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Happiness is - Forgetting!

Unhappiness really is to do with what you focus on - which determines what you remember. Scientists have shown what effective therapists have long known - that memory is selective.
A study found that repressing memories for long enough can cause them to be erased completely. Scientists at Lund University used EEG (brain) scans to watch when parts of volunteers' brains where actively trying to forget something. My kids can see me do that any day of the week - but there you go.
Now, we have been doing this type of thing on traumatic and unpleasant memories for years using hypnosis and NLP techniques. But the point is, we now have some sort of evidence gathering on the science side.
Full article in the Telegraph.

Happiness = 'closed for siesta'

Meditation can cut heart attack and stroke by 50%. Beat that with drugs if you can.

Some of us knew this... and now science does too. By Richard Alleyne The Telegraph. 

The practice, which involves the continual repeating of a mantra, was found to reduce high blood pressure, cholesterol and thickening of the arteries. It is also protects against diabetes.

"This is a seminal finding," said Dr Norman Rosenthal of the American government's National Institute of Mental Health. (Forgive my little rant here, but I really do marvel at how long science can insist on looking in the wrong direction - and spend a lot of money in the process.)

"The prevention of heart attack and stroke and actual lengthening of lifespan by an alternative treatment method is exceedingly rare, if not unprecedented. If Transcendental Meditation were a drug conferring so many benefits, it would be a billion-dollar blockbuster." Exactly. Take note. Pills are not the long term answer, not are they the most effective. Health is happiness-shaped

Bored to death?

Told you so - Do more of what you like and less of what you don't! 

People working in administrative and service roles are most likely to be bored in their jobs according to research reported by Stephen Adams, Medical Correspondent in The Telegraph today.

"Underchallenged" employees who end up finding they simply cannot take any more of the "monotonous and unstimulating" tasks that they are expected to perform. A study categorised two other types of burn-out: 'frenetic', in which the employee works "increasingly harder to the point of exhaustion"; and 'worn-out', where workers "give up when faced with stress or lack of gratification".Longer-serving employees were more likely to be "worn-out", with those clocking-up more than 16 years' service most at risk."The longer the service, the greater the likelihood of having this burn-out," found the author. These people find a way of getting through the day -  "a passive coping strategy" but become ineffective in the process.

Old but good test for your happiness prospects

Michael Fordyce began researching into happiness before it all got so popular.

In his view, the picture from psychological research has not changed that much since the mid 70s. I am just researching his contribution to the field, and thought you might like to try out his questionnaire to assess your happiness assets <here>.

HOWEVER - Fordyce points out that there are those people who swim against the tide and are happoy even though they are low on happiness assets. Equally, there are those who never tap into their plentiful assets, and are not happy in life. So really, he argues, there is only one question that matters:

How happy a person are you?

POSSIBLE ANSWERS: A. Extremely happy; B. Very happy; C. Pretty happy; D. Somewhat happy; E. Neutral (not particularly happy or unhappy); F. Somewhat unhappy; G. Pretty unhappy; H. Very unhappy. 

SCORING: No official scores for this; your answer says all that matters.

The New Science of Reality - so what's possible now??

I have only just come across this work; a co-student gave me the heads-up; she is looking into the scientific eveidence for healing energy transfer. What's this got to do with happiness? Well, what would be the consequence of discovering that, for a fact, everying you think the world is made from and based on is not what it seems at all? I have heard many times people say spmething along the lines of "yeah, it would be nice to live an ideal life - but i live inthe real world". What if the where no real world?? Or what if that real world is something you are involved in co-creating? Too fantastic? Quantum physics has been "too fantastic" for nearly 100 years, and it is getting even more messy. Watch these amazing lectures by Dr Swanson.
Lesson 1            Lesson 2       Lesson 3         Lesson 4

Brits are miserable - official :(

We in the UK are less happy than people in the United States, according to the first study of wellbeing in the UK. Less than half of us feel we are thriving, and about four out of ten of us are unhappy with the boss, who orders us about rather than treating us as part of a team. Read more in the Independent here.

From this month, The Office for National Statistics will include four questions about well-being in the Integrated Household Survey, including how satisfied you are with your life, how happy or anxious you feel and to what extent you feel "the things you do in your life are worthwhile".

Looking back was when you were happiest?

Researchers found that people with personality traits that allow them to be nostalgic about the past have higher life satisfaction than those who exaggerate or mull over their failures 

Extroverted people had the best ability to do this whereas those with neurotic tendencies were the worst. (Is this really new??) The study, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, suggests that outlook rather than experience and fortune has a strong influence on overall happiness.(As any decent therapist knows.)

It also suggests that by changing certain traits, rather than a whole personality, individuals could greatly improve their happiness levels. More... The Telegraph.

Genetic Happiness

The 5-HTT gene affects transportation of serotonin in neurons, according to a study reported in The Telegraph.The researchers found that 69% of people who had two copies of the gene said they were either satisfied or very satisfied with their life as a whole. This fell to 38% those who had no copy of the gene.The study is published today (FRI) in the Journal of Human Genetics; author De Neve, said: "It has long been suspected that this gene plays a role in mental health but this is the first study to show that it is instrumental in shaping our individual happiness levels.Of course, our well-being isn’t determined by this one gene – other genes and especially experience throughout the course of life will continue to explain the majority of variation in individual happiness. But this finding helps to explain why we each have a unique baseline level of happiness and why some people tend to be naturally happier than others, and that’s in no small part due to our individual genetic make-up."

Happy mind - happy body

Rupert Christiansen interviews Britt Tajet-Foxell,the Royal Ballet’s resident psychologist for some 20 years (The Telegraph).
"Working on the mechanics of dancers’ injuries ..I became increasingly fascinated by their psychology. I observed how two dancers with the same injury could respond to it in completely different ways, one making a full recovery, the other never even making it back on stage."

"Dancers ... have little autonomy or control. They are taught to obey orders... This can lead individuals to doubt who they really are. I realised I wasn’t so interested in healing injury, as in using the healing of injury as a springboard to make a better dancer and a stronger personality."

One case is a dancer with an old heal injury. "My first thought on waking up every morning was anticipation of the pain I might feel when I put my heel on the floor. Being a get-up-and-get-on-with-it kind of person, I was sceptical that Britt could help. But she made me visualise my good heel and my bad heel: the good heel was running water and blue sky, the bad heel was gnarled broken twigs and barren landscape. Slowly, I learnt to see the bad heel as good heel too, and I realised that the pain was in my head, not in my heel."