Monthly Archives: March 2012

Will I Be Pretty?

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When is enough, enough? After watching this YouTube video that was sent to me I became overwhelmed with emotion as I thought about how many women and girls in our culture have become obsessed with our physical appearance. Literally. I mean obsessed. At first I thought, “Yeah, speak it loud and clear sister! Looks shouldn’t matter at all! And as women we need to stop thinking about, caring about, or worrying about what we look like! Who even cares!” Well, after coming down from this emotional high and thinking about it a little further I’d have to say that I do feel this way… to a certain extent… but I’m not ready to go out and burn my bra any time soon.

I believe we, both men and women alike, were created with an eye for beauty – not just in other humans, but also in our world. There is so much natural beauty around us and many of us feel good when we experience the beauty of creation. So then, if we were born with the propensity to appreciate looking at things that are pretty and appealing, is it then maladaptive to want to be attractive and appealing ourselves? I’m tempted to say no. Is it maladaptive and unhealthy to be constantly preoccupied with wanting to devise ways to look more attractive? And spend much of our time, energy, effort, and talents attempting to attain a certain feeling that is not actually attainable by way of stuff and things? To that I’d have to say yes.

Something else that has come out of my research on happiness which I found fascinating is that as it turns out, on these extreme makeover shows where women who thought they were unattractive and thought that they could only ever find real happiness if others found them physically beautiful, were right… after they’d recovered from their umpteen different face, body, and skin operations and procedures and were able to look in the mirror and for the first time be giddy with delight in what they saw these women did feel really, really happy… for the first few month. At best. Usually the dramatic spike in happiness stuck around for a few weeks after recovery and then went right back to generally the same level of personal happiness the madeover women felt before they ever went under the knife.

So, will it make me genuinely happy and content with myself if I shop till I drop and acquire all the nicest clothes, sexiest purses, or most powerful pumps? If I have the perfect shade of chestnut hair, the most flattering hue of rose coloured lips, or the ideal waist-to-hip ratio? The research results are clear: not a chance. Is it, however, unhealthy to enjoy and delight in feeling attractive and pretty from time to time? Of course not. Just as long as we don’t naively buy into the lie (aka marketing tactic) that it will actually make us happier.

Signed. Sealed. Delivered.

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Because we were created as social beings, when we do things that make others feel good, we can’t help but feel good ourselves. In continuing with the conversation about gratitude I found in my research on happiness a neat little gratitude exercise. The exercise involves writing a gratitude letter. Pretty self explanatory. In detail though, it entails expressing our appreciation in concrete terms to someone who has been kind, thoughtful, or helpful to us in one way or another. It could be your mother, father, an old friend, a new friend, a teacher, a coach, a mentor… pretty much whomever. The letter is to entail a detailed description of what he or she did for you and exactly how it affected your day, your week, your year, or your life. The exercise becomes even more powerful if we read the letter aloud to the person to whom our gratitude is directed.

Positive Psychology researcher Martin Seligman and his colleagues (2005) performed a study on the happiness benefits of expressing gratitude with this type of gratitude letter. Over the course of one week the participants in the study were instructed to write and then deliver by hand a letter of gratitude to someone who had been particularly kind, caring, or thoughtful to them. After the exercise was completed, the participants were to report back and unsurprisingly all of them reported an immediate and significant increase in their levels of felt happiness and a decrease in their feelings of depression. What’s more is that most of the same participants maintained an increase in their overall happiness even at a one month follow up.

While reading this, my thoughts immediately went to my grade 11 and 12 math teacher, Mister Outerbridge. He was such a lovely man and an incredible teacher. Now mind you math had always been my favourite subject in school, but there was something about Mister Outerbridge that made me enjoy it even more. He was the type of teacher who would come in early and make himself available before school if any of his students wanted to come in and ask questions about their homework, or to gain clarity on a concept or two. I often took the opportunity to go in for the extra support and almost every time I would walk into his classroom long before the first bell was to ring he would be up at the chalk board writing out formulas and humming or, more accurately ‘da, da, dee, da, da, da’-ing a joyous tune to himself. Such a delight. He was always so patient, clear, encouraging, and helpful. One couldn’t help but find the man lovely.

I think I will make it my intention in the next couple weeks to find the time to sit down and write a letter of appreciation and gratitude to him. Just the thought of doing this makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

 

Seligman, M.E., Steen, T.A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist, 60: 410-421.

Becoming a Natural

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Further to the conversation on increasing happiness in our lives, research suggests that one of the things that people with high levels of happiness do is remember to be intentionally grateful. Gratitude has been shown to be a very powerful antidote to sadness, frustration, depression, anxiety, and envy. By choosing to focus on and be grateful for what we do have we become much less likely to focus on or be worried about what we don’t. Now I’m not trying to be trite and recommend in the midst of despair that we should just stuff our sadness aside and look on the bright side – by no means. Sadness, frustration, and anger do have a valuable place in our lives, and giving those emotions some space is very important. That said, some boundaries with how much we indulge those emotions is very important as well. It’s not so useful to keep ourselves in an endless downward spiral of misery, and although it sometimes feels like we can’t help but feel sad, bad, mad, jealous, or worried, we in fact, to a greater or lesser extent, can.

By intentionally making a short list of things we are grateful for on a regular basis, either in our heads, by speaking them to another, or by actually writing a few down from time to time, we can’t help but start to see things differently.

The great news is that the research on happiness also shows that our personal happiness has very little to do with what we do or do not have: so for those of us who believe we would be happy if only…we would be wrong. It has very much more to do with the perspective that we chose to take. Sometimes easier said than done, but like most things that become natural this too takes patience, practice, and persistence.