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Dr. Parks-Sheiener answers: Why are happy people healthier?

Dr. Acacia Parks-Sheiner — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:29:49 +0000

Dr. Acacia Parks-Sheiner is an instructor in positive psychology, a researcher and a member of the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. Dr. Parks has taught a variety of classes on how to use positive psychology interventions, and she often gets questions from students and clients about what will work best for them.

The happiness-health relationship isn’t magic – although some parts of it may be biological, a big part of why happy people are healthier stems from behaviors that come more easily to happy people. A study by Bob Emmons and colleagues found that people who experience gratitude on a regular basis are more likely to spontaneously exercise, and they also get better sleep. These short-term health behaviors lead to long-term benefits like longer life span. So if getting happier doesn’t seem worth the effort by itself, think abut the health benefits!

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Happy Mind, Happy Body – Exercise is Therapy: Self-Monitor

happier.com — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:14:35 +0000

By guest contributor Gloria Park Perin

When chronic exercisers are asked about the top reason they engage in physical activity, the #1 reason they cite are shifts in mood, namely increases in experienced positive emotion. Unfortunately, exercise isn’t instant gratification, and most people won’t experience the mood-boosting effects of exercise until they have developed a regular routine for several weeks.

Keep an exercise log. Record the date and time of activity, the intensity, and the length of each session of physical activity. Also note if you were alone, or with a friend, and how much you enjoyed the activity. Free tools are available online and even on your iPhone.

Monitor your mood. At the end of each day, log into Happier and use the Positivity Test or Authentic Happiness Index to track changes in your positivity ratio or happiness levels. Record your scores in the exercise log.

Use feedback to revise your strategy. After several weeks, go back and review the log. Are there specific types of activities that boost your mood over others? Does the time of day for exercise seem to have an impact? Take note of these patterns and adjust your routine.

Optimism Can Be the Difference Between Life and Death

Andrew Rosenthal — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:03:49 +0000

Dr. Michael Evans of St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto writes in The Globe and Mail that Optimism May Help Ward Off Disease. He cites a recent study from Dr. Hilary Tindle et al in Circulation (the journal of the American Hearth Association) that followed 97,000 women and found that optimism is predictive of less heart disease.

Evans tells the story of a patient:

Marie was 64 when she contracted a rare form of cancer in the bile duct. Her prognosis was poor. We tried many interventions and had some success but, alas, only in the short term.

Marie was a teacher and had researched a new therapy based in, of course, California. It seemed to be a hybrid of unproven but promising new medical treatments with some alternative treatments added to the mix.

She had the money and an incredible, even refreshing, faith in this therapeutic cocktail, and wanted to try it while she was still relatively healthy. Tickets were bought and I wished her bonne chance .

She received a call the day before she was to leave to say there’d been a mistake, and she didn’t qualify for their program. Marie died the following week.

While the news about the health impact of optimism isn’t new, it’s a good reminder about the importance of becoming more optimistic.

We recently asked happier.con consultant Dr. Acacia Parks-Sheiner to define optimism from a scientific perspective: “The reason that we often talk in the research about optimism being more important is that… if you’re optimistic, you’re actually going to try, and you make it more likely that what you want to happen will [occur].”

We also asked Martin Seligman, the author of “Learned Optimism” to give an overview of the findings on optimism and physical health. The research shows that those who are optimistic have “much better” cardiovascular health than pessimists, with 1/4 the rate of cardiac deaths as the rest of the population.

Want to see optimism in practice? Then check out this great video from the people at The Foundation for a Better Life.

This video spot is from The Foundation For a Better Life.

Are Happy People Really Healthier? Yes!

Dr. Acacia Parks-Sheiner — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:05:01 +0000

Dr. Acacia Parks is an instructor in positive psychology, a researcher and a member of the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. Dr. Parks has taught a variety of classes on how to use positive psychology interventions, and she often gets questions from students and clients about what will work best for them.

Great Resources for Psychological Health and Wellbeing From the American Psychological Association

Andrew Rosenthal — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:34:00 +0000

We recently discovered a great website from the American Psychological Association. The APA Help Center “is your online resource for brochures, tips and articles on the psychological issues that affect your physical and emotional well-being, as well as information about referrals.”

One of the best things about the Help Center is that it’s a one-stop source of accurate, up-to-date information on psychological health and policy. The site provides answers to frequently asked questions and even has a resource center for reporters. This is our new go-to place for verified statistics and definitive answers to common questions about psychological well-being.

Props to the APA for putting everything together in one spot!
Topic areas on the site include:

Work and School

Family and Relationships

Health and Emotional Wellness

Disasters and Terrorism

Managed Care and Health Insurance

Facts and Statistics

Do you have any favorite resources on the web for psychological health information? Support for patients or facts and statistics for reporters? Feel free to share in the comments section.

French President Sarkozy Says: Join the Revolution and Focus on Happiness

happier.com — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:16:47 +0000

Image originally from HuffingtonPost.com / AP

Measuring happiness isn’t only for psychologists and philosophers. In a recent speech, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called on world leaders to join a ‘revolution’ and measure happiness indicators in place of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Sarkozy isn’t alone in his focus on measuring well-being as an indicator of national health and growth, but he is one of the highest-profile leaders to make the case so far.

“A great revolution is waiting for us,” Sarkozy said. “For years, people said that finance was a formidable creator of wealth, only to discover one day that it accumulated so many risks that the world almost plunged into chaos.”

The work of two Nobel prize winning economists has helped Sarkozy make his case. And, according to the Huffington Post, Sarkozy will raise the issue with global leaders at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, PA.

When is Chiropractic Care a Scam? What About Reflexology? Magnetic Therapy?

ToddKashdan — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:34:09 +0000

This post comes from happier.com expert Todd Kashdan, Ph.D.

I was a horrible football player in high school. Terrified of losing my expensive non-disposable contact lenses, I made the unwise decision to remove them before walking onto the field. As you might expect, I was often crushed to the ground without even seeing who hit me. Friends and family in the stands witnessed brutal breaks in my shoulder and torn ligaments in my neck. When my pain tolerance wore thin and I relented to surgery, the next several months were spent with an arm wed to my torso under plaster. When the cast was removed, besides physical therapy, I saw a chiropractor. And it seemed to work. The pain disappeared, my shoulder and neck felt supple, and so I continued going to chiropractors for years.

Impatient to become bigger, stronger, and faster, I never let my body heal on its own terms. When I finally did, I realized that I felt better without my trusty chiropractor.

Why do I share this story? Because when someone is in chronic pain, unable to function, they are susceptible to charismatic people who claim to have the answers. Skepticism disappears. Consumers aren’t to blame. This is an age of unprecedented information overload. Who has the time to read the science on whether chiropractic care works? Chiropractic care must be effective. After all, why would health insurance companies pay for visits? I mean, if someone suffers from crippling depression, their insurance only pays for 10-15 visits to a therapist (even though most treatments require at least 3 months to be effective!).

Despite my narrow focus on chiropractic care, I could just as easily be talking about other alternative approaches such as reflexology (the unproven idea that there are connections between the foot and nearly every organ in the body and applying pressure to the right spots on the foot can alleviate ailments and even diseases).

As a clinical psychologist and scientist, I wanted to share three red flags that an intervention is likely to be a scam or sham on the horizon:

1. Jargon. If a practitioner knows what that they are doing, they should be able to explain why their services are needed and how they work so that an 11-year old can understand. Don’t ever blame yourself if you are confused by wacky terms, practitioners should be able to describe your problem and their plan in everyday language. If your chiropractor tells you that subluxations of the bones and joints (misalignments) are responsible for an illness or disease, don’t be content with this gobbledygook. I kid you not, this is the exact same thing that Daniel D. Palmer, the founder of chiropractic care, wrote about in 1895! Palmer thought that subluxations were the cause of nearly every problem suffered by humankind. Haven’t we learned a few things about the human body in the past 115 years? After all, in 1895, scientists had just learned that little microbes called germs can cause disease and perhaps its a good idea if surgeons wash their hands before reaching inside your body cavity.

Moving beyond chiropractors, there are proponents of magnetic therapy who claim that wearing their brand of necklace or bracelet will change the body’s magnetic field, aligning or changing electrons, which in turn stimulates healing. Sounds really interesting until you ask how this magnetic field works. How do little trinkets know exactly which electrons and body parts need to be changed and which to leave alone? And how did this magnetic field get out of whack in the first place to lead to health conditions such as headaches, sinus problems, arthritis, insomnia, and cancer and heart disease? All of which are supposedly healed by magnetic therapies (a multi-billion dollar industry)!

2. Evidence. Following the mantra of Carl Sagan, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” But let’s be generous, how about evidence showing that a group of people receiving alternative medicine fare better than people who exercise regularly, sleep well, and eat healthy over a 6-month period?

Gushy testimonials are not enough. What do you think happens after a reflexologist gives you an intense foot massage or a chiropractor stretches the joints and tissues that join vertebrae to one another? You’re going to feel real good, much better than when you came in. And you are going to attribute this relief, this feeling of hope, to chiropratic care or reflexology. And in a few days when you return to how poorly you felt before, you are going to schedule another appointment.

On top of this, we often attempt to justify the time, effort, and money devoted to therapy by saying that it’s helpful. These reactions are often automatic. That is, we don’t deceive ourselves on purpose, it happens outside of conscious awareness. Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance. Before your first ever visit to a chiropractor, you might be 60% confident that it’s going to help. Asked again after spending hundreds of dollars on dozens of visits, you are likely to be 70, 80, even 100% certain that the treatment is working. There are hundreds of studies to document this process. Our knowledge about ourselves is more flawed than we think. This is just one of many reasons why anecdotes do not quality as acceptable evidence that medicine works.

Ask your practitioner for stronger evidence. Ask about published research. Ask for details about the research such as what other possible explanations could exist for why people ended up better after treatment. You want to know if their treatment is better than waiting and letting the body heal on its own. You want to know if their treatment better than exercise. You want to know if their treatment is better than taking pain relievers. You want to know what exactly is going to be changed that is relevant to the problem being treated. And while you’re asking questions, carefully observe your therapist. Look for signs of resistance, look for signs that they’re comfortable (vs. being pissed off) with your curiosity, and look for signs that they are more interested in your health instead of selling their wares. Any good therapist should welcome an engaged, skeptical consumer walking through their doors…unless they have something to hide or something to be afraid of.

3. Change should be observable and measurable. There should be some clear, objective way to know that the treatment is doing what is supposed to do. I’m not talking about feeling good after being touched in a gentle way on the feet or back. Feeling good doesn’t mean a treatment works. Our feelings are affected by the weather, hormones, music, colors, and a thousand other features that have nothing to do with being treated for an ailment.

If a chiropractor says that a subluxation is the cause of your problem, then you should be able to gauge the steady, systematic decline of a subluxation. If you are taking part in magnetic therapy, you should be able to observe changes in your magnetic field and the alignment of electrons and ions. Ask your practitioner how they are going to measure what your magnetic field looks like before treatment and how they are going to notice whether there is improvement. If there is no way to tell that you improved except by what you feel then there is no evidence that their work is responsible for any gains. Can you see it on an X-ray? in a blood test? in a brain scanner? a test of flexibility, stamina, or physical strength? Do other people notice a difference (who don’t know you are being treated)? You can never rely solely on anyone’s so-called words of expertise. They have plenty of economic incentives to tell you that you are getting better or that you need to be patient and continue what you are doing with them to get better.
Yes, I’m concerned when people offer treatments that lack evidence. I’m concerned when people in pain or who are sick, weak, or desperate for help are preyed upon. When someone invests their limited time and money in a treatment that doesn’t work, there is an opportunity cost. That is, they are being pulled away from treatments that can really help them. When this happens, everyone loses.

Here’s a simple idea for health care reform, only support treatments that work. When it comes to the spinal manipulations of chiropractors, magnetic therapies, and reflexology, there is little evidence that they are effective in the treatment of any medical condition. And as for lower back pain, headaches, or neck pain, these procedures have yet to be shown to be any better or worse than any other standard intervention that consumers are confident in. This includes massages and exercise. So if you want to get rid of some pork and help prevent problems in the first place, remove chiropractic care from health care plans and support people to exercise regularly….

Dr. Todd B. Kashdan is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at George Mason University. He is the author of Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life. For more about his books and research, go to www.toddkashdan.com

The Federal Government Seeks to Improve Your Optimism and Happiness

Andrew Rosenthal — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 13:39:52 +0000

Did you know that the Federal Government now has a program to help promote mental resilience during tough times? According to a blog post from the L.A. Times, the “first-of-its-kind website [is] designed to be one-stop shopping (except that it’s free to use) for information and resources on how to protect, sustain and improve your mental health in the midst of economic hardship.”

The site, available online at http://www.samhsa.gov/economy/ was developed by the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).

According to the Times, “SAMHSA’s acting director, Eric Broderick, explains in a news release that ‘by helping people remain resilient, we can help promote the overall recovery of our nation.’ “ (Thanks to happier.com marketing team member Michael for the tip-off to the article.)

At happier.com, we applaud the government’s recognition that Americans are under extreme stress today and that such stress can lead to serious impacts on mental and physical health and important things like financial stability and interpersonal relationships. And we have developed happier.com because we are believe we can inspire people to be happier and more resilient through online tools and assessments.

The indicators on SAMHSA are a good place to determine where to start. And the resources on happier.com are a great way to live better through tools that make a difference.

From Martin Seligman: Optimism & the Prevention of Heart Attack

Martin Seligman — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:01:53 +0000

There is good evidence that building optimism will make you more resilient from depression and more productive at work. There is also mounting evidence that optimism may make you physically healthier, with some of the strongest evidence coming from well-designed studies of cardiac mortality. I believe that your learning the skill of optimism could save your life. (If I am wrong, you have very little to lose except some of your pessimism.) Here’s why I believe this:

The story begins at a poker game in Northern Iowa in the late 1980’s. Bob Colligan, a psychologist from the Mayo Clinic, sat to my right. After singing “two tenors” every time a pair of tens appeared on the table, he made an intriguing suggestion about health. I had presented a talk earlier that evening on the suggestive evidence that optimism improves health in aging men. Bob mentioned that since 1950 every patient admitted to the Mayo Clinic for any physical problem took the Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory, the MMPI. This is a 500 item yes-no test (“I am a secret agent of God”). Could we somehow code each item for optimism or pessimism and form a new optimism-pessimism scale?

Chris Peterson did just that, and Bob soon began to analyze the optimism or pessimism of patients admitted to the Mayo Clinic for all causes, using Chris’s technique. To see if optimism predicted longevity, Bob selected 839 consecutive patients who referred themselves for medical care in 1950. Death from any cause was the focus of the study and two hundred of these patients had died by the year 2000. The optimists had a whopping nineteen percent increase in longevity when their expected life span was compared to that of the pessimists.

Many of these deaths were cardiac, so Greg Buchanan and I undertook a prospective study of optimism and second heart attack. In this study, unlike the Mayo Clinic study, we knew the entire range of risk factors for each patient, so we could better zero in on pessimism as the deadly culprit. One hundred and twenty-six men had their first heart attack in the early 1980s in San Francisco. At that time, they were all interviewed about their lives. Their “attributional style” — pessimism or optimism — was derived from these interviews in just the same content-analytic way that we derived the optimism or pessimism of the MMPI items. The raters of the interviews were, of course, blind, unaware of the health of the men. Over the next eight years, half of these men died, mostly of a second heart attack. What predicted who would survive and who would die? Damage to the heart at the first heart attack, Type A, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight, and the entire panoply of traditional physical risk factors did not predict second heart attack. Pessimism, on the other hand, predicted second heart attack and death. Of the most pessimistic quartile, 86 percent died, whereas only 33 percent of the most optimistic quartile died (Buchanan, 1994).

Laura Kubzansky of the Harvard School of Public Health found similar results. In 1986, 1306 men took the MMPI, from which she derived the optimism-pessimism score. In 10 years of follow-up, 162 cases of coronary heart disease occurred: 71 cases of nonfatal myocardial infarction, 31 cases of fatal coronary heart disease, and 60 cases of angina pectoris. She adjusted for smoking, weight, blood pressure, and a variety of other traditional risk factors. Men with high levels of optimism had less than half the risk for combined fatal and nonfatal myocardial infarction and for angina pectoris. The greater their optimism, the lower the risk for cardiac incidents.

In the largest study, 999 Dutch men and women from the Arnhem Elderly Study, took a variety of psychological tests and were followed for nine years, from 1991 to 2001. 397 died, and a high level of optimism was far and away the best predictor of survival. Taking sex, age, disease, education, smoking, alcohol, prior cardiac disease, cholesterol, and weight into account, strong optimists were at one-quarter the risk for cardiac death. Again the higher the optimism, the more protection against cardiac death. This was true of both men and women.

So the effects of optimism on risk for heart attack are strong, stronger probably than most or even all of the traditional risk factors. But is optimism the cause of the lower risk for heart attack or does it merely correlate with some unknown protective factor, like serotonin level or genes, which in turn is the active ingredient, causing both the optimism and the protection from heart attack?

We do not know, and there is really only one impeccable way to find out: a random-assignment experimental study, in which some people are randomly assigned to become optimists and later heart attacks are measured. Random assignment rules out all such confounding “third variables.” There is one such study in the literature: My research group invites the most pessimistic members of Penn’s entering freshmen to be randomly assigned to a control group or to a workshop which teaches the optimism techniques you will learn over the next three months. The freshmen who learn optimism not only have less depression and anxiety over the next three years but their physical health is significantly better than the controls. While the study is not about heart attack, but about the whole mélange of undergraduate physical ills, it shows optimism to be a cause, not just a correlate of better health.

I urge you (and the people you care about) to do the exercises on happier.com diligently, and as my mother used to say “use them in good health.”

References:

Buchanan, G.M., Gardenswartz, C.A.R., & Seligman, M.E.P. (1999). Physical health following a cognitive-behavioral intervention. Prevention and Treatment, 2.

Giltay, E., Geleljnse, J., Zitman, F., Hoekstra, T., & Schouten, E.(2004). Dispositional optimism and all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in a prospective cohort of elderly Dutch men and women. Archives of General Psychiatry, 61, 1126-1135.

Kubzansky, L. Sparrow, D. Vokonas, P. and Kawachi, I. (2001). Is the Glass Half Empty or Half Full? A Prospective Study of Optimism and Coronary Heart Disease in the Normative Aging Study. Psychosomatic Medicine, 63, 910-916

Maruta, T., Colligan, R. Malinchoc, M. & Offord, K (2000). Optimists vs. pessimists: Survival rate among medical patients over a 30-year period. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 75, 140-143.

New Research: Happiness Constant Across Age, Even with Older Adults

Andrew Rosenthal — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:54:48 +0000

A new study finds that happiness is pretty much constant across age, even in very old adults. The study Growing Old in American: Expectations vs. Reality was published by the Pew Center.

Original image from the Pew Research Center

From a summary of the full report (PDF):

Are Older Adults Happy?

They’re about as happy as everyone else. And perhaps more importantly, the same factors that predict happiness among younger adults-good health, good friends and financial security-by and large predict happiness among older adults. However, there are a few age-related differences in life’s happiness sweepstakes. Most notably, once all other key demographic variables are held constant, being married is a predictor of happiness among younger adults but not among older adults (perhaps because a significant share of the latter group is made up of widows or widowers, many of whom presumably have “banked” some of the key marriage-related correlates of happiness, such as financial security and a strong family life). Among all older adults, happiness varies very little by age, gender or race.

What do you think? The New York Times asked a similar question in their blog New Old Age, and receievd lots of responses.

Does this reserch hold true based on your experience? Have you encountered studies that lead to different conclusions?

If you were working with a group of 65+ year-olds, what components of positive psychology would be most relevant? How does the science of happiness apply to aging?