Archives for September 2015

Are We Born Vengeful?

September 15, 2015 By Jenn Knudsen

What comes more naturally: To punish a thief—or to help her victim?

That’s the question tackled in a first-of-its-kind study published in the journal Current Biology. “Until recently,” the researchers write, “little attention has been paid to how punishment and a sense of justice develop in children.”

To find the answer, the researchers created experiments for children ages three to five that are similar to those previously tested on our evolutionary cousins, chimpanzees.

With their cohort of 137 children, the authors placed a single child and two puppets at a table, and put into motion scenarios that mimicked some societally recognized wrongs, such as theft and unfair treatment.

For example, a child seated at a table with two puppets would witness goods being taken away by one puppet from the other, or by a puppet from the child himself.

Dr. Keith Jensen is one of the study’s authors and a lecturer in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Manchester. In an email, he points out that one of the study’s key outcomes is that many preschoolers in the former scenario showed outright concern for the victim who was thieved. The children tried to restore the filched object to the upset puppet rather than punish the thief-puppet.

Why would a child—here acting as an “observer” or “bystander”—bother to intervene and help the puppet-victim?

“There are famous examples where, even as adults, we don’t,” Jensen says. “What is particularly reassuring is that children do respond strongly to the needs of others.”

In similar studies with chimpanzees, the bystander watches passively as an injustice occurs, not acting to help the victim. Or, as a matter of copycat behavior, the chimp takes the desired object herself, believing it’s OK to do so.

By contrast, Jensen notes that human children in most cultures learn at a very young age that stealing is bad.

Many in the study became very aware that taking away from someone an important item like food or a toy is bad, as it causes anguish. To remedy the other’s woe, the children would restore the object to the wronged puppet or instead cache it in his “cave.”

“It seems the concern for the distressed puppet was just so strong, the children felt the need to do something,” Jensen reports.

And this tendency should be nurtured, he says. “[W]e could build on the natural inclination of young children to help others and their sensitivity to distress.”

Practically speaking, on a playground, for instance, where a modicum of the world’s rough-and-tumble nature often transpires, “The parent or teacher could ask the observing child (say, of a pushing incident) to help them help the victim and focus more on the good they can do,” Jensen explains.

Should an injustice never be punished? The researchers agree that when consequences are warranted, they should be put in place. But they argue that punishment should take a back seat to shoring up innate kindness.

“[T]his has important implications for the evolution of cooperation,” says Jensen. His co-authors are Drs. Katrin Riedl, Michael Tomasello, and Josep Call, all from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany.

Jensens concludes: “The natural justice of younger kids is what we should nurture first.”

This article first appeared in http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/.

Compassion: The Rise of Man

September 15, 2015 By Jamie Flook

The Latin origin of the word compassion literally means co-suffering. When we see Syrians running in terror on our TV screens, our hearts run with them. When we see homeless folk selling magazines, our hopes stand with them. That’s compassion. As a society we have compassion for these people but is it enough?

Is it enough?

Society shows compassion for the refugees and the homeless magazine sellers, but what about the others? What about those Syrians and Iraqis that we don’t see? Those faceless souls being tortured in The Islamic State hidden away from the media gaze and excluded from public chatter. And how about those homeless people who don’t sell magazines? You know the ones, slumped in shop doorways looking downcast, the ones we like to call beggars. Where is the compassion for them? What about the people in life who don’t fight for themselves? Either because they can’t or won’t. Are they somehow less worthy of compassion?

I see the battle for compassion as one of the titanic duals of modern times fought in many arenas. As a species we have evolved greater compassion now than at any time in our recorded history. And yet conversely we have also developed a ruthless approach to life that for the first time, threatens the very notion of compassion itself. If somebody makes an innocent mistake through oversight or incompetence, we want them fired instead of asking how we can help them improve. We stigmatize the depressed. If somebody won’t work because they can’t find the motivation to get out of bed in the morning, we say let them starve instead of let’s help them even more. Logically speaking though, since when did taking something from someone who has so little ever act as a good motivator? Surely a forward-thinking compassionate society would be asking are we doing enough? Can we pay more? Can we do more for them? Is it enough?

Ruthless business leaders, politicians and many others like to invoke Charles Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ explanation of biological evolution as a mantra for life. This can be used to defend the gross accumulation of wealth at the expense of everybody else including the vulnerable. However, it’s also a gross misrepresentation of the great man himself. Physical health aside, when used metaphorically, some people use the term “survival of the fittest” to talk about those most competent or those most financially successful or those with some form of power. The funny thing is though, those who believe the strong defeating the weak is some kind of natural happening to be encouraged can never call themselves Darwinian.

In “The Descent of Man, And Selection in Relation to Sex,” Darwin wrote “the highest moral achievement is concern for the welfare of all living beings, humans and nonhuman.” Furthermore, consider this which he wrote specifically about compassion:

“In however complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one another, it would have been increased through natural selection, for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best.”

When I talk about compassion, I’m not even saying we should give more money or time — I guess all I’m saying is let’s be less judgmental. At my secondary school, a lot of my fellow pupils were vicious individuals, in some cases psychotic. However there were also some who weren’t so bad. Whenever I hear of another of the not-so-bads making the news for having turned to a life of drugs or petty crime, I try to think of them not as the hardened users or criminals they have become, but more rather as the children they once were.

The homeless (both sellers and doorway dwellers), Syrians and Iraqis (both refugees and those left behind), the unemployed, the mentally ill (both psychologically and psychiatric), the incompetent and the rest are not criminals. They are people. If we want to be the fittest, we need to be less judgmental. We need to be more compassionate. Compassion is a virtue of the giants, spread it and ye shall walk among them.

This article was first published in http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Self-Compassion in Kids

September 15, 2015 By Shilagh Mirgain

Over the years, there has been a tremendous emphasis in our society on building kids’ self-esteem. Psychologists now think we should be teaching children how to develop self-compassion instead.

The problem is that self-esteem is often developed by social comparison, meaning it requires a person to feel special and superior to others on a variety of dimensions. Kids feel good about themselves when they get the A, win the game, receive the trophy and sometimes even by putting other kids down to make themselves feel better. But this constant comparison needing to be better than other kids instills a belief that it is not ok to be average. When things don’t go well, feelings of superiority slip and self-esteem takes a nose dive, leaving kids vulnerable to anxiety, insecurity and depression.

What’s the solution?

Teach children how to develop self-compassion. Self-compassion is learning to extend understanding, compassion and encouragement to yourself when things don’t go your way, treating yourself the way you would a close and treasured friend. Research shows increasing self-compassion has all the benefits of self-esteem but without the downsides. Unlike self-esteem, self-compassion reduces anxiety, lowers feelings of embarrassment when you mess up, and is associated with steadier and more consistent feelings of self-worth.

There are several ways to help foster self-compassion in kids, including:

Mindfulness

In a world driven by distraction, teach your child how to be in the moment. Some ways to do so include:

Help them notice things around them, savoring positive experiences when they occur. Teach them how to be present with themselves.
Encourage them to take 3 deep breaths when feeling stressed, overwhelmed or distracted to return to the moment and back to their center.
Help them develop awareness of their thoughts and feelings, to not ignore them but to also not become overwhelmed by them either.
Help them learn how to observe non-judgmentally their internal experience, understanding that they don’t have to believe every thought they think, especially the negative ones, and that emotions, like ocean waves rise and fall if you just let them be.
Help your children identify those moments of struggle and difficulty as opportunities to practice self-compassion.

Validate their experience, such as saying, “oh this is a difficult moment,” or “that was really tough to go through,” make them aware of what they are feeling by labeling their emotions “oh you’re sad,” or mad, scared, hurt, etc. and talk through their reactions.

Kindness

Kindness begins when we understand that we all struggle. Teach your children to talk kindly to themselves versus being critical. This builds a stable sense of self. Self-criticism isn’t helpful and only produces a variety of negative consequences, including feeling badly about oneself. Next time your children start saying something critical, point this out to them and then teach them to reframe these thoughts into something positive and forgiving. The way we communicate with our children establishes a blue print for how they will eventually communicate with themselves. Talk to them in a non-critical way. Teach them how to self soothe during difficult times. Say to a small child, “Let’s practice hugging ourselves like mom and dad do to make you feel better. You can do this for yourself when you feel bad to remember how much you are loved.” Teach older children to put their hand on their heart to self-soothe when upset. These small gestures help them value and feel good about themselves just as they are no matter what is going on.

Teach kids how to be kind to others. Ask what they did in their day to make someone happy, find volunteer opportunities to do together as a family, encourage your kids to write thank you notes, recognize regularly when someone did something nice for another in the family.

Compassion for Others – Common Humanity

Remind your children that they are not alone in experiencing this difficult thing, other kids feels the exact same way. Everyone struggles, feels inadequate, does not get approved of, or fails at something in life. It’s part of our common humanity. This helps normalize what a child is going through and reduces shame and embarrassment over mistakes made and not feeling good enough.

Encourage them when they see people throughout their day to offer them compassion. Teach them to wish others well, saying silently or verbally to others, “may you be happy, healthy and free from suffering.” . When our sense of self-worth is based on being a human being intrinsically worthy of respect, rather than on achieving certain ideals, our sense of self-worth is much less easily shaken. And that will make for a very good school year ahead.

This school year, instead of seeking to become extraordinary and special, encourage your children to find the wonder and marvel of the ordinary. How to sit with sadness in themselves and others, the comfort that a touch of a hand can provide, the warmth of compassion for themselves and others struggling. Teach them the simple pleasure of wishing someone else well, happiness and ease. When they learn to be full present with these simple moments, then the extraordinary aspects of their life will unfold naturally.

Gratitude

It’s so easy to focus on what’s wrong. Teach your children to focus on what’s right. Studies have shown that children who cultivate gratitude in their lives have better social relationships and do better in school. Make gratitude a part of your daily conversation. During dinner or as part of a bedtime ritual, ask children to share three things they’re grateful for about themselves and their lives. Ask them to reflect on why these things occurred to deepen their appreciation and understanding of the good things in their lives, including aspects of themselves, and not take it for granted.

As we talk about mindfulness, kindness, compassion and gratitude, what we’re really talking about is putting more love out in the world. And that can be one of the most meaningful gifts we can give our children.

This article first appeared in http://blogs.uwhealth.org/.

22 Habits That Will Make Your Life a Little More Peaceful Each Day

September 15, 2015 By Brianna Wiest

1. Throw out, sell or donate everything you don’t need. Use this guide to minimalism to help you decide what you’re keeping in excess. If there’s anything that will immediately release your anxiety and put you at ease, it’s making the choice only to keep the physical things that either serve a purpose or hold a positive meaning for you.

2. Organize everything you do. And I mean everything. Your paperwork should be filed and your bills should be organized as soon as they come in the door. Your clothes should be kept in an easily accessible fashion, and your day-to-day necessities should always be placed somewhere you can easily find them. It will take so much of the guesswork and fumbling out of searching for that one random thing you only use once every two weeks (but desperately need, when you do).

3. Don’t consume what you don’t need. This is the other half, the more difficult half, of releasing everything you don’t use: you can’t buy more crap to replace it. Only buy the food you’re going to eat, and be very mindful and selective of what clothing and other products you buy. Will you actually use them? Do you even really want them, or do you want to just feel better in the moment? Trust me: A bolstered bank balance and the confidence of having a little more self-control will feel much better (and so will keeping a simple space you can actually maintain).

4. Put your self before your work life, as often as you can. Sure, there are some exceptions — like when you have to take care of your responsibilities and forego a few more minutes of sleep for an important email — and that’s fine, as long as you’re in the mindset that you are not your work. You are more than just what you do and earn.

5. Do something that makes you meditative. If sitting cross-legged and breathing isn’t your jam, find something that is. Do whatever it is that makes you really grounded and present and in the moment. If that’s going for a long drive with the windows down and music blaring, do that. If it’s dancing, do it in your room each day. If it’s painting, schedule time to do that, too.

6. Learn to turn daily chores into therapeutic practices… for example, bathing. You have to do it regardless, and the combination of hot water, the physical act of “cleansing” and how relaxing a hot shower or long bath is at the end of a long day makes it an ideal daily practice to reduce your nerves. Light a candle and listen to music and use salts to cleanse yourself. Be meditative about your rituals, and focus on the act of releasing and clearing.

7. Start to build a commonplace book. It’s a collection of quotes, ideas and passages that particularly inspire you or make you think, compiled and organized and filed neatly, so you can access whatever information you feel you need. Keep sections for “inspiration” or “healing” or “relationships” or “work,” and keep track of all the little things you come across that inspire you.

8. Incohesively journal. And don’t worry about storybooking your life… similar to the commonplace book, just jot down the ideas and epiphanies and observations you have in your day-to-day life. Look back and reflect on the things that most compel you to express them, and they’ll give you an idea of what it is you need to change/do more or less of in your life.

9. Burn candles at night. The flame itself is mesmerizing and calming; it will make your space smell better, and will overall give you a beautiful ambiance.

10. Replace your daily coffee/tea intake with hot water with lemon and honey. It’s relaxing and yields incredible health benefits. It’s cheaper and more natural than your usual latté alternative. There’s nothing not to love.

11. Only pay in cash. It’s difficult until it becomes a habit, and then you won’t be able to imagine how you ever did anything else. It keeps you conscious of what you’re spending (makes you realize how much the little things add up), keeps you on your budget and completely removes the “will this purchase dip into my bill money” fear (which should never be an issue).

12. Recite mantras. Even if it seems a little too new-agey for you at first, I promise, it’s so extraordinarily powerful that you’ll actually start to consider what it is you repeat to yourself once you see how impactful this practice becomes. Whatever you feel you’re lacking, or you want more of, say you “are” that thing. For example: “I am safe.” “I am in financial abundance.” “I am always taken care of.” “I am successful.” You lay the foundation to enact a self-fulfilling prophecy. “I am” is the most powerful “prayer” you can say.

13. Stop interacting with people who aren’t positive influences in your life, and don’t apologize for doing so. If they want to call you rude or unkind, so be it. You are under no obligation to make other people comfortable at the expense of your own sanity.

14. Cook your own dinner. There’s something very grounding about combining ingredients and working with foods and making your own meals. It makes you feel connected, responsible and empowered, in the simplest, most human way.

15. Observe what you unconsciously consume. Food, music, reading, TV. These things affect how you feel throughout your days. Don’t underestimate the power of the things you don’t even realize you’re letting into your life.

16. Ask yourself what kind of life you’d like to live, and base your other goals off of that idea. If what you think you want, for example, is to “start a business,” ask yourself if doing the dirty work of it, day in and day out, is your passion — or if you’re just in it to say you did it and seem successful. This, more than anything else, is how to determine the path best suited to you.

17. Make much more realistic goals than you normally do. You won’t actually be accomplishing any more or less than usual, but you will remove the guilt from believing you should have done more.

18. Find your ultimate joy in the simplicity of everyday life. Show yourself that you don’t need extravagance to have a truly incredible internal experience. You don’t need expensive foods to have a great meal. You don’t need anything other than what you currently have to start living the life you want. Why? Because the life you want is ultimately rooted in a feeling — a feeling that you can induce simply by shifting your perception.

19. Pay attention to what you seek. You will find it, no matter what. If what you subconsciously want is to see all the things that are wrong with your life, so as to force yourself to change it, that’s exactly what you’ll get. If what you seek is knowing all the ways you’re as unworthy as you fear you are, that’s what you’ll get, too. (So of course, you can make the opposite true.)

20. Develop a personal philosophy, and let it guide you through your daily life and decisions. If you don’t have any personal belief about why we’re here, what you’re ultimately doing, what your purpose is, etc., you’re going to live a highly unfulfilled life, riddled with worry, anxiety and unrest. You don’t have to adopt the beliefs of a certain religion or a particular group of people, but you do have to subscribe to what feels absolutely right to you. Not because somebody else told you so… but because it’s aligned with who you inherently are, and how you inherently think.

21. Stop trying to police yourself. Contrary to your instinct, much of the effort you exert to “hold yourself together” is useless. The more you integrate every aspect of who you are, the less you will unknowingly exert energy toward suppressing feelings, therefore compounding your stress and putting yourself on the road to implosion at any given moment. It’s more dangerous to suppress and ignore the “negative” aspects of who we are than it is to accept them. (In psychology, this is sometimes referred to as the “shadow selves” or Gestalt therapy.)

22. Stop believing that the way you perceive things is the way they actually are. Leave yourself room to be surprised. Remember that when you’re in a place of fear, you’re not seeing things clearly, or the way they really are. Remember that you can’t predict what will make you happy, but you can choose to seek gratitude, and peace, in the present moment.

This article first appeared in http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.