Category: Self Help

The Art of Nostalgia

“The Art Of Nostalgia” is a elaborate collection of nine personal essays of Lauren. These essays aim to capture nostalgia’s essence on how does it effects the person and the thought process. The essays bring the reader on a journey as Lauren crafts a timeline of memories that reflect a deep-rooted nostalgia for places, people, and transient phases of life. She, inadvertently, strings together pieces of herself, pieces that shape who she is at her core, daring us to ponder our own stories, our own past that vitally remains within us.

Here is some insight on how to tame the phenomenon that is nostalgia.

The cycle of Nostalgia

Keep in mind that you’ve missed things a thousand times before, and it always becomes easier. It may take weeks, or months, but it always does. Whether it’s a place, a person, or your favorite food that you can no longer eat because you just found out you’re gluten free, it always gets easier.

Be Realistic: The most dangerous part of nostalgia is the tendency to romanticize. When you look back, look back on the past as it actually was. Doing so will prevent you from ranking the past as better than the present.

Look Forward: Avoid excessive planning, but when that new movie tells you how enlightening your twenty-something years are, or how incredible your forties are, listen. Your grandmother is right when she says you have a lot to look forward to. Be excited for, and do not fear, what lies ahead.

Always Live In The Moment – Try to embrace how exciting life can be when you truly live in the moment. Respect the epitomic Cards and try new things everyday.

Balance – Try to find a balance between the past and the present. Keep in touch with old friends, and remember the events that made you the person you are today. Most importantly, always participate in Instagram’s “throwback Thursday.”

The first and probably the most important consideration is the attitude with which we approach our material. Since nostalgia serves no immediate purpose besides providing pleasure it is a fundamentally aesthetic memory experience, which means we should approach our material with the mindset of an artist.

Stress Makes It Harder to Recognize Danger

Have you ever felt stress in your daily life or on any special occasion? I am sure the answer is Yes for all of us and we all go through it in our daily lives. It can be at some instances positive feeling which can help us perform better and take action at the right time. When this stress becomes chronic, things can get out of control and it can impact the daily life. When you experience the sweaty hands when there is an important event or speech, this is stress. When your heart pounds while going for a first date is what stress is. You can feel it in both mind as well as body.

This automatic response developed in our ancient ancestors as a way to protect them from predators and other threats. Faced with danger, the body kicks into gear, flooding the body with hormones that elevate your heart rate, increase your blood pressure, boost your energy and prepare you to deal with the problem.

Emotional signs of stress

There are many different ways in which stress is manifested in a healthy individual. There are some reactions which a body performs to handle some stressful or unfamiliar situation. These reactions are nothing but the stress effects on the body and while undergoing such things, our body becomes more and more prone to ddangerous situations. With constant pressure, the ability of the brain to respond to dangerous situations become weaker and can also effect the ability to identify a prevailing dangerous or imminent situation. Some of the vital symptoms of stress due to which the situation becomes out of control are as follows:

Irritation
No sense of humor
Frustration
Feeling overworked
Feeling overwhelmed
Sense of helplessness
Apathy

Some of the Behavioral signs of stress causing Danger are as follows:

– decreased contact with family and friends
– poor work relations
– sense of loneliness
– decreased sex drive

Tips to overcome affects of stress in Dangerous setup

Stress is your daily life ingredient. It cannot be skipped and only can be handled – with care. If you or a loved one is feeling overwhelmed by stress, talk to your doctor. Many symptoms of stress can also be signs of other health problems. Your doctor can evaluate your symptoms and rule out other conditions. If stress is to blame, your doctor can recommend a therapist or counselor to help you better handle your stress.

It is important to recognize when the stress in your life is causing negative consequences. Stress and anxiety can cause mental or emotional symptoms in addition to physical ones. Some of the them are as follows:

– feelings of impending doom
– panic or nervousness, especially in social settings
– difficulty concentrating
– irrational anger
– restlessness

Mental Accounting and Self-Control

Have you ever heard about Mental Accounting and Self Control? This topic has become my personal favorite concept. Richard Thaler’s work on the idea of mental accounting is that people have separate accounts in their mental being for everything and they spend everything from that account treating different things differently. People don’t treat all of their money or time or effort or other resources as if they have one big pool of it. Instead, they have separate mental accounts, and when they spend money or time or effort they keep track of it based on the mental account it came from. These accounts are typically very much individual in nature and majorly based on people’s goals for their own lives.

This concept of Mental Accounting was first named by Richard Thaler (1980). In this theory people code, categorise and evaluate economic outcomes. Mental accounting theorists argue that people group their assets into a number of non-replaceable mental accounts. One detailed application of mental accounting, the behavioural life cycle hypothesis (Shefrin & 1992), theorizes that people mentally frame assets as belonging to either current income, current wealth or future income and this has implications for their behaviour as the accounts are largely non-interchangeable.

Nobel prize for the Richard Thaler’s theory

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Richard Thaler from the University of Chicago and works at the intersection cynosure of psychology and economics. One of the things that Thaler has become known for is the concept of the “nudge,” which is a small change to someone’s environment that can have a big influence on their behavior in economic situations. The most famous example of a nudge is forcing people to “opt out” of default options. Research suggests that people typically stick with the default option on a form. That means policy makers can decide which option they want most people to choose and make that one the default.

Another very important concept used to understand mental accounting is that of modified utility function. There are 2 values attached to any transaction – acquisition value and transaction value.

How Mental Accounting is related to Self Control

The idea is by keeping separate mental accounts, it is easier to engage in self-control. When you start to spend too much against one of your mental accounts, it makes it easier to walk away from new purchases. Many of Thaler’s studies focus on these decision processes like these.

Judging Trustworthiness From a Face?

There has been a research conducted by scientists wherein they have found that our brains are able to judge the trustworthiness of a face even when we cannot consciously see it. This has shown some light on the fact that we make snap judgement about people by just looking at them.

Trust as well see is the fundamental ingredient of the human beings mutual interdependence. As an example on how trust is embedded in our daily life, just look at the following examples:

1. The server brings us a meal in a restaurant, trusting we’ll pay after we’ve eaten it.
2. We put in long hours at work, trusting that our employer will give us our wages at the end of the month.
3. We zip through green lights, trusting that cross traffic will stop at their red lights.

Changes in Trustworthiness perspective

As we grow adult, there is a big change in the way people judge trustworthiness from appearances. These judgements are not known in children. All age groups from 5-7 or 10 years old or adults have rated the trustworthiness of trustworthy and untrustworthy faces with neutral expressions. Ability to evaluate the trustworthiness of faces emerges in childhood, but may not be adult like until 10 years of age.

According to research we have two modes of thinking — a quick, intuitive mode and a slow, rational mode. Each has strengths and weaknesses. When making snap judgments in the social atosphere, the intuition will usually yield better decisions than reason. In all other cases, reason tends to triumph over intuition.

The bottom line for making social judgements – If you do not have any information to rely on, trust your intuition or guts; it will be right more often than not. But keep in mind that your gut is far from foolproof, so don’t ignore contextual cues of untrustworthiness.

How Many Ways Can We Measure Well-Being?

The definition of well being is different for different people. Everyone has a different opinion about it. But most of the people now believe that it is just not material possessions and consumptions. It is more and more related to other aspects as well such as health and good social relations. Can the happiness and its levels in life can be quoted as the fundamentl attribute towards well being? So what is the real measure of well being? Is it happiness, social progress, or combination of all factors of good life?

How to Measure happiness and Well being?

One possibility of finding this is through some opinion survery where the participants respond to simple questions on their degree of happiness or life satisfaction. According to some of these surveys it has been found that money, econimic progress, financial wellbeing has lesser than expected contribution towards satisfaction.

Some Expert opinion about Well Being

Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen has pointed out that knowing well-being on the basis of feelings of satisfaction, pleasure, or happiness has below two issues.

The first is called physical-condition neglect wherein, human beings adapt at least partially to unfavourable situations, meaning the poor and the sick can still be relatively happy.

The second issue is called valuation neglect wherein valuing a life is a reflective activity that should not be reduced to feeling happy or unhappy.

The Office for National Statistics in the UK was asked by the Prime Minister David Cameron to know what is happiness and wellbeing and can they be measured. After six months of project the Jill Matheson, the director of the program reported that happiness is one intangible thing and wellbeing is measurable in the same way our economy is.

Some key aspects for Well Being

Children’s happiness
Economy and inequality
Health
Work/life balance

Harvey Weinstein Proves Sex Addiction Doesn’t Exist

Harvey Weinstein is been in news recently for allegations of sexual misconduct. He is reportedly seeking treatment at a center in Arizona currently which focuses on sex addiction. He has some serious more than 20 allegations of sexual misconduct, harassment and assault. He stated in one of the emails to the CEO’s and directors the following: “All I’m asking is let me take a leave of absence and get into heavy therapy and counseling. Whether it be in a facility or somewhere else, allow me to resurrect myself with a second chance,” Weinstein reportedly wrote. “A lot of the allegations are false as you know but given therapy and counseling as other people have done, I think I’d be able to get there.”

After Weinstein’s resolution for seeking treatment for sex addiction and the corresponding mental illness can wrongly make such abusive actions stand along with sexual addiction for comparison.

It is not only sexual addiction which can be seen as a mental issuess in Weinstein. There could be other mental problems, too, and why not see his primary problem as

• The abuse of power?
• The incredible lack of empathy?
• Self-destructiveness?
• The fear of being insignificant, of not even existing?
• The inability to keep marital vows?
• The lack of integrity?
• The inability to feel sufficiently nourished by an incredible career?
At the end with the Weinstein’s case it is being discussed deeply that there’s no such thing as “sex addiction,”. So what does Weinstein and others suffer from then?

The difference of offending behavior and ‘sex addiction’

Chris Samuels, director of the Sexual Addiction Treatment and Training Institute in New York, stressed that these are two separate issues. “The perpetrator (of sexual misconduct) is opportunistic, often motivated by power dynamics and often self-justifying and remorseless,” she said. “The sex addict, by contrast, is fairly constantly dealing with compulsive urges to act-out as a coping modality, is seeking emotional relief from stress rather than seeking to exercise power over another, and is rarely without shame or guilt about his or her behavior.”

Can You Change Your Personality?

No two humans walking or ever walked on this planet has the same personality and characters. Everyone is very much unique and different than other and often behave in different ways in different situations. There are no strengths and weaknesses or any particular type of personality and there is no idea of ideal personality just like there is no ideal human being to follow in this world.

That being said, it is almost impossible that at some point in life you will not say “I wish I had a different personality”. You might look for becoming more outgoing, more organized, more resistant to issues and concerns, etc. It would not be a big surprise if the most frequent question people ask for while going for personal development classes is “Can I change my personality?”.

Every personality type is unique and has different strengths. Your basic personality type cannot change, however, you can train yourself and change some of the aspects of your personality that you strive for changing or taking different course in life. Such a change in life is possible either by change in environment or your own willpower.

What the Science thinks about changing Personality

Scientists believe that personality traits not only determine what we are like, but may also impact our social relationships, work experiences, mental and physical health, and other aspects of our life. But a recently published study suggests that our characteristic personality type may be more changeable than we think.

According to researchers at the University of Chicago, who analyzed over two hundred studies to see how different types of psychotherapy and pharmaceutical drug treatments impact personality traits for people with mental-health issues, stated that personality traits are often measured and it is possible to observe shifts in them. These shifts in personality seemed to reflect actual changes in general traits, not just a temporary change in mood, such as the alleviation of depression or anxiety.

What we can do to change the personality?

The first step to making real and lasting changes in personality is to be critical of any self-development program that boasts instant, or radical change. As it takes many years to develop patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, it will take some time in the time of years to to alter them.

Are you having Self Control over yourself?

Self control is defined by the experts as the impulse control or the ability to delay displaying gratification and controlling emotions. According to the prominent university research, if the person has a better self control, then it leads to better health and prosperity further discouraging crime and substance abuse. It is a vital ingredient in day to day behavior for achieving desired goals and remove all the harmful impulses or emotions.

Questions To Ask Yourself

Do you want to know where you stand towards the self control aspect and how do you think it is going to impact your life? Try answering these questions and know how control you have over yourself?

Are you Emotionally Stable – Do you have generally stable and peaceful mood which does not change drastically within span of hours or minutes, until and unless there is any reason/event for such change?

Are you feeling stable with respect to Self-Image & Life Goals – Do you know who you are and where you are going in your life? Are you certain about your position, standing and journey in life?

Do you have a stable personal relationship – Are you in a stable relationship and you are living peacefully in that relation?

Do you exhibit caution while taking important decisions in your life? – Do you think carefully before saying something or taking some action?

Do you follow genuineness in your day to day life? – Do you have theatrical or attention-seeking ways of speaking and acting?

Do you maintain Chasity in your like and avoid having casual sex (“one night stands”)?

Top tips to Live Your Life Well like a Dream come true

You might have bumped into the articles and theories around how to keep yourself happy and live a life well. These tips are scattered around all subject areas and do not divulge the top of these tips to make you live happier and healthier for years. There are many such tools and tips which can make you feel stronger and more hopeful.

1. Connect with others
2. Stay positive
3. Get physically active
4. Help others
5. Get enough sleep
6. Create joy and satisfaction
7. Eat well
8. Take care of your spirit
9. Deal better with hard times
10. Get professional help if you need it

Why Mental Health Matters for all of us?

Does this question poses any dilemma in your mind thinking that mental health matters only to people with mental illness? Well the answer is mental health is not dependant on you being a patient of mental health.

Here are some of the kep benefits of putting a check on your mental well being and pay attention:

1.You can keep your emotions, thoughts and attitudes under check to affect your energy, productivity and overall health in positive manner.
2. Good mental health strengthens your ability to cope with everyday hassles and more serious crises and challenges.
3. It is essential to creating the life you want.
4. Same as you brush teeth for healthy teeth and gums, take bath for proper hygiene; similarly take steps to promote your mental health. Start with the first step to keep stress under check.

Ten Things You Can Do for Your Mental Health

Each and every one of the us are important and so our thoughts in their individual way are important. We need to take care of our mental health along with the physical health. There has to be a balance which is needed to keep things under positive routine. Follow these tips to help find the right balance in your life.

We should be Valuing ourself – You should be treating yourself with kindness and respect. You should not opt for self-criticism, since it tend to take things in wrong direction. Take your timeout for hobbies and favorite projects, Spend time for something like crossword puzzle, planting in garden, dance lessons, learn to play musical instrument or learn another language. Challenges as well as satisfaction you get by overcoming these hobby related challenges gives greater sense of self respect and value.

Start taking god care of your body since healthy mind resides in a healthy body. Take some of the important steps such as eat nutritious meals, say no to cigarettes, drink lots of water, do regular exercise and get enough rest or sleep. Researchers have time and again proven that sleep deprivation is one of the leading cause of people becoming depressed or mentally unfit.

Always be in company of good and positive people. You can just surround yourself with people who take life as it comes and live it to the fullest. According to research in different universities across locations, people with strong family or social connections are healthier than those who lack a family support network. If being with family is a challenge, then you should participate in activities where you can meet new people, such in a club, class or support group.

Give your services and time for someone else. You can volunteer your time and energy to do something for others which can be tangible for helping others in need.

Stress is present in all phases for all types of people. The only solution to stress is to learn how to deal with it. You can start by practicing good stress coping skills like following One-Minute Stress Strategies, do Tai Chi, exercise, take a nature walk, or write a journal Remember that a good laugh can boost your immune system and reduce stress.

Empty your mind from negative thought and make it free from noise. You can do this for meditation, mindfulness and prayers. It can help improve your state of mind and outlook on life.

Expectation, whether from self or from others are doomed to fail someday. The only solution to this common issue is to set realistic and acheivable goals. Whether the situation is academic, professional or personal, write simple steps which can make you realize your goals. Try not to over-schedule. Progressing towards your goals make you get the satisfaction and determine your own self-worth.

Keep changing your routine things to ensure any monotonous fatigue creeping in your mind. You should break the monotony and perk up a tedious schedule. Someday, try to change your jogging route, take a unplanned road trip, choose different park for your daily meetup, etc.

Say a big NO to alcohol and drugs. These things can only aggravate problems and gives no relief, whether temporary or permanant.

Reach out for help when you think you have some trouble in your daily life and you have tried some of the above tips without remarkable changes. Asking for help is a sign of strength and it is in no sense a type of weakness. In order to lead a full, rewarding life, we should take advice and help from the experts and other people with similar experiences. At the end we are the social animals and the only way to solve our problems is to discuss and seek help.