I wrote the first entry in my 'Gratitude diary' on 12th July, 2002, and that was a special day! I had read about the value of writing things one feels grateful about, and so started my diary. When I read these entries, it recreates that time and warms my heart. And then I chanced upon this piece from the scriptures, which so clearly emphasizes the virtue of being grateful. So here is the story:
Long ago a bird was living in a desert and its living conditions were awful; there was no green tree and water. It was very sick, with no feathers, nothing to eat and drink and no shelter to live, so he kept on cursing his life all the time. The bird was perpetually stressed because of the lack of food and shelter from the scorching sun in the desert. One day an Angel was crossing from that desert. The bird stopped the Angel and inquired, ”Where are you going?” Angel replied ”I am going to meet God". So the bird asked the angel, "Please ask God when my suffering will come to an end?" Angel said,” Sure, I will!' and bid a good bye to the bird.
Angel reached the God’s place and shared the message of bird with Him. Angel told Him how pathetic the condition of the bird was and inquired when the suffering of the bird was going to end ? God replied, "For the next seven life times the bird has to suffer like this, no happiness till then". Angel said, "When bird will hear this he will get disheartened. Could You suggest any solution for this?"
God told him to recite this mantra ‘Thank you God for everything’.
Angel met the bird again on the way back and delivered the message of God to the bird. After seven days the angel was passing again from the same path and saw that bird was so happy. Its feathers grew up on his body, a small plant grew up in the desert area, a small pond of water was also there, and the bird was singing and dancing cheerfully. Angel was astonished how it happened! God had told that for seven life times there was no happiness for the bird. With this question in mind he went to visit God.
Angel asked his query. Then God replied,"Yes it was true that there was no happiness for the bird for seven life times but it was because of the bird reciting the mantra 'Thank you God for everything’ in every situation. When bird fell down on the hot sand, it said 'Thank you God for everything'; when it could not fly. it said 'Thank you God for everything'. So whatever the situation was, the bird kept on repeating 'Thank you God for everything' and therefore the seven life times karma got dissolved in seven days.
When I read this story it further guided me towards the power of gratefulness. I felt a tremendous shift in my way of feeling, thinking, accepting and viewing the life situations. I adopted this mantra in my life whatever the situation I faced, I started reciting this mantra ‘ Thank you God for everything’. It helped me to shift my view from what I did not have to what I have in my life. This simple mantra really left a deep impression and I started feeling how blessed I am!
Thursday 10 September 2020
Sunday 6 September 2020
What about the 15-hour working week, asks an anthropologist?
Last Monday, an article was published in The Straits Times (31st Aug, 2020) by an anthropologist, James Suzman, titled "The 300,000-year case for the 15-hour working week". He makes a strong argument that to understand the future of work, we need to look deep into our past. The article mentions some things from our evolution, which compelled me to read it again, and it seemed to make so much sense. I am putting the main points from this article below, which I think we all need to pay attention to, and do something about it. In his words:
For three decades, I have been documenting the lives of the Ju/'hoansi people of the north-western Kalahari, and their often traumatic encounter with modernity. The Ju/'hoansi are perhaps the best known of the handful of societies who still sustained themselves by hunting and gathering well into the 20th century. And to them, very little about the relentlessly expanding global economy makes sense.
Why, they asked me, did government officials who sat in air-conditioned offices drinking coffee and chatting all day long get paid so much more than the young men they sent out to dig ditches? Why, when people were paid for their work, did they still go back the following day rather than enjoy the fruits of their labour? And why did people work so hard to acquire more wealth than they could ever possibly need or enjoy?
It was hardly a surprise that the Ju/'hoansi asked these questions. By the time I started working with them, it was already widely accepted that they were the best modern exemplars of how all of our hunting and gathering ancestors must have lived. But the longer I stayed with them, the more I became convinced that understanding their economic approach not only offered insights into the past - it also provided clues as to how we in the industrialised world might organise ourselves in an increasingly automated future.
Seldom have these lessons seemed more urgent. As jobless numbers surge as a result of Covid-19's spread, practices once seen as fringe are accepted as an almost inevitable part of the new world order.
Governments are talking up their willingness to embrace revolutionary economic vaccines, from state-sponsored furlough schemes to giving us cash to eat in restaurants - anything to get people back to work.
The same spirit infused pre-pandemic debates about the future of work, which focused mainly on concerns arising out of the relentless cannibalisation of the employment market by ever more productive automated systems and artificial intelligence.
WHAT IS WORK FOR?
It is easy to see why this generates such anxiety. The work we do also defines who we are; it determines our future prospects, dictates where and with whom we spend most of our time and moulds our values.
In the early 20th century, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030, capital accumulation, improvements in productivity and technological advances would have ushered in an age in which no one besides a few “purposive moneymakers” worked more than 15 hours in a week. Yet, says the writer, most of us now work longer hours than Keynes’ contemporaries did.
So much so that we sing the praises of strivers and decry the laziness of shirkers, while the goal of universal employment remains a mantra for politicians of all stripes.
But it wasn't meant to be like this. Ever since the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, people have been tantalised by the prospect of a future in which automation progressively liberates ordinary folk from dreary work.
In 1776, the founding father of modern economics, Adam Smith, sang the praises of the "very pretty machines" that he believed would in time "facilitate and abridge labour"; in the 20th century, Bertrand Russell described how, in a soon-to-be automated world, "ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting" and even lose their "taste for war".
Russell was hopeful that this change would happen in his lifetime. "The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organisation of production," he observed in 1932, "it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world."
And from the turn of the 20th century to the onset of World War II, weekly working hours in industrial countries did indeed reduce steadily.
The economist John Maynard Keynes, Russell's contemporary, was of a similar mind. He predicted that by 2030, capital accumulation, improvements in productivity and technological advances would have solved the "economic problem" and ushered in an age in which no one besides a few "purposive moneymakers" worked more than 15 hours in a week.
He also took the view that the metallic hum of automated production lines was the death knell of orthodox economics. The institutions and structures that organise our formal economies are predicated squarely on the assumption of scarcity: that although people's desires are limitless, the resources available to satisfy their needs and wants are not. In the automated future, he believed, absolute scarcity would be a thing of the past, and as a result, we would cheerfully discard our by-then obsolete economic infrastructure and working culture.
Hindsight tells us they were wrong. We passed the thresholds Keynes argued would need to be met to achieve a "golden age of leisure" decades ago. Yet most of us now work longer hours than Keynes' and Russell's contemporaries did. And as automation and Covid-19 corrode the employment market, we remain fixated on finding new work for people to do - even if that work often seems to have no point other than to keep the wheels of commerce turning and pushing growth back into the black.
BORN TO WORK
In a very fundamental way, we are born to work. All living organisms seek, capture and expend energy on growing, staying alive and reproducing. Doing this elemental work is one of the things that distinguishes living organisms such as bacteria, trees and people from dead things, like rocks and stars. But even among living organisms, humans are conspicuous for the work they do.
Most organisms are "purposive" when they expend energy, meaning that while it is possible for an external observer to determine a purpose to their actions, there is little reason to believe that they set about their work with a clear vision of what they want to achieve in their minds.
Humans, by contrast, are uniquely purposeful. When we go to work, we usually do so for more reasons than just to capture energy. Plotting our species' evolutionary trajectory reveals that over thousands of generations, our bodies and minds have been shaped progressively by different kinds of work our various evolutionary ancestors did.
It also shows that natural selection moulded us into master generalists, supremely adapted to acquiring an astonishing range of skills during our lifetimes. Charting our evolutionary history also suggests that for most of history, the more purposeful and accomplished at securing energy our evolutionary ancestors became - by virtue of the simple tools they made and eventually, perhaps half a million years ago, by their mastery of fire - the less time and energy they spent on the food quest. Instead, they spent time on other purposeful activities such as making music, exploring, decorating their bodies and socialising.
Indeed, it is possible that our ancestors would never have developed language were it not for the free time won by fire and tools because, like our cousins the gorillas, they would have had to spend up to 11 hours a day laboriously foraging, chewing and processing fibrous, hard-to-digest foods.
New genomic and archaeological data now suggests that Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago. But it is a challenge to infer how they lived from this data alone.
HOW HUNTER-GATHERERS LIVED
The most famous of these studies dealt with the Ju/'hoansi, a society descended from a continuous line of hunter-gatherers who have been living largely isolated in southern Africa since the dawn of our species. And it turned established ideas of social evolution on their head by showing that our hunter-gatherer ancestors almost certainly did not endure "nasty, brutish and short" lives.
The Ju/'hoansi were revealed to be well fed, content and longer-lived than people in many agricultural societies, and by rarely having to work more than 15 hours per week had plenty of time and energy to devote to leisure. Subsequent research produced a picture of how differently Ju/'hoansi and other small-scale forager societies organised themselves economically.
It revealed, for instance, the extent to which their economy sustained societies that were at once highly individualistic and fiercely egalitarian, and in which the principal redistributive mechanism was "demand sharing" - a system that gave everyone the absolute right to effectively tax anyone else of any surpluses they had. It also showed how, in these societies, individual attempts to either accumulate or monopolise resources or power were met with derision and ridicule.
Most importantly, though, it raised startling questions about how we organise our own economies, not least because it showed that, contrary to the assumptions about human nature that underwrite our economic institutions, foragers were neither perennially preoccupied with scarcity nor engaged in a perpetual competition for resources.
AGRICULTURAL ROOTS OF SISYPHEAN STRUGGLE
For while the problem of scarcity assumes that we are doomed to live in a Sisyphean purgatory, always working to bridge the gap between our insatiable desires and our limited means, foragers worked so little because they had few wants, which they could almost always easily satisfy. Rather than being preoccupied with scarcity, they had faith in the providence of their desert environment and in their ability to exploit this.
If we measure the success of a civilisation by its endurance over time, then the Ju/'hoansi - and other southern African foragers - are exponents of the most successful and sustainable economy in all of human history. By a huge margin.
These days, Ju/'hoansi do not have much cause to celebrate this. Largely dispossessed of their lands over the past five decades, most scrape a living in shanties on the fringes of Namibian towns and in "resettlement areas" where they do battle with hunger and poverty-related diseases. Unable to secure jobs in a capital-intensive economy where youth unemployment hovers just below 50 per cent, they depend on begging, casual labour - often in return for maize porridge or alcohol - and government aid.
If our preoccupation with scarcity and hard work is not part of human nature but a cultural artefact, then where did it originate?
There is now good empirical evidence to show that our embrace of agriculture, beginning a little over 10,000 years ago, was the genitor of not just our belief in the virtues of hard work but, alongside it, the basic assumptions about human nature that underwrite the problem of scarcity and, in turn, the institutions, structures and norms that shape our economic - and social - lives today.
It is no coincidence that our concepts of growth, interest and debt as well as much of our economic vocabulary - including words such as "fee", "capital" and "pecuniary" - have their roots in the soils of the first great agricultural civilisations.
Farming was much more productive than foraging, but it placed an unprecedented premium on human labour. And no matter how favourable the elements, farmers were subject to an unrelenting annual cycle that ensured that most of the efforts only ever yielded rewards in the future. More than this, as any farmer will tell you, the fates will punish those who put off an urgent job like mending a fence or sowing a field in a timely fashion and reward those who go the extra mile to make contingencies for the unexpected.
Were Russell still alive today, he would probably be happy to learn that there is good evidence that our attitudes to work are a cultural byproduct of the miseries endured in early agricultural societies.
REASONS FOR REVIEWING WORK CULTURE
Yet there are many good reasons to revisit our working culture, not the least of which being that for most people, work brings few rewards beyond a payslip. As the pollster Gallup showed in its momentous survey of working life in 155 countries published in 2017, only one in 10 western Europeans described themselves as engaged by their jobs. This is perhaps unsurprising. After all, in another survey conducted by YouGov in 2015, 37 per cent of working British adults said their jobs were not making any meaningful contribution to the world.
Even putting these facts aside, there is a far more urgent reason to transform our approach to work.
Bearing in mind that at its most fundamental, work is an energy transaction, and that there is an absolute correspondence between how much work we collectively do and our energy footprint, there are good grounds to argue that working less - and consuming less - will not just be good for our souls but may also be essential to ensuring the sustainability of our habitat.
The economic trauma induced by the pandemic has provided us with an opportunity to reimagine our relationship with work and to re-evaluate what jobs we consider really important. Few now would be willing to stick their necks out to argue in favour of an economy that incentivises our best and brightest to aspire to be derivatives traders rather than epidemiologists or nurses, and once-fringe ideas such as the provision of universal basic income or the formalisation of a four-day week have flourished.
And more than all this, the pandemic has also reminded us that when it comes to how we work, we are far more adaptable than we often realise.
For three decades, I have been documenting the lives of the Ju/'hoansi people of the north-western Kalahari, and their often traumatic encounter with modernity. The Ju/'hoansi are perhaps the best known of the handful of societies who still sustained themselves by hunting and gathering well into the 20th century. And to them, very little about the relentlessly expanding global economy makes sense.
Why, they asked me, did government officials who sat in air-conditioned offices drinking coffee and chatting all day long get paid so much more than the young men they sent out to dig ditches? Why, when people were paid for their work, did they still go back the following day rather than enjoy the fruits of their labour? And why did people work so hard to acquire more wealth than they could ever possibly need or enjoy?
It was hardly a surprise that the Ju/'hoansi asked these questions. By the time I started working with them, it was already widely accepted that they were the best modern exemplars of how all of our hunting and gathering ancestors must have lived. But the longer I stayed with them, the more I became convinced that understanding their economic approach not only offered insights into the past - it also provided clues as to how we in the industrialised world might organise ourselves in an increasingly automated future.
Seldom have these lessons seemed more urgent. As jobless numbers surge as a result of Covid-19's spread, practices once seen as fringe are accepted as an almost inevitable part of the new world order.
Governments are talking up their willingness to embrace revolutionary economic vaccines, from state-sponsored furlough schemes to giving us cash to eat in restaurants - anything to get people back to work.
The same spirit infused pre-pandemic debates about the future of work, which focused mainly on concerns arising out of the relentless cannibalisation of the employment market by ever more productive automated systems and artificial intelligence.
WHAT IS WORK FOR?
It is easy to see why this generates such anxiety. The work we do also defines who we are; it determines our future prospects, dictates where and with whom we spend most of our time and moulds our values.
In the early 20th century, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030, capital accumulation, improvements in productivity and technological advances would have ushered in an age in which no one besides a few “purposive moneymakers” worked more than 15 hours in a week. Yet, says the writer, most of us now work longer hours than Keynes’ contemporaries did.
So much so that we sing the praises of strivers and decry the laziness of shirkers, while the goal of universal employment remains a mantra for politicians of all stripes.
But it wasn't meant to be like this. Ever since the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, people have been tantalised by the prospect of a future in which automation progressively liberates ordinary folk from dreary work.
In 1776, the founding father of modern economics, Adam Smith, sang the praises of the "very pretty machines" that he believed would in time "facilitate and abridge labour"; in the 20th century, Bertrand Russell described how, in a soon-to-be automated world, "ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting" and even lose their "taste for war".
Russell was hopeful that this change would happen in his lifetime. "The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organisation of production," he observed in 1932, "it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world."
And from the turn of the 20th century to the onset of World War II, weekly working hours in industrial countries did indeed reduce steadily.
The economist John Maynard Keynes, Russell's contemporary, was of a similar mind. He predicted that by 2030, capital accumulation, improvements in productivity and technological advances would have solved the "economic problem" and ushered in an age in which no one besides a few "purposive moneymakers" worked more than 15 hours in a week.
He also took the view that the metallic hum of automated production lines was the death knell of orthodox economics. The institutions and structures that organise our formal economies are predicated squarely on the assumption of scarcity: that although people's desires are limitless, the resources available to satisfy their needs and wants are not. In the automated future, he believed, absolute scarcity would be a thing of the past, and as a result, we would cheerfully discard our by-then obsolete economic infrastructure and working culture.
Hindsight tells us they were wrong. We passed the thresholds Keynes argued would need to be met to achieve a "golden age of leisure" decades ago. Yet most of us now work longer hours than Keynes' and Russell's contemporaries did. And as automation and Covid-19 corrode the employment market, we remain fixated on finding new work for people to do - even if that work often seems to have no point other than to keep the wheels of commerce turning and pushing growth back into the black.
BORN TO WORK
In a very fundamental way, we are born to work. All living organisms seek, capture and expend energy on growing, staying alive and reproducing. Doing this elemental work is one of the things that distinguishes living organisms such as bacteria, trees and people from dead things, like rocks and stars. But even among living organisms, humans are conspicuous for the work they do.
Most organisms are "purposive" when they expend energy, meaning that while it is possible for an external observer to determine a purpose to their actions, there is little reason to believe that they set about their work with a clear vision of what they want to achieve in their minds.
Humans, by contrast, are uniquely purposeful. When we go to work, we usually do so for more reasons than just to capture energy. Plotting our species' evolutionary trajectory reveals that over thousands of generations, our bodies and minds have been shaped progressively by different kinds of work our various evolutionary ancestors did.
It also shows that natural selection moulded us into master generalists, supremely adapted to acquiring an astonishing range of skills during our lifetimes. Charting our evolutionary history also suggests that for most of history, the more purposeful and accomplished at securing energy our evolutionary ancestors became - by virtue of the simple tools they made and eventually, perhaps half a million years ago, by their mastery of fire - the less time and energy they spent on the food quest. Instead, they spent time on other purposeful activities such as making music, exploring, decorating their bodies and socialising.
Indeed, it is possible that our ancestors would never have developed language were it not for the free time won by fire and tools because, like our cousins the gorillas, they would have had to spend up to 11 hours a day laboriously foraging, chewing and processing fibrous, hard-to-digest foods.
New genomic and archaeological data now suggests that Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago. But it is a challenge to infer how they lived from this data alone.
HOW HUNTER-GATHERERS LIVED
The most famous of these studies dealt with the Ju/'hoansi, a society descended from a continuous line of hunter-gatherers who have been living largely isolated in southern Africa since the dawn of our species. And it turned established ideas of social evolution on their head by showing that our hunter-gatherer ancestors almost certainly did not endure "nasty, brutish and short" lives.
The Ju/'hoansi were revealed to be well fed, content and longer-lived than people in many agricultural societies, and by rarely having to work more than 15 hours per week had plenty of time and energy to devote to leisure. Subsequent research produced a picture of how differently Ju/'hoansi and other small-scale forager societies organised themselves economically.
It revealed, for instance, the extent to which their economy sustained societies that were at once highly individualistic and fiercely egalitarian, and in which the principal redistributive mechanism was "demand sharing" - a system that gave everyone the absolute right to effectively tax anyone else of any surpluses they had. It also showed how, in these societies, individual attempts to either accumulate or monopolise resources or power were met with derision and ridicule.
Most importantly, though, it raised startling questions about how we organise our own economies, not least because it showed that, contrary to the assumptions about human nature that underwrite our economic institutions, foragers were neither perennially preoccupied with scarcity nor engaged in a perpetual competition for resources.
AGRICULTURAL ROOTS OF SISYPHEAN STRUGGLE
For while the problem of scarcity assumes that we are doomed to live in a Sisyphean purgatory, always working to bridge the gap between our insatiable desires and our limited means, foragers worked so little because they had few wants, which they could almost always easily satisfy. Rather than being preoccupied with scarcity, they had faith in the providence of their desert environment and in their ability to exploit this.
If we measure the success of a civilisation by its endurance over time, then the Ju/'hoansi - and other southern African foragers - are exponents of the most successful and sustainable economy in all of human history. By a huge margin.
These days, Ju/'hoansi do not have much cause to celebrate this. Largely dispossessed of their lands over the past five decades, most scrape a living in shanties on the fringes of Namibian towns and in "resettlement areas" where they do battle with hunger and poverty-related diseases. Unable to secure jobs in a capital-intensive economy where youth unemployment hovers just below 50 per cent, they depend on begging, casual labour - often in return for maize porridge or alcohol - and government aid.
If our preoccupation with scarcity and hard work is not part of human nature but a cultural artefact, then where did it originate?
There is now good empirical evidence to show that our embrace of agriculture, beginning a little over 10,000 years ago, was the genitor of not just our belief in the virtues of hard work but, alongside it, the basic assumptions about human nature that underwrite the problem of scarcity and, in turn, the institutions, structures and norms that shape our economic - and social - lives today.
It is no coincidence that our concepts of growth, interest and debt as well as much of our economic vocabulary - including words such as "fee", "capital" and "pecuniary" - have their roots in the soils of the first great agricultural civilisations.
Farming was much more productive than foraging, but it placed an unprecedented premium on human labour. And no matter how favourable the elements, farmers were subject to an unrelenting annual cycle that ensured that most of the efforts only ever yielded rewards in the future. More than this, as any farmer will tell you, the fates will punish those who put off an urgent job like mending a fence or sowing a field in a timely fashion and reward those who go the extra mile to make contingencies for the unexpected.
Were Russell still alive today, he would probably be happy to learn that there is good evidence that our attitudes to work are a cultural byproduct of the miseries endured in early agricultural societies.
REASONS FOR REVIEWING WORK CULTURE
Yet there are many good reasons to revisit our working culture, not the least of which being that for most people, work brings few rewards beyond a payslip. As the pollster Gallup showed in its momentous survey of working life in 155 countries published in 2017, only one in 10 western Europeans described themselves as engaged by their jobs. This is perhaps unsurprising. After all, in another survey conducted by YouGov in 2015, 37 per cent of working British adults said their jobs were not making any meaningful contribution to the world.
Even putting these facts aside, there is a far more urgent reason to transform our approach to work.
Bearing in mind that at its most fundamental, work is an energy transaction, and that there is an absolute correspondence between how much work we collectively do and our energy footprint, there are good grounds to argue that working less - and consuming less - will not just be good for our souls but may also be essential to ensuring the sustainability of our habitat.
The economic trauma induced by the pandemic has provided us with an opportunity to reimagine our relationship with work and to re-evaluate what jobs we consider really important. Few now would be willing to stick their necks out to argue in favour of an economy that incentivises our best and brightest to aspire to be derivatives traders rather than epidemiologists or nurses, and once-fringe ideas such as the provision of universal basic income or the formalisation of a four-day week have flourished.
And more than all this, the pandemic has also reminded us that when it comes to how we work, we are far more adaptable than we often realise.
After reading the article, what thoughts you have? Do we need to change our policies and work towards a shorter working week? Will that be beneficial for everyone
Tuesday 7 July 2020
How positivity can transform us
I was truly impacted while reading this article titled "Are You Getting Enough Positivity in Your Diet?"by Barbara Fredrickson who is the Kenan Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and also the author of "Positivity'. Hence I thought of sharing parts of it with you. Here it is, in her words:
Imagine you’re a water lily. It’s early dawn and your petals are closed in around your face. If you can see anything at all, it’s just a little spot of sunlight. But as the sun rises in the sky, things begin to change. Your blinders around your face begin to open and your world quite literally expands. You can see more. Your world is larger.
Just as the warmth of sunlight opens flowers, the warmth of positivity opens our minds and hearts. It changes our visual perspective at a really basic level, along with our ability to see our common humanity with others. We know this because we’ve done studies that show this.
When people experience positive emotions, they have a wider awareness -- which may explain why people have a better memory for peripheral details when they’re remembering episodes that were positive. Positive emotions quite literally help us see more possibilities. And there are lots of benefits that flow from this:
- People are more creative when they’re experiencing positive emotions; when solving a problem, they come up with more ideas of what they might do next. This enhanced creativity has been directly linked to having a wider awareness.
- People are more likely to be resilient. I have conducted a whole line of research showing that people are able to bounce back more quickly from adversity when they’re experiencing positive emotions.
- Kids’ academic performance improves. Research has shown that kids do better on math tests or other tests if they’re just asked to sit and think of a positive memory before they take the test.
- There are medical benefits. Research has shown that doctors make better medical decisions when they’re given a bag of candy—a really small way of inducing positive emotions. Keep that in mind the next time you go to your doctor’s office!
- Positive emotions make us more socially connected to others, even across groups. They help us see the universal qualities we share with others, not our differences. And other experiments show that if you induce positive emotions, people are more trusting and come to better win-win situations in negotiations.
So positive emotions don’t just help us see the glass half full—that’s true, but it’s not the whole story. They also help us see larger forms of interconnection. They help us see the big picture.
Positive emotions transform us
The second core truth about positive emotions is that they transform us for the better—they bring out the best in us.
Positive emotions transform us
The second core truth about positive emotions is that they transform us for the better—they bring out the best in us.
Now one interesting fact about all living things is that scientists estimate that, on average, we replace one percent of our cells each day. That’s another one percent tomorrow, about 30 percent by next month, and by next season, 100 percent of our cells from today—that’s one way of looking at it. So maybe it’s no coincidence that it takes three months or so to learn a new habit or to make a lifestyle change; maybe we need to be teaching our new cells because we can’t teach an old cell new tricks.
But one of the things I think is even more exciting is that the latest science suggests that the pace of cell renewal and the form of cell renewal doesn’t just follow some predetermined DNA script. Our emotions affect that level of cellular change. What this suggests is that if we increase our daily diet of positive emotions, we broaden our awareness over time and change who we become in the future.
With this in mind, I was inspired by some of the newest research on meditation to look into how people might use meditation to elevate their basic levels of positive emotion—the amount of positive emotions they feel day-in, day-out.
In particular, I looked at a form of meditation called loving-kindness meditation, sometimes called metta, which asks people to take that warm, tender feeling they already have toward a loved one and learn to generate it toward other people, ranging from themselves to people with whom they have difficulties and eventually to all sentient beings on Earth.
People in my studies were novice meditators, but as they learned loving-kindness meditation over the course of eight weeks, their daily levels of positive emotions subtly shifted upwards. And this boost in positive emotions helped them build some important resources. One of those resources was mindfulness, their ability to stay in the present moment and maintain awareness of their thoughts, feelings, and surroundings. Also, their close and trusting relationships with others improved from the time they started learning meditation to a few weeks after the training ended.
We also saw improvements in people’s resilience—their ability to bounce back from difficulties and effectively manage the challenges they encountered—and reductions in aches and pains and other signs of physical illness. These results suggest that if we increase our daily diet of positive emotions, we emerge three months later as more resilient, more socially connected versions of ourselves.
The positivity ratio
So positive emotions can clearly carry some profound benefits. But how much positivity do we need in our lives to reap these benefits—how much is enough?
Our research has concluded that a ratio of at least three-to-one -- three positive emotions for every negative emotion -- serves as a tipping point, which will help determine whether you languish in life, barely holding on, or flourish, living a life ripe with possibility, remarkably resilient to hard times. Ratios of about two-to-one are what most of us experience on a daily basis; people who suffer from depression and other emotional disorders are down near one-to-one or lower.
It’s important to note that the ratio is not three-to-zero. This is not about eliminating all negative emotions. Part of this prescription is the idea that negative emotions are actually necessary.
Consider a sailboat metaphor. Rising from the sailboat is the enormous mast, which allows the sail to catch the wind and give the boat momentum. But below the waterline is the keel, which can weigh tons. You can see the mast as positivity and the keel down below as negativity. If you sail, you know that even though it’s the mast that holds the sail, you can’t sail without the keel; the boat would just drift around or tip over. The negativity, the keel, is what allows the boat to stay on course and manageable.
When I once shared this metaphor with an audience, a gentleman said, "You know, when the keel matters most is when you’re sailing upwind, when you’re facing difficulty." Experiencing and expressing negative emotions is really part of the process for flourishing, even -- or especially -- during hard times, as they help us stay in touch with the reality of the difficulties we’re facing.
So this idea of the ratio points out where we should be. But how do we get there? What are the best ways to foster positive emotions and achieve this ratio?
Here’s my advice: If you make your motto, “Be positive,” that will actually backfire. It leads to a toxic insincerity that’s shown to be corrosive to our own bodies, to our own cardiovascular system. It’s toxic for our relationships with other people. I think we all know that person who’s trying to pump too much sunshine into our lives. I think that’s the biggest danger of positive psychology: that people come out of it with this zeal to be positive in a way that’s not genuine and heartfelt.
One of the things that I think is very useful is to keep in mind that there’s reciprocal relationship between the mindset of positivity and positive emotions—a mindset of positivity begets positive emotions, and positive emotions beget positivity. So if we lightly create the mindset of positivity, from that positive emotions will follow.
How to foster that mindset? It helps to be open, be appreciative, be curious, be kind, and above all, be real and sincere. From these strategies spring positive emotions.
Now some of these are pretty self-explanatory, but I do want to explain what “be open” means as a way to increase your positive emotions. The reason that this works is that so often we can be preoccupied worrying about the future, ruminating about the past so we’re completely oblivious to the goodness that surrounds us in the present moment. But when we’re really open to our current circumstances, those sources of goodness are so much easier to draw from, and they yield positive emotions.
Another thing, I think, that can be really useful is to step on the positivity scale frequently and track your positivity ratio. I think knowing one day’s positivity ratio may not be too informative. But if you take this short measure at the end of every day for two weeks, you could probably get a sense of what your life is like right now. Then continue to use it as you continue to make changes in your life, as you introduce more opportunities to be grateful, or start a meditation practice, or start volunteering and giving more frequently, and then track your positivity ratio and see if it changes—see how those steps make a difference in your life.
Just as a nutritionist will ask people to keep track of their physical activity and their caloric intake as a way to meet their health and fitness goals, this is a way to keep track of your daily emotional diet so you can meet your well-being goals.
I want to close with a famous Native American story. It goes like this: One evening, an old Cherokee tells his grandson that inside all people, a battle goes on between two wolves. One wolf is negativity: anger, sadness, stress, contempt, disgust, fear, embarrassment, guilt, shame, and hate. The other is positivity: joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and above all, love.
The grandson thinks about this for a minute, then asks his grandfather, “Well, which wolf wins?”
The grandfather replies, “The one you feed.”
Happy reading everyone, and re-reading.... I hope you would have enjoyed this article as I enjoyed it!
Sunday 12 April 2020
Learning requires three partners
Learning requires effort. Good education takes three partners - student, teacher and parents. While the student's main responsibility is to study well and realize his potential, and the teacher's duty is to teach effectively so that the students do well in life, then what is the parents’ role? What can a mother or father do to help her/his child perform better?
Children spend 16 to 18 hours at home and only 6 to 8 hours at school but the role and duties of teachers and schools are overemphasized. Early formative years of a child are the most impressionable period. Parents are the first and foremost teachers of children, who ‘teach’ not only by telling but also by practical examples. Also teachers keep changing but parents are constant companions. The parents' role in the upbringing and education of a child is immense. As a lecturer, I used to think that parents should be just seen occasionally and that's all. But now that I have raised two children of my own, my attitude has changed. I am convinced that if parents take an active part in their child's education and development, it makes an enormous difference.
In the triangle of child, parents and teacher, if there is some communication or relationship problem at any of the three links, the child's performance cannot improve at school. Education is the way students are prepared, intellectually and morally, to survive the waves of change that sweep the world. The purpose of education is to enable young people to become more knowledgeable and adaptable, to be well-rounded and civilized adults.
Parents’ role is to keep the balance right and not push the children and create a hothouse climate. Besides, parents must play a big part by supporting their child's search for knowledge in different ways. For instance, if your child is in junior college doing A-levels and wants to study arts or music instead of medicine or accountancy for a degree, think again before you give your judgement. Times are changing and you, as parents, have a great responsibility to encourage and support your child in letting him pursue his interests in a particular field.
Children spend 16 to 18 hours at home and only 6 to 8 hours at school but the role and duties of teachers and schools are overemphasized. Early formative years of a child are the most impressionable period. Parents are the first and foremost teachers of children, who ‘teach’ not only by telling but also by practical examples. Also teachers keep changing but parents are constant companions. The parents' role in the upbringing and education of a child is immense. As a lecturer, I used to think that parents should be just seen occasionally and that's all. But now that I have raised two children of my own, my attitude has changed. I am convinced that if parents take an active part in their child's education and development, it makes an enormous difference.
In the triangle of child, parents and teacher, if there is some communication or relationship problem at any of the three links, the child's performance cannot improve at school. Education is the way students are prepared, intellectually and morally, to survive the waves of change that sweep the world. The purpose of education is to enable young people to become more knowledgeable and adaptable, to be well-rounded and civilized adults.
Parents’ role is to keep the balance right and not push the children and create a hothouse climate. Besides, parents must play a big part by supporting their child's search for knowledge in different ways. For instance, if your child is in junior college doing A-levels and wants to study arts or music instead of medicine or accountancy for a degree, think again before you give your judgement. Times are changing and you, as parents, have a great responsibility to encourage and support your child in letting him pursue his interests in a particular field.
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