Presentation for the Advance Club in Marion, Indiana introducing the Science of Happiness and activities that crossover into preventing dementia. Presented October 20, 2021 First 14 slides is the back story of how I became interested in this topic - notes start on slide 15.
15. There is a SCIENCE to
Happiness
&
Positive Psychology
16. Course at Yale
most popular course
EVER
You can take it for free. Link is in
the Livebinder!
17. WHY should We Care
about HAPPINESS?
Business Wire says,
“By 2030, depression and mental health problems
will be among the most widespread and costly
diseases in the developed world. Promoting
resilience can prevent depression, anxiety and
behavior problems in young people.”
19. WHY ELSE Should we
CARE about HAPPINESS?
Link to Mom talking about dad...
Link trying to get Mom to sing...
Because many of the
strategies to boost
happiness also are linked
to preventing dementia!
20.
21. What IS Happiness?
Psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, defines happiness as
“the overall experience of pleasure and meaning.”
Neither “pleasure” nor “meaning” alone quite
describe happiness. You need meaning to give you a
sense of purpose in life, and you need pleasure to give
you a sense of joy or well-being in the present
moment.
22. What it is NOT...
People think it is a string of moments
of enthusiasm -
it is not that, not short-lived emotions…
Happinessisaquality of living
23. OVERVIEW
• Good NEWS: We can AFFECT our HAPPINESS
• Tie-in to Preventing Dementia
• KEY STRATEGIES to increase Happiness
in Your Own Life!
25. GOOD NEWS!!!!
Our level of happiness is shaped by the
choices we make. If you’ve been
chasing wealth, fame, good looks,
material things, and power, you may be
looking for happiness in all the wrong
places.
27. Why ? Research SAYS
By studying the personalities of identical twins they've
found that about
●50 percent of our happiness -- or unhappiness -- can be
traced to our genes.
●40 percent we can control with our daily thoughts and
actions
●10 percent is related to our life circumstances, such as where
we live, how much money we have, our marital status, or
looks
28. Think About That!
40 percent of our happiness "is left for the
intentional activities that we can choose to engage
in -- the things that we do and think every day of
our lives.”
29. So what DOES Make us Happy?
Behaviors that
Train Your Brain for
happiness
30. 1 POWER
of a SMILE
Smiling adds
7.2 Years to
your Life!
Baseball Card Experiment
31. POWER of a SMILE
SMILE - the “Beaming “ smile Players who
didn't smile in their pictures lived an
average of only 72.9 years, where players
with beaming smiles lived an average of
almost 80 years.”
Is a smile worth seven years extra years of
life to you?
32. POWER of a SMILE
• Smiling stimulates a brain mechanism when we
smile that’s better than chocolate!
• 1 smile, stimulates level of brain stimulation as
2000 bars of chocolate!
• Adds 7 years to your life.
33. Smile More...
HAPPY PEOPLE DON'T HAVE THE
BEST OF EVERYTHING - THEY
MAKE THE BEST OF EVERYTHING
It's CONTAGIOUS
34. Smile More...
Research links smiling to a variety of
positive outcomes including…
• Lower levels of stress hormones like cortisol,
adrenaline, and dopamine
• Increased levels of endorphins and
other mood-enhancing hormones
• Normalized blood pressure
35. Take a Selfie!
Researchers from the University of
California, Irvine studied college students
and found that snapping selfies and
sharing images with friends had a positive
effect on their psychological and
emotional states. The results were
published in the journal Psychology of
Well-Being.
PRACTICE TIP
36. 2. Show Gratitude
Showing gratitude is one of the
simplest yet most powerful things
humans can do for each other.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
37. Show Gratitude
Along with smiling, research shows that gratitude is good
for our health, affecting mood and well-being. Practicing
Gratitude literally re-wires our brains. When we notice
kindness and other gifts we’ve benefited from, our brains
become wired to seek out the positives in any situation,
even dire ones. As a result, we’re better at bouncing back
from loss and trauma.
38. The Thank You
Note
Writing a thank you
note lights up your
brain.
Do you have any thank
you notes that are so
special you keep them?
GRATITUDE - PRACTICE IT!
39. Write it Down
(be positive)
Research shows if you actually list one
thing you are grateful for every night for
three weeks, the chemistry of your brain
literally changes to a ‘happier’ state
equivalent to taking an antidepressant.
40. Throwback Thursday is
good for you!
Researchers have found that the act of reminiscing is actually a
technique that many people use to make themselves feel better;
reminiscing can also calm you down in stressful situations (Speer
& Delgado, 2017). While the idea that thinking about positive
memories can improve mood and resilience to stress is not a new
finding, it is affirming to know that “simply recalling happy
memories can combat acute stress at a physical level”
(Young, 2017)
42. Best Surprise Ever
Favorite TBT:)
Make a pile of favorite pics to make you smile
and recall good memories, or put up a photo
album online so you can always know where to
find memories that will boost your mood.
Riley surprises us with a visit home from LA
43. 3 BE POSITIVE
(CNN) Are you a pessimist by nature, a "glass half empty" sort of
person? That's NOT good for your brain. A new study found
that repetitive negative thinking in later life was linked to
cognitive decline and greater deposits of two harmful proteins
responsible for Alzheimer's disease. "We propose that
repetitive negative thinking may be a new risk factor for
dementia," said lead author Dr. Natalie Marchant, a psychologist and
senior research fellow in the department of mental health at
University College London, in a statement.
45. AWESOME THINGS
Science says just THINKING about AWESOME
things will boost your mood. Making a habit of this
will increase your happiness! See this
Ted Talk for inspiration! Neil Pasricha’s
3 A’s of Awesome.
47. In contrast...
Watching too much news...Negative news
can also affect mood and lead to feelings of hopelessness,
anger, and fear. One study, for instance, found that people
showed an increase in both anxious and sad moods after
only 14 minutes of watching TV news. These negative
stories can also exacerbate worries about our own
personal lives even if they aren’t directly related to the
content of the news story.
48. In contrast...I had to stop watching LA news
during the riots. I was so worried seeing my
son on the news - no words to describe it.
My anxiety was with me all the time.
49. 4 Health & Exercise
EXERCISE CHANGES THE BRAIN
The research is in and there are many positive brain benefits to which
exercise leads. According to John Ratey, Harvard Medical School
psychiatrist, “Exercise is the single best thing you can do for your brain
in terms of mood, memory, and learning.”
Doctors recommend 30 minutes of brisk activity daily, or 150 minutes per week.
50. 4 Health & Exercise
Grow new Brain Cells!
Doctors recommend 30 minutes of brisk activity daily, or 150 minutes per
week. New York University neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki says that we can
decrease our dementia risk by 30 percent just by walking and that exercise
has been shown to improve cognition among those who have already
received a dementia diagnosis.
● Suzuki says you can “re-sculpt” your brain with exercise, allowing it to
grow new brain cells in the hippocampus and improving memory
54. Diet to Prevent Dementia
Intermittent Fasting-
5:2 Diet reverses
cognitive decline
(Gabby Sell, former
student getting her
Doctorate in
neuroscience Iat
John Hopkins ) saw
great gains with this
approach
55. Exercise Your Brain!
LEnjoy strategy games, puzzles, and riddles. Brain teasers and strategy
games provide a great mental workout and build your capacity to form
and retain cognitive associations. Do a crossword puzzle, play board
games, cards, or word and number games such as Scrabble or Sudoku.
● Purchase some new puzzles and always have one going in a
corner of a room. Working a puzzle hits all kinds of happiness
factors, esp,. If you do it with someone else. As you work,
you are giving your brain some mental aerobics and it’s easy
to make a social connection, a huge component of
happiness…
57. READ (exercise your brain)
“I like to eat, play, and watch TV, and I am NOT going to
learn to read.” 5-yr.-old Riley Reese
58. Regular READING
(a magic elixir for health)
Folks who read at least 30 minutes a week are 20
percent more likely to report greater life satisfaction
and 11 percent more likely to feel creative. They're also
28 percent less likely to suffer from depression and 18
percent more likely to report high self-esteem. Even if
your worries are just garden variety, reading will probably
help. Reading a book was ranked as a more effective
cure for anxiety than taking a walk or chatting with a
friend, and almost one in five respondents (19
percent) said reading helps them feel less lonely.
59. ● Studies done by the Reading Agency in the UK
have also found that reading for fun can reduce
symptoms of depression and dementia.
● Research on the effects of brain-stimulating
activities back up the memory-boosting
benefits of reading. One study published in the
journal Neurology, found that life-long readers
were better protected against Lewy bodies,
amyloid burden, and tangles over the 6-year
study. Reading into old age also reduced
memory decline by more than 30 percent,
compared to other forms of mental activity.
READ (exercise your brain)
60. 5 GIVING & Generosity
Be a GIVER: Invest your own
resources to serve - buy
experiences not things...
5 Giving and Generosity
61. Comedian Steven Wright once
said, “You can’t have everything.
Where would you put it?”
Practice Strategies & Tips
62. Do you have a garage, an attic, a spare bedroom (or all 3 of
these things) filled with ‘stuff?’ If you don’t, you probably know
someone who does. There’s science behind why we have so many ‘things’ or
objects that aren’t being used. After 20 years of research, Dr. Tom Gilovich has
come to the conclusion that experiences provide greater joy than things,
explaining that “One of the enemies of happiness is adaptation. New things
are exciting to us at first, but then we adapt to them.”
In fact, there is even a word for this: Your Word for the Day:)
Stuffocation. a feeling of stress caused by having so many
things that you do not know how to use or store them all.
word for the day: stuffocation
64. You can't put a
price on a
memory...
Practice Strategies & Tips
65. ● experiences produce joy during the
anticipation of the experience, the actual
experience itself, and then from the
memories afterwards.
● Experiences tend to bring us together with
other people, and social connection is a
major key to happiness.
Buy Experiences
70. 6 Stay SOCIAL
Good Genes are Nice but JOY is better -
80 year study- community lengthens life
Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what
keep people happy throughout their lives, the study revealed.
Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to
delay mental and physical decline, and are better
predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ,
or even genes. That finding proved true across the board
among both the Harvard men and the inner-city participants.
71. Psychologists at Harvard University found that people spend about
47% of their waking hours thinking about something other than what
they are doing. They also found that this mind-wandering makes
people unhappy.
• Being mindful helps avoid mistakes and accidents, reduce stress and
increase happiness.
7 BE PRESENT - MINDFULNESS
72. Life is happening in front of you every day; if you don’t pay attention you
can miss a wonderful opportunity to connect. Powering down and
disconnecting from the devices we’ve become so dependent on means
less fragmented moments throughout the day. Your attention span will
increase, your self-awareness and mindfulness will grow, and
you’ll be able to appreciate and savor your time and the people you
encounter throughout the day.
7 BE PRESENT - UNPLUG
73. 8 Self Acceptance
Mark Williamson, Director of Action for Happiness, said:
"Our society puts huge pressure on us to be successful and
to constantly compare ourselves with others. This causes a
great deal of unhappiness and anxiety. These findings
remind us that if we can learn to be more accepting of
ourselves as we really are, we're likely to be much happier.
The results also confirm us that our day-to-day habits have
a much bigger impact on our happiness than we might
imagine."
74. 9 Find Purpose
"Living with purpose gives you a recurring
touchstone or goal, which leads to feeling
less anxious about your direction in life.
That underlying calm about your life can
pay big health dividends. Plus, get this.
Being more calm about your life direction
and purpose typically leads to being more
organized!
75. HAPPY BRAIN, HAPPY YOU!
BY TRAINING OUR BRAIN TO THINK IN A MORE
POSITIVE, MORE OPTIMISTIC WAY- WE CAN
TRAIN IT FOR HAPPINESS, IMPROVING OUR
SENSE OF WELL-BEING AND ALLOWING OUR
BRAIN TO FUNCTION AT PEAK CAPACITY.
Wrap it Up
76. WRAP it UP...Our level of happiness
is shaped by the choices we
make. Enduring happiness comes
from ...sharing experiences and
making memories with others. Some
of these practices may help
prevent dementia and preserve
your brain health!
77. And Finally - September 20,2021
A GOOD LIFE IS A COLLECTION
OF HAPPY MEMORIES.
Dennis Waitley
Seems like a good day
to make some!
