Are hope and despair both self-fulfilling prophecies?
ldiers faced a difficult "final exam" of a march across the desert in full gear. "The study manipulated the soldiers' hopes - and fears - about the difficulty of the march. The goal was to determine what, if any, impact their psychological state had on their physical performance." Via Maximum Brainpower: Challenging the Brain for Health and Wisdom: ...I developed the idea of manipulating hope to understand how optimism and pessimism affect the brain. The result was a large-scale study that…
3 minutes
Flow: The #1 Secret To Enjoying Your Work
u want to be experiencing "flow." It's when you're so wrapped up in what you're doing that the world fades away: Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity... The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task although flow is also described... as a deep focus on nothing but the activity – not even…
3 minutes
Why do life-threatening situations make some people more calm?
e heart rates of the best bomb disposal experts actually drop when they're in the danger zone. Why? Confidence. Via The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success: Back in the 1980s, Harvard researcher Stanley Rachman found something similar with bomb-disposal operatives. What, Rachman wanted to know, separated the men from the boys in this high-risk, high-wire profession? All bomb-disposal operatives are good. Otherwise they’d be dead. But what did the stars have that the…
2 minutes
Why do we play?
y do we play? We play in order to learn: Via Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul: Play creates new neural connections and tests them. It creates an arena for social interaction and learning. It creates a low-risk format for finding and developing innate skills and talents. How does this work? When something is fun, it commands our full attention and provides an emotional reward, two things that are key to strengthening memory:…
4 minutes
How can you make your weekends more awesome?
at's the research have to say about making Friday through Sunday that much better...? Don't Trust Your Instincts Ever eat or drink too much, feel awful, then do it again... and feel awful again? As counterintuitive as it may sound, we're actually pretty bad about remembering what really makes us happy. Reading Harvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert's bestselling book Stumbling on Happiness my main takeaway was this: Much of our unhappiness springs from the fact that we're terrible at accurately…
4 minutes
In the long run, do cheap purchases make us happier than expensive ones?
en making expensive purchases (like vacations) we think about the money and what we're getting. With cheaper stuff (going to the movies) we focus more on who we're with. Focusing on relationships brings more long term happiness. Via PRWeb (hat tip: Jennifer Aaker) Statistical analysis showed that when considering inexpensive experiences, people’s main concern was with whom they would share the experience, preferring to do them with friends rather than family. For more luxurious experiences people were most concerned with…
1 min read
How To Find Meaning In Life, Backed By Research
man beings certainly gravitate to religion and it seems we all have an tendency to believe in some sort of karma. Your mind may require meaning. Studies show it's one of the key factors underlying happiness and motivation. So what does research say about how we might be able to find meaning in life? Meaning Is About Stories Studies have shown that stories are key to some of the most fundamental parts of our lives: increasing happiness, group solidarity…
3 minutes
Happy Thoughts: Here are the things proven to make you happier:
hat's the secret to a head full of happy thoughts? Time to round up the research on living a happy life to see what we can use. First, yeah, a good chunk of happiness is controlled by your genes but there's a lot you can do to make yourself happier.…
5 minutes
