Psychology Simplified on Achieving Happiness & Health By Laughter

Happiness is achieved by treating Life as good for a laugh. More than that, research says it is actually good for our health. So say American scientists based at the University of Maryland. Laughter not only achieves a lift in our mood, it has an amazing impact on our blood pressure. How? And Why?

These researchers monitored people who volunteered to watch edited highlights alternatively of a war film or a comedy film.

Here’s what they discovered! The war film clips caused the blood vessels of those watching to react just as they do when we have mental stress in our lives. Sustained by watching such films endlessly and it follows that it will have an adverse effect on the heart, leading to heart disease and strokes.

Conversely, the blood vessels of those watching highlights of a comedy expanded, improving circulation and reducing blood pressure.

Laughter, they conclude , is medically great for your heart. They even claim that it is as powerful as aerobic exercise and statins.

Yet what should we take from this? Laughter makes you heathier and happier. Clearly yes! But does that finding surprise you, really? In truth, don’t we all feel so much better after a good laugh? Self-evidently Yes!

So what is the simple lesson to achieving a greater happiness level and better health?

It is simply this: knowing this truth on its own is not enough. We do actually have to provide ourselves with the opportunity to laugh. We do need to listen to or watch someone who will help us do that. And for some of us that is difficult. It is as though we have to accept it is OK for us to laugh.

We do not need permission, for Goodness Sake! We can do it without breaking laws!

Playing dvds or media devices in our car, on trains and planes is common place yet we do that mostly for musical enjoyment. That’s better than nothing, but not the same!

Lightening up our lives, being able to see the funny side of things, better still, being able to laugh at ourselves – they are all vital if we are going to realise the full benefits of laughter. So please for your sake, and for those in your family or business, make provision in your day and your week to laugh. To achieve all or any of the benefits, please deem it important enough and of significance..

So let me end this sincere but serious exhortation and allow you to go and book, buy, rent some digital, audio or video material to make you laugh. Then resolve to play a download or DVD of a comedian or funny film. Actually letting oneself laugh is now proven to be worth the commitment.

Best wishes

Gerry Neale

Author of paperback "Squaring Circles - From the Dark Into The Light"

Psychology Simplified On the Four Steps To Achieving A Behavioural Skill

The following words or analysis in terms of the mechanics of behavioural patterning are not mine, but the description of the four stages to learning a new skill are, in my view, spot on:

1. Unconsciously Incompetent (don't know what we don't know)
2. Consciously Incompetent (find out what we don't know)
3. Consciously Competent (find out how to do it better or for the first time)
4. Unconsciously Competent (do it automatically as a habit)

But let’s just look at the ways, good and bad, that we can pattern these as behaviours.

Take a beneficial outcome, first. Let’s say we cannot drive a car, but we know a good teacher and we believe we can learn.

Stage One: we cannot drive a car because we have no idea about the rudimentary requirements of driving or what is involved. We are totally unconscious of them and therefore in that sense unconsciously incompetent.

Stage Two: Our teacher tells us what we don’t know and what we will need to be able to do. This makes us feel consciously incompetent, knowing now what we hadn’t been aware of and standing face to face with our incompetence. We can even suffer so much during our first lesson believing there is no chance we will ever learn how to drive!

Stage Three: With a car and our teacher, we can now work consciously at all the elements of steering, reversing, turning, emergency breaking and all other aspects of driving. The whole of this part of the learning process is a conscious struggle to apply the teaching and embed the lessons in our mind on how to drive. We finish each lesson less and less exhausted, as gradually our concentration begins to give way to our actions of driving beginning to become habitual. So we are now becoming consciously competent.

Stage Four: Becoming unconsciously competent is normally achieved in a real sense the more we drive after we have passed our test. If someone foolishly steps out into the road in front of us, our foot flies unconsciously from the accelerator to the brake. We drive the car more and more instinctively, and without being consciously aware of every action  

Now, lets look at a bad example. Let’s modify it to a degree, while still keeping to the four stages. Suppose our teacher is a friend has a shortcoming. Suppose this teacher has never turned a car round in the street. Worse, imagine he or she has never actually reversed a car and therefore cannot teach it! Finally visualize that we have such faith in this friend and teacher nevertheless, we are unaware of the need to question them.

All the other driving competences are embedded, but as and when our need during our driving test arose to turn the car round, we did as we were taught and without thinking more about it! We drove on in the wrong direction waiting to come upon a helpful roundabout so we could use it to first retrace our steps and then carry on in the other direction!

The test itself of course would be failed!

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Now please consider this a worse emotional case still. Imagine we had pretty competent Life Skill teachers in our parents. And they loved us. They taught us actually or by example how to behave in response to various situations. Just suppose, like our friend the driving instructor and reversing, our parents never argued. So not only did they ever seemingly resolve disputes or issues between them, they never taught us either. Only when the sulk or avoidance technique they used had dimmed, did the remaining normal family life resume.

Is it any wonder that soon we ourselves would have gone through all four stages and adopted a habitual avoidance technique in the face of disputes? Would we see it as unusual or self-evident when it became subsumed into all the other elements of our behaviour? Most likely not.

Could it be a crippling defect in our behaviour in the face of confrontation and dispute? Absolutely!

Often it can only be by revisiting our past that we can bring this to light for ourselves, begin to see it for what it is, work to correct it until we defend our corner when needs must.

Gerry Neale is an artist, mentor and writer. His first novel, Squaring Circles, has recently been published in Paperback and is already available on leading online sites such as Amazon (co.uk). The theme of the novel is how our spirituality, awareness of Nature and our emotions can dictate our cognitive behaviour. There is information on the book’s website at www.squaringcircles.co.uk. Examples of his mixed media watercolours can be viewed onwww.sirgerrynealeartprints.com

Psychology Simplified: Look where is it going!

As awareness grows on how we function psychologically speaking, so will that awareness lead to new methods of accountability and procedures as citizens.

See yesterday’s UK Daily Telegraph (18 08 11) headline “Chat-down follows The Pat-down at US Airports:”.

A potential two minute conversation has been carefully crafted, psychologically speaking, to allow security officers to judge better whether a traveller has suspicious motives for their journey. The many existing checks will not be replaced and this format will be a two month trial.

With honesty, clearly there is nothing to fear; but for evil-doers let us hope there is. Simple psychology can aid our lives enormously as well as make us safer

Gerry Neale

Psychology Simplified On Bringing The Best Or Worst Out In People

Would you accept that it is just as easy to do either! Which you achieve is pretty well entirely down to you! You can control your approach to get the Best or the Worst out of people. Now will come the shouts from readers that this is rubbish because some people are always intent in bringing out the worst in others! True, but aren’t they still proving the point? Aren’t they proving it is easy to do. Just because they decide not to try to bring the best out in people, why should you give up on it!

Take complaining, (which we all have to do from time to time)! This offers a great chance to vindicate our behaviour. Suppose you have an issue with an energy supplier. You ring their call centre angry about the problem. Be honest, is the person taking the call likely to be the first or last person to have been briefed on the cause of your problem. Is he or she likely to be all set to give you the information you need? Answer: No. Is he or she paid to try to help you? Yes!

Now the crucial question – again be honest and fair – do you think he or she vowed privately while on the way to work at the call centre that day, “I am going to screw up as many peoples problems as I can today?” Realistic answer: “No!”

Believe it not, even the people working in these front line complaint roles want to do a good job. They want to achieve a result for you. They can be just as frustrated that they themselves have yet to be given an explanation

So does blasting and bad-mouthing them help or hinder them when resolving your complaint? Of course, tell them you are very angry and desperately inconvenienced – assuming it is true – but don’t be angry with them and watch what happens!

Isn’t the reaction: ‘Oh Dear! Tell me more about it and and let me see if I can sort it out’.

Now you have a small team working on your problem.

If instead you blast them down the phone, surely all you get is a self-protective, defensive, classic job manual response for difficult callers.

Doctors, hospitals, police, airlines, telephone companies, holiday companies and many more, all employ people like you. Like you they too are busy, trying to simplify things. They have children with chicken pox or mumps, a parent ill, financial worries, or may not be feeling too great themselves.

Really! Is any of this, you ask, an issue for you and your complaint? You may say, after all the bother you have had, that there is absolutely no justification for accommodating any of this. Yelling at them is the only way, given the scale of the trouble..

So what would I say to that? OK! You choose! Adopt an approach asking for help and apologising for your aggravated state and watch how the helper’s own sense of justice kicks in. But multiply the problem by verbally assaulting the person in the call centre and who gains?.

This same simple psychology can be used with employees too. All managers work related surely have problems, disappointments and annoying issues. They too can deal with those in the part of the business that caused. There they can bring the worst out of the staff involved. It is so easy but solves nothing either.

Even more true is that some people who have caused us grief can be innocently unaware of the problem they have caused us. When told in civil manner they can be more horrified than we are as the sufferer. Yet when blasted out they can in ignorance deny it and exascerbate the whole affair.

What’s the simple ploy then? With the Psychology Simplified, just adopt a frame of mind to bring the best out in people. You won’t ever achieve 100% success but you will be astonished how it simplifies your life. More to the point still – watch your blood pressure drop! 

Gerry Neale is a mentor, an artist and a writer of many articles on Psychology published on Ezine and copied elsewhere. He is the author of a recently published cognitive novel called “Squaring Circles” ISBN 9780956868824. The book is a paperback available on line and soon to be available in UK book shops. More details are available at www.squaringcircles.co.uk  or via the publishers at www.pearlpress.co.uk

With Our Psychology To Life Simplified, Should We Live Longer?

It seems we may not! But what if we use our psychological powers to alter our habits and eat and drink responsibly, surely we would live longer then? Would you believe again the answer may be no? The disappointing news is that it seems the key to all this lies solely in our genes. But need this be taken as proof? I wonder!

If you are endowed with long life genes, then as like as not it seems, you can smoke more than you should, drink and eat more than you should. And, despite that, you will live as long as another with long life genes who has taken care of themselves physically.

Who says so? The Journal of The American Geriatric Society. They report on a study of some 500 people between 95 and 109 which they compared with 3000 others born in the same period. (One 109 year old had even smoked 40 cigarettes a day for 90 years!)

The researchers deduced we were either born to live longer or we weren’t. Worse, they seem to suggest that if you have not got long-life genes, then not only would you live a shorter life, but you could shorten it still further by over indulging in food and drink, and by taking no exercise!

Now if this is true, why are British people being warned that they will all live longer and instead of having 5000 people of over 100 now, by the middle of this century we will have half a million!

So I ask what is happening? Are we doing more than evolve steadily? Are we possibly mutating to achieve such a stunning change? Or are statistics playing tricks with us?

I recall a British MP in the !980’s with a wicked sense of humour and a great disregard for statistics. He asked two parliamentary questions. He asked first how many one legged men there were in the UK and second, how many one legged women!

It seemed that employment risks and the liability to men of serving in the Armed Forces meant there were more one legged men in the UK than one-legged women. He then extrapolated that as a proportion of the total UK population that there were 0.00999 one legged men, but only 0.00997 one legged women.

He then felt entitled to draw the conclusion - and proposed its acceptance by Parliament, that it proved that on average British Women had more legs than British Men!

So I feel I can still stay loyal to my belief that a good attitude to life leads to a longer and happier one! And I prefer that any temptation by the reader to point out any illogicality is resisted! 

Gerry Neale is the author of a novel with a cognitive behavioural theme called "Squaring Circles"

More information can be found at www.squaringcircles.co.uk

It can be ordered from any address from www.amazon.co.uk

or from the publishers website where you can scroll down to the 'Squaring Circles book cover and click on 'Add to Cart' www.pearlpress.co.uk

Squaring Circles, Psychologically Speaking

 

How does one square a circle at the best of times? Psychology, spirituality, emotions can so easily conspire to make us go round in circles when trying to analyse ourselves, let alone help us break an inhibiting and constraining emotional pattern. When mathematicians have argued from their standpoint on how it might be done and fallen out over it, it can be no surprise that to square a vicious circle of emotional behaviour can challenge a psychologist or counsellor even more. Yet I believe in large measure it can be achieved.

We are each a bearer of our own behavioural patterning, much of it established unwittingly or ignorantly in our childhood and if uncorrected, it is then borne by us into and onwards through our adult lives. Evidence of it, when it resurfaces, can even puzzle or shock the bearer when he or she experiences it.

Any ten things can leave any one of us unmoved, untroubled, undisturbed. Yet an eleventh can trigger in us unaccountable hurt, anger, fear, depression or a multitude of other emotional responses. Try this exercise in a group and in the unlikely event that two participants apparently will experience a similar response to a stimulus, analysis will soon show that the detail of each person’s response is actually fundamentally different.

Questioning any person experiencing the unusual response can often seem to set in train an increasing circle of a stimulus leading to an unaccountably disturbed reaction to it, then to more emotional contemplation of the stimulus, which in turn heightens the disturbed reaction still more, which further accentuates the effect of the stimulus and so on, round and round.

Sometimes if you try to break the circle and ask the person experiencing the response if they can recall any link back to its origin, they can. But very often they cannot. It can reside in the dimmest part of our childhood only to be identified after detailed personal reflection or professional help.  Without that, such emotional patterns remain circular and unresolved, perpetually crippling our self-esteem, self-confidence and sense of self-worth. More weird, is that we are often ignorant of their presence within us.

If we are to try to square any of these emotionally driven circles, to make them less wearing, draining, inhibiting for ourselves – and certainly less disorientating for our partners and friends caught up in this process, then first we really need to want to address the issue or issues. Without that declared choice being made, no amount of self-reflection and will power will change anything permanently.

However with that desire present in us, we will be motivated to find the cause, analyse it, understand it, and then begin to modify its impact on our behaviour.

In conclusion, I have to say three things though.

First, just as the notion of squaring circles emotionally is difficult to grasp, so is it difficult in most cases to achieve more than a substantial moderation of the adverse effect of a behavioural pattern we have borne for years. Yet I am convinced that much can be done, even if it cannot be entirely eradicated.

Second, the more I have studied in terms of the psychology involved, the more of a mistake I believe we make about what each of us actually is as a person. Most will see our obvious and maybe exaggerated response to certain things as evidence of what inherently we are as a person. I now don’t! I have joined the school of thought that says these reactions are not what we really are and they cloud the picture of what we truly are. These apparent personality traits are no more, nor less than patterned responses adopted to try to handle emotional challenges which were beyond us at the time.

And to those who say, ‘Ah! But it runs in his or her family! The father or the mother was the same!’ I would ask this: ’Yes, so the parent may have been, but couldn’t the child have copied the behaviour rather than inherited it?

Third and last, I suspect that until further cognitive research is completed, squaring circles will be as difficult for the psychologists to master as it is for mathematicians to crack completely!

Notes From The Author:

Sir Gerry Neale recommends those needing help with constructive introspection read a book by  Tim Laurence called ‘You Can Change Your Life: A future Different from Your Past With the Hoffman Process.’

Sir Gerry is a mentor, an artist and an author of a cognitive based novel called “Squaring Circles: From The Dark Into The Light.’ More information can be obtained from www.squaringcircles.co.uk or by scrolling down the publishers page at www.pearlpress.co.uk to find the book cover.