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Don’t Beat Stress… Meet Stress
Doctors can’t tell you much about migraines. According to Healthline.com, a partial list of triggers includes lack of sleep, caffeine, foods, food additives, hunger, dehydration, alcohol, strong odors, bright lights, loud sounds, weather change, exercise, hormones and — my personal favorite — stress.
At their best, migraines will interrupt my sleep several times a night. At their worst, they shoot burning needles of agony into my brain for 14 hours straight until I finally pass out from exhaustion.
I’ve dealt with migraines for about a quarter century now. During my last series, a new neurosurgeon put me on steroids to relax my muscles, a regimen that prevents headache Armageddon while allowing the cycle to slowly run its course.
It’s working, mostly, for which I’m enormously grateful. But not without a curious side-effect.
Now I’m too relaxed.
Groupthink: Blinded by “I’m Right”
Crossword puzzles. Sudoku. Word games. Logic problems. These are common recipes from the diet books for the mind. Go traveling. Take up knitting or gardening. Learn Italian. Drive a different way to work. Get an advanced degree. Anything and everything that piques cognitive activity belongs in our catalogue of mental health activities.
“That’s all good,” says Barbara Strauch, author of The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind and New York Times health and medical science editor. But the most intriguing advice Ms. Strauch has heard is this: “Deliberately challenge your view of the world. Talk to people you totally disagree with.”
It makes sense. Nothing kicks the brain into overdrive like having to defend your point of view against attack, or the desire to dismantle an argument you find unsound or wrongheaded. What’s more, Ms. Strauch asserts that the brain is actually primed for questioning assumptions, since reexamining our beliefs provides the opportunity to revisit, or more deeply contemplate, why we believe the way we do.
“Confronting things you disagree with may not make you change your mind,” she says, “but it will perhaps give you a view that is more satisfying to the middle-aged brain.”
And who knows? Sometimes we may even discover that we’ve been wrong.
The True Rewards of Giving
Would most people rather save one person or save the world? The answer might surprise you.
University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic asked subjects for donations to save a little girl from starvation. To one group he gave no other information; to the other group he added that this girl was one of millions of other starving people. Logically, that extra bit of information should make no difference, since the girl being saved is the same.
But as one of my mentors likes to say, human beings are psychological and not logical creatures. Case in point: subjects in the second group donated about half as much money as those in the first group.
Building Character and Acquiring a Civil Tongue
Older readers will remember Johnny Carson, the legendary host of the Tonight Show whose 30-year tenure preceded that of Jay Leno. But not so many remember Mr. Carson’s predecessor, Jack Paar, and fewer still will recall why he left the show.
In the opening monologue one night, Mr. Paar uttered the expression “W.C.,” a mostly-forgotten anachronism meaning Water Closet, yet another anachronism meaningbathroom. The censors bleeped the term as profane. Mr. Paar quit the show in protest.
The story strikes as comical, and we can’t help rolling our collective eyes at the overzealous censors who couldn’t tell real profanity from the merely indelicate. But when it comes to values, we can’t escape the inevitable objection: who gets to decide where to draw the line?
Conquer Laziness Now
Readers of a certain age may remember an old Goodyear tire commercial with the tag line, “You can pay me now, or pay me later.” The applications transcend auto repair, as Shaomin Li, professor of international business at Virginia’s Old Dominion University discovered on a business trip to Taiwan.
As he was being chauffeured from one venue to the next, Professor Li noticed that his host always backed into parking lot spaces, opting for often tricky and laborious maneuvering over the simpler method of pulling straight forward. Detecting a wider pattern of behavior, Professor Li conducted his own experiment. He discovered that 88% of Chinese drivers back in when they park, in contrast to 6% of American drivers.
“All of a sudden,” recounts Professor Li, “I said, gee — isn’t this delayed gratification?”
The Drifters: A Generation Lost in Space
You know who they are. You’ve seen them. They’re everywhere. On the roads. In the malls. In office buildings and grocery stores and parking lots.
There’s no way to avoid them. And there are more of them every day.
You know who I mean: the drifters.
They’re the ones driving just under the speed limit – 28 MPH in a 30 zone, not quite slow enough to pass and maddeningly unaware. They’re the ones walking through the aisles, down the halls, up the stairs, and across the floor, like Energizer Bunnies with batteries that have finally run down, refusing to stop but plodding along, sporadic, lethargic.
And it’s not just their lack of speed, not merely their dawdling. That we could live with, anticipate, and circumvent. It’s something much more than that – or much less.
They drift.
Start Making Better Choices
Why are fish so smart? Because they go around in schools.
Turns out, it’s no joke. Just ask Christian Agrillo, a comparative psychologist at Italy’s University of Padova. In his research, Dr. Agrillo tests something called numerical competence. By placing three black dots in front of a desirable object (like food, or a door that leads to other fish) and two dots in front of an undesirable object (like no food, or a door that leads nowhere), Dr. Agrillo has been able to determine that fish have the ability to differentiate between different numbers.
Along the way, however, the researchers discovered something else. Put fish together and they make better decisions than they make when they’re alone.
The Illusion of Wisdom
Seat belts. Shoulder straps. Air bags. Radial tires. Automatic headlights. Warning chimes. Back up cameras.
It’s only a matter of time before car manufacturers introduce the next big safety innovation… and the next, and the next… inexorably making us safer and safer as we take to the roadways.
Or so it would seem.
But are we really safer, or are we indulging an illusion of safety that may actually place us in greater danger?
Yonason Goldson 