Mindframe

  Happiness: it’s something we all want, and in one way or another, most of us spend our lives attempting to pursue it. Multiple industries are devoted to our quest for increased joy. Now, a team of researchers at Iowa State University have carefully studied several mental strategies designed to make us happier. Their goal is to give us the low-down on the best way to lift a bad mood. The contenders? Loving-kindness, interconnectedness, and downward social comparison. Loving-kindness involves sincerely wishing for other people to be happy. Interconnectedness means meditating on the ties that we all share—for example, universal hopes and dreams. Downward social comparison occurs when you focus on how you are better off than others around you. To test the effectiveness of these various thought patterns, the team—led by Professor Douglas Gentile, Senior Lecturer Dawn Sweet, and grad student Lanmiao He—had college students walk around the building for 12 minutes....

In sports, it’s called being in the zone . I’m talking about those moments when self vanishes, time seems to slow down, and you are operating with maximum confidence. A sense of calm pervades, even though you might be surrounded by a frenzy of activity. Your focus intensifies and your actions and decisions seem to meld. This is the psychological state known as flow , researched and pushed into the spotlight by University of Chicago professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. You might know what flow looks like from the outside if you’ve ever experienced a great jazz player riffing, or a skilled comedian doing improvisation.  And you probably know how flows feels if you meditate. If you’re in sales, it’s those times when you and your customer seem to be synced up in perfect harmony. A writer experiencing flow has the sense that the words on the page are being dictated by some outside source. When you and your best friend are so deeply engaged in conversation that an hour feels lik...

  What do behavioral traits and infectious diseases have in common? According to researchers James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis, quite a bit.  Let’s suppose that in your thirties, you become obese. We might assume that your jelly donuts and lack of exercise has finally caught up with you. Fair enough. What might surprise you is the contagious effect your new weight is having on your peer group. Your friends are 57% more likely to gain weight as a result of hanging out with you.  Not only that, but their friends, the ones not in your immediate circle, are 20% more likely to gain weight as well. The same contagious effect seems to be true about smoking. According to Massimo Pigliucci in Answers for Aristotle , quitting smoking means “your friends have a 67% chance of quitting too, and their friends a 36% chance; this is also true of alcoholism, depression, and the effect is even present for happiness (meaning subjective well-being) itself!” ‘Wait a minute,’ ...

The Declaration of Independence famously champions "the pursuit of happiness". For many, joy and personal fulfillment are one and the same. So what is the secret to happiness? It's a question long pondered by history's great philosophical minds.  Frequently, it's framed in terms of attempting to live a more spiritual life. But Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology and education at University of Chicago, takes a different tack. In his book, Finding Flow, Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "chick-sent-me-high"), suggests that the key to living a happy life is to habituate a process of personal challenge aimed at enhancing the intensity of experience. By that, he means that when pursuing any activity, we should practice the following four principles: Establish a clear and compatable set of goals  Have a method for deriving immediate feedback  to gauge your effectiveness Work at peak skill level to master  the significant challenge you...