Why we need to sleep well

All of us have trouble sleeping now and then, and notice how much it can reduce our ability to focus, function and feel well the next day. For the majority of us for whom this is only an occasional inconvenience – or a finite period, like the parents of new babies – we usually take it in our stride and catch up with sleep the next night, or week, or month.

If, though, you are someone who currently suffers from poor sleep, or regular insomnia, the effects may be seriously affecting your life and your sense of wellbeing. And more people suffer from this condition than many of us imagine. Recent figures show that:

• On average, 50% of people slept badly last night
• Over 30% of the population suffers from insomnia or another sleep disorder
• 27% of people have sleep problems at any one time
• 10% of people have chronic insomnia.

And far from being a minor irritation, sleep disorders put sufferers at significantly greater risk of physical and mental health problems, ranging from depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder to immune deficiency and heart disease.

“Whilst great emphasis is rightly placed on the importance of diet and exercise, sleep has for too long been neglected as a major influence on the physical and mental health of the nation.”

Dr Andrew McCulloch, Chief Executive of the Mental Health Foundation

The UK charity, the Mental Health Foundation’s report, “Sleep Matters” shows the impact of sleep on health and wellbeing and details how, far from being a minor irritation, sleep disorders put sufferers at significantly greater risk of health problems.

Its data also reveals the extent to which sleep disorders like insomnia affect everyday issues such as relationships and work. Taken from the “Great British Sleep Survey”, the largest ever survey of the nation’s sleep (conducted by sleep organisation Sleepio), the data shows that compared to people who sleep well, people with insomnia are:

• Four times as likely to have relationship problems (reported amongst 55% of survey respondents with mild, moderate or severe insomnia, compared to 13% of respondents who slept well)
• Three times as likely to experience low mood (83% compared to 27%)
• Three times as likely to lack concentration during the day (78% compared to 26%)
• Three times as likely to struggle to ‘get things done’ at work or elsewhere in their lives (68% compared to 23%)
• Over twice as likely to suffer from energy deficiency (94% compared to 42%)

Sleep Writing

One way of helping improve your sleep is to keep a sleep journal. Each morning, note down how easy or hard it was to get to sleep and the quality of the sleep you experienced. On good days, analyse what your evening routine was, what you ate and drank and describe your state of mind on going to bed. On days when sleep was elusive, do the same, noting what might have stopped you sleeping in terms of your own activity, attitude and consumption, or what outside factors kept you awake (noise, light, temperature). At the end of each week, look at the positive and negative influences on your sleep and try to incorporate the first into a regular routine, and minimise the second.

By the end of a month you should have a very clear idea of what helps and hinders you getting to sleep; the things which cause you to wake up in the night; and how to use this information to improve your sleeping habits.

“There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub.”

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, scientist, doctor, educator, mother

(1926-2004)

Golden Glow

Another tip is to actively relax before sleeping. Download and listen to the free "Golden Glow" relaxation audio on The Real Secret website while lying in bed at night and get into the habit of clearing your mind of anxious and repetitive thoughts while relaxing each and every muscle in your body.

More info on insomnia in this blog post, and on reducing stress and taking control of your life in The Real Secret, available in print and Kindle formats on www.amazon.com and www.amazon.co.uk.

Rage - How To Stay In Control

 

We all know what anger is, and we’ve all felt it: either as mild irritation or at times as extreme displeasure. Anger is a natural, adaptive response to threats; it inspires powerful, often aggressive feelings and behaviours, which allow us to fight and to defend ourselves when we are attacked. A certain amount of anger, is, therefore, necessary to our survival and a completely normal, healthy, human emotion.

But when it turns to rage, it is anger that is out of control and destructive. Although rage stems from anger, rage is never heathy. Rage denotes a complete loss of control and is characterised by shouting, threats of violence as well as acts of violence, and involves a degree of aggressiveness that is out of proportion to any provocation. Unlike anger, rage is not a normal, healthy emotion. Rage is destructive and harmful to all involved.

If you find yourself acting in ways that seem out of control and frightening – both to yourself as well as to the victim of your rage – you will need to seek help to find better ways to express your anger and deal with your emotion. There are psychological tests which can test your ability to express anger apropriately, but most of us know if we have a probem with rage. We understand, almost instinctively, that our anger is not healthy anger.

It’s worth having an idea of the common ways in which most of us deal with anger. In general people use a variety of both conscious and unconscious processes to deal with their angry feelings. The three main approaches are expressing, suppressing, and calming.

1. Expressing your angry feelings in an assertive, not aggressive, manner is the healthiest way to express anger. To do this, you have to learn how to make clear what your needs are, and how to get them met, without hurting others. It can sometimes be very difficult to tread the line between assertiveness and aggression – especially in the heat of the moment.

2. Anger can be suppressed, and then converted or redirected. This happens when you hold in your anger, stop thinking about it and focus on something positive. The aim is to inhibit or suppress your anger and convert it into more constructive behavior. The danger in this type of response is that if it isn’t allowed outward expression, your anger can turn inward on yourself. Anger turned inward may cause hypertension, high blood pressure, or depression.

Unexpressed anger can create other problems. It can lead to pathological expressions of anger, such as passive-aggressive behavior (getting back at people indirectly, without telling them why, rather than confronting them head-on) or a personality that seems perpetually cynical and hostile. People who are constantly putting others down, criticising everything, and making cynical comments haven’t learned how to constructively express their anger. Not surprisingly, they aren’t likely to have many successful relationships.

3. Finally, you can calm down inside. This means not just controlling your outward behavior, but also controlling your internal responses, taking steps to lower your heart rate, calm yourself down, and let the feelings subside. This response can be especially helpful if things have become over-heated and you need to restore your balance before expressing your anger in an appropriate and uselful way. Many people find that by removing themselves, physically, from the situation is also helpful. However, it’s important that the anger is addressed later when your feelings have calmed down and you are again in control.

Strategies to help you calm down angry feelings include:

Simple relaxation, such as deep breathing and relaxing imagery.

• Breathe deeply and slowly, from your diaphragm; breathing from your chest won’t relax you. Picture your breath coming up from your “gut”.
• Slowly repeat a calm word or phrase such as “relax”, “take it easy.” Repeat it to yourself while breathing deeply.
• Use imagery; visualise a relaxing experience, from either your memory or your imagination.

You can download our free relaxation audio from The Real Secret website

Practise these techniques daily. Learn to use them automatically when you’re in a tense situation.

Think! When you’re angry, your thinking can get very exaggerated and overly dramatic. Try replacing these thoughts with more rational ones. For instance, instead of telling yourself, “oh, it’s awful, it’s terrible, everything’s ruined,” tell yourself, “it’s frustrating, and it’s understandable that I’m upset about it, but it’s not the end of the world and getting angry is not going to fix it anyhow.” Remind yourself that getting angry is not going to fix anything, that it won’t make you feel better and may actually make you feel worse.

Logic defeats anger, because anger, even when it’s justified, can quickly become irrational. So use cold hard logic on yourself. Remind yourself that the world is not out to get you, you’re just experiencing some of the day to day irritations that are a part of everyone’s daily life. Do this each time you feel anger getting the best of you, and it’ll help you get a more balanced perspective.

Angry people tend to jump to and act on conclusions, and some of those conclusions can be very inaccurate. The first thing to do if ywhich ou’re in a heated discussion is slow down and think through your responses. Don’t say the first thing that comes into your head, but slow down, breathe, and think carefully about what you want to say. At the same time, listen carefully to what the other person is saying and take your time before answering. Try to stay as cool as you can, reminding yourself that allowing yourself to get into a rage will not solve anything.

I have only touched the tip of the iceberg that is rage. There is a great more to say but that will have to wait for another day. My main aim today has been to look at the ways in which we typically deal with anger and to offer some simple techniques for dealing with anger that has the potential to become an unhealthy rage.

Victim support: We would like to know more about the experience of being on the receiving end of a rage attack and so it would be very helpful if anyone reading this blog and who has had such an experience could comment on how they coped and what strategies for coping they would recommend.

Posted by Annabel

There are exercises and activities in The Real Secret which can help you gain control of your life, communicate more effectively and process anger, grief and trauma. You can buy it in paperback or Kindle formats on www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.com, as well as other online booksellers; you can order it through any bookshop.

Seven Steps to Self Help

If you browse the ‘self-help’ shelves of a bookshop you will come across a vast array of different self-help strategies and approaches. You could spend some time going through the different books looking for the one that you think will best suit you and your particular problems. Nothing wrong in that – after all we are all different and our problems come in all shapes and sizes. Indeed, a ”one size fits all” approach to therapy is very unlikely to be effective.

There are, however, a few underlying principles which form the backbone of all good therapeutic approaches and these basic principles also apply when you're trying to make changes in your life with or without a self help programme. Once you have the basic principles under your belt, the question of which approache you should consider will become very much easier. The First and Most Important Principle is to:

1. Trust Yourself to Find Your Own Solutions
The best help for you will be the help you create for yourself. You need to find your own solutions and any therapist or any self-help book worth their salt will help you do just that. Rather than imposing a “cure all” they will seek only to help and support you find your own way out of any difficulty. It’s true that therapists may have studied and know more about techniques and treatments than you, and you may well need their help and guidance, but no-one knows yourself better than you do. Recognising this, a good therapist should ask you to Trust Yourself to work things out above all other advice. This is because until you trust yourself to help yourself you will never be helped – no matter how knowleagable or experienced your therapist. Beware the books that tell you they have a magic cure. There is no magic cure. No quick solution that doesn’t involve you doing most of the work. Sorry – but you know I’m right.

2. Remember You Are Not Alone
When suffering we often tend to feel as if we are the only one. Everyone else seems so much happier or at least, even if they do have problems, they seem to be in control and able to cope so much better that us. The truth is, we all have problems and we all cope as best we can. It’s true that some people cope better than others for some things – but they may well do worse in other areas. One thing is for sure – if you are human you will suffer. Scratch the surface of any of us and you’ll find a story comparable to your own – you are not alone. Keep this in mind especially when you find yourself feeling a bit slef-pitying.

When you’re feeling particularly downcast, one tip is to think of someone who’s faced a similar situation and handled it well. What can you learn from their situation and the way in which they dealt with it? It could be someone you know, but just as helpful are examples from literature or film. Another suggestion is to imagine your current life and its difficulties as a film with you as the scriptwriter. What different solutions or endings can you imagine?

3. Take one small step at a time

Problems come in all shapes and sizes and our responses to these problems differ enormously but one thing we all sometimes do is to make our problems appear bigger than they really are. We need to keep things in perspective, or risk feeling overwhelmed. Feeling overwhelmed can lead to a sense of helplessness, and it’s this helplessness that you need to avoid at all costs. Whatever the size of the problem, the way to begin tackling it, is not to expect to deal with it all at once. Like climbing an enormous mountain you need to take one step at a time. If you spend too much time thinking about the size of the mountain you would probably give up before beginning. The same applies to problems and difficulties – concentrate on the small steps you can take and keep going.

4. Are you sure about wanting to change?
This is a tricky one. Many of us say we want to change things because we feel unhappy with the way things are at the moment. We talk about making  "life changes" and, indeed, there are now hundreds of books on the subject. Of course, it’s fine to make changes, but before we can even begin we really need to know not only what it is that we want to change but, far more importantly, we need to imagine what our lives will look like when we have made those changes. What’s your life going to be like when you no longer have the particular problem that so upsets you now? There is no point setting out on a difficult journey – change is always difficult – if you don’t know where you’re headed or even if it’s where you want to be.

5. Filling in the gaps
It’s important to consider what your new life will look like after you have dealt with those things in your current life which you wish to change. In doing this you will come to realise that some of your old habits will need to be replaced by new habits if you are to be successful. What, for example, are you going to do with the time you’ll save when you no longer have to deal with the problems that so beset you now? Filling in those gaps with positive behaviours will help support, in the long term, any changes you make now. In other words, you need to think about the positive aspects of change and make sure that you don’t fall into the trap of seeing only problems.

6. Be Open to Change 
The notion that there is a perfect life just waiting for you to discover, once you’ve got over present difficulties, is nonsense. There is no such perfect life. Not for you and not for anyone. An interesting life, on the other hand, will be constantly interrupted with problems and difficulties that you’ll need to sort out or overcome. Being open to change will give you the necessary flexibility to deal with these problems, so don’t be afraid of change. Change can open up all sorts of interesting possibilities. Try to see change as a positive force and avoid seeing change as a necessary evil.

7. What Role Do You Play In Your Difficult Life?
This is no easy question and one that asks you to be scrupulously honest with yourself. Is there any chance that you could perhaps be making things worse for yourself ? Is there any chance that you are actually maintaining the difficult situation by refusing to acknowledge your own part in it? Perhaps the hardest part of any resolution of life’s problems is taking responsibility for our own actions, accepting that perhaps, just perhaps, we might in fact be a big part of the problem. One way of gauging the part you are playing is to return to imagining your current life as a script – a book or a film. What other actions could you have taken to avoid the situation that now troubles you? In the light of that, can you think of anything that you could do now to make things better in the future ?
In Short: Is it always someone else’s fault?

There are exercises in A Simpler Life – our audio book – which can help you reconnect with your authentic self and your personal values, and The Real Secret is a flexible self help book which you can use to create your own self development programme. They are both available on www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.com

Posted by Annabel

The Importance of Learning to Listen

On every measurement of human happiness, good relationships with other people rate very high, if not top of the scale. And how many times have we all been told that communication is the key to good relationships? So how come, when we start talking, at work or at home, about something we know the other person doesn’t share our views on, we end up so often with a predictably pointless discussion, or worse, aggressive argument?

We can’t force other people or circumstances to change, but we can modify our own outlook and behaviour, which in turn will elicit different responses from others. One of the most frequent causes of friction in close relationships is that one, or both parties, believes their point of view is not being heard. You may feel this yourself, but a way to improve the situation is to make sure that you are listening properly to what the other person is telling, and asking of, you. You might find that what they want from you is very different to what you had assumed.

“Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one fact that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.”

William James, psychologist (1842-1910)

Neurolinguistic programming quite rightly tells us that amongst the most important factors in good communication is the use of rich and varied language, which appeals to the sensory bias of the other person. So someone who employs phrases like “I hear what you’re saying” will understand you better if you use auditory metaphors; a person who “sees your point” will see it more easily if material is presented in a visual way; while it’s helpful to appeal to the emotions of someone who tells you “I feel very positive about…”.

Added to which, ensuring that the way you speak and your own body language are aligned to your words, and learning to read and interpret the body language of other people, are as important in communicating as the content of what you are actually saying.

However you process information, or present your material, nothing is more infuriating than sensing that the other person has not properly listened to you or your point of view. And it works both ways – if there’s a long standing disagreement festering in any of your relationships, you may unintentionally be failing to listen to what your partner, child, friend, parent, boss or colleague is trying to make you understand. My earlier post also points out how important listening is to Happiness At Work.  

“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961)

In Step 8 (Richer Relationships) of The Real Secret, we describe the skill of Empathic Listening. It involves focusing exclusively on the other person, using both your intellect and intuition to understand what they want and need you to hear from them – particularly on a difference of opinion - and ensuring that what you've understood them to say is what they intended you to hear.

When you listen empathically, you use your whole self not just to hear what the other person is saying, but to gain insights into what they are thinking and feeling. By extending this courtesy to them, you also allow the other person the space and time to communicate in a more relaxed and less combative manner.

When you are listening empathically, you will find yourself:

• Engaged and interested, with your attention focused outwards on the other person
• Intent upon and looking toward the other person, only glancing away occasionally to process what they are saying
• Mirroring the other person’s posture and gestures
• Using language which is “you” (not “I” or “me”) centred; using key words and language patterns that match the other person’s.
• Asking the other person open questions rather than expressing your own beliefs.

You can find more information for developing Empathic Listening in The Real Secret, which is available in paperback and Kindle format on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com, as well as most other online booksellers. You can order it through any bookshop, too.

Posted by Lucy

How to Change Your Eating Habits

Are you someone who likes to eat popcorn in the cinema? I am; it’s a built-in part of the enjoyment of the whole experience – though not in the theatre, where I just still crave the childhood treat of a little tub of ice cream in the interval. It’s silly, really, because I never buy popcorn on any other occasion, and I only eat ice cream when I’ve bought it for guests or children in my own home. Or do I? Let’s be honest; sometimes when I’m feeling tired or fed up, I will go and see if there’s some ice cream lurking in the freezer and have a surreptitious bowl to cheer myself up. And chocolate… let’s not go there.

The fact is, when we associate a particular kind of food with a pleasant experience, we’ll seek it out to boost our mood in other situations. Research on chocolate has shown that, contrary to what we like to believe, it doesn’t in itself make us feel happier. "There is some slight evidence that chocolate triggers the release of opiate-like chemicals in the brain but really its relationship with our emotions operates in the reverse direction," says Professor Andy Smith of Cardiff University. "We seek out a chocolate snack when we feel upset or are emotional because, in the past, we have had pleasant associations with it. That is why it is a comfort food."

It’s all too easy to create an association with a particular kind of food or, indeed, a subconscious habit. An experiment reported in the August 2011 issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin shows just how much our past experiences influence our eating habits; but also offers some hope for simple ways in which we can break habits that we want to.

The researchers gave people a bucket of either nice, fresh popcorn or stale, week-old popcorn just as they were going into a cinema to watch a film. Some of the audience were habitual popcorn eaters and some were not. The film goers who didn't usually eat popcorn in the cinema ate far less stale popcorn than fresh popcorn because it didn’t taste as nice. Duh! Obviously, you would think.

But viewers who usually ate popcorn while watching movies, ate about the same amount of popcorn whether it was fresh or stale. In other words, the ingrained habit of eating popcorn in the cinema overrode the fact that the stale popcorn didn’t even taste nice.

"When we've repeatedly eaten a particular food in a particular environment, our brain comes to associate the food with that environment and make us keep eating as long as those environmental cues are present," said David Neal, lead author of the study, who was a psychology professor at USC when the research was conducted and now heads a social and consumer research firm.

"People believe their eating behaviour is largely activated by how food tastes. Nobody likes cold, spongy, week-old popcorn," said corresponding author Wendy Wood, Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at USC. "But once we've formed an eating habit, we no longer care whether the food tastes good. We'll eat exactly the same amount, whether it's fresh or stale."

The researchers controlled for hunger and whether the participants liked the popcorn they received, and they also gave popcorn to a control group who watched movie clips in a meeting room – an environment not normally associated with popcorn. In the meeting room, even habitual film-watching/popcorn eaters ate much less stale popcorn than fresh, demonstrating how much environmental cues can trigger automatic eating behaviour.

But there is hope for those of us who overeat, or eat the wrong foods because of ingrained habits or associations.

In another experiment, the researchers tested a simple disruption of automatic eating habits. Once again using stale and fresh popcorn, they asked participants going into a film to eat popcorn, but this time using either their dominant or non-dominant hand. Using the non-dominant hand seemed to disrupt eating habits and cause people to pay attention to what they were eating. When using the non-dominant hand, viewers ate much less of the stale than the fresh popcorn, and this worked even for those with strong film viewing/popcorn eating habits.

So if you’re trying to change eating habits, check whether there are times and places when your body and mind have come to expect a certain type and amount of food, and avoid or change them. There are ways of tricking your brain, such as using smaller plates to contain smaller portions, and your body by drinking a glass of water before you eat a meal. Or simply try eating with the wrong hand.

"It's not always feasible for dieters to avoid or alter the environments in which they typically overeat," Wendy Wood said. "More feasible, perhaps, is for dieters to actively disrupt the established patterns of how they eat through simple techniques, such as switching the hand they use to eat." And then there’s also the Hawthorne Effect, which shows that just paying attention to what we do, results in our doing it better. More on this and taking control of your eating habits in The Real Secret Step 5, “Healthy Body”.

Posted by Lucy

You can get your copy of The Real Secret in paperback or Kindle format on www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.com .

More Happiness Less Crime

Since the outbreak of riots and looting in London and other cities in the UK, politicians and commentators have blamed the lack of morals in the younger generation, single-parent (specifically single-mother) families, lack of fathers and “black” culture (from a right wing perspective); and government cuts, closure of youth services, inequality and poor moral leadership from the top (bankers, MPs, the police and press) from the left.

I favour the latter group, but maybe many of these have had a part to play; maybe some represent aspects of an underlying malaise that affects British youth – a malaise called unhappiness.

Bill McCarthy, a UC-Davis sociology professor, and Teresa Casey, a postdoctoral researcher at UC-Davis, have recently presented their new study at the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. "Get Happy! Positive Emotion, Depression, and Juvenile Crime” suggests that, in addition to their other benefits, programmes and policies that increase childhood and adolescent happiness could deter nonviolent crime and drug use.

The authors used data from nearly 15,000 seventh- to ninth-grade students in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the largest, most comprehensive survey of adolescents ever undertaken, over two years (1995 and 1996). They found that about 29% of the young people surveyed reported having committed at least one criminal offence, and 18% said that they had used at least one illegal drug. The researchers then correlated these reports with self-assessments of emotional well-being. They claim theirs is the first study to investigate the association of happiness with juvenile crime. Unlike positive psychologists, sociologists have spent little time studying the consequences of happiness – or lack of it.

McCarthy and Casey’s research found that happier adolescents were less likely to report involvement in crime or drug use. Adolescents with minor, or nonclinical, depression had significantly higher odds of engaging in such activities. They argue that positive emotions also have a role: "We hypothesize that the benefits of happiness— from strong bonds with others, a positive self-image, and the development of socially valued cognitive and behavioral skills— reinforce a decision-making approach that is informed by positive emotions.”

The study also found that changes in emotions over time matter. Adolescents whose happiness levels decreased or depression levels increased over a one-year period were more likely to be involved in crime and to use drugs. The odds of drug use were notably lower for youth who reported that they were more often happy than depressed, and were substantially higher for those who indicated that they were more depressed than happy.

But what needs do young people need to have met in order to have a reasonable level of wellbeing? Back to the positive psychologists: Ed Diener from the University of Illinois has taken a new look at an old theory – Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, first published in 1954. Maslow claimed that humans need their physiological needs (food, shelter etc) to be met first, followed by safety; only then can social needs for love, belonging and self-esteem be met; with “self-actualisation” the pinnacle of his famous pyramid.

Diener, also a senior scientist for the Gallup Organization, helped design the Gallup World Poll, a landmark survey on well-being with 60,865 participants from 123 countries, conducted from 2005 to 2010. His results agreed with Maslow’s view that there are human needs that apply regardless of culture, but not with his ordering of these needs. "Instead of working from the bottom up, to be happy we need all of them at once - and the needs that are most linked with everyday satisfaction are interpersonal ones, such as love and respect. Our troubles, conversely, relate most to lack of esteem, lack of freedom, and lack of nourishment. It’s only in retrospect, when we look back on the quality of our lives thus far, that basic needs become significant indicators for well-being.”

Ed Diener believes that public policymakers should take serious note. Since each of Maslow's needs correlates with certain components of happiness, he says "all the needs are important all the time. Our leaders need to think about them from the outset, otherwise they will have no reason to address social and community needs until food and shelter are available to all."

University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Martin Seligman, who says the study might be a breakthrough, adds: "Governments should take these measures seriously and hold themselves accountable for public policy changes for the well-being of their citizens.

Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of the charities The Place To Be and Kids Company, has written eloquently about how the social needs of some young people in the UK are simply not being met:

“An absence of morality can easily be found in the rioters and looters. How, we ask, could they attack their own community with such disregard? But the young people would reply "easily", because they feel they don't actually belong to the community. Community, they would say, has nothing to offer them. Instead, for years they have experienced themselves cut adrift from civil society's legitimate structures… It's not one occasional attack on dignity, it's a repeated humiliation, being continuously dispossessed in a society rich with possession. Young, intelligent citizens of the ghetto seek an explanation for why they are at the receiving end of bleak Britain, condemned to a darkness where their humanity is not even valued enough to be helped.”

Happiness is important; the happiness of young people is crucial – not only to each individual and their growth into a mature, balanced and productive adult, but for the society in which they live alongside all of us. One of the implications Ed Diener draws from his findings is simply this: “The findings indicate that improving individual life must include improving societies.” In his Take Home Message, he says “We also found that societal need fulfillment— particularly of basic needs— has effects independent of an individual’s personal need fulfillment, so that it is beneficial to live in a society with others who have their needs fulfilled. Improving one’s own life is not enough; society-wide improvement is also required.”

Posted by Lucy

The 12 step programme of The Real Secret could raise happiness and lower depressive tendencies in a young person you know. It is available in paperback and kindle format on www.amazon.com and www.amazon.co.uk as well as other online booksellers; and can be ordered in any bookshop.

The Top Ten Mistakes We Make When trying To Change Our Behaviour

Is behaviour difficult to change? How come some of us find it easy and others very difficult? A group of researchers at Stanford University have looked at this question and come up with the top ten mistakes we make when trying to change our behaviour.

1. Relying on Willpower.
Willpower doesn't exist - it's just another excuse we all use to explain why change is so hard. There is no evidence for willpower. No special gene. It's all been a cover-up.You need to forget about willpower. Pretend it doesn't exist. Forget the pretend (sorry - still coming to terms with the loss).

2. Attempting Big Leaps instead of small steps
One small step at a time. You're after small successes remember not giant leaps for mankind - you haven't landed on the moon.

3. Ignoring How Your Environment Affects You
If you want to change your life then you need to change the context. You'll have to read The Real Secret if you want to know how - I'm not giving all our secrets away!

4.Trying to Stop Old Behaviours instead of Creating New Ones
Forget all that advice about avoiding old behaviours. Takes too much time and effort. Concentrate instead on the new behaviour. Stop avoiding the old and start doing the new.

5. Stop Waiting for Motivation
I've told you this before - here - I'm not telling you again

6. Underestimating The Power of Triggers
Behaviour is always, always triggered. Feel thirsty? Hungry? Enraged? Sleepy? Upset? Work out what it is that triggers the behaviour you want to change, then think before you act.

7. Believing that Information Leads to Action
Well it just doesn't - we aren't that rational. You'll need to read The Book.

8. Focusing on Abstract Goals rather than Concrete Behaviours
Abstract : get fit
Concrete : walk for 15 minutes a day
See The Book for more help setting and achieving goals.

9. Wanting to change a Behaviour FOREVER
Wrong! You need to concentrate on a fixed period - remember small steps?

10. Assuming that Behaviour Change is Difficult
Behaviour change is not difficult - when you know how. Read The Book

So there you have it - the top ten mistakes we all make when trying to change our behaviour. Personally I can think of a few more but these ten are apparently the ones we all make.

Posted by Annabel

Love Is The Drug - or a Form of Madness

A friend of mine is in love. She’s in love with a man who loves her, but who also has a wife and children. When she sees him, she’s in seventh heaven; when she can’t see him, especially for any length of time, it feels like a kind of hell. In between the two she thinks of him obsessively and longs for texts, emails or phone calls that relieve the pain. She says they make each other happy, but with the situation as it is she wishes desperately she wasn’t in love with him. The only solution she can see would be for her to fall in love with someone else (more available, perhaps); despite the suffering, she won't be taking our advice on how to end a relationship.

Another friend of mine is not in love. She has had a number of relationships in recent years, the latest of which she ended a few months ago. She has suffered from depression before and feels she is slipping into depression again. She thinks that in the past she might have unconsciously used the emotional high of falling in love to repeatedly ward off depression. Despite this insight, and that she knows he didn’t and couldn’t make her happy, my friend is tempted to reconnect with her ex to get another hit.

Both these women are intelligent and self aware, but both find it hard to overcome the intense feelings that “being in love” produces; both talk in terms of “addiction”, “obsession”, “highs”, “withdrawal symptoms”… the language of drug abuse and madness. The neuroscience of love suggests this is completely appropriate.

Research suggests that there are three forms of love for a partner (or potential partner): lust, romantic love and attachment. The three different categories involve different brain systems: lust (craving sexual gratification) is driven by androgens and estrogens such as testosterone; romantic love (attraction), which is characterised by euphoria, mood swings, focused attention, obsessive thinking and intense craving for the loved one, is driven by high levels of the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine, and low serotonin levels; while attachment (peaceful, long term relationship) is driven by the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin.

Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki of University College, London, originally located the areas of the brain activated by romantic love by looking at brain scans of students who said they were madly in love and analysing their patterns of brain activity. It appeared that a relatively small area of the human brain is active in romantic love, compared with that involved in ordinary friendship; and the brain areas active in love are different from the areas activated in other emotional states, such as fear and anger. Parts of the brain involved in being “in love” include the one responsible for gut feelings and those which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine. So the brains of people in love don’t look like those of people experiencing strong emotions, but rather like those of people snorting coke.

Jim Pfaus, a psychologist at Concordia University, in Montreal, says the aftermath of lustful sex is similar to the state induced by taking opiates. A mix of chemical changes occurs, including increases in the levels of serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin and endogenous opioids (the body's natural equivalent of heroin). Love, it seems, uses the neural mechanisms that are activated during the process of addiction. We are literally addicted to love.

The description of being “madly in love” isn’t far off the truth either. Some researchers suggest this mental state might share neurochemical characteristics with the manic phase of manic depression. Dr Helen Fisher of Rutgers University, and author of the book Why We Love, suggests that the obsessive thought patterns and actual behavioural patterns of those in love — such as attempting to evoke reciprocal responses in one's loved one — resemble obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).

Dr Fisher says that love is not so much an emotion as a drive; a motivation system and part of the brain’s reward system. It is a need which compels us to seek a specific mating partner and links the drive to all kinds of distinct emotions according to how well or badly the relationship is going. The emotions are powerful whether positive or negative: one study shows that when a female prairie vole mates, there is a 50% increase in the “feel good” hormone, dopamine, in the reward centre of her brain; another that 40% of people who had been dumped in the past eight weeks experienced clinical depression, and 12% severe depression.

Lust, romantic love and attachment are connected, not just in body and mind but in brain circuitry. Dr Fisher tells people not to have sex with people they don’t want to fall in love with, because often that is the result. The testosterone of lust can activate the neurotransmitters of love, while an orgasm can raise the attachment hormones which promote long term affection and monogamy. She believes romantic love is a stronger craving than sex, but that when oxytocin and vasopressin kick in (around 18 months later), they may interfere with the dopamine and norepinephrine pathways, so making the passionate “in love” feelings start to fade.

It is also around this time, especially if the attachment hormones haven’t established themselves, that reality can kick in and lovers start to be released from their addiction. People realise that the objects of their adoration are not god-like, that their relationship may be causing them more pain than pleasure, or that they are simply bored. Relationships often fall apart after about two years, sometimes because one member starts (perhaps unconsciously) to crave the high of a new addiction.

This is a pattern my second friend recognised in herself, but it seems we all embed patterns of attraction and relationship early, starting with our very first love. Interestingly, both my friends’ relationships are/were with early boyfriends they have reconnected with some twenty years later.

Very few experiences in our lives are as intense and overwhelming as our first love, which most often takes place in our teenage years. Although it may evaporate fast, teenage first love is more intense than love in adulthood because of our high energy levels and flooding hormones. The memories we retain are deep and strong – and in women particularly, the “in love” state causes increased activity in brain regions associated with memory recall. Websites like Friends Reunited were publicly blamed for breaking up marriages as people rekindled the thrill of first love after contacting old lovers.

So, if the state of “being in love” is neurologically similar to taking drugs and mental illness, could we treat it as we do addiction or OCD? Researchers think there is a short and finite period between lust turning to romantic love when we could consciously choose not to fall, but we would have to be very self aware and very strong and use strategies akin to cognitive behavioural therapy. Anti-depressants which raise serotonin levels might alleviate the pain of break up, or reduce the desire for or ability to fall in love.

In general, though, the best defence against the madness and/or addiction of love is to maintain your personal levels of emotional wellbeing. Having high levels of self-esteem and resilience makes you more likely to attract a similarly well-balanced and positive partner with whom you can form a mutually supportive and enduring relationship, and less likely to become obssessed with or adicted to someone who causes you pain. (See our post on The Laws of Attraction.)

The twelve steps of The Real Secret can help you, or a young person making early relationships, to become grounded in a positive outlook and self-confidence, and has advice on how to achieve Richer Relationships. It is available in paperback and kindle on www.amazon.com and www.amazon.co.uk .

Posted by Lucy