Happiness is ephemeral, subject to the vagaries of everything from the weather to the size of your bank account. We’re not suggesting that vou can reach a permanent state called “happiness” and remain there. But there are many ways to swerve off the path of anxiety, anger, frustration, and sadness into a state of happiness once or even several times throughout the day. Here are 20 ideas to get you started, Choose the ones that work for you. If tuning out the news or making lists will serve only to stress you further, try another approach. 1. Practice mindfulness. Be in the moment. Instead of worrying about your checkup tornorrow while you have dinner with your family, focus on the here ard now—the food, the cormpany, the conversation. 2. Laugh out loud. Just anticipating a happy, funny event can raise levels of endorphins and other pleasure-inducing hormones and lower production of stress hormones. Researchers at. the University of California, Irvine, tested 16 men who all |...
Creating a sense of peace and calm in your life means more than just coping with stress as best you can; it also means actively embracing those things that bring pleasure and satisfaction. A big part of doing this is finding work and hobbies that challenge you é without overwhelming you. Have you ever been so engrossed in an activity that you forgot to worry about your problems? “Happy people often are ina zone called “flow,” Dr. Myers says. That’s when two hours fly by in two minutes because you’re so involved in what you’re doing. In one study researchers gave volunteers a pager and had them note what they were doing and how they felt every time they were beeped. They found people usually felt happier if they were mentally engaged by work or active leisure than if they were just sitting around. Ironically, the less expensive a leisure activity is, the more absorbed and happy people often are while doing it, Dr. Myers says. Hobbies are not only soothing (for...
As babies we instinctively know how to breathe properly. But as adults we tend to forget. Babies breathe with their whole bodies, their stomachs —__ puffing out every time they breathe in and collapsing when they breathe ¢ ’ out. Now check your own breathing. Place one hand on your chest and the other on your stomach, then take a normal breath. Which hand moved more? If you’re like most people, neither moved much, but the hand on your chest probably moved a bit more. That’s the habit of shallow breathing that most of us have acquired—and it’s why we use barely 20 percent of our lungs’ Capacity when we breathe (even less when we’re stressed), It’s small wonder that scientists used to think anxiety and hysteria nature and that they could be brought aheuit by: faulisy breathing: While that may not be true, it is true feel stressed. that you can use deep breathing to counter the fight-or-flight reaction any time you feel stressed You can use deep breathing to...
When you discovered you had high cholesterol, how did you react? Did you panic and begin picturing your own death from a heart attack? Or did you take a deep breath and view the diagnosis not as terrible news but as a kick in the pants to finally make some healthful lifestyle changes? If it’s the latter, congratulations—you’re a positive person, able to take potentially negative experiences and put a positive spin on them. If it’s the former, well then, you’re like all too many Americans these days … focusing more on the doom and gloom. If you tend to view the glass as half empty, don’t despair. A growing movement called “positive psychology” is identifying ways that even the most negative-minded people can reframe, or spin, their outlooks on events. Remember, it’s not a stressful event that is detrimental to your heart, it’s your Learning to think reaction to it. So learning to think positively e may be one of the best things you can do to positively may be...
The reality is that you can’t completely eliminate stress from your life—nor would you want to, Boredom can be just as stressful in its own way as racing to mail your taxes at 11:50 p.m. on April 15. But you can change the way you react to stress. And that’s what counts, When researchers look more closely at the stress-heart disease Connection, they find it isn’t the stressor itself that’s responsible for the negative health effects, Dr, Suarez says, but how much emotion that stressor arouses. The rest of this chapter, then, will focus on techniques for coping with stress in new, healthier ways. >...
When researchers at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, asked women to recall a situation or event in their lives that made them angry, not only did the women’s stress hormone levels spike, so did their cholesterol levels. And when researchers in Dr. Stoney’s lab at Ohio State University studied male and female airline pilots, they found pilots’ LDL levels rose about 5 percent during times of high occupational stress. While the reasons for the stress-cholesterol connection are still under study, researchers have some theories. One is that stress hormones send a message to your body fat to give up some fatty acids—a way of ensuring you’ll have enough energy if you have to move quickly, (This, of course, is an evolutionary response to the fact that our cave-dwelling ancestors were physically threatened quite often.) With that release—as well as the release of triglycerides from the liver—you have more fatty acids circulating in your blood for conversion to...
According to the Encyclopedia of Stress, “stress” is one of the most frequently used but ill-defined words in the English language. We say we’re stressed when we’re late for work and when we can’t pay our bills. We laugh about the stress of the holidays and cry over the stress of a divorce. Even an ostensibly happy occasion—such as the birth of a child—can be stressful. The encyclopedia defines stress as a “real or interpreted threat to the physiological or psychological integrity of an individual that results in physiological and/or behayioral responses.” In other words, stress is any change in your world that evokes same reaction from you. If you’re a neatness nut, having 10 people staying in your house for a long weekend could be incredibly stressful; but if you don’t mind chaos and clutter, then let the fun begin. If you thrive on to-do lists and deadlines, a week with absolutely nothing to do and nowhere to go could make you crazy; another person might feel...
