Bronnie Ware, a former palliative care nurse and bestselling author, shares the five most common regrets of the dying—and her advice on how to live a life full of happiness and joy.
-----
Regrets of the Dying: I Wish I’d Lived a Life True to Myself, Not the Life Others Expected of Me
-----
I Wish I Hadn’t Worked so Hard
-----
I Wish I’d Had the Courage to Express My Feelings
-----
I Wish I Had Stayed in Touch With My Friends
-----
I Wish I Had Allowed Myself to Be Happier
-----
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/948843
News Release 5-Apr-2022
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Association for Psychological Science
Past research on mental illness has focused mostly on chronic and recurring mood, anxiety, and substance-use disorders that keep people from thriving and enjoying life. New research published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, however, reports that many people who have suffered from mental illness are able to thrive and lead a high-functioning life.
“Our research tells us how many people can recover from a mental illness and go on to experience a life with high levels of well-being and functioning,” said Andrew Devendorf, a researcher at the University of South Florida and lead author of the article. “Contrary to traditional clinical wisdom, we found that mental illness and substance-use disorders may reduce but do not prevent the possibility of thriving.”
The researchers also found that having longer episodes of mental illness or experiencing multiple mental illnesses in one’s lifetime reduces, but does not eliminate, the chances of thriving.
-----
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/943396
News Release 17-Feb-2022
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Scientific Reports
In countries with higher national happiness, citizens who perceive societal pressure to be happy report poorer wellbeing than those in countries with lower national happiness, finds a study published in Scientific Reports.
-----
The authors found that societal pressure to be happy and not sad was reported across almost all countries from their sample and was significantly correlated with citizens reporting poor wellbeing, but there were variations when comparing between countries. Poor wellbeing included reduced life satisfaction, experiencing fewer and less intense positive emotions and more symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress. For most wellbeing indicators, the relationship between societal pressure to be happy and poor wellbeing was almost twice as strong in countries with higher World Happiness Index scores than in countries with lower national happiness scores.
Countries included in the study that were rated as having higher happiness in the World Happiness Index included The Netherlands and Canada, while countries rated with lower happiness included Uganda and Senegal.
Egon Dejonckheere, lead author, said: “The level of happiness individuals feel pressured to achieve may be unattainable and reveal differences between an individual’s emotional life and the emotions society approves of. This discrepancy between an individual and society may create a perceived failure that can trigger negative emotions. In countries where all citizens appear to be happy, deviations from the expected norm are likely more apparent, which makes it more distressing.”
-----
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/937783
News Release 16-Dec-2021
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Arizona State University
Middle-aged adults in the United States today experience worse mental health than older generations of Americans and also their European and Asian peers.
To understand what is happening with middle-aged American adults, a research team led by Arizona State University scientists compared middle age across different cultures and periods of time. The study examined how physical and mental health in midlife changed over time and in different countries. American adults currently in their 40s, 50s and early 60s have more symptoms of depression and worse memory recall than older Americans did when they were the same age. This pattern was found in Australian middle-aged adults but not in those living in Germany, South Korea or Mexico. Years of education was associated with better mental health in midlife, but the strength of this buffering effect has waned for Americans currently in their 40s, 50s and 60s relative to older American generations and to middle-aged adults in Australia, Germany, South Korea and Mexico.
-----
The physical health of adults in their 40s and early 50s improved over time in all five countries included in the study. American adults born in the 1950s and 1960s have been healthier in midlife than people born in the 1930s and 1940s were when they were in their 40s and 50s. In the US, this health improvement dissipates by the late 50s and early 60s.
-----
In general, education protects people from experiencing symptoms of depression or having memory difficulties later in life. But, college-educated American adults born in the 1950s and 1960s reported worse memory recall than their older, also college-educated, peers. This pattern did not exist in any of the other studied countries.
“While the future of American middle-aged adults might not look that bright, we can look to other countries to see what works for overall success in midlife,” Infurna said. “Other countries have more accessible health care systems and social safety nets like paid family leave, subsidized childcare, and paid work and vacation leave. These differences can help support adults in midlife, who are often juggling working, parenting and caregiving, and suggest ways the US can make things better.”
-----
I try to look for things to be grateful for in everyday life. This includes being grateful when I avoid a negative experience, like when I drop a glass, and it doesn't break. I feel this greatly contributes to having a good mood.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-01/uoe-og012121.php
News Release 21-Jan-2021
'Attitude of gratitude' keeps older people in Japan feeling hopeful as they age
University of Exeter
Older people in Japan have an "attitude of gratitude" which keeps them feeling hopeful despite the challenges of aging, a new study says.
Feeling thankful and grateful for the care and support they have had during their life helps pensioners in the country to be more optimistic, even when they experienced difficulties and were anxious about getting older, an expert found.
•••••
"Gratitude in Japan can be seen to a large extent as a recognition of how much one relies on others as one moves through life. Gratitude highlights feelings of interdependence in the social world."
Many people said they wouldn't be the person they were without others who played a significant part in their life. A phrase they liked to use was arigatai, "I am grateful," and sometimes kansha, "gratitude". This gratitude might exist for having been able to lead a full life, for having had a good husband who supported the family, for having understanding in-laws, or simply for an opportunity to work.
Dr Kaved�ija said: "While people in Japan might hesitate to say they are happy, gratitude is mentioned frequently. Through appreciation, dependence on others is not seen as simply a burden or a potential source of embarrassment, but also as moving and deeply meaningful. Meaningful relationships and encounters with others comprise a valuable foundation for what Japanese people call ikigai, or that which makes life worth living."
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-01/aru-hok010721.php
News Release 7-Jan-2021
Study finds time spent outdoors is associated with higher levels of happiness
Anglia Ruskin University
A new study has found that spending time outdoors and switching off our devices is associated with higher levels of happiness during a period of COVID-19 restrictions.
Previous academic studies have indicated how being outdoors, particularly in green spaces, can improve mental health by promoting more positive body image, and lowering levels of depression and anxiety.
•••••
It found that levels of happiness were higher when participants were outdoors rather than indoors. In addition, more daily screen time and higher levels of loneliness were both associated with lower levels of happiness. The impact of loneliness on happiness was also weaker when participants were outdoors.
Co-lead author Viren Swami, Professor of Social Psychology at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), said: "While lockdowns can help slow down the transmission of COVID-19, research has also shown that prolonged periods of lockdown take their toll on mental health.
"Our results are important in this context because they show that being able to spend time outdoors under conditions of lockdown has a beneficial impact on psychological wellbeing. Being outdoors provides opportunities to escape from the stresses of being confined at home, maintain social relationships with others, and engage in physical activity - all of which can improve mental health.
•••••
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-12/uow-rpt120420.php
News Release 7-Dec-2020
University of Wisconsin-Madison
A growing mental health crisis is the "second wave" of health issues that experts anticipate due to the prolonged stress of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a recent Kaiser Family Foundation Tracking poll from July, 53 percent of U.S. adults reported that their mental health had been negatively affected by worry and stress over the pandemic - up from 32 percent reported in March.
•••••
The framework is based on scientific evidence that suggests well-being can be cultivated through practice in daily life.
•••••
The framework focuses on four pillars that have been studied in the lab and have been shown to improve with training: awareness, or attentiveness to one's environment and internal cues such as bodily sensations, thoughts and feelings; connection, or appreciation, kindness and compassion; insight, which refers to fostering curiosity and self-knowledge; and purpose, understanding your values and motivations.
For instance, awareness -- and in particular meta-awareness (being aware that you're aware) -- appears to decrease stress, increase positive emotions, and can be strengthened through mental training practices like meditation. Awareness helps curb some of the harmful effects of distraction, which is shown to impair cognitive function and increase stress-related responses in the body related to inflammation and aging.
Another example is a trait like purpose in life, which is a personally meaningful aim that people can apply to daily life. Purpose is associated with positive biological and physical health outcomes.
"There are qualities of a healthy mind that many people don't know are even trainable," says Cortland Dahl, a research scientist at the center, who is lead author on the paper. "We don't think of them as skills. Many of us have thought we are hardwired to be like this or that, but the reality is these qualities are much more trainable and malleable than we think. It's a very empowering view of the human mind -- we can learn to be in the driver's seat of our own mind."
The new framework provides evidence that people can weather life's ups and downs with resilience, and that the brain and body can change and adapt. Rather than replacing other views of well-being, researchers say the framework complements other models by focusing specifically on scientific evidence for dimensions of well-being that are trainable and can be learned so that people flourish.
•••••
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-11/uor-wma112520.php
News Release 25-Nov-2020
University of Rochester
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," Leo Tolstoy wrote famously in 1878 in the opening lines of Anna Karenina. Turns out the Russian author was onto something.
Cohesive families, indeed, seem to share a few critical traits--psychologists agree. Being emotionally flexible may be one of the most important factors when it comes to longevity and overall health of your romantic and familial relationships.
That's the finding of a new University of Rochester meta-analysis, published in the Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, which statistically combined the results of 174 separate studies that had looked at acceptance and commitment therapy, mindfulness, and emotion regulation.
•••••
"Put simply," says coauthor Ronald Rogge, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, "this meta-analysis underscores that being mindful and emotionally flexible in tough and challenging situations not only improves the lives of individuals, it might also strengthen and enrich their close relationships."
Psychological flexibility versus inflexibility
Psychological flexibility is defined as a set of skills that people use when they're presented with difficult or challenging thoughts, feelings, emotions, or experiences. Such skills encompass:
Being open to experiences--both good and bad--and accepting them no matter how challenging or difficult they might be
Having a mindful attentive awareness of the present moment throughout day-to-day life
Experiencing thoughts and feelings without obsessively clinging to them
Maintaining a broader perspective even in the midst of difficult thoughts and feelings
Learning to actively maintain contact with our deeper values, no matter how stressful or chaotic each day is
Continuing to take steps toward a goal, even in the face of difficult experiences and setbacks
The opposite--psychological inflexibility--describes six specific behaviors, including:
Actively avoiding difficult thoughts, feelings, and experiences
Going through daily life in a distracted and inattentive manner
Getting stuck in difficult thoughts and feelings
Seeing difficult thoughts and feelings as a personal reflection and feeling judged or shameful for having them
Losing track of deeper priorities within the stress and chaos of day-to-day life
Getting derailed easily by setbacks or difficult experiences, resulting in being unable to take steps toward deeper goals.
Psychologists consider the rigid and inflexible responses to difficult or challenging experiences dysfunctional, ultimately contributing to and exacerbating a person's psychopathology.
•••••
How flexibility shapes interactions
Through their analysis, coauthor Jennifer Daks, a PhD candidate in the Rochester Department of Psychology, and Rogge discovered that within families, higher levels of various forms of parental psychological flexibility were linked to:
Greater use of adaptive parenting strategies
Fewer incidents of lax, harsh, and negative parenting strategies
Lower perceived parenting stress or burden
Greater family cohesion <
Lower child distress
Within romantic relationships, higher levels of various forms of psychological inflexibility were linked to:
Lower relationship satisfaction for themselves and their partners
Lower sexual satisfaction
Lower emotional supportiveness
Greater negative conflict, physical aggression, attachment anxiety, and attachment avoidance
•••••
https://news.yahoo.com/scientists-think-40-happiness-genetic-224422421.html
Vanessa Caceres
,INSIDER•November 5, 2020
Some people seem to be born with a happier, carefree disposition than others, and research indicates that — yes — some of your sense of well-being may be in your genes. But only partly.
Your genes make up an estimated 40% of your ability to be happy, says psychotherapist Susan Zinn of Susan Zinn Therapy in Santa Monica, California.
But that doesn't mean that if you weren't born with certain genes, you're destined to be unhappy. Zinn says that "it's completely possible to rewire our brains for happiness," because the other 60% of happiness comes down to lifestyle and other environmental factors.
•••••
Happiness is typically determined by three main components, according to Zinn:
Life satisfaction. •••••
Feeling engaged with what you do every day. •••••
Having meaning and purpose in life. •••••
•••••
Despite your genetic makeup, there are ways you can learn to be happier, even in difficult times. Other traits, such as resilience, can be cultivated over time.
"You have a choice," Zinn says. "It's no different than deciding what to wear or what food to order. When it comes to happiness, there's a lot we can do about it."
One way to achieve a happier state is to let go of a quest for perfectionism that focuses only on the end goal of success, Zinn says.
•••••
Here are some other practical ways to choose happiness:
Volunteer. •••••Exercise. •••••
Nutrition. •••••
Get out in nature. •••••
Show gratitude and practice kindness. •••••
Laugh. •••••
Tune in to meaning and spirituality. •••••
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-10/uoy-srr102020.php
News Release 20-Oct-2020
University of York
Lack of sleep significantly impairs our ability to stop unwanted and unpleasant thoughts from entering our mind, a new study reveals.
The authors of the study say the findings could have implications for people suffering from psychiatric conditions associated with unwanted thoughts - such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and schizophrenia.
•••••
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-10/uoc-ee101320.php
News Release 19-Oct-2020
University of Cambridge
Our brains can't always reliably evaluate experiences that unfold over time
We tend to give disproportionate weight to the later part of an experience
This can lead to bad decisions when choosing whether to repeat an experience
Humans are hard-wired to prefer experiences that end well, and the influence of previous experience declines the longer ago it happened. This means we can't always trust that choices we make based on previous experience will serve our best interests in the future.
New research, published today in The Journal of Neuroscience, has revealed that two different parts of the brain are activated, and compete with each other, when we make decisions based on past experience. They can cause us to overvalue experiences that end well despite starting badly, and undervalue experiences that end badly despite starting well - even if both are equally valuable overall.
•••••
The further back in time an experience was, even if still quite recent, the less weight it carries in making the next decision. The researchers call it the 'happy ending effect': we tend to make decisions based on previous experiences that ended well, irrespective of how good the experiences were overall.
In the study, twenty-seven healthy male volunteers were asked to choose which of two pots of coins, viewed on-screen one at a time, had the greatest total value. They watched as coins of varying sizes - representing their value - fell from the pots in quick succession, while a brain scanner revealed what was happening in their brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The task was repeated several times with different sequences of coins.
The volunteers systematically chose the wrong pot when the coins decreased in size towards the end of the sequence. This reveals that the brain was imposing a penalty on the whole sequence, irrespective of its total value, when the ending was not good. The effect varied from person to person, but only a few were able to ignore it entirely and make a completely rational decision.
•••••
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-10/uoc--fsd092820.php
News Release 1-Oct-2020
Cross-cultural study finds a strong inverse correlation between loneliness and wisdom
University of California - San Diego
Over the last few decades, there has been growing concern about loneliness across all ages, particularly in middle-aged and older adults. Loneliness, defined as feeling isolated or not having an adequate number of meaningful personal connections, is consistently associated with unhealthy aging and has been identified as a major risk factor for overall adverse health outcomes.
In a recent cross-cultural study, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and University of Rome La Sapienza examined middle-aged and older adults in San Diego and Cilento, Italy and found loneliness and wisdom had a strong negative correlation.
•••••
"Both loneliness and wisdom are personality traits. Most personality traits are partially inherited and partially determined by environment," said Jeste.
Wisdom has several components, such as empathy, compassion, self-reflection and emotional regulation. Researchers found that empathy and compassion had the strongest inverse correlation with loneliness. People who were more compassionate were less lonely.
"If we can increase someone's compassion, wisdom is likely to go up and loneliness is likely to go down," said David Brenner, MD, vice chancellor of UC San Diego Health Sciences. "At UC San Diego, we have considerable interest in enhancing empathy and compassion to reduce levels of stress and improve happiness and well-being."
•••••
Jeste noted that a limitation of this study was that it was cross-sectional. Only longitudinal studies can establish cause-and-effect relationships. Next steps will include testing an intervention to increase compassion for reducing loneliness.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-09/f-gfi091720.php
News Release 23-Sep-2020
Frontiers
A father's involvement in the parenting of an infant is associated to a lower risk of experiencing paternal depressive symptoms during the first year of the child's life, according to a study published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychiatry. The investigators in the larger study conducted home interviews with 881 low-income ethnically and racially diverse fathers from 5 different sites in the US, one month after the birth of a child and controlling for social and demographic variables, they examined the three parenting indicators: father time spent with the infant, parenting self-efficacy and material support for the infant. They also assessed paternal depressive symptoms at regular intervals (1, 6 and 12 months after birth) using the Edinburgh Postpartum Depression Scale.
•••••
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-09/uoc--wb091520.php
News Release 21-Sep-2020
University of California - San Francisco
A regular dose of awe is a simple way to boost healthy 'prosocial' emotions such as compassion and gratitude, according to a new study by researchers at the UC San Francisco Memory and Aging Center (MAC) and the Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI) -- a partnership between UCSF and Trinity College Dublin to improve brain health worldwide.
In the study, published September 21, 2020 in the journal Emotion, older adults who took weekly 15-minute "awe walks" for eight weeks reported increased positive emotions and less distress in their daily lives. This shift was reflected in "selfies" participants took on their weekly walks, in which an increasing focus on their surroundings rather than themselves was paralleled by measurably broader smiles by the end of the study.
"Negative emotions, particularly loneliness, have well-documented negative effects on the health of older adults, particularly those over age 75," said Virginia Sturm, PhD, an associate professor of neurology and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the John Douglas French Alzheimer's Foundation Endowed Professor in the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. "What we show here is that a very simple intervention -- essentially a reminder to occasionally shift our energy and attention outward instead of inward -- can lead to significant improvements in emotional well-being."
•••••
"Awe is a positive emotion triggered by awareness of something vastly larger than the self and not immediately understandable -- such as nature, art, music, or being caught up in a collective act such as a ceremony, concert or political march," Keltner said. "Experiencing awe can contribute to a host of benefits including an expanded sense of time and enhanced feelings of generosity, well-being, and humility."
•••••
No surprise to me.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-09/uobc-prb091520.php
News Release 15-Sep-2020
University of British Columbia
New research from UBC finds that after a night of shorter sleep, people react more emotionally to stressful events the next day--and they don't find as much joy in the good things. The study, led by health psychologist Nancy Sin, looks at how sleep affects our reaction to both stressful and positive events in daily life.
•••••
•••••
https://news.yahoo.com/majority-americans-lowest-point-us-125325563.html
Of course, there have been worse times before the memory of most of us. But with our choice not to deal much with various problems, esp. those involving environmental degradation, fear for the future of not only the nation, but the world, is very rational.
IMO: Being proud of "being" something like a citizen of a particular country is unwarranted. I am grateful I am an American, rather than one of the countries where conditions are so bad. But I am proud because of actions I choose to take, like working at the polls, and trying to be open to truth, etc.
