Archive for August 26, 2009
Happiness loves Misery
What you have doesn’t always matter as much as how it stacks up against what others have. Buying the most expensive house on the block may but be savvy investing, but it will make you feel you were doing better in life than if it were surrounded by mansions.
On the other hand, happiness plummets if you compare your lot to what you think you should have or you could have had. Take the Olympic athletes. Bronze medal winners, it turns out, feel more satisfied than silver medallists. Why? The second place finishers, researchers believe, stew over how they just missed the gold, whereas those who placed third marvel at how close they came to not winning anything at all. Understandable, but not very sensible. And those athletes know what they want which, it turns out, many of us often don’t.
Born Happy
Whether you are happy most of the time or generally miserable, you can thank your parents. It seems our “pleasure potential” if we were positive and outgoing or negative and inhibited is inherited. But keep in mind that what is wired in our brains is only a potential. You are not fated to a certain degree of happiness, no more, no less. Medications, cognitive therapy, and possibly meditation and exercise can change brain circuitry and lift spirits. What is more, though you tend to go up and down around your pleasure potential set point, you can make choices that keep you at the top of your range instead of at the middle or bottom. Experts commonly estimate that about 50 percent of happiness is related to your genetic lot, but that still leaves a lot of the balls in our court.
Born happy and be glad.
Possible Spasm
People usually get spasm after strenuous activity. Chances are your arms and legs are tired if you experienced any of these:
a. You drove through an hour of traffic sans power steering.
b. Your job required a lot of moving of the arms as well as prolonged standing.
c. You just walked up and down supermarket aisles then lugged home heavy grocery bags.
It is good idea to rest your arms and prop up your legs for about 15 minutes before washing or taking a shower. An alternative is using sanitizing gel to clean your hands. If none of the above situations applies to you, then by all means, do what you’ve always done.
