The Happiness Doctor Is In...

A Mayo Clinic physician offers a joyful plan based in science Dr. Amit Sood, 48, reckons, based on average life span, that he has 10,000 days more to live. That sense of finite time helps him focus his attention, show compassion, be grateful and help others — all actions that lead to happiness. Sood chooses happiness. And he wishes for you to choose it, too. His recently released Mayo Clinic Handbook for Happiness pulls together easy things to incorporate into a busy life to boost joy and fulfillment. The Mayo Clinic researcher, educator and clinician grew up in India and was a young medical student during the massive 1984 chemical spill in Bhopal. He witnessed the resulting injuries and suffering of people whose homes and lives were destroyed by the accident. When he moved to the United States a decade later, he thought he would find, he says, “the Disneyland of the world.” And yet, he saw suffering, stress and pain in this country, too. Why, he wondered, is happiness so elusive? What is it about the human condition that pulls us to the negative? The problem, his research showed, is our brains. They are not designed for peace and happiness but to constantly scan the environment for what could harm us, looking always for what’s wrong or out of place. And our minds wander — most of us spend 50 to 80 percent of our time thinking wandering thoughts. We can’t seem to help it. When Mayo gave people 174 choices of activities that made them happy, “thinking” came in dead last. Yet, it gobbles up our finite days. So how to break free of the brain’s relentless churning, its pull to the negative? “If we can do that,”...

How to Create Meaning in Dementia Care...

One of the most important things to a caregiver of someone with Alzheimer’s is to know their loved one is happy. However, they are often so overwhelmed by the responsibility of caregiving, that the fun of being together is lost. All engagement tends to be for survival and not for enrichment. This often results in a negative atmosphere affecting the mood of everyone, including the person with Alzheimer’s. Left unchecked, the resulting tensions will often lead to behavioral issues from both individuals. Slipping Away Unsure how to even act around each other, the care partners (the person with Alzheimer’s and his or her caregiver) may fall into a world of isolation. They may worry about what others think or feel their situation is unlike others’. They can become so uncomfortable that they may withdraw from family, friends and society. Changing these tendencies is important to the health and well-being of both individuals because meaningful human interaction, whether in a one-on-one situation or in a group setting, is important to everyone’s happiness. Finding Happiness With Alzheimer’s disease, it’s important that engagement is adapted to meet the changing needs of the individual while focusing on the things that enrich the person’s life and bring happiness. For this to work, the caregiver must accept how things are now and discover ways to incorporate meaningful activities on daily basis. While a caregiver will routinely look back at how things were, it’s vital to appreciate that the person with Alzheimer’s is the same person as in the past. It’s the disease that’s making the individual act different, and typically, the same things will still bring happiness to his or her heart. These men and women still want to be included in activities and to...

Why You Should Give Yourself a Hug...

Self-compassion improves health The lives of millions of boomers in their 50s and 60s have been characterized by ambition, achievement and competitiveness. Then the recession and lingering economic woes took their toll. For many, drive has given way to disappointment. Self-esteem has been eclipsed by worries about money, retirement and aging. Many of us think we should be doing better. But here’s advice worth heeding: Stop berating yourself. A growing body of research from some of the nation’s top universities is documenting the benefits of self-compassion — being as kind and accepting of your own failures as you would a friend’s. Giving yourself a break and accepting your imperfections improves overall health and well-being, boosts creativity and success and can even help people cope better with aging, studies have found. Moreover, those who score high on tests of self-compassion have less depression and anxiety. We Are All Imperfect “Treating oneself kindly leads people to understand and experience the reality that their troubles are part of the human condition,” says University of Texas at Austin educational psychology associate professor Kristin Neff , who has published a book on her research on self-compassion, Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. Self-compassion, Neff says, is recognizing that we are all imperfect and should support ourselves, as well as others. This is especially relevant for boomers who, at this stage, tend to tally their life achievements and come up short. Even bags under the eyes and a painful joint or two can lead to a barrage of self-criticism. In fact, says Neff, people with low self-compassion mistakenly believe that being self-critical will motivate them. “But being kind to yourself does not lower standards,” she says. “With self compassion you aim and reach...

5 Secrets to Transform Your Experience of Aging...

They’ll help you shift from a sense of loss to a sense of gain My 15-year-old son Evan walked off the tennis court triumphantly, as if he had just won the U.S. Open. Up to that point, our matches had always ended in a tie: I made sure of that or, rather, I could make sure of that. Now, toweling off while feeling an unfamiliar tug on my heart, I said to him, “Hey, Ev, did you ever wonder why the score always remained the same in our tennis matches over the years?” Then, in a suggestive whisper, I continued: “Maybe you could continue that trend — gracefully?” He didn’t respond, but I knew his answer. And it was deafening. Walking back to the car, I was consumed by the thought that my relationship with Evan (and with my life generally) was clearly at a crossroads. Staying positive as I aged would require letting go of capacities that were diminishing and embracing ones that were expanding. Easy transition? No! Gratifying? Mostly! Here are five secrets I’ve learned along the way that helped turn my experience of aging from a sense of loss into a sense of gain: Learn to accept what is. There is no end to the expanding benefits of embracing life on its own terms. If I hadn’t accepted my inevitable decline in physical acuity — the awareness of which began on the tennis court that day — it would have led to nothing but suffering. Instead, by refocusing my attention on supporting, even celebrating, my son’s physical ascension from boy to early manhood, I was able to walk away from “defeat” feeling relatively good. This mindset shift allowed me to interpret the situation, and many others...

Why Letting Go Is the Path to Happiness...

‘The Ecstasy of Surrender’ author says it’s an anti-aging secret, too Bestselling author and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA Dr. Judith Orloff is a model for balancing fierce left-brain intellect and right-brain compassion. She calls herself an “empathic psychiatrist,” and it’s her ability to connect with her patients on an emotional level while supporting them and offering wise life strategies that puts her in a rarefied league. As a follow-up to her 2009 book, the wildly popular Emotional Freedom, Orloff has penned The Ecstacy of Surrender: 12 Surprising Ways Letting Go Can Empower Your Life . She gave readers a taste of it in a TED talk. , which garnered more than half a million views on YouTube. In the new book, Orloff shows why surrender is a more effective approach to life than trying to control or force things. She offers examples and exercises to help us make that simple, yet super-challenging, leap when it comes to power, money, communication, relationships and mortality. I had the pleasure of chatting with her about these subjects and others and was especially eager to hear whether she felt surrender was more important to boomers than other age groups. Highlights from our conversation: Next Avenue: You’ve said you write about what you want to learn about. How did you pick the subject of surrender? Orloff: Well, because I’m a control freak and I tend to fight with life sometimes, and worry, and get attached to patterns and relationships that aren’t good for me and I can’t rid of them … my deepest desire was to learn surrender on a deep, deep level so I could shed what wasn’t working for me and learn how to trust and flow instead of...