Clif > Books: health-and-selfhelp‎ (40)

Nonobvious ways to become a better conversationalist.
1. Treat attention as an on/off switch, not a dimmer. SLANT method: sit up, lean forward, ask questions, nod your head, track the speaker. Listen with your eyes. That’s paying attention 100 percent.
2. Be a loud listener. When another person is talking, you want to be listening so actively that
you’re practically burning calories.
3. Favor Familiarity. Find the thing the other person is most attached to. It’s your job to draw out what lessons they learned and how they changed as a result of what happened.
4. Make them authors, not witnesses. They don’t only want to talk about what happened; they want to know how you experienced what happened.
5. Don’t fear the pause. Because speaking and listening involve many of the same brain areas, so once your go into response mode, your ability to listen deteriorates.
6. Do the looping. If you try this looping method, you realize often you are interpreting people incorrectly.
7. The midwife model. A midwife is there not to give birth but simply to assist the other person in creation.
8. Keep the gem statement at the center. This is the truth underneath the disagreement, something you both agree on.
9. Find the disagreement under the disagreement. Being curious about your friend’s experience is more important than being right.
10. Don’t be a topper. If you want to build a shared connection, try sitting with their experience before you start ladling our your own. (p.74-81)

If your body's immune system responds to an exposure to an antigen or allergen, then you have an allergy. Typically, that will usually mean that you also have an IgE response, but not necessarily. What's more important is that your immune system has a hyperactive response to an otherwise harmless substance. If you have symptoms similar to a food allergy, but they are being caused by some bodily system, condition, or mechanism other than the immune system itself, then you have an intolerance (which, to be perfectly clear, is not an allergy). If you develop a localized wheal reaction to a skin-prick test (which we'll explore more in chapter 2) but don't experience allergic symptoms when exposed to that allergen, then you have a sensitivity, not an allergy. (p.21)

Hospital admissions for asthma tripled in just two decades, between the 1970s and the 1990s, before leveling off to a steady rate today. And although rates of asthma in developed nations have been slowing, they continue to climb in underdeveloped parts of the world, causing the overall rate to continue its rise globally, even while it remains constant in places like the United States.

This is why experts predict that allergy rates will continue to rise for the next several decades. Allergic disease is less prevalent in rural areas of low-income countries, but allergic sensitization is at the same level (quick reminder: you can have a sensitivity without developing an allergy). In other words, people everywhere have the same sensitization, but there are fewer active symptoms and fewer cases of active disease in rural areas of poor countries. As countries begin to develop, rates of allergy tend to rise. Why? (p.58)

Research by the Centers for Disease Control and. Prevention has shown that one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight. witnessed their mother being beaten or hit.

In his study of factors threatening our civilization, Jared Diamond identifies a dozen issues that are "like time bombs." Any of these, including climate change, water scarcity, overconsumption, overpopulation, habitat destruction, loss of topsoil, and rising toxin levels, could trigger the collapse of our society. In combination, their potential impact is even more devastating. Describing his research into the existential threats we face, science writer Julian Cribb said: "I was meeting more and more people who were starting to wonder whether we were entering the 'end game' of human history."? The uncertainty we face can be expressed in just four words: Will we make it? (p.261)

What helps us face the mess we're in and respond with Active Hope? The story of the Great Turning includes a vital ingredient that is game-changing. It is the unexpected resilience and creative power of life itself. The tomato reminds us that collapse doesn't have to be the end. If it is squeezed in a suitable environment, it is possible to imagine returning a year, a decade, or even a century later and see tomato plants growing. Seeds released by squishing may survive harsh winters or droughts, sprouting into new life time after time. This different kind of resilience is a powerful force of nature. It can be seen in the tender green shoots that bring burned-down forests back to life. It can also be recognized in our own creative power to redesign, adapt, and transform our ways of living, our patterns of organization, and our essential view of life. (p.262)

Theists, atheists, and nontheists alike are all free to explore the practice of Zen.

Once scenarios like these are in full swing, little can be done to avert needless suffering and mitigate the damage. The key to avoiding such situations in our own lives is to be aware of the looming threat they pose and strengthen the decision-making muscles that will deflect them. Science is on your side. The Institute of Medicine, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and numerous other researchers and authorities agree that relentless medical aggression hurts patients. It imposes needless suffering on the dying. It is unlikely to extend life and may even shorten it.

Unbelievably, twenty years and hundreds of millions of dollars in medical education and palliative care initiatives have had little impact on such heedless intensive intervention. One in four patients who enter the ICU with documented DNR orders get last-ditch treatments even the professional oncology society recognizes as harmful. And three in four younger cancer patients with a documented preference for comfort care get at least one aggressive intervention during their last month of life. (p.253)

In our foray into identity and ancestry DNA we returned back to our innocuous looking ancestry box, but with it we have considered the growth in popularity of these kits. We looked at how ancestral informative markers help us understand these tests, how these markers relate to much more than geographic regions. They’re relevant in areas from law enforcement to health. We talked about the sensitivity of this information, important privacy issues. We talked about how narratives of science and society shape medical research and treatment, we dug into the story of Maria with her gaggle of siblings and how new information links us and sometimes in unexpected ways. We speculated on better babies and the need to make ourselves better. We talked about personalized medicine with a goal of creating a healthy happy population for the widest variety of people. We looked at the limits of these tests to defined racial identity with Rachel Dolezal, and imagined with Brooklyn how these tests can take us out of our day to day self, and help us see more in one another’s clothes and eyes.

“Ultimately, meaning comes through finding a way to sustain your love for the person after their death while you’re moving forward with your life. That doesn’t mean you’ll stop missing the one you loved, but it does mean that you will experience a heightened awareness of how precious life is. … In that way we do the best honor to those whose deaths we grieve. … Loss is simply what happens to you in life. Meaning is what you make happen. (p16)”

1. Meaning is relative and personal

2. Meaning takes time. You may not find it until months or even years after loss.

3. Meaning doesn’t require understanding. It’s not necessary to understand why someone died in order to find meaning.

4. Even when you do find meaning, you won’t feel it was worth the cost of what you lost.

5. Your loss is not a test, a lesson something to handle, a gift, or a blessing. Loss is simply what happens to you in life. Meaning is what you make happen.

6. Only you can find your own meaning.

7. Meaningful connections will heal painful memories. (p16)

Sometimes people say they don’t want to find meaning in their loss. They just want to call a tragedy a tragedy. To find meaning in it would be to sugarcoat it and they don’t want to do that. I think they are afraid that if they let go of the pain, they will lose the connection to their loved one, so I remind them that the pain is theirs and no one can take it away. But if they can find a way to release the pain through meaning, they will still have a deep connection to their child—through love. Just like a broken bone that becomes stronger as it heals, so will their love. (p183)

- Part I of Women Rowing North considers the challenges of aging, including ageism and lookism, caregiving, loss, and loneliness.
- Part II considers the travel skills necessary for our river journey north. These include understanding ourselves, skillful choices, community building, managing our narratives, and gratitude. I emphasize the importance of being useful. Barbara Kingsolver said it best: “Happy people have found a use for themselves like a good tool.”
- Part III turns readers toward the lifeboat of long-term loving relationships. Whether or not we have a family, we need to live interdependently with others. Our growth depends on interaction: isolation is the quickest path to stagnation.
- Finally, Part IV explores the rewards of this life stage, including authenticity, enhanced perspectives, and bliss. For this book’s title I chose the word “rowing” rather than sailing or floating because, to stay on course, we need to make an effort, choose a positive attitude, and maintain a strong sense of direction.

It’s a profound challenge to sit on the hot seat and listen with an open heart to the hurt and anger of the wounded person who wants us to be sorry, especially when that person is accusing us (and not accurately, as we see it) of causing their pain. Yet both personal integrity and success in relationships depend on our ability to take responsibility for our part (and only our part) even when the other person is being a jerk.

When older people look back on their lives and are asked to pinpoint the age at which they were happiest, what do you suppose they say? Maybe age eight, when they had few cares? Maybe their teenage years because of all the activity and the discovery of sex? Maybe their college years, or the first years of starting a family? Wrong. The age that comes up most often as the happiest time of one’s life is eighty-two! The goal of this book is to help raise that number by ten or twenty years. Science says it can be done. And I’m with science.

Be warned: those who make their opinions sound like the Ten Commandments see their grandchildren only on major holidays and in photographs.

There are really only two commandments of Nanaville: love the grandchildren and hold your tongue.

I am sad to say that the grandparents who do otherwise are the ones about which we tend to hear most often, that great Greek chorus that says, mine were out of diapers by age two, how come he isn’t talking yet, and later on, I don’t like those friends of hers, why did you let her do that to her hair, and what kind of wedding is that? Many human relations are about power and control at base, but the grandparents who try to exercise that power and exert that control do so at their peril, especially with parents who may already be feeling frazzled and unsure. Which, as far as I’ve been able to tell, is most parents much of the time. (p.93-94)

The census bureau says that in the year Arthur (i.e. her first grandchild) was born, there were more grandparents in the United States than ever before in our history, up by nearly 25 percent in the last two decades. At the same time we are part of a funnel, the net effect of changing ideas about how many people reasonably constitute a family. My paternal grandfather had thirty-two grandchildren. His son, my father, had twelve. I don’t know how many grandchildren we will eventually have…but I can easily figure out that it would take some extraordinary act of either conception or adoption for me to come anywhere close to twelve. (p.121)

... A woman of child-bearing age who was born by C-section, fed formula, or received antibiotics at any point in her life—or if this is true of her mother or grandmother—does not have the important bacterial species B. infantis.... if any one of those scenarios applies to you, your mother, or your grandmother ... you no longer harbor B. infantis in your body and are therefore unable to pass it on to your children. ... The demise of the bacterium coincides most eerily with the perplexing increase in all of these diseases of autoimmune origin, like atopic dermatitis, food allergies, environmental allergies, colic, asthma ... ... ... Indeed, atopic dermatitis in babies born between 1960 and 2000 has risen fivefold, and type 1 diabetes incidence in children has also increased fivefold. (p99)
... 97 percent of American babies do not have B. infantis in their gut. On the other hand, the majority of infants in less-industrialized countries have a gut dominated by Bifidobacteria. (p101)

... down the line the implications are profound for preventing chronic diseases like cancer, especially those in the gastrointestinal tract. Bear in mind that the United States has seen an alarming rise in the incidence of colon and rectal cancers in people in their twenties and thirties, something previously unheard of.

The emulsifiers that we have tested are disrupting the composition of the gut microbiota, they're changing the species of bacteria, and they are doing it in a way that promotes inflammation ... (p122)

The researchers also did a small-scale study in humans and for one week gave artificial sweeteners in amounts allowed by the FSA to people who had never previously consumed artificial sweeteners. The researchers found that amount was enough to alter the subjects' gut bacteria and induce glucose intolerance in more than half the participants. (p127)

And as we piece this puzzle together, antibiotics, emulsifiers, artificial sweeteners, and our highly processed diets, which are missing vital components, are likely resulting in the elimination of all but the most hearty, aggressive strains of bacteria, which are potentially encroaching on the intestinal mucosal lining, causing inflammation and eventual disease. (p129)

...female rodents exposed to BPA in the womb exhibit risk factors for breast cancer and as they age are developing full-blown carcinomas in the mammary gland. (p148)
... low-dose fetal exposure in mice led to an increase in body weight, liver weight, and abdominal fat mass when those mice became adult males. (148)

... organotins change how the body responds to calories. ... ... animals that we treat with these chemicals don't eat a different diet than the ones who don't get fat. They eat the same diet ... They're eating normal food, and they're getting fatter ...(p151)

Your maternal grandmother was exposed to TBT while your mother was in the womb. While your mother was developing as a fetus, you were developing as germ cells within her ovary. This means that not only was your mother exposed to the chemical, but you were exposed to it as a germ cell. What's even more alarming is that your future children (the fourth generation) are also affected, even though your children had no direct exposure to the chemical. (p153)

In a study that tested how impulsivity and the quality of neighborhoods are related to delinquent behavior, researchers found that impulsivity predicted delinquency as expected, but only for boys who lived in poor neighborhoods. In other words, being in a poor neighborhood was related to higher delinquency only for boys who were already impulsive; nonimpulsive boys in poor neighborhoods were no more likely to be juvenile offenders

When researchers have studied the personalities of dogs and of chimpanzees, they find the same big five traits, plus a sixth trait that reflects how dominant they are.

About 40% of the variability that we see in how achievement- oriented different people are has some sort of genetic basis.

One experimental study measured people’s happiness and then injected them with the cold virus. The results showed that happier people were less likely to come down with a cold. And if they did get sick, happier people tended to have less severe symptoms and were sick for fewer days than unhappy people.

Somewhere between 30% and 50% of the variability in happiness across people is due to people’s personality characteristics rather than to the objective quality of their lives.

Research shows that there’s no relationship between affect intensity and happiness overall—probably because happiness reflects the proportion of positive and negative emotions that a person experiences over time. Happy people experience a higher ratio of positive to negative emotions than unhappy people do.

30% to 40% of the variability that we observe in virtuous feelings and ethical behaviors is related to stable aspects of personality

People who identify as liberal versus conservative tend to use the 5 moral foundations differently. In every country that’s been studied, liberals primarily use only 2 of the foundations when they make moral judgments: the one that emphasizes caring for other people and avoiding harm and the one that involves the importance of fairness. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to endorse and use all 5 foundations—not only care and fairness, but also group loyalty, respect for authority and tradition, and physical and spiritual purity. So, people on the right sometimes judge things as wrong that people on the left don’t even see as moral issues.

Research shows that religious people and conservatives are no more intellectually arrogant on average than atheists and liberals are.

People who think that the world is just are more likely to derogate and blame people for their personal misfortunes. For example, people who score higher in the belief in a just world are more likely to think that poor people are responsible for their plight and that victims of crimes probably did something to cause it or at least weren’t careful enough.

People who score higher in authoritarianism tend to populate the most fundamentalist segments of every religion.

Research has shown that people with different identity orientations give different reasons for being physically active. Having a predominately personal identity orientation is associated with reasons such as improving one’s health and physical condition, feeling better physically, and self-satisfaction. But people with a predominant social identity orientation said they exercised to interact with other people and to look better.

The ability to infer other people’s emotions is more highly heritable than the ability to infer what other people are thinking.

Women are, on average, 2.3 years younger than their male partner.(in USA)

Studies of men who are in prison show that prisoners with higher testosterone are more likely to have been incarcerated for violent crimes, such as murder and assault, whereas those with lower levels of testosterone are likely to be in prison for nonviolent crimes.

Amounts of heritability:

• 40% to 60%—Five basic dimensions of personality
• 50%—Intelligence
• 87%—height
• 43%—identifying as politically liberal or conservative
• 45%—attitude toward organized religion
• 36%—attitudes about exercise
• 37%—attitude toward reading

The most individualist countries tend to be the most Westernized; the United States, Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and the Netherlands top the list.
It’s common for people from Western cultures to assume that the most collectivist cultures are countries in East Asia, such as Japan, but in fact, the most collectivist countries are places such as Ecuador, Peru, Columbia, and Venezuela. Pakistan is also on that list.
Japan actually falls in the middle of the individualist- collectivist continuum, along with countries such as Spain, India, Israel, and Austria. They’re the most balanced between individualism and collectivism.

One study found that self-control was the only personality variable among 32 variables studied that significantly predicted grade point average among college students.

The lecturer told listeners not to become worried if they occasionally manifest symptoms of a "personality Disorder." Estimates are that, in any given year, around 10% of adults would qualify for a diagnosis of at least one of the 10 personality disorders. And many more people would show the general disordered pattern of behavior, but it wouldn’t create enough of a problem for their lives for it to meet the diagnostic criteria. The symptoms need to be sufficiently persistent to damage social relationships to meet diagnostic criteria.

A study conducted in 2015 showed that narcissistic people tend to have parents who overvalued them—who thought they were unusually special— which implies that children seem to acquire narcissism, at least in part, by internalizing their parents’ inflated views of them.
The study also showed that parental warmth, not parental overvaluation, seemed to lead to greater self-esteem in the child, supporting the idea that narcissism is different than just having high self-esteem.

Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder is one of the most prevalent personality disorders in the United States, with an estimated prevalence of about 2.4% of the general population.

Personality disorders appear to be more heritable than most normal personality characteristics. About 50% to 80% of the variability that we see in these disorders seems to be genetic.

Five Criteria of Psychological Adjustment

1. a lack of genuine psychopathology or mental illness
2. the ability to get along with other people and maintain some supportive close relationships
3. the ability to pursue and achieve one’s goals
4. the ability to cope with problems that arise in life
5. a sense of subjective well-being.

A meta-analysis of more than 100 studies showed that flexibility was related to psychological adjustment, well-being, and mental health.

Well-Adjusted Personality Types—studies repeatedly reveal 3 qualitatively different types of people, and these 3 basic types of people differ mostly in terms of their psychological adjustment. (1) resilient type, (2) overcontrolled personality type, (3) undercontrolled personality.

Addressing psychological adjustment by classifying everybody into one of 3 personality types is an oversimplification that misses nuances and differences among people within each of these types. But it does reveal a few things about personality and adjustment:

— 1. In general, there is only one basic way to be well adjusted but 2 basic ways in which to be poorly adjusted. Fundamentally, the difference between being well adjusted and poorly adjusted lies in how high people are in neuroticism and how well they get along with other people.
— 2. The specific characteristics that create the resilient, overcontrolled, and undercontrolled personality types are correlated in nonrandom ways that produce these patterns. In other words, the various characteristics that create each of these 3 types of people tend to go together. People who have one of the characteristics in a profile also tend to have the others.
—3. As we deal with problems in ourselves and in other people,it may be helpful to think about the degree to which those problems reflect the overcontrolled profile versus the undercontrolled profile. Looking beneath the behavioral and emotional manifestations of adjustment problems allows us to think about the psychological characteristics and processes that undermine adjustment and lower well-being in any particular case.

Extreme childhood trauma can affect well-being, but as long as parents or other adults provide the needed emotional support and rational guidance, a certain amount of stress, struggle, and adversity in childhood actually promotes better long-term adjustment than if the child has no negative experiences.

Small changes make big difference.
All things in moderation.
Bodies seek balance (homeostasis)
Goldilocks Rule: Use what's good fit for you.
Can't fool mother nature.

• Elevate: Create moments that rise above the everyday.
• Pride: Help people feel proud of accomplishing milestones.
• Insight: Help people understand an important truth.
• Connection: Forge transformational alliances among people.

People in wealthier regions, like Scandinavia, reported being happier than those in poorer ones, like sub-Saharan Africa. But when it came to meaning, it was a different story. Wealthy places like France and Hong Kong had some of the lowest levels of meaning, while the poor nations of Togo and Niger had among the highest, even though people living there were some of the unhappiest in the study. One of the most disturbing findings involved suicide rates. Wealthier nations, it turns out, had significantly higher suicide rates than poorer ones. For example, the suicide rate of Japan, where per-capita GDP was $34,000, was more than twice as high as that of Sierra Leone, where per-capita GDP was $400. This trend, on its face, didn’t seem to make sense. People in wealthier countries tend to be happier, and their living conditions are practically heavenly compared with places like Sierra Leone, which is racked by endemic disease, dire poverty, and the legacy of a devastating civil war. So what reason would they have to kill themselves?

The strange relationship between happiness and suicide has been confirmed in other research, too. Happy countries like Denmark and Finland also have some high rates of suicide. Some social scientists believe that this is because it is particularly distressing to be unhappy in a country where so many others are happy—while others suggest that the happiness levels of these countries are being inflated because the unhappiest people are taking themselves out of the population.

But Oishi and Diener’s study suggests another explanation. When they crunched the numbers, they discovered a striking trend: happiness and unhappiness did not predict suicide. The variable that did, they found, was meaning—or, more precisely, the lack of it. The countries with the lowest rates of meaning, like Japan, also had some of the highest suicide rates.