Journals, Science and Personal Empowerment
Education is empowerment: a vehicle to help you to take control of your life.
Regular readers will notice a new list on the left hand side of the blog, entitled “Journals.”
It is always my aim to provide you with as much documentation and supporting information as possible. As I have said before, the days of passively accepting the words of an “expert” are coming to an end.
In the self-help arena, we are entering what I refer to as the fourth phase, in which any advice on psychology, relationships, health or medicine must be supported by empirical data. Personal advice is fine, but it has to stand the test of research. But there’s an important point that sometimes gets missed: research is not just aimed at testing whether or not something works, but also at improving existing methods. As an example, there is research going on today that is refining and often improving traditional healing techniques that have been in use for centuries.
There are tens of thousands of journals focusing on health and wellness, medicine, psychology and spirituality. I scan a large number of them each week, and if I see something that looks interesting and relevant to our themes of Health, Integrated Medicine, Meaning and Purpose, I delve into it in a great deal of detail before writing an article here.
If you would like to follow up on something that I have written, I thought that it would be very useful for you to have access to some of the main journals.
My criteria for selection were that they had to be peer-reviewed, they had to carry pertinent articles and at least the abstracts of articles would be available on line. A few of the journals publish the whole text of selected articles.
I have not been able to find a listing like this anywhere on line: if something like it exists, it must be well hidden!
I do hope that you find that this new resource will be valuable to you. If people have ideas for other journals I shall have a look at them and tell you what I think! I shall aim to keep the list around about 100 journals and I shall keep things moving: if journals are no longer publishing articles which will support our mission, I shall move them off to make room for someone else.
Self-help and Reality
I’ve spent my professional life trying to empower people, to give them the tools to help them cope with illness or adversity and to help them see that conquering a problem is only the half way stage. We have to try to understand the meaning and purpose of an accident, illness or sudden death.
One of the things that has dismayed me is the way in which so much self-help advice is grounded in nonsense. Pop psychology that is flatly contradicted by empirical data; misunderstandings about basic science and misquotations of elements of the Ageless Wisdom.
When people are only given bits of a story they cannot use the information: they can only follow a set of formulae. The direct result is that a lot of what passes for self-help does not help free people and make them independent of the opinions of others. Instead it makes them into followers who hope that the next book, CD or seminar will reveal the missing pieces of the puzzle.
The trouble is that many of the most charismatic self-help gurus don’t have those missing pieces themselves.
I was thinking about this after reading a nice article by Dudley Lynch whose blog I have recommended before. Dudley instroduces a dose of reality into some of the statements made by guests on a recent Larry King interview. He also recommends some books, to which I would add Steve Salerno’s book SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless.
There is an antidote to all of this. Earlier this year I wrote about what I call the "Changing Landscape of Self-help."
We are now in a fourth age of self-help in which the recommendations of self-help are firmly rooted in empirical research. We also need to recognize a constant danger of all the exhortations to be happy and creative. I read an article the other day by someone whom I like very much. But it was the usual fare: a story about the Wright brothers, another about Bill Gates, and then on to a rousing, "If they could do it so can you." But these people have a unique grouping of talents. Not everyone can be a creative powerhouse anymore than everyone can sing. That’s just fine: everybody has some gift and purpose in life. But I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had to pick up the pieces because some self-help speaker has told people that they would be able to achieve something. The person couldn’t and was left feeling flat, inadequate and depressed. The speaker was long gone, and had no idea of what he had done.
Before following some self-help, health or wellness program, I would suggest that you ask ten questions:
- Who is promoting the program and why?
- What are his or her qualifications for producing and teaching this program?
- How is he or she going to benefit: are they just doing it for the money?
- Is the program specific to my needs?
- What is the evidence for claims made for the program?
- Have independent people critically evauated the material?
- Have other people been helped by the program?
- Is the material updated regularly?
- Is there some system for providing ongoing support?
- How will I be better able to serve others once I have done the program?
If you spend a couple of minutes looking at the items on this blog and in my books and articles, I think that you’ll see for yourself that it’s absolutely feasible to ask and give positive answers to all ten question.
The Barnum Effect
Whoever would have thought that the quintessential nineteenth century showman Phineas Taylor Barnum, best known for his claim that, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” would one day lend his name to a psychological principle known colloquially as the Barnum Effect or more accurately as the Forer effect.
Barnum was a marketing genius long before Madison Avenue had been built. Born in Bethel, Connecticut in 1810, by 1835 he purchased an 80-year-old slave and displayed her as the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington. He went on to create “The Greatest Show on Earth,” in which he displayed everything from performing elephants to people with an array of medical maladies displayed for the masses.
The Barnum Effect is a term said to have been coined by the psychologist Paul Meehl, to describe a very real psychological phenomenon in which people tend to accept as accurate a general statement about themselves, especially a flattering one. Even though the statement could describe just about anyone. Add a few numbers, letters or aspects to the statement, and it is accepted even more quickly, because then it appears to be in some way scientific.
The original experiment was done by Bertram Forer in 1948. He gave his students a personality test, and then gave them an analysis supposedly based on the test’s results. He invited each of the students to rate the analysis on a scale of 0 (very poor) to 5 (excellent) as it applied to themselves: the average was 4.26. He then revealed that each student had been given the same analysis.
What he wrote for the students is worth duplicating, because you may have seen similar things written about you, and it is very easy to be taken in. This is what Forer said:
- “You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.”
I recently saw this in action when I was persuaded by a friend and life coach to pay almost $50 to do an online evaluation, which turned out to be valueless. Though P.T. Barnum would have been proud of it! Let me explain.
Questionnaires and rating scales can be fun and interesting. After all, books and magazines are full of them. But it is essential not to take most of them too seriously. Designing a rating scale is a huge job. We first begin with an aim for the scale, so that we can later test its face validity: the degree to which it has succeeded in meeting that aim.
After we create it we have to test it and see whether different people can agree on the results. The next step is to see if the findings can be generalized to men and women and different ethnic groups. And finally we have to see whether the results actually tell us anything meaningful from which we can adopt a course of action.
When someone tells me that, “I did a Gnobbly-Komonsky rating scale and it made me see my relationship in a completely new way!” the chances are that the rating scale has nothing to do with it. The only things that can make you see something in a new way is you. Unless validated, tests and scales are rarely more than catalysts. It does not matter if the test has been administered to a million people. If it has not gone through all of the steps to see if its okay, it will never be anything more than a piece of fun that may or may not help catalyze change.
So how do you protect yourself against the Barnum Effect?
- First, be skeptical, second be very skeptical, and third be very very skeptical
- Whenever you are given a personal interpretation, whether it comes from a psychologist or astrologer, have a look to see how specific are the interpretations?
- Next see whether any parts of the interpretation would apply to someone else. (You can test this by taking a horoscope in a newspaper, cutting out the twelve interpretations, without the title, “Virgo, “Scorpio” and so on. Then shuffle them and see which apply to you. Pop astrology is very different from a detailed and personalized evaluation by an intuitive who happens to be using astrology.)
- Ask how the test was created, and in whom it was tested? Not how many people have taken it, but what independent measures have been used to validate it?
- Don’t take any action on what you are told until you have objective, external validation.
- Research has shown that people with higher indices of neuroticism are more likely to fall for the Barnum Effect. If you have fallen for it, see if some of the balancing techniques that I describe on the website might help protect you from making the same msitake again.
If you are interested in going into this in a bit more detail, there is quite a nice article on how to read a medical journal article, that looks at some of the better known fallacies.
Finally here are some more Barnum-isms:
“More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing than by believing in too much.”
“Every crowd has a silver lining.”
The Parachute Approach to Evidence
Almost three years ago, one of the British Medical Journal – one of the top rated medical journals in the world – published an amusing article with an extremely serious sting in the tail. The article, entitled “Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma due to gravitational challenge,” highlighted some of the absurdity surrounding the constant demand for scientific validation using only one set of criteria.
The authors pointed out that – as with many interventions intended to prevent ill health – there had been no randomized controlled trials of parachutes in preventing the major trauma that may be caused by gravity!! Yet we would hope that nobody would consider exiting a plane in flight without first equipping himself or herself with a parachute.
Advocates of evidence-based medicine have criticized the adoption of interventions that have only been evaluated by using observational data.
The authors therefore said that, “We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organized and participated in a double blind, randomized, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.”
They used the lack of randomized controlled trials in testing parachutes to show that situations still exist where such trials are not only unnecessary, but also dangerous.
Anyone who has spent 30 seconds on this blog knows that I’m firmly committed to the rational analysis of data. But I am just as certain that there are many valid types of evidence.
There is an important article in this week’s issue of the British Medical Journal that lies at the heart of Integrated Medicine, and the research that we’ve been facilitating. The article suggests that waiting for the results of randomized trials of public health interventions can cost hundreds of lives, especially in poor countries with great need and potential to benefit. If the science is good, we should act before the trials are done.
The article argues that the “parachute approach,” where practice and policies are based on good science but without randomized trials, is often more suitable in resource poor settings. They go on to consider three areas of critical importance, in which there are real ethical, moral and logistical problems if we wait for the results of randomized controlled trials.
They use the three examples of:
- Oral rehydration therapy
- Male circumcision to prevent HIV infection
- Misoprostol for postpartum hemorrhage
We have constantly run into the same kinds of problems with alternative, complementary and now Integrated Medicine. In most of theses fields there is precious little in the way of randomized controlled trials, but a wealth of clinical reports and case series. The problem with unorthodox medicine is that much of it does not fulfill one of the criteria for the parachute approach: to be “based on good science.” This is one of the reasons for expending so much energy on finding common ground between conventional and Integrated Medicine, and for investigating several advances in the basic sciences that may help us square the circle.
It is also why we have adopted a second criterion: the potential for a therapy to do harm. Clearly the level of evidence for risk and benefit is quite different for a potentially risky surgical procedure, compared with, say, crystal therapy. The biggest risk with crystal therapy is that it might get used inappropriately in place of a treatment that has been shown to work.
But above all else, when we are dealing with sick and suffering people, we have to take action. Safe action, action that has a good chance of helping, and action that is fully explained to the individual. Honestly and straightforwardly, and without false optimism.
“A man’s best friends are his ten fingers.”–Robert Collier (American Writer and Publisher, 1885-1950)
The Author Revealed!
I’ve had a great many very kind comments about this blog. So to all the people who’ve said nice things, “Thank you!” And for all the people who’ve wanted to discuss, debate, criticize and clarify, I thank you too: that’s the way that we’re going to move forward and create a more comprehensive science-based approach to personal growth, health and wellness.
I’m also constantly asked who writes all these blog items, the podcasts, the articles and the book reviews at Amazon? It can’t be one person can it? Well, it actually is all one person: C’est moi, a.k.a. RP.
So I take full responsibility for everything that I write. And, of course, any errors of omission or commission are my own.
Though I try exceptionally hard to ensure that all the entries are as accurate as I can make them. That being said, I also give you follow up resources and things like the Healia.com search box so that you can check on what I say. I want to guide, educate, help and support you, so that you can make you own decisions. And if you are working with someone else, then I would like your next meeting with your health care provider to be even better informed.
This weekend I was horrified to hear a fairly well known doctor give a very glib and somewhat inaccurate summary of a new medicine that’s just just been given "approvable" status by the US Food and Drug Administration.
Several people challenged his evaluation: “Where did you get that from?” they asked. “The Wall Street Journal,” was the response. Now I like and respect the WSJ, and the doctor was, in fact, misquoting the article. But that’s not the point: nobody who has responsibility for providing medical care or advice should be doing it without carefully reviewing the evidence. What we call examining the “Primary sources.”
An important study was published a year ago, and we saw an extraordinary spectacle: some doctors and psychologists began making statements about how patients should be treated, and about how healthcare policies should be changed. Based not upon the evidence, but on newspaper reports of the evidence. In the end, the National Institute of Mental Health issued a press release to clarify what the study did and did not say.
On the topic of evidence and primary sources, let me turn to one of the other pieces to our work, and that is self-help.
There are many people in the self-help movement who have revolutionized the lives of millions. But there are some others who have not.
The days of people being able to get away with telling others how to live their lives or how to achieve health or success, based only on their personal opinions, rather than on something tangible, are finally coming to an end.
When a self-help guru says, “If I can do it anyone can,” they are just plain wrong. They are dismissing so many factors in a person’s life and then claiming that one size fits all. It’s so sad that many people who have failed to fulfill all these gurus’ proclamations and promises blame themselves rather than the bad advice. And as a result some end up being much worse off, for they feel that they have failed.
I have seen countless people racked by guilt because they had bought into the idea that all illness is self-created. I recently read something outrageous: that all depression is caused by unexpressed anger. So according to this nonsense, if you stop being angry, you’ll stop being depressed.
I have no idea where the writer got this from, and of course, sometimes a person’s depression can be traced back to anger about trauma, abuse or a failed relationship. But as a generalization it’s utter bovine excreta. I’ve seen people attempt to kill themselves because of profound depression, and it most assuredly had nothing to do with unexpressed anger!
Attitudes and emotions can have a huge impact on health, but people certainly don’t need to be made to feel guilty because they are ill!
This website and blog and the many others that I highlight are quickly transforming the world of self-help, health and wellness from hyperbole and opinion to an empirical science. Naturally enough, there are people with vested interests who want to keep things as they are, but they are like King Canute whose courtiers believed that he could turn back the tide!
With your help, I’m going to continue to do this work, and I would like to thank all the people around the world who are already helping us to introduce, what a great Sage has called:
"The Prophecy of a New Dawn in Health and Healing."
Our Unique Brains
One of the fundamental tenets of the old self-help movement is that we all have the same brains and so we all have the potential to become a Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein or Michelangelo.
But is this really true?
I’ve talked a lot about the way in which genes in the brain do not so much determine your behavior, but instead predispose you to respond to the environment in certain ways. If asked the question, “Why has she got depression? Was it because of the abuse as a child, or because her grandmother had depression?” The answer is “Yes.” All of the above.
I’ve examined many hundreds of brain scans, and one of the most striking features of them is their variability. It’s a strange paradox: when we look at the nerves running to your fingers or your toes, they are pretty much in the same place in everyone. The veins and arteries are often in different places, but those peripheral nerves tend to stay put.
Yet when we get to the brain, things are very different. I’ve never seen two brain that look the same. This has been a big problem in research: how do you compare the brain of someone with depression with a healthy volunteer? We usually end up doing all sorts of sophisticated computer modeling to be able to compare two very different brains. This is also why we are a bit skeptical about people who claim to be able to diagnose illnesses based on brain scans. There is just so much variability.
This came up last week, when Grigory Perelman turned down a prestigious honor for his extraordinary work in mathematics. Here we have someone who’s brain works quite differently from other people. He has a very remarkable gift, but I doubt that anyone else could simulate what he has achieved.
I knew a woman who was employed as an air traffic controller by the Royal Air Force. Like all air traffic controllers, she had to have an amazing ability: to be able to tell – without instruments – where every plane was in the sky. With planes flying in different directions at 300-500 knots, the variables are staggering. Yet Veronica and her co-controllers could do it easily.
One of the reasons that I landed in the United States was that I was given a problem to solve. It had to do with measuring an inaccessible region of the brain that is mind-bogglingly important. World class investigators had been trying to solve the problem for four years. After years of playing chess, I have a reasonable ability to visualize things in three dimensions. That was all that it took to solve the problem. Within three weeks we started cranking out data that changed the way in which we think about major mental illness.
Could anyone model Grigory Perelman, or Veronica the air traffic controller or my modest efforts in brain imaging? Is that something that everyone can do?
The answer is almost certainly not.
Although we are forever being told that we can each be whatever we want to, that is not what the evidence says.
I am in no doubt that most people have the potential to perform far above their accustomed level.
But I’m just as sure that not everyone can do everything.
There is often a subtle subtext here: if you have not achieved everything that you want, it is because you have failed. And that’s wrong. Human potential is magnificent, but there are almost certainly some neurological constraints on what each of us can achieve. The key to much of our work is to see how we can expand beyond those neurological limitations.
There’s a terrific discussion of some of these issues by Steven Pinker from Harvard.
Optimism and Pessimism
It is sometimes very disheartening to read articles that are probably well intentioned, but in which the writer hasn’t done the most basic research.
I was just sent an article on optimism and pessimism, in which the writer extols the benefits of developing an optimistic outlook on life. And yes, it’s nice to be optimistic, but he – at least I think that it’s a he – makes several significant errors.
He gives examples of several well-known people who were supposed to have attained great things by being optimistic rather than realistic. He has clearly not studied the lives Thomas Edison or Henry Ford in any detail. Or Winston Churchill, Mother Teresa or Ted Turner.
He then says that optimism cannot be measured. Yes it can, there are many validated rating instruments. There is also a lot of research on the relationship between optimism, pessimism, temperament and cognitive and personality styles.
He goes on to say that you can learn to have an optimistic outlook on life. That is only half true. There are well-known genetic predispositions to optimism and pessimism. I’ve also written about recent work from Finland that makes it clear that it is very difficult to develop an optimistic mind set if you spent your childhood in a low socioeconomic status family. Special techniques may be needed to help people who were disadvantaged in childhood.
The idea that you can achieve anything by just “thinking it,” is not just wrong but it leads to some people feeling inadequate because they cannot generate enthusiasm and optimism. I have seen countless people feel guilty because they could not feel happy and optimistic the way that the motivational speaker told them to!
An un-researched and unbalanced article does more harm than good. It’s no good saying that it wasn’t meant to be scientific: you, as a reader, deserve better than some generalized nostrums based on wishful thinking. If someone recommends something, you need to know whether you can rely on what you are being told, or if it is just an unsubstantiated opinion. If it’s just an opinion, that’s fine, but you need to be told that, and why you can rely on that opinion, or why the writer has chosen to disregard research and previous experience.
So are you stuck with you genes and your upbringing? No you are not. But it is important to know if you are one of the people who do better with negative cognitions. It is well known in psychology that some people do much better with a constant negative outlook on life. In fact a psychologist – Julie Norem – wrote a first rate book on the subject entitled The Positive Power of Negative Thinking: Using Defensive Pessimism to Harness Anxiety and Perform at Your Peak.
There are techniques from cognitive therapy that can help change a person’s outlook and the newer technique – Attachment and Commitment Therapy – teaches ways of detaching from negative and pessimistic cognitions, rather than trying to stick a smiley face on them.
Best of all are the techniques of Integrated Medicine, that help attitudinal problems with a combination of highly individualized physical, psychological, social, subtle and spiritual techniques.
“If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.”–Unknown Author
Revisiting Resilience
“I don’t measure a man’s success by how high he climbs, but how high he bounces when he hits bottom.”
–General George S. Patton (American General, 1885-1945)
Resilience is the process of being able to adapt and to thrive in the face of adversity, stress, trauma, tragedy or threats. A resilient person is les likely to succumb to any of these life events and is less likely to develop mental illness. But resilience is more than a passive strength or resistance to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: it is a dynamic capacity that not only protects us, but enables us to turn adversity into strength and an opportunity for growth.
Despite our extraordinary health care system and a multi-billion dollar antidepressant industry, the rates of depression are increasing throughout the Western world. A recent book has suggested that boredom was unknown before about 1760: the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. All this tells us that something is seriously wrong with our resilience.
“The measure of a man is the way he bears up under misfortune.”
–Plutarch (Greek Biographer and Priest to the Oracle at Delphi, A.D. 46-c.120)
In Healing, Meaning and Purpose, I pointed out some of the incredible changes that have taken place over the last one hundred years, and their impact on health. To try and apply the principles of the past to the problems of the present and future is unlikely to be crowned with success. We need to adapt. Buddhists do not normally eat meat. Except for Tibetan Buddhists, who need to eat some meat in order to survive at the high altitudes of the Himalayas. I have a good friend who created the finest integrated medicine clinic in the world, the Hale Clinic in London. Normally an abstemious vegetarian, when she was embroiled in business meetings, she would often take some meat to remain grounded. I have done the same thing myself for years. I prefer not to eat meat. I have not had a steak in more than thirty years. But if I am to do a lot of traveling and need to work with politicians and business people, a bit of chopped up fish or poultry can be essential.
The changes in our lifestyles over the past century have dramatically reduced the level of physical activity necessary to provide life’s basic resources: our effort-based rewards that are intimately involved in the regulation of mood. If you think about it for a moment, if your great-grandparents wanted to eat, there was probably a lot of effort involved. Our brains still contain a huge number of circuits that evolved to play roles in sustaining the kind of continuous effort that would be critical for the acquisition of resources such as food, water and shelter. So what happens when we suddenly on longer need much physical activity to obtain those resources? What happens to those parts of the brain that have millions of years evolving? There will be reduced activation of those brain regions essential for reward, pleasure, salience, motivation, problem-solving, and effective coping strategies. The practical consequence of that is that these systems will not sit there idling: if under-stimulated, since these systems are so heavily involved with our emotions, we would expect to see people becoming depressed. And we know that depression has been increasing throughout the Western world. Of course, many people need to stimulate these regions of the brain artificially, as with drugs, pornography or extreme sports.
Effort-based rewards are an essential component of resilience to life’s stressful challenges. Purposeful physical activity is important in the maintenance of mental health. It therefore makes sense to put more emphasis on preventative behavioral and cognitive life strategies, rather than relying solely on psychopharmacological strategies. Our strategy is geared toward protecting people from developing depression, and compensatory behaviors. One of the very interesting new ideas in pharmacology is that antidepressants and antipsychotics may act to enhance resilience at both the cellular level and in the whole person. This is a very different concept from thinking of medicines as chemicals that simply block symptoms.
Our aim is to improve resilience and gradually to increase activation of all those under-used systems of the brain to treat and then to prevent problems. All the things that mother always said were good for you: healthy exercise, meditation, a balanced diet, charity and kindness, and actions aimed at fulfilling your personal and Higher Purpose have already been shown to treat and to protect.
Here are some proven methods for improving resilience:
1. Learn to be adaptable: the heart of resilience is the ability to take things in your stride and to be able to surf the ocean of change, rather than trying to hold the hold it back.
2. Be aware of the blockages in your mind or in the subtle systems of your body that are preventing you from bouncing back form adversity
3. Attitude: avoid seeing a challenge as an insurmountable problem
4. Accept that change is part of life: you can do little about it, but you can do a great deal about how you react to change
5. Ensure that you have meaningful goals that are consistent with your core desires and beliefs, and that you are moving toward them
6. Do all that you can to work on establishing your own Purpose in life. You can create a purpose for your life, but also be aware that there is a Higher Purpose in you life
7. Take decisive actions: even if the first action may not be the best one. Any action is usually better than denying that problems exist, and hoping that they will evaporate while you are asleep or watching television
8. Develop and maintain close relationships. Even if you are not a sociable person, relationships are one of the most potent way of protecting yourself from life’s ups and downs
9. Look for opportunities to learn more about yourself, and how you react to situations. This doesn’t mean becoming an introvert or a rampant narcissist, but it does mean taking a moment each day to review where you are and what you can learn form things that are or have happened in your life. This is a big subject, but there are many good ways to answer the question, “Why is this happening to me again?” and from preventing habitual problems and routine self-sabotage. (I shall be publishing an eBook and CD about this crucial topic in the very near future)
10. Work on developing a positive self-image. I have had some harsh things to say about the excesses of the self-esteem movement, but it has now been replaced by something far more valuable: the science of positive psychology. We have a great deal of empirical data on how to improve a person’s happiness and resilience. Again, we can speak about that some more if you are interested.
11. Maintain hope for the future. We have done research that has shown that one of the best ways of predicting a positive outcome with major mental illness, or of reducing the risk of recurrent substance abuse is to instill hope. Again, there are techniques for doing this, even when the whole world seems to be against you.
12. Maintain perspective: do not blow things out of proportion, and remember that this too shall pass.
13. Take care of yourself, physical, emotionally and spiritually. Listen to yourself: what does your body need? What do you need emotionally? What do you need from a relationship? What do you need spiritually?
14. Are you giving others what they need from you? If you have a nagging sense that you are not giving a child or a spouse that they need and deserve, it can dramatically reduce you resilience.
15. Rather than just thinking about and worrying over your problems, or problems that may turn up in the future, get into the habit of thinking of yourself not just as an individual who is going through problems, but as a boundless spiritual being who is learning a lesson.
16. Never forget to think about the legacy that you are going to leave. Not just to your family, but to the world at large. If you can’t think of one, this is a good time to begin to create one. That is an enormously powerful perspective on the world and on your problems.
“I am an old man and have had many troubles, most of which never happened.”
–Mark Twain (a.k.a. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, American Humorist, Writer and Lecturer, 1835-1910)
Technorati tags: Resilience Life event Life balance Legacy Stress management
Historical Amnesia
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
–George Santayana (Spanish-born American Philosopher, Humanist and Poet, 1863-1952)
For a long time now I have been convinced that one of the many reasons for the social dislocation in much of the developed world is that we have lost our memory. If we do not remember who we are, what we are, where we came from or where we are going, we are doomed to a life of perplexity and confusion. Have you ever felt that there is something about you, some skill, some knowledge, some hidden fact that is there just beyond the horizon, but that you cannot quite grasp? That feeling can be very disorientating and anxiety provoking.
We need to remember our history, and the insights of the geniuses who came before us will help us to understand and to frame the chaos of our lives.
I was thrilled to read a piece by Richard Stengel, the new Managing Editor of Time magazine, in which he laments the epidemic of historical illiteracy that threatens every aspect of our lives. As he points out, being an American is not based upon ancestry or geography, but an acceptance of the ideas of who we are. A few years ago, a survey of Americans aged 18-49 found that only 10% could name the president who ordered the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. At the time of the study, I was having lunch with a group of faculty at a major Ivy League university, and one of the assembled company – a very good clinician and researcher – responded to the results by saying, “Who cares who did?” We all need to care for these major events provide a context and a framework for us to understand our place in the world, and who we are as a people and as a nation. As Thomas Jefferson, our 3rd president said: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Historical illiteracy is a threat to democracy and may lead us to repeat mistakes.
I have spent years working on a series of antidotes to this historical amnesia. As one part of this effort, I have developed a database of quotations. Not cute sayings, but insights, comments and revelations that mean something and can transform our lives. As I said in the introduction to my book Words of Power:
“This book has been created over thousands of years and by thousands of minds. You will find here the fruits of many lifetimes of contemplation and study. From the marble halls of ancient Greece, to the steamy ashrams of India; from the sacred groves of the American Natives, and from the medicine huts of Africa right up to the startling insights of mystics and scientists walking amongst us today.”
Knowing what someone said is valuable, but only half of the equation. We are evolving as a species. If you met a persons from a thousand years ago, they might appear quite dull: our thoughts, beliefs and perceptions are also the fruits of the times and places where we live. It is good to know who said something, and essential to know when and where it was said. As in any conversation, the words are only a small part of a communication: context is key.
For many years now, I have strongly suggested that people interested in personal development should spend just a few minutes a day with a classic maxim or quotation.
If you are interested in quotations, I have well over 27,000 in my database, and I would be very happy to post some of them.
Technorati tags: Social dislocation Quotations Memory Historical illiteracy
The Changing Landscape of Self-Help
The self-help movement has been through three phases, and we are now entering a fourth phase, which is, I think, the most exciting of all.
The first phase began with those philosophers, both Eastern and Western, who first began to talk about human freedoms and our capacity as humans to use the powers of our minds to influence our emotions, beliefs, attitudes and life circumstances. There is a clear line running from Plato and Aristotle, through philosophers like Marcus Aurelius (the same person who was such an important figure at the beginning of the movie Gladiator), Saint Augustine, Francois de La Rochefoucauld, Emanuel Swedenborg, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Emerson. In the east, both Buddha and Lao-Tzu talked about the way in which our minds construct our reality.
The second phase built on the insights of these good people with the growth of the “Positive Thought” movement, which started rather over a hundred years ago and revolved around the idea that “thoughts are things”, and was buttressed by folk psychology. That is common sense psychology. Names like Ernest Holmes, Charles Haanel, Napoleon Hill and Earl Nightingale were some of the standard bearers of this phase. The trouble with commonsense psychology is that a lot of commonsense turns out to be wrong. Let me give you an example. In recent years there has been a lot written about self-esteem. This remains a poorly defined term in psychological research, but the National Association for Self-Esteem (NASE) defines healthy self-esteem as “the experience of being capable of meeting life’s challenges and being worthy of happiness.”
The theory has been that if you have low self-esteem, that is a bad thing, so boosting your self-esteem must be a good thing. Indeed entire educational systems have been built up around this idea. I lived through a time in Britain when some people tried to ban competitive games on the grounds that competition is bad and that if someone lost, it might damage their self-esteem and cause them psychological damage.
There is a very interesting study that came out in 1989, comparing mathematical competence in students in eight different countries. Korean students ranked the highest in mathematical skills, while those in the United States had the lowest rating. Now the study had an interesting sting in the tail: the researchers asked the students to rate how good they thought they thought they were at mathematics. The American students who did so poorly, actually had the highest overall opinion of their ability, while the Koreans who had the best results had the lowest opinion of their abilities.
I was reminded of that study by watching a few minutes of an early episode of American Idol on which Simon Cowell was skewering some of the contestants, who then protested loudly despite that they were brilliant, despite having just given a lamentable performance. There is good quality scientific research that has shown that self-esteem has little or no effect on personal goals, academic achievement, healthy lifestyles or interpersonal relationships. Indeed, there are several studies suggesting that inflated self-esteem may be dangerous: extremely high self-esteem can make some people narcissistic and is a feature of many sociopaths and some psychiatric illnesses. People who have exaggerated views about their self-worth often become hostile if they are criticized or rejected. It seems clear that boosting self-esteem on its own does not seem to do anything very much. But having it raised by achievement is very valuable.
The third phase of development of the self-help movement incorporated some pop psychology and some experimental work. I am thinking of pop psychology like the false dichotomy of right and left hemispheres of the brain, or the primacy of channeling emotion to get tasks completed. It led to claims that all that was necessary for success was to learn this, or master that, and you would be successful beyond your wildest dreams. We were instructed to live more passionately, to generate a burning desire for something, to have an unshakable belief that we would be successful, to set clear goals, to create a plan of action, to persist, affirm, visualize, give ourselves permission to succeed. The list goes on and on. I am quite certain that each of them was correct and that each has helped a lot of people, but in our changing world, mastering any one of those will not be as effective as using all of them together. We also saw the problems that could sometimes occur when folk took little bits of psychological research out of context and tried to apply it to human problems.
We are now entering a fourth phase, in which sophisticated empirical research is driving a new psychological enterprise. Much of the credit for this new approach must go to Marty Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania, who has become the guru of positive psychology. I know that many people have been surprised when I, and others, make self-help recommendations, not based solely on my personal experience, but also rooted in careful research. We are now entering an exciting time, and the challenge is to see which self-help programs really hold water, and to use the scientific method to improve them further.
Technorati: self-help, self-esteem, Marty Seligman, psychology
