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AWE: FOR ALTRUISM AND HEALTH?
Slate: By now you’re probably mulling over some of your New Year’s resolutions – do five planks a day, eat more quinoa, keep better track of expenses. Let me add one more to your list: seek more daily awe. Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world. Early in human history, awe was reserved for feelings toward divine beings – e.g., gods humans invoked in the village ritual houses that sprang up some 10,000 years ago, the spirits Greek families felt guarded over their fates, and encounters with the divine at the center of the world’s great spiritual traditions.
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Trying to Cure Depression, but Inspiring Torture
The New Yorker: In May, 2002, Martin Seligman, the Director of the Positive Psychology Center, at the University of Pennsylvania, was giving a lecture at the San Diego Naval Base. It had been sponsored by the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, and some hundred listeners were in attendance. The topic of Seligman’s talk was simple: for a good part of his career, he had studied a concept that came to be known as learned helplessness, the passivity that often comes after we’ve faced problems that we can’t control.
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Your Friends Sort of Know When You’ll Die
Pacific Standard: Your friends know you better than you know yourself. They even know how long you’ve got to live. Well, roughly speaking they do. It’s not that they’ve got extrasensory perception, time machines, or membership in the secret conspiracy that surrounds you. It’s just that psychological traits like conscientiousness and emotional stability are decent predictors of longevity, and your friends’ beliefs about your traits are, when averaged, more reliable than your own. Researchers know that personality traits affect health—conscientiousness, for example, turns out to be a pretty good predictor for risk of death.
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Why the modern world is bad for your brain
The Guardian: Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting. At the same time, we are all doing more. Thirty years ago, travel agents made our airline and rail reservations, salespeople helped us find what we were looking for in shops, and professional typists or secretaries helped busy people with their correspondence. Now we do most of those things ourselves.
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Hard Work, Hard Times: Self-control and Joblessness
The Huffington Post: A big part of parenting is teaching kids self-control. Yes, sugary snacks do taste good, but even so, we shouldn't eat them too often. Yes, we know that math homework may not always be fun, but it must come before TV. Yes, soccer practice may seem tedious, but it's the road to excellence on the field and beyond. And so forth. No parent disputes this. It's in the manual. Indeed, we're all expected to take this life lesson on faith. Hard work and effort are virtues worth instilling, and worth having. But what do we mean by "worth"? Does self-discipline today really pay off later in life -- in jobs, paychecks, promotions and bonuses, professional prestige and wealth?
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Writing Your Way to Happiness
The New York Times: The scientific research on the benefits of so-called expressive writing is surprisingly vast. Studies have shown that writing about oneself and personal experiences can improve mood disorders, help reduce symptoms among cancer patients, improve a person’s health after a heart attack, reduce doctor visits and even boost memory. Now researchers are studying whether the power of writing — and then rewriting — your personal story can lead to behavioral changes and improve happiness. The concept is based on the idea that we all have a personal narrative that shapes our view of the world and ourselves. But sometimes our inner voice doesn’t get it completely right.
