Lecture 10-16

Lecture 21-23

Positive Psychology 17

In this session, Tal talked a lot about the importance of exercises in relation to the topic of Mind-Body.
The barriers to exercises are below. Exercise itself and the recognition of the importance of exercises will help us overcome the barriers.

• Starting to do it is not easy as we felt the ache and challenge to our body.
• Lack of time. Actually it’s an investment. It does not rely on self-discipline, but it’s a ritual we should have.
• Our subconscious about exercises.

When Tal talked about exercise implements in schools, I thought through how I grew up. I don’t know if China has foreseen the importance of physical exercises or not, but some well-being concepts (e.g., cooking healthy food, having 100 steps strolling after dinner) have embedded in the Chinese culture for hundreds and thousands years. Actually, the sports class is a part of the education in China from nursery to university. It’s a compulsory course and we needed to pass the exam to get the credit of the course as a part of the study grade. However, truly and sadly I can see nowadays more and more young students have become less and less doing physical exercises because they have electronic toys, video games, iPod, TV and social media to entertain indoors.
I laughed when Tal talking about his experience of enlightened and his meditation class. I can see that I am not able to do a long meditation at all. My mind wanders a lot most of time. 30 minutes per day is fairly a lot for me. This is the 4th time I listened to the course. I remember that I skipped the sitting meditation practice in the first two times; last time I was doing something else over the time when Tal was practicing it with his students in the session; and this time I could really follow and was willing to try. It did bring calmness to me in a few minutes.
Meditation is to focus on one thing; its foundation is deep breathing, and it’s no bad or good meditation. It’s about being here and now.
The foundation of happiness revolution has to come with an exercise revolution.

Mindfulness simply changes us from doing to being.
Tal recommended “deep breathing”, which is important to everyone and can be practiced easily. Tal noted it again, this class is to help us chip away the excess stone so that we can go back our natural wisdom, our natural healer.

People and their work:

• John Ratey – exercise and mental health, introduced twice a week interval training.
• John Ratey’s book SPARK: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain
• Nathaniel Branden – self-esteem
• Bill Swan – self-confirmation theory
• Richie Davidson, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Herbert Benson, Paul Ackerman – meditators have high correlation to high level of well-being, more resilient to painful emotions, calmer, and less startle responses.
• Daniel Goleman – neuroscience, brain is malleable and can change.
• Matthieu Ricard’s book Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill
• Jon Kabat-Zinn – how meditation can apply to people who don’t have much time
• Herbert Benson – meditation 15-20 minutes a day and well-being, and three deep breaths strategically through the day can transform our life.
• Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness
• Andrew Weil’s CD – Breathing: The Master Key to Self Healing

Positive Psychology 18

This session carries on the topic of Mind-Body.
Sleep should be treated as an investment though we feel that we are lack of time.
Touch is a natural need as important as sleep and physical exercises.
Love is the first predictor to happiness. Relationship is a natural need. Understand what you need. The problem is not the stress, but the lack of recovery.

Interesting research findings:​

• In average between 19 and 28 years old, 1/4 get 8 hours sleep in 24 hours, 75% don’t get enough sleep (USA national data).
• Lack of sleep put on our body weight and is likely to lead to depression.
• We are more likely to have unpleasant dreams in the earlier night and more likely to have pleasant dreams later on in the night.
• If you can’t have 8 hours sleeps a day, naps over the day will help.
• Americans are in general are among the least tactile people in the world.
• Introvert people have higher innate level of arousal; extrovert people have lower level of arousal. Introvert people need alcohol to reduce level of arousal. Extrovert people need coffee to help them up to their optimum level of arousal.
• 2/3 of marriages today end up in divorces. It doesn’t mean the 1/3 is thriving. [Really? I don’t think it’s the Asian society although it’s worse than older generations, but this is a shock figure!]

People and their work:

• William Dement – sleep and well-being
• Tiffany Field – the importance of touch by research about touching premature babies.
• William Masters and Virginia Jonson – the importance of touch in the sex therapy
• Harry Harlow – the importance of touch by research about monkey babies.
• Virginia Satir – We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We need 12 hugs a day for growth.
• Martin Seligman – happy people recover quicker, they have thriving interpersonal relationships.
• Brian Little – a restorative niche, formal recovery (see his article)
• John Gottman – research on single sex relationship and opposite relationship – predict divorce with an accuracy level of 94%.
• David Myers – companionship, life-long relationship
• Leo Buscaglia – perfect relationship
• David Schnarch’s book Passionate Marriage​

Positive Psychology 19

This session is about love and relationship.
I like this session especially as it taught me to understand an unsuccessful relationship and to learn what makes relationship thrive. It took me longer to complete this session comparing to other sessions as I needed a break each time when Tal said something that touched me.
What makes a relationship thrive?

• working hard (When we have the finding mindset, it threatens our schema. We need to have cultivating mindset, it’s malleable mindset that will help us work on hardship)
• what makes the relationship unique is not finding that right person; it’s cultivating that one chosen relationship. It’s by virtue of working together, of being together,  of spending time together, of dedicating one another.
• having mutually meaningful goals and working together.
• active love and rituals
• making that shift from the desire to be validated to the desire to be known – we need to open-up ourselves, for instance our weakness, our insecurity – express rather than impress.
• allowing for conflict in a relationship
• happy relationship, love is in the details
• healthy communication
• keep the conflict/dispute private
• positive perception

The Golden rule: Do not do unto to others what you would not have done unto yourself.
The Platinum rule: Do not do unto yourself what you would not have done unto others.
The Tritium rule: Do not do unto those who close to you what you would not have done unto those who are not so close to you.

Interesting research findings:​

• Behaviour management research shows that healthy teams have cognitive conflict (focusing on the person’s behaviour, thoughts or ideas) rather than affective conflict (focusing on the person, the emotion, or who they are).
• Women generally are better at fights than men. It has a physiological reason for it. When men feel attacked or threatened or disapproved, they have more physiological respond to it, they avoid it and switch off.​

People and their work:

• David Schnarch and John Gottman
• Carol Dweck – fixed and malleable mindset
• Muzafer Sherif – argued that Gordon Allport’s work “contact hypothesis” in 1930s was not enough and couldn’t resolve the conflict.
• David Schnarch’s book Passionate Marriage
• Parker Palmer’s book The Courage to Teach
• John Gottman – one right relationship in all relationships is that they all have conflicts. In average, they have one conflict for each five positive interactions
• John Gottman’s study on gay couples – different to different sex couples, when they have conflicts, they touch, hug or make a smoothing way of reducing the conflicts.
• Sandra Murray’s term “positive illusions”. Tal disagreed the use of the world “illusions”. For him, it’s real and a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• Brad Little’s term “illusory grow “​

Positive Psychology 20

This session is about humour presented by Shawn Achor. A full lecture video is here.
Shawn has a different teaching style from Tal’s. He speaks much faster but the content making people laugh.
I often think people who are humorous are genetically funny. Actually, we can use the Beta press to change the way that we actually view our environment so it’s actually adaptive for us and we learn to be humorous.
The sympathetic nervous system (which makes us energetic) and the parasympathetic nervous system (which makes us clam) work together to make us react to the world. The soprano effect, called by Shaw, is the chronic activation of the sympathetic nervous system. Humour is like mindfulness and meditation, activates the sympathetic nervous system.
Laughing itself is both medicine and exercise.
Humour increases pain tolerance and reduces pressure. It is a luxury.
Humour is extremely contagious because we are actually hardwired for empathy for other people and the mirror neurons in our brain begin to active when we see other people laughing.
Humour is a signal of cognitive fitness.
Humour can make us transfer things that we thought were negative or bad or upsetting in the past.
Six ways of increasing your humorous level:

• Writing Journals – write the things that make you laugh over the day, think the things funny and change the shape of it and reform the pattern in your brain.
• Watching funny people – because of mirror neurons, you actually pick up the rhythm from them.
• TQP (the Two Question Process) – repeating to ask the two questions to yourself “why am I so funny?”, “Why nobody recognise this?”
• The permission to be subhuman.
• The variety is absolutely the spice of life. The more you can change up the pattern you are doing, the more you see the potentials in your environment.
• The Tetris Effect.

Interesting research findings:​

• On eResources – 97:3 ratio of research on negative factors to humour research.
• Medical School Syndrome – the way we study the world around of us actually change the lens through which we view the world
• The Tetris Effect – It makes player see the Tetris shapes when they are not playing the game. Shaw called it as a cognitive afterimage.
• 10 to 15 minutes of laughing is enough to burn the amount of calories of a medium size block of chocolate.
• Our mammalian brains are actually hardwired for variety.

People and their work:

• Three people in the area of humour research: Sigmund Freud, Henri Bergson and Shaw Achor.
• Sigmund Freud’s book Jokes and Their Relation to The Unconscious. He argues that homour is way that allows for id impulses come out. Humour is a psychological release.
• Henri Bergson argues that humour is the point in which we correct somebody when we slip or fall off the human developmental trajectory. Humour is a social “corractive”.
• Shaw Achor believes that humour is a mindful lens through which we view the world. Humour is a cognitive lens.
• Richard Wiseman’s book The Luck Factor
• Barbara Fraley’s research on humorous and encounters
• Eric R. Bressler studied the difference between men and women in terms of humour
• John Gottman’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Source: 5minsbreak.wordpress.com/tag/harvard-open-courses-1504/