Happiness: Confirmed by Science (#1)

The work Meaningful Trainings does is outside the world of "evidence based", "clinical" or "credentialed". We are firmly in the realm of ancient knowledge. We noticed that all road come from somewhere and that somewhere was before any of the social constructs we now consider eternal.

Life seems to seeks balance. Cultures have various names and descriptions for this sought after state but most often I hear happy as the preferred emotional destination. So we had to chuckle when I found this article buried deep in my browser bookmarks. Ancient knowledge through a modern lens.

Our Holiday gift to our partners is a timely reminder of what we know and often overlook. An ode to the basics with a citation. I've included the author at the end of each post. (Funny story - as I followed links within the original article, I found previous articles with, slightly variant lists . This is the last and has eleven suggestions. Who can argue with more suggestions on how to be happy?

This series will carry us to the end of 2019. Enjoy and, as always, we wish you,  Much Light

Smile - According to PsyBlog, smiling can improve our attention and help us perform better on cognitive tasks:"Smiling makes us feel good, which also increases our attentional flexibility and our ability to think holistically. When this idea was tested by Johnson et al (2010), the results showed that participants who smiled performed better on attentional tasks which required seeing the whole forest rather than just the trees."
A smile is also a good way to reduce some of the pain we feel in troubling circumstances:
"Smiling is one way to reduce the distress caused by an upsetting situation. Psychologists call this the facial feedback hypothesis. Even forcing a smile when we don't feel like it is enough to lift our mood slightly (this is one example of embodied cognition)."

Exercise - A study in the Journal of Health Psychology found that people who exercised felt better about their bodies even when they saw no physical changes:
"Body weight, shape and body image were assessed in 16 males and 18 females before and after both 6 x 40 minutes exercising and 6 x 40 minutes reading. Over both conditions, body weight and shape did not change. Various aspects of body image, however, improved after exercise compared to before."

Sleep - In NutureShock, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman explain how sleep affects positivity:
"Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories get processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories yet recall gloomy memories just fine.
"In one experiment by Walker, sleep-deprived college students tried to memorize a list of words. They could remember 81 percent of the words with a negative connotation, like cancer. But they could remember only 31 percent of the words with a positive or neutral connotation, like sunshine or basket."

Family & Friends - I love the way Harvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert explains it:

"We are happy when we have family, we are happy when we have friends and almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more family and friends."
George Vaillant is the director of a 72-year study of the lives of 268 men.
"In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, 'What have you learned from the Grant Study men?' Vaillant's response: 'That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.'"

                                                                         From "Want to be Happier?...", Jeff Haden 6/16/16