Body & Mind – Page 56 – Things Are Good

You can Learn to be Luckier in Life

luck

Are you lucky? Do you want to be? Because you can increase your luck skills by practicing – seriously!

Christine Carter demystifies how luck works at the Greater Good Science Center where she is a sociologist and author of books on luck. In her efforts to examine luck she came across other research by Richard Wiseman who thinks luck comes down to observation and action. Over the last decade his research has revealed how we perceive luck and how we tend to miss out on “lucky” experiences due to anxious blindness.

Wiseman didnâ€™t stop there. He turned these findings into a â€œluck schoolâ€ where people could learn luck-inducing techniques based on four main principles of luck: maximizing chance opportunities, listening to your intuition, expecting good fortune, and turning bad luck to good. The strategies included using meditation to enhance intuition, relaxation, visualizing good fortune, and talking to at least one new person every week. A month later, he followed up with participants.Â Eighty percentsaid they were happier, luckier people.

â€œI thought if Wiseman can train people to be lucky, you can certainly teach those skills to our kids, and they have other really good side effects too,â€ says Carter, like better social skills and a stronger sense of gratitude. She came up with aÂ few basic strategiesÂ for parents to teach their kids, including being open to new experiences, learning to relax, maintaining social connections, and (yes) talking to strangers. All of these techniques had one theme in commonâ€”being more open to your environment both physically and emotionally.

Practicing Meditation Changes Your Brain and Sense of Self

hands

Achieving mindfulness through mediation can help you relax and even assist you in achieving a more fulfilling life. Recent fMRI studies have shown that this can be proven by looking at the brain itself; indeed, structures inside your brain tend to alter based on how much meditation one does! This is really neat stuff because it means you can change the way you think and process the world through a very simple practice!

What should the average person take away from your study?

Mindful self-awareness is a non-judgemental, present-moment awareness of body and contents of the mind. On the neural level, this form of awareness quietens regions related to inner speech, â€‹thinking about the self, and ruminating, while regions related to the perception of the body are activated. In our study we found that the neural pattern during mindful self and body awareness was stronger in less depressed, healthier individuals. Thus, mindful self-awareness seems to represent a particularly healthy mode of self-perception.

We also found â€“ as expected â€“ that neural activations related to mindful self-awareness were particularly strong in expert mindfulness meditators. More interestingly, we also show that when we instruct untrained participants to enter relatively short periods of mindful self-awareness in the MRI scanner, these patterns can also be seen in untrained participants.

This means, meditation training increases the ability to perceive the self in a more healthy, present-moment, body-centered way, but also that already in untrained individuals, short periods of mindful self-awareness are possible and offer the potential to enter a healthy self-perception state.â€‹

It’s Fine to not Check Your Email

Stop compulsively checking your email. Frequent checking of one’s inbox will lead to stress for a few reasons so it’s best to schedule your email checking to every couple of hours or so (depending on your job). By limiting how often you look in your inbox you will be able to focus on other tasks and actually get things done. And getting things done and off you your todo list will lead to less stress.

So relax and don’t let your inbox be your boss.

Checking email less often may reduce stress in part by cutting down on the need to switch between tasks. An unfortunate limitation of the human mind is that it cannot perform two demanding tasks simultaneously, so flipping back and forth between two different tasksÂ saps cognitive resources. As a result, people can becomeÂ less efficientÂ in each of the tasks they need to accomplish. In addition to providing an unending source of new tasks for our to-do lists, email could also be making us less efficient at accomplishing those tasks.

Indeed, although the participants in our study sent and received roughly the same number of emails during both weeks, they reported doing so in approximately 20 percent less time during the week when they checked their email less frequently. Constantly monitoring our inboxes promotes stress without promoting efficiency. When it comes to checking email, less might be more.

6 Hour Workdays Work Fine

Office room
The eight hour work week that has become standard in the developed world is a result of the industrial revolution and the efforts of unions for reasonable working conditions (without unions who knows how long the workday would be!). Today the long workday doesn’t seem to be justified though. In Sweden a municipal government experimented with a six hour workday and, for the most part, it worked out fine. Inspired by that experiment Swedish companies have been trying the six hour workday and have noticed no decrease in productivity – meaning you can have two more hours to living and it won’t negatively impact your employer.

“Our staff gets time to rest and do things that make them happier in life,” says CEO Maria Brath. “For example, cook good food, spend time with family and friends, exercise. This, then, is profitable for the company, because the staff arrives at work happy and rested and ready to work.”

As in most jobs, employees there likely wouldn’t work for a full eight hours even if they were in the office longer. “Our work is a lot about problem solving and creativity, and we don’t think that can be done efficiently for more than six hours,” she says. “So we produce as much asâ€”or maybe even more thanâ€”our competitors do in their eight-hour days.”

Teen Substance Abuse Decreases When They Have Fun

teen computer Being a teenager is hard with all the chaos that is finding one’s identity and dealing with the incoming stresses of life. In many places around the world, teens react to these pressures by using illicit substances or otherwise “misbehaving”. Iceland was having a huge problem with teens drinking and smoking throughout the 90s, then they decided to do something about it. Today Iceland has pretty much eliminated smoking among teens and substance abuse is almost a rounding error on surveys.

The solution that Iceland discovered is to give teenagers something to do. It’s that simple. Instead of having bored kids trying to find something to kill time, give them something that they find enjoying.

â€œWe didnâ€™t say to them, youâ€™re coming in for treatment. We said, weâ€™ll teach you anything you want to learn: music, dance, hip hop, art, martial arts.â€ The idea was that these different classes could provide a variety of alterations in the kidsâ€™ brain chemistry, and give them what they needed to cope better with life: some might crave an experience that could help reduce anxiety, others may be after a rush.

At the same time, the recruits got life-skills training, which focused on improving their thoughts about themselves and their lives, and the way they interacted with other people. â€œThe main principle was that drug education doesnâ€™t work because nobody pays attention to it. What is needed are the life skills to act on that information,â€ Milkman says. Kids were told it was a three-month program. Some stayed five years.