For Christmas, I bought my wife a subscription to Marriage Partnership. In the first issue we received, there was a good article about "couples devotional":
No amount of being religious can replace the time a couple spends in shared prayer. Research shows that couples who frequently pray together are twice as likely as those who pray less often to describe their marriages as being highly romantic. And couples who pray together are 90 percent more likely to report higher satisfaction with sex than couples who don't pray together. Because of the vulnerability it demands, prayer draws a couple closer.
If prayer is so good for marriage, why don't more couples do it? Because it's not easy and the price of that vulnerability can seem too high ... We've become convinced that the most desperate need in many marriages is not for more excitement or activity, but for depth. Try sojourning together toward communion with God. Then your aching urge to be connected - soul to soul - will be satisfied.
There was also a good quote from Trent Dilfer, quarterback of the Cleveland Browns. He said, "People are often enamored with my Super Bowl ring. But it's my wedding ring that I'm most proud of. Having a good marriage takes even more work than winning a Super Bowl."
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
My brother sent this page to me and it's totally cool. Well ... maybe only cool if you're into analytics and data visualization. In some situations, the right visualization can make all the difference. Enjoy.
Monday, January 01, 2007
Cool Christmas present
For Christmas, my brother bought me a ton of CO2 emissions through NativeEnergy. Specifically, NativeEnergy will use the money to build new wind power projects that reduce one ton of CO2 emissions (about a third of a car's annual emissions). What a thoughtful gift. Thanks! For Christmas, I gave some of my in-laws $10 each towards the purchase of compact flourescent lightbulbs (or some other energy efficiency project of their choice). It was one way to remember the environment (a gift to humanity) this holiday season.
The Science of Happiness
I just read an article in the January-February issue of Harvard Magazine called "The Science of Happiness". Apparently "positive psychology" is a new and fast-growing field, although some like Daniel Gilbert (author of Stumbling on Happiness) "don't think psychology needs a movement ... probably 85% of the ideas are worthless, but that's true everywhere in science." As I was reading through the article, I marked three passages that I thought were interesting:
Environs, too, affect mood. Settings that combine “prospect and refuge,” for example, seem to support a sense of well-being. “People like to be on a hill, where they can see a landscape. And they like somewhere to go where they can not be seen themselves,” Etcoff explains. “That’s a place desirable to a predator who wants to avoid becoming prey.” Other attractive features include a source of water (streams for beauty and slaking thirst), low-canopy trees (shade, protection), and animals (proof of habitability). “Humans prefer this to deserts or man-made environments,” Etcoff says. “Building windowless, nature-less, isolated offices full of cubicles ignores what people actually want. A study of patients hospitalized for gall-bladder surgery compared those whose rooms looked out on a park with those facing a brick wall. The park-view patients used less pain medication, had shorter stays, and complained less to their nurses. We ignore our nature at our own peril.”
“We evolved in a much different world, with much less choice and no sedentary people,” Etcoff continues. “We didn’t evolve for happiness, we evolved for survival and reproduction.” For this reason, we are sensitive to danger. “Pleasure and the positive-reward system is for opportunity and gain,” Etcoff explains. “And pleasure involves risk, taking a chance that can override some of your fear at that moment.”
Happiness activates the sympathetic nervous system (which stimulates the “flight or fight” response), whereas joy stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system (controlling “rest and digest” functions). “We can laugh from either joy or happiness,” Vaillant said. “We weep only from grief or joy.” Happiness displaces pain, but joy embraces it: “Without the pain of farewell, there is no joy of reunion,” he asserted. “Without the pain of captivity, we don’t experience the joy of freedom.”
I've seen a couple of authors make the distinction between happiness and joy before. I've also heard authors argue that we can't appreciate what's good in our lives within having some bad stuff for contrast.
There was one other passage from Daniel Gilbert that was thought-provoking:
The reason is that humans hold fast to a number of wrong ideas about what will make them happy. Ironically, these misconceptions may be evolutionary necessities. “Imagine a species that figured out that children don’t make you happy,” says Gilbert. “We have a word for that species: extinct. There is a conspiracy between genes and culture to keep us in the dark about the real sources of happiness. If a society realized that money would not make people happy, its economy would grind to a halt.”
That last sentence is pretty interesting. If people weren't interested in making more than a bare minimum amount of money, would capitalism still be able to operate or would it fall apart?
I wonder where all this research will take us - or whether it will be a passing fad with not much to show for itself 10-20 years from now.
Environs, too, affect mood. Settings that combine “prospect and refuge,” for example, seem to support a sense of well-being. “People like to be on a hill, where they can see a landscape. And they like somewhere to go where they can not be seen themselves,” Etcoff explains. “That’s a place desirable to a predator who wants to avoid becoming prey.” Other attractive features include a source of water (streams for beauty and slaking thirst), low-canopy trees (shade, protection), and animals (proof of habitability). “Humans prefer this to deserts or man-made environments,” Etcoff says. “Building windowless, nature-less, isolated offices full of cubicles ignores what people actually want. A study of patients hospitalized for gall-bladder surgery compared those whose rooms looked out on a park with those facing a brick wall. The park-view patients used less pain medication, had shorter stays, and complained less to their nurses. We ignore our nature at our own peril.”
“We evolved in a much different world, with much less choice and no sedentary people,” Etcoff continues. “We didn’t evolve for happiness, we evolved for survival and reproduction.” For this reason, we are sensitive to danger. “Pleasure and the positive-reward system is for opportunity and gain,” Etcoff explains. “And pleasure involves risk, taking a chance that can override some of your fear at that moment.”
Happiness activates the sympathetic nervous system (which stimulates the “flight or fight” response), whereas joy stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system (controlling “rest and digest” functions). “We can laugh from either joy or happiness,” Vaillant said. “We weep only from grief or joy.” Happiness displaces pain, but joy embraces it: “Without the pain of farewell, there is no joy of reunion,” he asserted. “Without the pain of captivity, we don’t experience the joy of freedom.”
I've seen a couple of authors make the distinction between happiness and joy before. I've also heard authors argue that we can't appreciate what's good in our lives within having some bad stuff for contrast.
There was one other passage from Daniel Gilbert that was thought-provoking:
The reason is that humans hold fast to a number of wrong ideas about what will make them happy. Ironically, these misconceptions may be evolutionary necessities. “Imagine a species that figured out that children don’t make you happy,” says Gilbert. “We have a word for that species: extinct. There is a conspiracy between genes and culture to keep us in the dark about the real sources of happiness. If a society realized that money would not make people happy, its economy would grind to a halt.”
That last sentence is pretty interesting. If people weren't interested in making more than a bare minimum amount of money, would capitalism still be able to operate or would it fall apart?
I wonder where all this research will take us - or whether it will be a passing fad with not much to show for itself 10-20 years from now.
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