I like to think of it as the toughest and most maddening video game in the world. Dan agrees:

It’s not easy. You will “fail” a million times but the “failing” and starting over is succeeding. So this isn’t like most things in your life where, like if you can’t get up on water skis, you can’t do it. Here the trying and starting again, trying and starting again, that’s the whole game.

It works. And meditation doesn’t cost anything. All you need to do is be breathing, and breathing is something that’s always with you and never stops.

And if it ever does stop, well, you may have more urgent problems to deal with.

(For more on what the happiest people do every day, click here.)

So how do we tie all this together?

Sum Up

You can still see Dan on Nightline and Good Morning America but luckily he’s not having any more panic attacks.

Is meditation going to give you magic powers? No. Even the Dalai Lama loses his temper.

Seriously — Dan asked him during an interview.

Via 10% Happier:

“Is your mind always calm?” I asked.

“No, no, no. Occasionally lose my temper.”

“You do?”

“Oh yes. If someone is never lose temper then perhaps they may come from another space,” he said, pointing toward the sky and laughing from the belly, his eyes twinkling beneath his thick glasses.

But research says meditation can make you less stressed and more happy. Here’s what Dan told me:

The bad things in my life are still bad but I am not making them worse than they need to be by adding on a bunch of useless rumination. We assume that our happiness is derived from external circumstances, like how much money we’re making, if we had a happy childhood, if we married well, whatever. The radical proposition of meditation is that happiness is self-generated. You can develop your happiness muscle the way you develop your biceps in the gym. That is hugely, hugely empowering and a comforting notion.

5 minutes a day. That’s all it takes to give your happiness muscle a workout.

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6 Things The Happiest Families All Have In Common

a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/40645538@N00/3107088883/">Pink Sherbet Photography via Compfight cc

Family life is hectic. Most of us play it by ear and hope it works out well.

Or maybe you haven’t started a family yet but when you do you want to do itright.

Aren’t there some legit answers out there about what creates the happiest families? Yes, there are.

To get the facts I called Bruce Feiler, author of the New York Times bestseller,The Secrets of Happy Families.

When writing his book, Bruce knew there were answers already out there — but not necessarily where we’d expect.

He found solutions to common family problems in business theory, Harvard negotiation techniques, and even by talking to Green Berets.

Below you’ll learn:

1.       The #1 predictor of your child’s emotional well-being.

2.      The #1 predictor of their academic achievement — and behavior problems.

3.      And the simple thing that steers kids away from drugs, toward better grades and even improves their self-esteem. And more.

Here’s what makes strong, happy families:

1) Create A Family Mission Statement

I asked Bruce what he would recommend if he could only give one piece of advice.

He said: “Set aside time to talk about what it means to be a part of your family.”

Ask: “What are your family values?” In business-speak: Develop a mission statement for your family.

Here’s Bruce:

Initiate a conversation about what it means to be a part of your family. Sit down with them and say “Okay, these are our ten central values.”

“This is the family we want to be. We want to be a family that doesn’t fight all the time.” or “We want to be a family that goes camping or sailing” or whatever it might be.

When my family did it, it was literally a transforming experience. We ended up printing it and it hangs now in our dining room.

Does “defining values” seem too big and intimidating? It’s really nothing more than setting goals.

Here’s Bruce:

Did we do every one of those things every day, every week, every month? No, that’s not that point. But the point is, when it goes wrong, you have that goal out there. “We want to be a family that has fun together. Have we made time to play recently? No, we don’t. So let’s make time to play. Let’s go bowling or hiking or roller skating.”

You have goals at work. You have personal goals. Why wouldn’t you have goals as a family?

So you and your family discussed your values and came up with a mission statement. What other thing did Bruce say was vital?

Like the mission statement, it’s another story. But it’s not about the future — it’s about the past.

2) Share Your Family History

Research shows whether a kid knows their family history was thenumber one predictor of a child’s emotional well-being.

Here’s Bruce:

…researchers at Emory did this study that showed that the kids who know more about their family history had a greater belief that they could control their world and a higher degree of self-confidence. It was the number one predictor of a child’s emotional well-being.

And research confirms that meaning in life is all about the stories we tell ourselves.

But here’s what’s really interesting: recounting your family history is not just telling kids, “Our family is awesome.”

Recounting the tough times, the challenges your family faced and overcame, is key.

Here’s Bruce:

Understanding that people have natural ups and downs allows kids to know that they too will have ups and downs. It gives them the confidence to believe that they can push through them. It gives them role models that show your family’s values in practice.

Mission statements, family history… that’s a lot of talking. When is all this supposed to happen? Whenever you get around to it? No way.

3) Hold Weekly Family Meetings

You’re not mom or dad anymore — you’re now co-CEO’s. To find the way to keep a family improving Bruce turned to the world of business.

Your family needs a weekly board meeting with all the shareholders present. Sound cold and clinical? Wrong.

Bruce’s wife says it’s one of the best things they’ve done to make their own family life happier.

It’s not complicated and it only takes 20 minutes, once a week.

Here’s Bruce:

We basically ask three questions. What worked well this week, what didn’t work well this week and what will we agree to work on in the week ahead?

And if the kids meet the goal, they get to help pick a reward. And if they don’t, they get to help pick a punishment. They don’t do it without us, but we all do it in consultation.

Bruce did a TED talk explaining in detail how techniques from the business world, like meetings, can improve our families:

So your family has a mission, a shared history and you’re meeting regularly. This is great because everyone is talking, which is crucial.

But what inevitably comes with talking a lot? Arguing. It’s normal and natural and that’s okay.

But you have to have rules so it isn’t a path to hurt feelings and homicide investigations. What’s the proper way to argue?

4) How To Fight Right

Bruce wanted to find the best way to resolve disputes — so he didn’t turn to books about families, he turned to a pro.

Bill Ury is co-founder of the Project on Negotiation at Harvard Law School and co-author of the classic, Getting To Yes,

What can one of the best negotiators teach families about resolving those inevitable everyday squabbles of life?

Bruce outlines three key steps:

Number one, “Separate everybody.” In negotiation speak; this is “Go to the balcony.” Take a moment where you look back on the fight as if it were on a stage and you’re on the balcony and say “Okay, what’s really going on here?” This reduces emotions like anger.

Second, we ask our kids to come up with three alternatives. In negotiation speak; this is “Expand the pie before you divide the pie.”

Bruce admits this part can be tricky. But you need to make it clear nobody is leaving the table until there are three options.

The third stage is “Bring people back together.” In negotiation speak; this is “Build the golden bridge of the future.”

Have the kids pick one of the three that they like best. What’s key is that the children created the alternatives and agreed on the best solution.

As Bruce explains in his book, when kids get a say, it works out better for everyone. Don’t be a dictator unless you have to.

(To learn how how you can resolve conflict with lessons from FBI hostage negotiators, click here.)

So mission statements, family meetings and fighting right are great — but what keeps a family together day to day?

5) Have Family Dinner Together… Any Time Of The Day

Research shows having dinner as a family makes a huge difference in children’s lives.

As Bruce writes in his book, The Secrets of Happy Families:

A recent wave of research shows that children who eat dinner with their families are less likely to drink, smoke, do drugs, get pregnant, commit suicide, and develop eating disorders. Additional research found that children who enjoy family meals have larger vocabularies, better manners, healthier diets, and higher self-esteem. The most comprehensive survey done on this topic, a University of Michigan report that examined how American children spent their time between 1981 and 1997, discovered that the amount of time children spent eating meals at home was the single biggest predictor of better academic achievement and fewer behavioral problems. Mealtime was more influential than time spent in school, studying, attending religious services, or playing sports.

I know what many of you are thinking: Our schedules are crazy. It’s too hard to get everyone together. We can’t do it every night.

And that’s 100% okay. “Dinner” isn’t the important part. All that matters is that time together, whenever it is.

And it doesn’t even have to be that much time. How much real conversation happens at family dinner? 10 minutes.

As Bruce likes to say, the rest of the talking is “Take your elbows off the table” and “Please pass the ketchup.”

What’s the best way to make use of those 10 minutes? Here’s Bruce:

So number one, the first big thing to be aware of is that parents do two-thirds of the talking in that ten minutes. And that’s a problem.

So your first goal should be to flip that and let the kids do more of the talking. So that would be issue number one.

Number two, I would say a great thing to do in that ten minutes is to try to teach your kid a new word every day. There’s a tremendous amount of evidence out there that one of the biggest determinants of success in school has to do with the size of vocabulary.

(For more research-based parenting techniques, click here.)

Mission statements, family history, meetings, fighting right, dinners… That’s a lot to do. Heck, it’s a lot to just remember.

What’s Bruce’s recommendation to the family that’s already strapped for time? What overarching theme can we see in all of these tips?

6) Just Try

Ask anyone if they want to make their family happier and, of course, they’ll say yes.

Then ask how many hours they’ve actively invested in that goal over the past month. I’m guessing the reply is going to be “Ummmmm…”1

Reading about improving your family is only the first step. But the second step isn’t all that much harder: Try.

Here’s Bruce:

We know if we want to improve in our career, we have to work at it. And yet, we don’t do that with our family life. We sort of say “It’s the end of the line, they’ll always be there. It’s always going to be stressful. I’ll just deal.” Well, no.

If we work with our families and take small steps to try and make them better, we actually can make our families happier. And in the process, we can make every member of our family happier. So what’s the secret to a happy family? Try.

And the research backs Bruce up.

Studies show improving any relationship is as easy as actively showing interest in the other person or sharing with them.

In fact, pretending time with your romantic partner is a first date makes it more enjoyable for you and for them. Why?

On first dates we make an effort. And that’s the secret here too: don’t just think about it, invest time and energy.

(For three of the most counterintutiive lessons on being a great parent, clickhere.)

So how do we tie all this together?

Sum Up

Here are Bruce’s 6 tips:

1.       Create A Family Mission Statement

2.      Share Your Family History

3.      Hold Weekly Family Meetings

4.      Fight Right

5.      Have Family Dinner Together… Any Time Of The Day

6.      Just Try1

Families come in all different shapes and sizes these days and the world moves a lot faster than it once did. But don’t fret.

Research shows that anyone can have a happy family.

Via 100 Simple Secrets of Happy Families:

Researchers have found that a loving family life can be created among any group of people. Long-term studies comparing adopted children to children raised by their biological parents find little difference in the children’s feelings on family life, and no difference in their ability to enjoy good relationships with peers.

- Neiheiser 2001

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Paying attention online

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Many a parent and teacher has despaired over how easily young people’s attention is diverted, especially when they’re online. Stay focused! we urge them. Don’t let yourself get distracted! Our admonitions have little sway against the powerful temptations of the Internet. But there may be a better way to help teenagers resist the web’s lures: let them know that their attention is being deliberately manipulated and exploited. If experience with another bad habit—smoking—is any guide, teens’ own desire for self-governance is a force far more compelling than the exhortations of their elders.

Ever since the first Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health in 1964, public health advocates have searched for ways to stop young people from picking up the habit. They’ve said that smoking makes them look stupid and makes their breath smell bad. They’ve tallied up how much cash teens would have if it weren’t wasted on cigarettes. And, of course, they’ve told teens that smoking kills, adding graphic images of black lungs and tracheotomy tubes.

None of these approaches has worked as well as supporters hoped, and some have even backfired, making teenagers more likely to smoke. But a few savvy individuals—advertising executives, mostly, with an assist from teens themselves—did come up with a strikingly effective way to turn young people against smoking. They took a page from cigarette companies’ own playbook, tapping into adolescents’ fierce desire for autonomy. Instead of flaunting that independence by smoking, these teen-whisperers suggested, do it by resisting the manipulations of Big Tobacco.

As journalist Tina Rosenberg recounts in her book Join the Club, the “counter-marketing” approach didn’t feature a “long, boring lecture in church hall or school auditorium about proper behavior. And it didn’t look like more recent attempts at swaying teens—the booklets and posters showing rows of graveyards and cancer statistics.”

Instead, it introduced public-service campaigns with names like “Rage Against the Haze” and “truth” (the lowercase first letter attesting to its youthful subversiveness). It broadcast commercials—some of them directed by teens—that quoted from tobacco companies’ internal documents, in which executives mused about how to replace the customers who were dying off with a new generation of smokers. And it sent young, attractive staff members into classrooms to deliver an unaccustomed message: “We’re not telling anyone how to live their life. We’re not against smokers or smoking. We’re just here to give you information on how tobacco companies are manipulating you.”

After decades of lackluster results (“The Bottom Line: No One Knows What Works,” read the headline of one article about antismoking efforts), the counter-marketing approach in the late 1990s generated impressive outcomes: In Florida, for example, the “truth” campaign led to an 8 percent decline in smoking among high school students and a nearly 20 percent decline among middle schoolers.

Counter-marketing relied, successfully, on teenagers’ indignation about being exploited by the tobacco companies. But Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds are bush leaguers at manipulating young customers when compared to today’s technology companies. The creators of today’s most popular apps, games and websites have perfected, quite consciously and deliberately, what writer Alex Soojung-Kim Pang has called “the commodification of distraction.” Who wants Joe Camel when you’ve got Facebook?

Pang—the author, aptly, of a book titled The Distraction Addiction — urges us to see the web as man-made artifact, the product of particular intentions and interests. “Some people talk about how the shiny-blinky flashing Internet appeals to our visually-oriented brains, how Facebook ‘likes’ and re-tweets give us a little shot of dopamine,” Pang writes on his blog, Contemplative Computing. “But these effects aren’t merely an accident. Technology companies actively design to maximize our engagement with them . . . Social media, gaming, and entertainment companies now spend enormous amounts of time and energy trying to get you to spend more time interacting with them, to recruit your friends to join them, and to intentionally or accidentally share as much information as possible with them.”

Young people, for whom a connected world is the only one they’ve ever known, are especially liable to accept the Internet as the state of nature, simply the way things are. Perhaps this blithe acceptance helps explain the furor that erupted last month over the revelation that Facebook had involved users in a psychological experiment without their knowledge, deliberately manipulating their moods by determining which of their friends’ posts (upbeat or morose) they saw.

From the perspective of academic research, this was indeed a troubling violation: investigators are obliged to obtain the consent of the subjects in their studies. But from the perspective of online product development and marketing, this was business as usual: companies that earn their money on the web do their best to manipulate our moods (and our attention, and our wallets) every minute we’re online.

Let’s encourage teenagers to discover (maybe with the help of their peers) that the freedom and autonomy they feel when they’re at the helm of their computers is in some ways an illusion, and let’s help them develop the skeptical, critical stance that would allow them to be truly autonomous users of the Internet. A template for such a project might be the efforts to show young people—especially young women—how magazine editors and advertisers seek to manipulate their sense of what the female body should look like. (The Photoshopped before-and-after images available through the Common Sense Media blog could well be the fashion world equivalent of internal tobacco company documents.)

Although there have been some attempts to teach students “critical thinking skills” with respect to the web, too often these programs adopt a sanctimonious tone, with all the rebellious appeal of extra-credit study hall. The history of antismoking campaigns offers a potentially more effective alternative. Granted, clicking a link or posting a status update won’t give teenagers lung cancer. But the undisciplined use of technology can waste their time, fragment their focus, and interfere with their learning. Just like their health, young people’s attention is a precious resource, and they should be empowered to resist the companies that would squander it.

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