Fight of Flight

Gut Instinct

Have you ever felt that internal gut response kick in when encountering certain situations?  That Gut Instinct, feels like a rush of emotions which might be telling you to go right, go left, or stop in your tracks?  Halloween is just a few days away and we have all seen our fair share of scary movies depicting – Gut Instinct! 

Our gut response is not a bad thing. We are – after all – animals (highly evolved and thinking animals, but animals’ none-the-less). Though we can rationalize a situation to death….if I go into this room, where Freddy Krueger may be, there is a potential for harm...having a rational thinking human brain may do more harm than good in some emotional situations.   

Studies have shown that your body’s intuition – sweaty palms, sinking feeling in the stomach, increased heart beat – will point you in the right direction faster than your brain’s problem solving center. This comes from an evolutionary need to survive.  Sometimes it was better to cut and run vs. stay and fight.  Well, even though we don’t encounter too many Zombies, Dracula or Michael Meyers these days, the next time you are potentially bogged down by data or a situation where your problem solving skills are working against you; check your dilated pupils, and go with your gut instinct!!

Cranky Co-workers

Office Bullies or Just Bad Manners?

 

Have you been experiencing higher than normal cranky co-workers?  Well, it may not just be you – recent research has shown that 86% of workers experience “bad manners.”  There are many factors that are contributing to the increase in bad moods and poor behavior at the office:  downsizing, wage cuts, change in leadership and more.  During these tough economic times, people who are still employed are taking on additional stress as well as taking on more than one role. This can create a greater chance of hostility in the workplace, creating an environment of rudeness.

So, how do you overcome this negativity in the work environment?  First of all, focus on what you have control over – YOU!! You only have control over your thoughts, your feelings and your behaviors. So, don’t let other people’s stress and baggage get the better of you. Encourage people to come together during these hard times. Humans want to feel socially connected, so create an environment at work which will help promote reciprocity and kindness towards each other.  People with strong social ties at work are more likely to live longer, according to new research in Health Psychology Magazine. So, why not promote a productive work environment through kindness, generosity, gratitude, and compassion.

You are not the only one going through tough times – we all are. And the best way to get through tough times is to come together.

Using Your Brain Power

Putting Your Brain Power into Practice

Have you ever heard of the phrase “group think”?  Well, the term “group-think” refers to the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility (Merriam-Webster Dictionary).

As many people in business know, this can be a terrible practice. It can stifle productivity, innovation and hinder motivation.  Yet, it is a typical and common place practice within business today.  And even though we know the negative ramifications of group think in an industry setting, sadly the use of group think may not be helping us to exercise our brains – and find that ‘ah ha’ moment of inspiration.

Have you ever known someone who can argue a point to death?  Even though this person can be exhausting at times, a new study from Columbia University says, using your debate skills is actually healthy. Having healthy debates (and I need to stress the word healthy here)…can actually stimulate our reasoning skills. It helps us to be more creative, socially flexible in group situations (i.e., open-minded and listen to all sides of the story) and it can foster a productive team – which may not always agree on every point, but can work together harmoniously knowing that even their opinion matters.

So, go ahead and have a debate today, encourage an environment where everyone can be heard. Of course, be careful of criticizing or attacking a person. Ideas are okay to question, it is not okay to personally attack someone because of those ideas.

Mindfulness

Using Mindfulness to help you in your daily life

What is mindfulness? It is a common phrase we here more and more these days, but what does it truly mean.  Well, the term mindfulness is a Buddhist philosophical and meditative term that refers to ‘being in the moment’.  The  true meditative definition would be - bringing one’s complete attention to the present experience on a moment-to-moment basis.

A more modern and Western definition from the Princeton Online Dictionary (wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn) - the trait of staying aware of (paying close attention to) your responsibilities.

So, how can mindfulness help you? While Mindfulness and other ancient philosophies are not new – they are new to research and scientific data. Part of what Positive Psychology or Happiness Research is trying to do, is to put empirical data to these ancient wisdoms. Some of the latest Mindfulness research is listed below. These are recent articles in the Monitor Magazine (the American Psychological Association Magazine).  These are wonderful examples of how you and your family can use mindfulness to make your life better. Enjoy!!

How to eat better—mindlessly

Psychologist Brian Wansink says that small changes in our environment can help us overcome our natural tendency to overeat.

By Lea Winerman

Monitor Staff

October 2011, Vol 42, No. 9

Print version: page 46

Want to eat a healthier breakfast? Psychologist Brian Wansink, PhD, might tell you to make a simple change: Move your bran cereal to the front of your pantry and put the Pop Tarts in back.

Wansink, director of the food and brand lab at Cornell University and author of the 2006 book "Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think," studies how things like plate size, menu descriptions and food placement affect what we eat—and how much. He's found that people are much more likely to eat the most conveniently placed food item in their pantry. He's also found that eating from a bigger bowl or plate, or drinking from a wider glass, can make people consume as much as 30 percent more calories—which, over a lifetime, could add up to dozens of extra pounds.

Wansink, who has been called the "Sherlock Holmes of food," solves his mysteries in a lab that he can dress up to look like a dining room, a restaurant, an airplane or anywhere else that people eat. His creative experiments are showing that some things that many people take for granted—such as the idea that our body knows when it's full—are simply false.

In one of his best-known studies, published in 2005 in the journal Obesity Research (Vol. 13, No. 1), he and his colleagues lured participants into their restaurant-lab with the offer of a free lunch. Half of the participants got a normal bowl of tomato soup. The other half sat down to a meal that seemingly never ran out. Their bowls were linked via a hidden tube to a six-quart vat of soup under the table. As the participants ate, the bowls subtly refilled. So from the participants' perspective, it looked as though they had hardly eaten anything at all.

Wansink and his colleagues let all of the participants eat for 20 minutes, then measured how much soup they had consumed and asked them how full they felt. They found that the participants with the self-refilling bowls ate 73 percent more than those with the normal bowls—but didn't report feeling any more full.

"Your tummy is a really terrible gauge of how full you are," Wansink told a packed house at APA's 2011 Annual Convention, where he described the soup-bowl study and other highlights from his more than a decade of food research.

For example, your stomach is not the only thing that can be easily tricked, he's found. Your tongue isn't very good at figuring out how much you like a food either. Wansink has found, for example, that changing the description of food on a menu—from, say, "seafood filet" to "succulent Italian seafood filet"—can make people rate a particular food as tasting better.

In one study, he and his colleagues served participants dinner, accompanied by a glass of "two-buck Chuck" Trader Joe's wine. They told half the participants that the wine was a new California label. The other half of the participants were told they were drinking North Dakota wine. Not only did the participants who thought they were drinking a California wine rate the wine as tasting better, they actually rated the food as tasting better as well, and the chef as having more training.

It might seem depressing to learn that we are so out of tune with our own tastes, and that we can't rely on our stomachs to know when we're sated. But the good news is that once we understand our hard-wired eating behavior, we can change our environments in ways that make us eat better, Wansink said.

For example, buying smaller plates and glasses.

After he did the study that showed that bigger plates and glasses make people consume more, he said, "I'm pretty sure everyone in the lab went out and bought new ones."

Now, Wansink is aiming to bring his research to one of the front lines in the fight against obesity: school lunch rooms. Through a project he's begun called the smarter lunchroom initiative, he's working with school systems around the country to make simple tweaks that will encourage students to eat more fruits and vegetables and fewer desserts.

In one school cafeteria, for example, he found that food servers dumped fruits into an unattractive metal bin near the steam tables. He bought a cheap fruit basket and piled the fruit artistically inside, and brought in a desk lamp to light up the display. Fruit sales more than doubled.

In another school cafeteria, he moved the salad bar from an isolated spot to a prime location next to the cash registers. Salad bar sales went up more than 200 percent.

Such simple solutions could be an effective and cheap tool to change students' eating habits, Wansink believes. Now, he and his colleagues are thinking big: They've recently received a $1 million federal grant to bring their ideas from the lab to the school system, and they're hoping to have as many as 35,000 schools on board by 2015.

Suppressing the 'white bears'

Meditation, mindfulness and other tools can help us avoid unwanted thoughts, says social psychologist Daniel Wegner.

By Lea Winerman

October 2011, Vol 42, No. 9
Print version: page 44

 "Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute."

That observation comes from "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions," Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1863 account of his travels in Western Europe. But the research that proved it true came more than a century later, from the lab of social psychologist Daniel Wegner, PhD.

Wegner, a psychology professor at Harvard University and the founding father of thought suppression research, first came across the quote more than 25 years ago.

"I was really taken with it," he said in a talk at APA's 2011 Annual Convention. "It seemed so true."

He decided to test the quote's assumption with a simple experiment: He asked participants to verbalize their stream of consciousness for five minutes, while trying not to think of a white bear. If a white bear came to mind, he told them, they should ring a bell. Despite the explicit instructions to avoid it, the participants thought of a white bear more than once per minute, on average.

Next, Wegner asked the participants to do the same exercise, but this time to try to think of a white bear. At that point, the participants thought of a white bear even more often than a different group of participants, who had been told from the beginning to think of white bears. The results suggested that suppressing the thought for the first five minutes caused it to "rebound" even more prominently into the participants' minds later.

The research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1987 (Vol. 53, No. 1) initiated an entirely new field of study on thought suppression. Over the next decade, Wegner developed his theory of "ironic processes" to explain why it's so hard to tamp down unwanted thoughts. He found evidence that when we try not to think of something, one part of our mind does avoid the forbidden thought, but another part "checks in" every so often to make sure the thought is not coming up—therefore, ironically, bringing it to mind.

After more than a quarter century of this research, Wegner said, he's realized that when he explains his work, listeners usually follow up with one question: "OK, so what do I do about this? Is there any way to avoid unwanted thoughts?"

The topic rings true for many people, perhaps especially because the thoughts that we often want to avoid are not as innocuous as white bears—they might involve painful memories or other difficult distractions.

In his APA presentation, Wegner described several strategies that he and others have come across to help "suppress the white bears." They include:

• Pick an absorbing distractor and focus on that instead: In one study, Wegner and his colleagues asked participants to think of a red Volkswagen instead of a white bear. They found that giving the participants something else to focus on helped them to avoid the unwanted white bears.
• Try to postpone the thought: Some research has found that asking people to simply set aside half an hour a day for worrying allows them to avoid worrying during the rest of their day, Wegner said. So next time an unwanted thought comes up, he suggested, just try to tell yourself, "I'm not going to think about that until next Wednesday."
• Cut back on multitasking: One study found that people under increased mental load show an increase in the availability of thoughts of death—one of the great unwanted thoughts for most people.
• Exposure: "This is painful," Wegner said, "but it can work." If you allow yourself to think in controlled ways of the thing that you want to avoid, then it will be less likely to pop back into your thoughts at other times.
• Meditation and mindfulness: There's evidence that these practices, which strengthen mental control, may help people avoid unwanted thoughts, Wegner said.