FAILING GOOD

September 25, 2019 By ChuckBehrens Leave a Comment

Do Other People’s Failures Make You More Self-Compassionate?

It’s a fair question. . .
and you ask it without always realizing that it’s even something you care much about

B U T

Knowing you’re not alone in failure might activate self-compassion in some people. . .
Y O U ?

It’s a question that the journalist, KIRA M. NEWMAN recently posed

Failure is trendy. Many successful people today are broadcasting their fails, flaws, and imperfections for all of us to see—from entrepreneurs who designed a whole conference about failure to fitness gurus posting their face-plants to Instagrammers fond of the #fail hashtag.

They seem to be aiming to normalize failure itself—to say to the rest of us (who are hiding our faults in a deep, dark closet) that it’s okay, everyone trips up sometimes. That’s a message we might try to communicate to a close friend when they’re distressed by their own failure. But does this strategy actually help?

According to a new study, it might—but only for certain people.

Researchers from the University of Waterloo recruited just over 100 college students to record a three-minute video about their interests and hobbies. Then, they were told, an “objective observer” was going to watch it and rate how socially skilled, friendly, likable, warm, intelligent, and mature they were on a scale of 1-9.

Before they got their score, students were shown how others had supposedly performed—averaging a 7 out of 9. Then, they got the bad news: They themselves had only scored a 5. (Of course, there were no objective observers and this was all part of the ruse to make students feel like they had failed.)

Next, the students were shown the score of one of their peers, someone of the same gender and in the same program at the university as them. Half of the participants saw that the peer also got a mediocre 5 out of 9, while the other half found out that the peer scored a 7—leaving them alone in their mediocrity.

After the experiment, the students filled out surveys of their positive and negative emotions, as well as their shame and guilt. The survey also assessed their level of self-compassion—that is, their ability to be kind to themselves while seeing their struggles as part of the human condition.

Did it make a difference whether they failed alone or saw others fail, too? It depended on how self-compassionate they were.

For highly self-compassionate people, the knowledge that they weren’t alone was beneficial—it led them to feel less shame, more positive emotions, and more self-compassion in the moment than when they thought they were the sole failure. This wasn’t the case for people low in self-compassion.

“Perhaps [the shared failure] led to better responses for self-compassionate individuals because this knowledge supported their pre-existing expectation that failure is a part of life,” write researchers Sydney V. Waring and Allison C. Kelly of the University of Waterloo. Indeed, another recently study found that

In other words, seeing a fellow coworker miss out on a promotion or another parent arrive late for back-to-school night could give us comfort—provided we already have a tendency to treat ourselves with care and kindness. Hearing about other people’s slip-ups doesn’t seem to create self-compassion out of thin air, though.

“Some people might not actually find that as helpful, and interestingly it would be the people who tend to have a more difficult time with failure—the more self-critical people,” says Waring.

As Waring and Kelly theorize, shared failure doesn’t really fit with the worldview of the self-critical, who typically see themselves as alone in their flaws and their suffering.

If you’re trying to comfort a self-critical friend, Waring says, jumping in with your own failure story might not do the trick. Instead, “we should be prepared to be flexible and open to trying out different strategies to see what works best for our friend,” she says—like validating their feelings about how hard the situation is.

And if you’re the one with a tendency to be harsh on yourself, you may need to cultivate self-compassion. Doing so will tend to bolster our beliefthat failures are learning opportunities and part of life. According to this study, that self-compassionate attitude could help us feel comforted when we witness the fallibility of other humans.

So here’s the question
(maybe for your LIFE):
ARE YOU THE KIND OF FRIEND
YOU’D WANT TO HAVE. . . ?

Pssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst
OF THE DAY:

The Science of KINDNESS

August 28, 2019 By ChuckBehrens Leave a Comment

IS KINDNESS A SCIENCE. . . ?

For the past three decades, Dacher Keltner has been researching human emotions, starting with micro-movements of facial muscles and more recently the relationship between powerlessness and health outcomes. Photo: Daphne White

The “science” of happiness may sound like an oxymoron to most people, but not so Dacher Keltner, psychology professor and director of the Greater Good Science Center (GGSC) at UC Berkeley. For the past three decades, he has been researching human emotions, starting with micro-movements of facial muscles and more recently the relationship between powerlessness and health outcomes. Along the way, he has written several books and co-created one of the most popular MOOCs (massive open online courses) in the country.

Keltner began studying psychology just as the field was transitioning away from a belief that all human decisions were based on rationality and facts (the brain as computer model), and toward the “emotion revolution.” The “explosion of interest in feeling” fit in with Keltner’s own family belief system, and he quickly found his niche. “My mother, an English professor and student of Romanticism, and my father, an artist guided by Lao Tzu and Zen, cultivated in me the conviction that our best attempts at the good life are found in bursts of passion,” he writes in his book Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life.

Keltner may look like a California surfer but actually comes from Scandinavian stock whose emotional makeup is more Ingmar Bergman than Beach Boys. The anxiety is not recognized or discussed in his family, but Keltner sees the pattern clearly. “People don’t realize it, but I have had a few periods in my life when I experienced exceptional degrees of anxiety and near-OCD,” he said. One of the defining characteristics of anxiety is “interior focus,” a hypersensitivity to bodily sensations such as heart palpitations, blushes, and sweating, he said. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Keltner, 55, has been on a life-long search for happiness and what he calls “the greater good.”

He started out “reading faces” as a post doc in the lab of Paul Ekman — made famous by the TV series Lie to Me — spending over 2,000 hours analyzing frame-by-frame video images of facial expressions in order to map different micro-emotions. “When I first heard about this, it was like an intellectual epiphany,” he said. It validated what he had learned about emotions, and provided a scientific way of measuring something that otherwise seemed ineffable.

Ekman claims that micro expressions cannot be hidden, even when a person is trying to conceal an emotion. By learning Ekman’s coding system, Keltner said, he entered a different “perceptual world … It’s the world before language, the way our primate predecessors communicated. Darwin was interested in this. It’s mind-blowing to be exposed to it.” While Ekman only studied six emotions at his UC San Francisco lab, Keltner eventually added another 15 emotions to the mix, including awe and compassion.

As a result of his studies, he can sometimes see things that others can’t. “I may see anxiety before a person is aware of it, or I might spot depression at an early stage,” he said. “There’s all this information in your face and voice and body. Most people pay attention to this maybe 60 percent of the time but with me, it’s maybe 70 percent. I use it with my teenage daughters,” he jokes. When it comes to his wife, though, “she doesn’t believe anything I say, just in general.”

Happiness and the Greater Good

“The connection between happiness and the greater good is pretty clear, and it’s under-appreciated,” he said. There is more to happiness than momentary, individual pleasure. “Social connection is one of the strongest determinants of health,” Keltner said. “We take a lot of happiness in giving to other people.” In fact, research shows that lonely people die younger than people with strong social networks. “Lonely college students had higher blood pressure than non-lonely ones, putting them at greater risk for heart disease, and this health disparity was even greater between lonely and non-lonely older adults,” according to an article in the Greater Good magazine.

Greater Good Science Center

GGSC was founded in 2001, with a gift from Berkeley alumni Thomas and Ruth Hornaday. After their daughter died of cancer, and soon after 9/11, the couple called Cal’s Dean of Social Sciences and said they wanted to create a center “that would really bring peace to people,” Keltner said. The dean, Geroge Breslauer, knew of Keltner’s work and referred the Hornadays to him.

When the idea for the center was first proposed, Keltner decided pretty quickly that he did not want to use the money just to write white papers and sponsor meetings. “I didn’t want to create the typical academic center,” he said. “The great thing about Berkeley is that I could say, ‘Let’s use the science of kindness and altruism and play and gratitude to promote the greater good. Let’s disseminate it to everyone, not just other academics’.”

But do these tools really work? Keltner said he practices many of them and finds that even in these bleak times, he is able to remain “60 percent optimistic.” That is a far cry from absolute happiness, of course. But then, Keltner said, most of his friends are “in despair,” especially about the political situation in the country. “Kindness is the most important thing,” he said. “That, and mindfulness.”

The Power Paradox

Much of his own work is about class, inequality, and power. Keltner’s latest book, The Power Paradox: How we Gain and Lose Influence, includes a chapter on “The Price of Powerlessness.” He writes about a part of his childhood lived in the “poor rural town” of Penryn, CA, where he discovered “the empathy, kindness, generosity, respect, and inclusiveness that the poor live by in response to the harsher material conditions of their lives.”

Returning to Penryn as an adult, Keltner discovered that most of his friend’s parents died young of a variety of diseases. His book cites research showing that a person’s social class predicts their vulnerability to disease. “With each rung down the class ladder,” he wrote, “an individual is more likely to suffer from disease and to live a shorter life, to battle hypertension, cervical, cervical cancer, and painful arthritis, and to suffer from other chronic illnesses.” Growing up poor, research shows, “shaves six years off life expectancy.”

Keltner writes about a “new science of power,” which posits that only socially intelligent, caring and compassionate people ultimately become leaders. His book revolves around 20 “Power Principles” such as “enduring power comes from empathy” and “enduring power comes from telling stories that unite,” and “groups give power to those who advance the greater good.” It is hard to connect those concepts with current reality.

Yet the “power paradox” of the book’s title is this: “we rise in power and make a difference in the world due to what is best about human nature, but we fall from power due to what is worst.” Keltner writes that people become leaders by exhibiting compassion, listening skills and other positive behaviors, but once they obtain power they tend to behave “like impulsive, out-of-control sociopaths.”

Keltner had originally written a longer chapter on coercive Machiavellian power for the first draft of the book, “but in the spirit of collective optimism we cut it,” he said. “If I were to write the book now, I would say that human societies are an interesting combination of coercive, manipulative, aggressive power and prosocial and connective power.” The book has been translated into 12 languages.

“There is a real hunger to foster feelings of reconciliation and compassion even at a time when people feel alienated from one another,” Marsh said. “They are eager for any information that can help develop a greater sense of empathy and forgiveness, even for people who seem different from themselves.”

Meanwhile, Keltner continues to explore practices related to the “greater good.” He volunteers at San Quentin a few times a year; works with national health care executives to incorporate GGSC practices into health care settings; and continues to teach and spend time with his family.

He also tries to spend as much time as possible outdoors, especially in places that evoke awe in him, such as the high Sierras. “Sometimes it takes a while to figure out who you are,” he said. He loves backpacking and camping and sleeping outside. “I don’t mind bears running around,” he said. Happiness, it turns out, can be found in unexpected places. . .

YEAH. . .YEAH. . .YEAH. . .YEAH. . .B U T. . .

so how does that translate to we, as

CARING CATALYSTS. . .

T R U T H ?

It doesn’t. . .

Theory is just THEORY

‘HOW TO’ IS POWERFUL

‘WANT TO’ IS SUPREME

D O
D O
D O
D O

is all that counts. . .

The Science of Kindness is great

The ACTION OF KINDNESS

second to ANYTHING

no YEAH-BUT’S

(ABOUT IT)

a l l o w e d

(theorize T H A T e x p e r i e n c e)

Are You Contagious?

July 31, 2019 By ChuckBehrens Leave a Comment

When Are You Most Likely to Catch Other People’s Emotions?

Researchers discovered an important factor that influences how contagious emotions are.

In a new study, Stanford psychologists examined why some people respond differently to an upsetting situation and learned that people’s motivations play an important role in how they react.

Their study found that when a person wanted to stay calm, they remained relatively unfazed by angry people, but if they wanted to feel angry, then they were highly influenced by angry people. The researchers also discovered that people who wanted to feel angry also got more emotional when they learned that other people were just as upset as they were, according to the results from a series of laboratory experiments the researchers conducted.

Their findings, published in June in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, reveal that people have more control over how their emotions get influenced than previously realized, the researchers said.

“We have long known that people often try to regulate their emotions when they believe that they are unhelpful,” said James Gross, a professor of psychology at Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. “This set of studies extends this insight by showing that people can also regulate the way they are influenced by others’ emotions.”

How do other people influence emotions?

To learn how people react to upsetting situations and respond to others around them, the researchers examined people’s anger toward politically charged events in a series of laboratory studies with 107 participants. The team also analyzed almost 19 million tweets in response to the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

In the laboratory studies, the researchers showed participants images that could trigger upsetting emotions—for example, people burning the American flag and American soldiers abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The researchers also told participants how other people felt about these images.

The researchers found that participants who wanted to feel less angry were three times more likely to be influenced by people expressing calm emotions than by angry people. But participants who wanted to feel angry were also three times more likely to be influenced by other people angrier than them, as opposed to people with calmer emotions. The researchers also found that these participants got more emotional when they learned that others also felt similar emotions to them.

“The degree to which people said they were motivated to feel or not feel certain emotions predicted how much they would be influenced when they were exposed to emotions from other group members,” said Amit Goldenberg, the lead author on the study and a Stanford doctoral candidate in psychology.

Emotional influence on social media

The researchers also looked at social media, where they could see how emotions played out in real time. They focused on the unrest that emerged on Twitter following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

After analyzing almost 19 million Twitter posts, the researchers found that Twitter users were more influenced by stronger emotions expressed by people in their social network compared to weaker and calmer reactions. They also found that when Twitter users responded to tweets that were similar in emotional intensity to their earlier reactions, the users amplified their emotions to express stronger outrage than others in their social network.

“The social dimension of emotions, particularly in response to socio-political events, is becoming increasingly important with the use of social media and people’s constant exposure to the emotions of others in online platforms,” wrote the study’s authors, who also included Jamil Zaki, assistant professor of psychology at Stanford.

Emotions as tools

Researchers have largely assumed that people’s emotions get influenced automatically—in an unconscious, immediate response to other people’s emotions, said Goldenberg. His team’s new research challenges that perspective.

“Our emotions are not passive nor automatic,” Goldenberg said. “They are a little bit of a tool. We have the ability to use our emotions to achieve certain goals. We express certain emotions to convince other people to join our collective cause. On social media, we use emotions to signal to other people that we care about the issues of a group to make sure people know we’re a part of it.”

Further research needs to be done in order to understand the relationship between people and their emotions. One of the next topics Goldenberg says he wants to examine further is whether the desire of people to want to see and experience certain emotions lies at the core of how they choose their network of friends and other people around them.

“It seems that the best way to regulate your emotions is to start with the selection of your environment,” Goldenberg said. “If you don’t want to be angry today, one way to do that is to avoid angry people. Do some people have an ingrained preference for stronger emotions than others? That’s one of my next questions.”

So just how Contagious are you?

If people were around you
in close corners for any part of any day
would they catch a good case of anger

H A P P I N E S S

I N D I F F E R E N C E

Just how
CONTAGIOUS ARE YOU ?
When People are in your midst
Do they come away
INFECTED
with your best
or. . . ?

Psssssssssssssssssssssssssssst:

GET CAUGHT

Start an incurable epidemic
of your glorious self
with no hopes
or no need
of an
a n t i d o t e

This article was originally published on Stanford News. Read the original article.

BY ALEX SHASHKEVICH | JULY 23, 201

O Happy DAY (s)

October 17, 2018 By ChuckBehrens Leave a Comment

I s H A P P I N E S S

a l l t h a t

H A P P Y

4 lessons from the longest-running

study on happiness

gives us a hint. . .

Stocksy

Essential, data-derived advice for leading a happy, healthy life, shared by researcher and psychiatrist Robert Waldinger.

Have you ever wished you could fast-forward your life so you could see if the decisions you’re making will lead to satisfaction and health in the future? In the world of scientific research, the closest you can get to that is by looking at the Harvard Study of Adult Development — a study that has tracked the lives of 724 men for 78 years, and one of the longest studies of adult life ever done. Investigators surveyed the group every two years about their physical and mental health, their professional lives, their friendships, their marriages — and also subjected them to periodic in-person interviews, medical exams, blood tests and brain scans.

With a front-row seat on these men’s lives, researchers have been able to track their circumstances and choices and see how the effects ripple through their lives. Psychiatrist Robert J. Waldinger, the study’s director and principal investigator, shared some of the major lessons in a popular TED Talk (What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness). He says, ”We’d been publishing journal articles with our findings for 75 years, but we publish in journals about lifespan developmental research that few people read. The government has invested millions of dollars in the research, so why keep it a secret?”

The big takeaways from that talk: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier, and loneliness kills. But there were, of course, many more lessons to be learned — the study has yielded more than 100 published papers so far, with enough data for “scores more” — and Waldinger shares four of them here.

1. A happy childhood has very, very long-lasting effects.

Having warm relationships with parents in childhood was a good predictor you’ll have warmer and more secure relationships with those closest to you when you’re an adult. Happy childhoods had the power to extend across decades to predict more secure relationships that people had with their spouses in their 80s, as well as better physical health in adulthood all the way into old age. And it’s not just parental bonds that matter: Having a close relationship with at least one sibling in childhood predicted which people were less likely to become depressed by age 50.

2. But … people with difficult childhoods can make up for them in midlife.

People who grow up in challenging environments — with chaotic families or economic uncertainty, for instance — grew old less happily than those who had more fortunate childhoods. But by the time people reached middle age (defined as ages 50–65), those who engaged in what psychologists call “generativity,” or an interest in establishing and guiding the next generation, were happier and better adjusted than those who didn’t. And generativity is not dependent on being a parent — while people can develop it by raising children, they can also exhibit it at work or other situations where they mentor younger adults.

3. Learning how to cope well with stress has a lifelong payoff.

We’ve all developed ways of managing stress and relieving anxiety, and Waldinger and his team have found that some ways can have greater long-term benefits than others. Among the adaptive coping methods they examined are sublimation (example: you feel unfairly treated by your employer, so you start an organization that helps protect workers’ rights), altruism (you struggle with addiction and help stay sober by being a sponsor for other addicts), and suppression (you’re worried about job cuts at your company but put those worries out of mind until you can do something to plan for the future). Maladaptive coping strategies include denial, acting out, or projection. The Harvard researchers found the subjects who dealt with stress by engaging in adaptive methods had better relationships with other people. And their way of coping had a cascade of beneficial effects: It made them easier for others to be with, which made people want to help them and led to more social support, and that, in turn, predicted healthier aging in their 60s and 70s. Added bonus: people who used adaptive mechanisms in middle age also had brains that stayed sharper longer.

4. Time with others protects us from the bruises of life’s ups and downs.

Waldinger has said “it’s the quality of your relationships that matters” is one significant takeaway from the study. Well, the researchers have found that quantity counts, too. Looking back on their lives, people most often reported their time spent with others as most meaningful, and the part of their lives of which they were the proudest. Spending time with other people made study subjects happier on a day-to-day basis, and in particular, time with a partner or spouse seemed to buffer them against the mood dips that come with aging’s physical pains and illnesses.

Waldinger continues to marvel at the researchers’ findings, even though he freely acknowledges how skewed their research group is — “it’s the most politically incorrect sample you could possibly have; it’s all white men!” (In fact, the group originally included John F. Kennedy.) With “only a handful” of the original subjects left to study, the Harvard team is now moving on to the men’s 1,300 children who’ve agreed to participate (a group that’s 51 percent female). But he’s painfully aware that the proposed cuts to the National Institutes of Health could end even their long-running study. “Our kind of research might be one of the first projects to go. Our work is not urgent; it’s not the cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s,” he says. “But we have a way of understanding human life that you can’t get anywhere else and it lays the foundation for important, actionable things.”

So maybe here’s the most important question of all:

A R E Y O U H A P P Y ?

or maybe it’s not the question at all. . .

IT’S YOUR ANSWER. . .

Eyes and EARS

October 25, 2017 By ChuckBehrens Leave a Comment

We use to play it as kids

usually in the back seat of the car

on longer-than-we-ever-wanted-trips:

PLAY THE GAME

WHAT WOULD YOU RATHER BE:

RIch/Poor

Hot/Cold

Get bit by a poison snake/Get bit by a shark

Be Deaf/Be Blind. . .

The Game was endless

and it did pass the time. . .

The question about the S E N S E S

seemed to always be the hardest. . .

even now. . .

What’s most important to you:

To be Heard

or to be Seen. . .

To See

or to Hear?

Tough decision, huh. . .

hopefully one you’ll never have to make,

but maybe S C I E N C E

can help. . .

When it comes to understanding how someone truly feels, it may be best to close your eyes and just listen, a new study shows.

Empathy allows people to identify the emotions, thoughts and feelings of others. To do this, people tend to not only focus on the exchange of words, but also a person’s facial expressions and other nonverbal cues.

But a new study from the American Psychological Association suggests that you could be trying to do too much. In fact, relying on a combination of vocal and facial cues may not be the most effective method for understanding the emotions or intentions of others, the study said. [5 Ways Your Emotions Influence Your World (and Vice Versa)]

“Social and biological sciences over the years have demonstrated the profound desire of individuals to connect with others and the array of skills people possess to discern emotions or intentions,” study author Michael Kraus, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Yale University, said in a statement. “But, in the presence of both will and skill, people often inaccurately perceive others’ emotions.”

The new research found that people who focus solely on listening to another person’s voice — including what the person says and vocal cues such as pitch, cadence, speed and volume — were able to better empathize with that individual.

In the study, the researchers examined how more than 1,800 individuals communicated with others. Some participants were askedto listen but not look at each other, while others were asked to look but not listen. And in some cases, the participants were allowed to both look and listen while communicating with one another.

In addition, some of the participants listened to a recorded interaction between two strangers that was read to them by a computerized voice lacking the usual emotional inflections of human communication.

On average, the study found participants were able to interpret the emotions of their partner more accurately when they just listened to the other person and didn’t focus on facial expressions. Furthermore, listening to the computerized voice proved to be the least effective for accurately recognizing emotion.

Although facial expressions can tell a lot about how someone is feeling, Kraus said that people are good at using facial expressions to mask their emotions. Also, watching and listening may reduce empathetic accuracy because more information isn’t always better, and trying to do both at the same time can actually make it harder to understand the meaning behind a person’s vocal inflection and facial expression.

“Listening matters,” Kraus said. “Actually considering what people are saying and the ways in which they say it can, I believe, lead to improved understanding of others at work or in your personal relationships.”

So let me ask:

DID YOU HEAR WHAT I DIDN’T SAY. . .

DID YOU SEE WHAT I DIDN’T S H O W

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. . .

L O O K Again

and see what you

H E A R

Death by LONELINESS

August 9, 2017 By ChuckBehrens Leave a Comment

Have you ever been lonely?

Do you know someone

who you believe is

L O N E L Y. . .

Who would think

that it could ever be deadly:

L O N E L I N E S S

The latest studies

T E L L

that in the United States,

about a quarter of the population lives a l o n e;

. . .In fact, RESEARCH presented

at the 125th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association

brings out the connection between

Loneliness and a Premature Death. . .

The Shocking Scoop:

Julianne Holt-Lundstad, A Professor of Psychology

at Brigham Young University

presented evidence from two meta-analyses

on the effects of social connection and H E A L T H

The first study looked at over 148 studies

involving more than 300,000 people

and found that people with SOCIAL CONNECTIONS

had a 50% lower risk of dying early

compared to people who did not have

strong social circles. . .

The other analysis of 70 studies

found that loneliness, isolation and living alone

all had a significant effect on a person’s

risk for early death. . .

Holt-Lundstad said, “There is robust evidence that social isolation and loneliness significantly increase risk for premature mortality, and the magnitude of the risk exceeds that of many leading health indicators.”

In a 2016 interview with FORTUNE,

John Cacioppo, author of

LONELINESS: HUMAN NATURE AND THE NEED FOR SOCIAL CONNECTION,

believes that loneliness has a physical and psychological effect on people’s health:

“Loneliness is bad for your mental health: Well-being goes down, depressive symptoms go up, your likelihood of developing mental health and affective disorders increases,” Cacioppo said. . .

Holt-Lundstad even went further to comment,

“Indeed, many nations around the world now suggest we are facing a ‘loneliness epidemic.’ The challenge we face now is what can be done about it?”

Can it be this simple:

As a Caring Catalyst

c a n

Merely BE-FRIENDING Some O N E

actually save their lives?

Maybe the deeper

Compassion 101

April 19, 2017 By ChuckBehrens 2 Comments

T H E Y

. . .say that Class is always in Session,

but it really does make a difference

as to which one,

doesn’t it?

C O M P A S S I O N 1 0 1 :

The understanding and application of what it means to

“S u f f e r W I T H”

a n o t h e r ;

to learn and then to apply

the feeling that arises

when one is confronted with another’s suffering

and likewise

t h e n

being motivated to relieve that suffering

in a single distinct

or varied ways. . .

Are you signing up?

Is it required

FOR YOU–

D O Y O U N E E D IT ?

What would your final project include?

Would you

Pass/Fail?

Up until now,

not a whole lot

was

s c i e n t i f i c a l l y

known about our potential

or possibility to actually create compassion—

the emotional state of caring for people

who are suffering in a way

that motivates a more caring behavior for others.

W E L L . .

Researchers at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds

at the Waisman Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison

actually proves that people can become more compassionate.

T h e y

had the SPECIMENS practice compassion,

first on a loved one,

then someone like a friend,

and then for themselves

and then someone they actually had past conflict with

like a troublesome co-worker.

T h e y

actually surmised that people can actually build up their

c o m p a s s i o n m u s c l e

and respond to other’s suffering

with care and a sincere desire to help;

So. . .

I F

you are in particular need of some training

or at least a good refresher

you can actually go to the

Center for Investigating Healthy Minds

website and Compassion on UP. . .

O R

we could just actually be more compassionate. . .

on our own. . .

on purpose. . .

intentionally!

How?

Dare to assume,

yes,

actually on purpose,

intentionally,

wholeheartedly

‘that every person you have contact with,

every day

on every occasion

just actually might be having the worst day of their lives. . .

Seriously, if you treated every person that way–

as if they were having their worst day,

suffered a terrible loss,

found out horrific personal news–

you don’t think you would be more compassionate

and that in fact,

they wouldn’t severely benefit?

It’ll cost you little

to hold a door,

pick up a dropped piece of paper or book,

compliment a hairstyle or a pair of glasses,

a shirt,

pay for the cup of coffee for the one behind you,

throw a quarter in the parking meter,

pass a tissue,

wash a car windshield

or being as anonymously creative as you can let yourself imagine. . .

Hmmmmmmm of the day:

Y O U W I L L F E E L B E T T E R A N D B E N E F I T !

Psssssssssssst:

There’s a study to prove it

. . . or you can actually find out on your own;

Don’t decide to be more Compassionate. . .

Just one person,

one act,

one deed at a time,

d o i t .

And then. . .

just better yourself,

beat your own record every day,

by doing just one more kind act than yesterday. . .

W O W

Look at that Compassion Muscle,

F l e x !

Impressive!

See you at the Blackboard, Class

Just 20 Seconds

August 3, 2016 By ChuckBehrens 1 Comment

T W E N T Y S E C O N D S

What can you do in just a mere

T W E N T Y S E C O N D S

Micro-Meditate

Stretch

Deep Breathe

Order a Meal

Add a few songs from a Spotify Playlist

Gift someone an Album

Donate to a Charity

Get a mini work out in

Book a Cleaning

Boost your mood by reading an inspirational quote

Set a Tiny goal

Pay your credit card bill

Find a restaurant and book a reservation

Schedule a hair appointment

Change your Facebook relationship status

Send an Error report

Check in on your sleep quality

Take and upload a Selfie

Text Anyone

Set a fantasy football lineup

Update our to-do list

Order alcohol to your front door with an app

TELL IF SOMEONE IS COMPASSIONATE

in just a mere

T W E N T Y S E C O N D S

Pssssssssssst:

Someone can actually tell in a mere twenty seconds

if you are really

C o m p a s s i o n a t e

According to a new study out of the University of California, Berkley, a person can in

t w e n t y s e c o n d s

tell if you are a compassionate person

by the way you have more open body language

eye contact

head nods

and smiling.

Imagine walking into a lab

and are shown a series of 20-second video clips

In each clip, a different person is listening to someone else speaking.

You can’t hear the conversation,

there’s no sound to the clip

but you’re told that the speaker is talking a time

when he or she suffered. . .

S E R I O U S L Y

Do you listen with your whole body?

(Literally, turn your whole body towards the person who’s speaking to you)

Do you make soft eye contact?

(Literally, not staring a person down but looking at a person full in their face; eyes, mouth, forehead)

Do you offer simple connecting gestures?

(Literally, smiling, nodding your head, and ‘uh-huh-ing’ without interrupting the speaker)

These three simple steps, the researchers tell us,

are simple but not always easy to do

when we’re distracted, busy or stressed out ourselves.

It takes just a mere

T W E N T Y S E C O N D S

and it’s a great reminder that there’s no

wait time

not even a second

for compassion to spontaneously arise.

When we have the

i n t e n t i o n

to experience

and offer

c o m p a s s i o n

we can make choices–even small ones

like how to make eye contact

that can lead to

authentic compassion

The Ba-Zillion Dollar Question:

W I L L Y O U ?

Do Other People’s Failures Make You More Self-Compassionate?

Knowing you’re not alone in failure might activate self-compassion in some people. . . Y O U ?

IS KINDNESS A SCIENCE. . . ?

Happiness and the Greater Good

Greater Good Science Center

The Power Paradox

When Are You Most Likely to Catch Other People’s Emotions?

Researchers discovered an important factor that influences how contagious emotions are.

How do other people influence emotions?

Emotional influence on social media

Emotions as tools

I s H A P P I N E S S

4 lessons from the longest-running

study on happiness

gives us a hint. . .

Essential, data-derived advice for leading a happy, healthy life, shared by researcher and psychiatrist Robert Waldinger.

1. A happy childhood has very, very long-lasting effects.

2. But … people with difficult childhoods can make up for them in midlife.

3. Learning how to cope well with stress has a lifelong payoff.

4. Time with others protects us from the bruises of life’s ups and downs.

SITE MAP

Knowing you’re not alone in failure might activate self-compassion in some people. . .
Y O U ?