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Happiness Health Ideas

Secondhand Therapy

Someone on twitter asked people in therapy to chime in with a piece of advice from therapy they found helpful. Here’re a bunch of different ideas in no real order.

Take care of your body during times of crisis and it will take care of you.

He may not always love me the way I want him to, but he’s loving me the best he knows how.

When you say “I feel that this action was inconsiderate” the other person can’t say you don’t feel that way.

Society doesn’t need to be the one setting your schedule. Eat breakfast at 11, go to bed at 1am. There’s no correct mold to fit, just find whatever works best for you.

The problem is you’re thinking rationally when dealing with somebody who’s irrational.

You’re not responsible for how anyone feels or reacts when you’ve done the right thing and are acting in kindness. The pain is on their shoulders.

You’re responsible for your actions, not others’ reactions.

Every time you resist feeling an emotion it goes down to the basement to lift weights.

Other people having it worse does not make your pain any less real, someone else’s broken ankle doesn’t mean yours isn’t sprained.

If you can imagine the worst thing, you can imagine the best thing. Both things are imaginary. Say out loud the positive outcome, repeat until it feels more real.

Honesty without tact is cruelty.

When you have a negative thought think…
Is it true?
Is it helpful?
Is it inspiring?
Is it necessary?
Is it kind?

Don’t attempt to understand why a dysfunctional person does what they do. Dysfunction has no logic behind it.

Relationships are as subject to the sunk cost fallacy as anything else. They shouldn’t be held onto at all costs simply because they’re long standing. No matter how good it once was or for how long, if it’s not serving you any more (or has become toxic) it’s okay to end it.

Never compare yourself to other people and even more importantly never compare yourself to fantasy versions of how your life would’ve turned out had you made a different choice. That’s the most dangerous mind game of all.

Thoughts aren’t facts.

Stop trying to make people happy who clearly prefer to be miserable.

Best response to bullies/teasing is to just shrug and honestly say “I’m sorry you feel that way.” And just keep on going.

You’re not responsible for the version of you that they created in their mind.

Tell people when they upset you instead of hoping they will notice your changed behavior towards them

Every child in a family has a different childhood.

Imagine Narcissists as a flower vase with no bottom. No matter how much water (praise) you fill it with, it’ll never be full. No matter how much you do or say, it’ll never be enough. You cannot fix them and they will just keep taking and never love you.

Listen to what people say but watch what they do.

The question that finally got me out of a toxic relationship: “Why do you have to be responsible for managing someone else’s disappointment?”

The only things I owe people are straightforwardness and kindness

You can’t spend all your time thinking of things in the far future. When you drive a car you have to be mindful of the destination but focus on what’s in front of you. If you look too far ahead, you’ll rear end someone.

For intrusive thoughts and rumination: schedule a short daily time to allow it, and when the thought comes into your head just put it off until that time. Eventually you may forget to do your daily ruminating and it just passes.

Pre-verbal trauma cannot be healed with talk therapy. Touch is the way to work with the parts of your nervous system that are traumatized and that are also too young to have narrative memory or words.

When people are abused by someone they love, they don’t stop loving that person. They stop loving themselves.

Don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm.

Stop asking the question “Why” when you can’t understand someone’s motivation. There’s no answer. Stop expecting something someone does not have to give.

My big one was my therapist telling me “you’re not a little kid anymore.”  I have control.

If the person you love most in the world (best friend, child, parent, etc) was in this situation, what would you want for them? That thought has helped me to start treating myself a lot better.

Sometimes the only closure will be accepting that you will not get closure.

‘Get up, dress up, show up’. These were the magic words when my anxiety tried to talk me out of having a social life. There’re a million reasons not to go, but if you do, you often end up enjoying yourself. Don’t overthink, just do it.

You’re unhappy because you’re making yourself do a lot of things you don’t want to do.

Be curious about why people do and say things. Ask them instead of assuming you know why. You never know what someone is thinking until you ask them. Save yourself the effort of mindreading (misreading) and ask.

I don’t go to therapy because when I find something that’s toxic, I get rid of it. Period.

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Happiness Health Ideas

Cautiously Optimistic

There’s lots of seemingly bad news every day.

But there’s always been bad news.

And now with more bandwidth available, I think we’re just taking taking in more info. Then combine that wit the human bias toward the negative that comes baked in to help with survival during our millennia spent in the wild as hunter gatherers.

The world’s population will begin trending downward sometime in the next decades.

Most people are unaware of the positive changes in our world. Read Hans Roling’s book “Factfulness” and you’ll see that even the folks who should know about positive trends don’t know about them. You’ll be surprised.

Educating women leads to women having less children.

Cities are more efficient than country living and so are effectively “greener.”

Most poverty reduction comes from economic growth and migration rather than  redistribution or philanthropy.

Think about this rapid change. In 1949, 75% of Chinese women were illiterate. But today China has one of the lowest rates of female illiteracy in the world — as well as the highest percentage of self-made female billionaires.

There’re lots of positive things happening, but they’re generally overshadowed by the negative news we constantly get.

 

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Health

Health test

Can you climb four flights of stairs at a fast pace in under a minute without stopping? If you can, you have good functional capacity. If not, it’s probably a sign you need more exercise.

This exercise data was crosschecked against heart attacks, strokes and deaths for 11 years or so after each study participant’s last clinic visit.

The findings were dramatic: The risk of experiencing these events was roughly 50 percent lower for those who lifted weights occasionally, compared with those who never did — even when they were not doing the recommended endurance exercise.

The people who lifted weights twice a week, for about an hour in total, had the greatest declines in risk.

“The good news,” says a co-author of the study, “is that we found substantial heart benefits associated with a very small amount of resistance exercise.” As an associational study, the results show only that people who occasionally lift weights happen to have healthier hearts — not that resistance training directly reduces heart-related health risks.

The data, though, does reveal associations between weight lifting and a lower body mass index, which might be connected to fewer heart problems.

The specifics of which exercises people were doing — lat pull-downs? dead lifts? squats? — or how many repetitions they did or at what level of resistance is unknown. But don’t wait.  It’s probably a good idea to lift some weights while the researchers figure out what the exact exercises were.

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Happiness Health

Technology and intermingling

Technology keeps advancing, and the pace just gets faster.

Long ago early hominid tools got smaller, more portable,  were made with materials sourced from farther away, and were decorated with pigments.

Technology has been the same ever since. Things start out big and clunky and they get small and portable.

Around 500,000 years ago in what’s now Kenya the seismic and climatic conditions disrupted food and water sources, encouraging the expansion of early hunter gatherers’ range. This expansion increased the likelihood of intermingling with other groups to and becoming aware of new resources and technologies.

Technology progresses because knowledge is always increasing. We invest in research and development, and no one intentionally replaces a good machine with an inferior one. Plus, workers’ skill levels keep rising because they’re getting more educated.

Inferior technologies sometimes succeed due superior marketing. Remember  VHS vs. Betamax? That’s a rare exception.

This trend seems to occur in nature too. There’s a growing consensus that advanced adaptations such as flying, swimming and gliding, once acquired, are unlikely to be reversed over the course of evolution.

Technology and the rising tide it produces seems to be at the root of people’s lives trending towards “better.” The story of things getting better is a big story that gets missed. In our daily life it’s hard to see the changes for the better that are slowly accumulating. The news generally focuses on what’s getting worse.

Here’s an example of things getting better that doesn’t get noticed.  Extreme global poverty has dropped from 90% just 200 years ago to 10% today. Most news would correctly report that 700 million people are living in extreme poverty. But that it’s being chipped away doesn’t get reported.

Soon, on the individual level, cyclists can look forward to a safer conditions after most cars and trucks are using self-driving technology, the machine drivers are better drivers and will make the roads safer for cyclists and passengers. Technology intermingles in ways we can’t predict.

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Health

The best seat on a flight

Which are the healthiest seats to book on airliners? Here’s some tidbits from a couple of articles about staying healthy while flying.

Not the best seat for mobility, but where should you sit to avoid getting sick.

First avoid the sitting in the center of the plane. And research shows that passengers in window seats face the smallest risk of infection.

How much contact passengers had with their fellow travelers varied by seat position. Those seated at the aisle averaged 64 contacts, the middle seat 58 and the window only 12. People sitting in the middle of the cabin had more contacts than those sitting in the front or back.

And if you can, skip using the bathroom on planes which see heavy use.

While it may seem that there is always a line for the restroom when you need one, only a third of passengers used the facilities even once, and half never used them at all.

Flu is most commonly transmitted by small respiratory droplets moving through the air after an infected person sneezes, coughs or talks. The droplets don’t go especially far — typically six feet or so — and they don’t become suspended in an aerosol that travels through currents of air in the plane’s cabin. The flu virus can also be picked up from something an infected person touched.

The team also collected samples from airplane surfaces before and after passengers boarded, and found that airplanes are pretty clean. Of 229 samples collected, not a single one showed any evidence of any of 18 common respiratory viruses.

The lead author, had some advice for people who fly when they have the flu. “Sneeze into your elbow, use good hand hygiene, and turn on your air vent. That will send the droplets straight to the floor.”

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Books Health Ideas Uncategorized

Cryptocurrency fever

Lately, people are getting caught up by the lure of big scores from cryptocurrencies.

I kinda have a broad brush understanding of them and that’s what most other people have too. Cryptocurrency has been described  as “everything you don’t understand about money combined with everything you don’t understand about computers.”

Unfortunately, most people don’t think about risks realistically.

For example, most people worry too much about the risk of dying from a wild animal encounter. They don’t really factor in the risk from animals we more commonly come into contact with.

The title of a NYT article framed the problem this way, “Afraid of Snakes? Wasps and Dogs Are Deadlier.”

The article reports most deaths aren’t from encounters with wild animals.

Dogs, cattle and horses are much more dangerous.

The wild animals presenting the greatest danger are bees, wasps and hornets!

Cryptocurrencies have a risk most people don’t understand. But they sound very seductive when you hear about their growth

Don’t be surprised if you lose money after investing in something you don’t really understand and that you don’t think is as risky as it is.

Risking what you have (and need) for the chance of getting what you don’t need is a bad idea.

 

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Health Ideas

Their god was called Gun

Maybe you’ve heard this little story about aliens visiting us. Aliens, on first observing humans, might think we serve dogs. As soon a dog poops, their attending human quickly recovers the precious gift from the dog in a special bag.

Maybe future historians, after reviewing the actions of modern Americans, might assume the American religion was built around a god called Gun. They’d see the records of mass killings using guns occurring fairly regularly, daily self sacrifices using guns, and the constant settling of disputes (usually with someone close to the shooter) with guns. Future historians would even discover there’re more pre-schoolers shot dead in America (about 75) than police officers are in a typical year.

These future historians might speculate that mental illness, criminal activity, or racial issues were the root of the problem before coming to the conclusion current researchers have come to. Namely that American violence comes down to the vast number of guns in America. These findings could lead future historians to theorize that the  US culture’s predominate god is named Gun.

They’re a couple of good articles about in the NYT , here and here, about gun violence and possible solutions. Here’re a few takeaways from the articles. The bottom line is this: The only variable explaining the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.

Worldwide, a country’s rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds it would experience a mass shooting. This relationship held even when excluding the US, indicating that it couldn’t be explained by some other factor particular. And it held when controlled for homicide rates, suggesting that mass shootings were better explained by a society’s access to guns than by its baseline level of violence. 

Americans make up about 4.4% of the global population but own 42% of the world’s guns. Only in the U.S. do we lose one person every 15 minutes to gun violence.

While there’s crime in other countries, American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.

While mass shootings can happen anywhere, they are only a matter of routine in the US.

In 2013, American gun-related deaths included 21,175 suicides, 11,208 homicides and 505 deaths from accidental discharge. That same year in Japan, a country with one-third America’s population, guns were involved in only 13 deaths. America’s gun ownership rate is 150 times higher than Japan’s.

The US is one of only three countries, along with Mexico and Guatemala, that begin with the assumption that people have an inherent right to own guns. But the US has determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society.

Gun safety or reducing gun violence should be framed as a public health issue using auto safety as a model with its constant efforts to make the products safer and limiting access by people who are most likely to misuse them.

We don’t ban cars, but we work hard to regulate them – and limit access to them – so as to reduce the death toll they cause. This has been spectacularly successful, reducing the death rate per 100 million miles driven by 95% since 1921.

States where guns are more regulated tend to have lower gun death rates.

But the problem is that lax laws too often make it easy not only for good guys to get guns, but also for bad guys to get guns. The evidence is overwhelming that overall more guns and more relaxed gun laws lead to more violent deaths and injuries. One study found that a gun in the house was associated with an increased risk of a gun death, particularly by suicide but also by homicide.

Although it’s mass shootings that get our attention, they’re not the main cause of loss of life. Much more typical is a friend who shoots another, a husband who kills his wife – or, most common of all, a man who kills himself.

Skeptics will say that if people want to kill themselves, there’s nothing we can do. In fact, it turns out that if you make suicide more difficult, suicide rates drop.

After tightening gun laws, firearm homicide rates dropped 40 percent in Connecticut. And after Missouri eased gun laws, gun homicide rates rose 25 percent.

Our laws have often focused more on weapons themselves (such as the assault weapons ban) rather than on access. In many places, there is more rigorous screening of people who want to adopt dogs than of people who want to purchase firearms. A car or gun is usually safe in the hands of a 45-year-old woman with no criminal record, but may be dangerous when used by a 19-year-old felon with a history of alcohol offenses or domestic violence protection orders.

Sunday’s horror at a church in Texas was 100% predictable. After each such incident, we mourn the deaths and sympathize with the victims, but we do nothing fundamental to reduce our vulnerability. The question isn’t whether we’ll restrict firearms, but where to draw the line. The real impetus for change will come because the public favors it.

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Happiness Health

Sleeping

Here’s some highlights on the importance of sleep from an article in The Guardian.

  • After being awake for 19 hours, you’re as cognitively impaired as someone who is drunk.
  • Two-thirds of adults in developed nations fail to obtain eight hours of sleep.
  • If you drive having had only four hours of sleep, you’re 11.5 times more likely to be involved in an accident.
  • To successfully initiate sleep, your core temperature needs to drop about 1C.
  • A hot bath aids sleep because your dilated blood vessels radiate inner heat, and your core body temperature drops.
  • The time taken to reach physical exhaustion by athletes who obtain less than eight hours of sleep, and especially less than six hours, drops by 10-30%.
  • It’s a myth that older adults need less sleep.
  • Morning types, who prefer to awake around dawn, make up about 40% of the population. Evening types, who prefer to go to bed late and wake up late, account for about 30%. The remaining 30% lie somewhere in between.

Matthew Walker is the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC, Berkeley and was formerly a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Walker has written “Why We Sleep,”  examining the powerful links between sleep loss and Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity and poor mental health. “No aspect of our biology is left unscathed by sleep deprivation,” he says.

“First, we electrified the night,” Walker says. “Second, our work: not only the porous borders between start and finish, but longer commuter times, too. No one wants to give up time with their family or entertainment, so they give up sleep instead. And anxiety plays a part. We’re a lonelier, more depressed society.”

But Walker also says that in the developed world, sleep is strongly associated with weakness, even shame, “We have stigmatised sleep with the label of laziness.”

More than 20 large scale epidemiological studies all report the clear relationship: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. To take just one example, adults aged 45 years or older who sleep less than six hours a night are 200% more likely to have a heart attack or stroke in their lifetime.

By looking at the brainwave patterns of people with different forms of dementia, sleep could be a new early diagnostic litmus test for different subtypes of dementia.

A lack of sleep also appears to hijack the body’s effective control of blood sugar, the cells become less responsive to insulin causing a prediabetic state of hyperglycaemia. When your sleep becomes short you’re susceptible to weight gain. Among the reasons for this are the fact that inadequate sleep decreases levels of the satiety-signalling hormone, leptin, and increases levels of the hunger-signalling hormone, ghrelin. “I’m not going to say that the obesity crisis is caused by the sleep-loss epidemic alone. It’s not. However, processed food and sedentary lifestyles don’t adequately explain its rise. Something’s missing. It’s now clear that sleep is that third ingredient.”

Getting too little sleep across the adult lifespan will significantly raise your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. In essence it has to do with amyloid deposits (a toxin protein) accumulating in the brains of those suffering from the disease, killing the surrounding cells. During deep sleep, such deposits are effectively cleaned from the brain. Without sufficient sleep, these plaques build up, especially in the brain’s deep-sleep-generating regions, attacking and degrading them. The loss of deep sleep caused by this assault therefore lessens our ability to remove them from the brain at night. More amyloid, less deep sleep; less deep sleep, more amyloid, and so on.

Sleep aids our ability to make new memories, and restores our capacity for learning.

A lack of sleep also affects our mood more generally. Brain scans carried out by Walker revealed a 60% amplification in the reactivity of the amygdala – a key spot for triggering anger and rage – in those who were sleep-deprived.

We sleep in 90-minute cycles, and it’s only towards the end of each one of these that we go into deep sleep. Each cycle comprises two kinds of sleep. First, there is NREM sleep (non-rapid eye movement sleep); this is then followed by REM (rapid eye movement) sleep.

“During NREM sleep, your brain goes into this incredible synchronised pattern of rhythmic chanting,” he says. “There’s a remarkable unity across the surface of the brain, like a deep, slow mantra. Vast amounts of memory processing is going on. To produce these brainwaves, hundreds of thousands of cells all sing together, and then go silent, and on and on. Meanwhile, your body settles into this lovely low state of energy, the best blood-pressure medicine you could ever hope for. REM sleep, on the other hand, is sometimes known as paradoxical sleep, because the brain patterns are identical to when you’re awake. It’s an incredibly active brain state. Your heart and nervous system go through spurts of activity: we’re still not exactly sure why.”

Does the 90-minute cycle mean that so-called power naps are worthless? “They can take the edge off basic sleepiness. But you need 90 minutes to get to deep sleep, and one cycle isn’t enough to do all the work. You need four or five cycles to get all the benefit.”

Walker says, “I give myself a non-negotiable eight-hour sleep opportunity every night, and I keep very regular hours. Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. I take my sleep incredibly seriously because I have seen the evidence.”

How is it possible to tell if a person is sleep-deprived? Walker thinks we should trust our instincts. Those who would sleep on if their alarm clock was turned off are simply not getting enough. Ditto those who need caffeine in the afternoon to stay awake. “I see it all the time,” he says. “I get on a flight at 10am when people should be at peak alert, and I look around, and half of the plane has immediately fallen asleep.”

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Happiness Health Ideas

Assholery

Whatever differences you might have had with President Obama, one thing you couldn’t say about him was that he was an asshole. The same thing goes for the presidents before him.

Now we have President Trump who many,even in his own party, feel is an asshole. Not too presidential unfortunately.

Here’s my shortened version of an interview with a Stanford psychologist about his book on dealing with assholes. It seems timely.

An asshole is someone who leaves us feeling demeaned, de-energized, disrespected, and/or oppressed. In other words, someone who makes you feel like dirt.

An asshole needs someone in their life to tell them they’re being an asshole.

There’s a distinction between temporary and certified assholes. Anyone, under certain conditions, can be a temporary asshole.  It’s more complicated than saying a certified asshole is someone who doesn’t care about other people. Certifiable assholes actually want to make you feel hurt and upset, and take pleasure in that.

Assuming you’re not the CEO and can’t simply fire an asshole, you have to do two things in terms of strategy.

First, you’ve got to build your case and a coalition. A important distinction is that some people are clueless assholes and don’t realize they’re jerks, but maybe they mean well. In that situation, you can have backstage conversations, gently informing them that they’ve crossed a line.

But if it’s one of those Machiavellian assholes who’s treating you badly because they believe that’s how to get ahead,  then you’ve got to get out of there if you can.

Say you have an asshole boss, there’s a power asymmetry, so it’s not as simple as telling him he’s an asshole. What’s your advice?

First, can you quit or transfer? If you’re stuck under a asshole, that means you’re suffering and you should get out – it’s that simple.

The second question is, if you must endure, are you going to fight or are you just going to take it? If you’re going to fight, you need a plan and a posse, you need to collect your evidence, and then you have to take your chances.

Try to have as little contact as possible with assholes.

One of the simplest, but admittedly hardest, things is learning not to give a shit – which takes the wind out of an asshole’s sails. When an asshole’s being nasty to you, ignore him.

Think about how a year from now he won’t be in your life, but he’ll still be the asshole he always was.

What if you’ve got an asshole as a peer or a colleague? Your chances of getting rid of them are higher because you have more power.

I’m in academia, which means there’re lots of assholes we can’t fire. But we can absolutely freeze them out. Don’t  invite them to events or gatherings. We can shun them politely and smile at them as necessary, but other than that we just ignore them. That’s how we deal with assholes.

But there’re some situations in which you may have to be an asshole to survive because you’ve got no choice but to push back against them. This isn’t ideal, but if that’s what you have to do, then that’s what you do.

If somebody has a history of hurting you, and they have a Machiavellian personality, the only thing they’ll understand is a display of force. The best way to protect yourself is firing back with everything you’ve got.

Some people deserve and need to be treated badly. Sometimes you have to speak in the only language they understand, and that means  getting your hands dirty.

We know that assholes have a corrosive effect on the people around them. There’re studies demonstrating that people working for assholes for many years end up being more depressed, more anxious, and less healthy. So there’s compelling evidence that assholes are terrible humans doing harm to other people.

What else is there to say? If you’re an asshole, you’re a failure as a human because you promote unnecessary suffering.

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Health

Fixing healthcare

Most Americans are too distracted by work life and family life to have enough bandwidth left over for analyzing complex issues.Especially healthcare issues.

Like most things, healthcare needs to be kept simple and fair. Our brains just don’t grasp all the nuances and implications of most healthcare plans. Then, with our brains  confused, we default to our biases (usually party loyalty) or to a simple metric such as how many people are covered.

Our government has been amazingly robust for hundreds of years, but it seems to fail under some conditions. One is when an issue gets too complicated for the public to understand. And the other is when corporations distort the system for profit.

Here’s a solution that might work in America today. I heard it from an older doctor, I’m not sure if it’s his idea or not, but it’s straight forward and simple: Everyone would be responsible for the first $2000 of their medical costs and the first $500 of their prescriptions each year. After hitting those maximums, the government would pick up the tab.

Maybe those numbers should be a little different, but they seem pretty reasonable. Each citizen would have some skin in the game but also know they’d be covered if things go south.