Monthly Archives: April 2017

Stress

I elected to go with Kelly McGonigal’s TED talk about making stress your friend.  I was highly surprised about the fact that stress if used the right way can actually help your heart.  How oxytocin works is something I new at least in part but I never knew it could work so effectively during stress even going so far as to help heal your heart from stress related damage  Kelly was highly competent in her explanations being a psychologist at Stanford University.  I can definitely use this information to help with my stress because I definitely have plenty of it.  It can help me focus whether I am stressed out at class.  It is also highly helpful when I am dealing with either my son’s or my medical issues.  So I look forward to applying this to everyday life in the hopes that it can potentially help my health versus stress always hurting it.


Managing Stress

In Kelly McGonigal’s TED talk, she discusses how a change in your perception of stress can change its physiology. It is no mystery that prolonged stress is detrimental to your health, but thinking about stress as a way that your body energizes itself could completely negate the negative effects of stress. I wanted to believe these claims however the more I watched the TED talk the less I believed in the speaker’s claim.

At first I found the speaker credible because she shared that she’s a health psychologist, but that trust was broken as she continued to talk. The studies she presented to back up her claim had little weight behind them. She discussed the death rates of people that viewed stress as a negative influence in their life, but failed to discuss why these people died. Were their deaths stressed related? There is correlation but no causation. Maybe changing your perspective on stress can ease some of your stress, but the underlying reason for that stress will still negatively impact your health. In the end, stress is a mechanism to prepare you to perform; it wears on your body over time. I believe in moderation; some stress is necessary to meet goals that you set for yourself. Reducing stress should still be a goal for those that have a lot of stress in their life, but I do agree that changing your outlook on a situation can be powerful. It can incite you to finish your work so you spend less time stressing over it. In the future, I’ll try changing my outlook on stress but I’ll also focus more on preventing excess stress in the first place.


First Impression- Happiness

I love the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Dan Gilbert’s TED talk offered a unique persepctive to the old age question of what makes us happy. His premise is simply this: we are tricked into what we think makes us happy. Before I dive anymore into his talk, Dan Gilbert is a professor at Harvard which gives him high credibility considering Harvard is one of the most prestigious schools in the world. He opened his talk like a professor would do in lecture, with a pop quiz. I found his pop quiz fascinating because it showed that, on average, parapalegics were just as happy as those who won the lottery, after one year. I can see why this is true because winning the lottery only offers temporary happiness that fades with the extreme event that caused the happiness whereas a parapalegic finds his or her happiness in everyday life. He then discusses how pursuing happiness is flawed because we have been led to believe that happiness can be found. His argument that happiness is synthesized was appealling to me. I agree with the notion that happiness comes from piecing together the things that make you happy in life. The study where students had to give a picture up and then their satisfication with the picture they kept, was measured a few days later, interested me. I interpreted the results of the study as a suggestion that wanting what you have makes you happy. Overall, it was an informative talk that I enjoyed watching. In the future, I look to improve my happiness by synthesizing my enjoyments in life rather than chase the holy grail of happiness because the former has long-lasting pleasant effects while the latter offers many oppurtonities for dissappointment.


Week 12 First Impression- Stress & Emotion

Kelly McGonigal’s Ted talk on stress was extremely interesting and made me think about stress in a whole new way. McGonigal is a health psychologist that had be teaching about the negative impacts of stress for many years. Like her, I had always heard that longterm stress can be very harmful. I have always feared becoming permanently affected by the large amounts of prolonged stress I have experienced as a pre-med student. This fear of stress is precisely what McGonigal discussed. She explained that if we change the way we think about stress, we can change the way our body responds to stress. She based this theory on a study that tracked 30,000 adults for 9 years. The participants were asked how much stress they were experiencing and how harmful they believed this was. The results showed that there was a 43% increased chance of dying in only those who believed stress was harmful. The result of this study was astonishing to me.  Can how we perceive stress really save our lives? This is a hefty claim and I think I would have to look into the study itself to make a decision on how valid the results really are or if they are due to chance. Kelly McGonigal is a health psychologist so I would assume that she is a credible source and that she did look at the study in depth and its methods before making any claims from its results.

Some of these claims, however, do seem logical if we stop to think about it. From my own personal experience, I know that when I let stress and anxiety get to me, I eventually breakdown. However, if I take a moment to organize by thoughts and step back for a moment, I can deal with the stress by planning things out and taking them on set by step. Therefore, not letting stress get the best of me can really increase my performance. McGonigal also discussed the neurohormone oxytocin. She explained that it is released when we experience stress and it motivates us to seek support and comfort in others. This seems very true. When I am super stressed, I’ll usually talk, or more often vent, to my parents about everything that is going on. I would have never imagined that this behavior is actually promoted by a hormone. As McGonigal said, its like our body has a mechanism built within the stress mechanism that aims to protect us from any harmful effects.

I think the most important take-away from this is that the way we think about our situation determines how we will react to it. We can view each challenge in a more positive light by finding our innate qualities, including biological responses, that can be used as strengths. Having a more positive mindset in each situation can definitely help us have better control over it.


Stress

What is stress? One way to define stress is as a state of mental or emotional strain resulting from differing or very demanding circumstances. This week I had to watch a Ted Talk video titled How to make stress your friend, in which Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist, discusses not only how stress can be positive and but ways in which stress can positively influence a person’s body and daily life. In that video, Kelly McGonigal was able to completely turn my point of view on stress around. There were several tests performed that shows people who view stress and the reactions that it causes as beneficial, not only did better in the tests but apparently Kelly McGonigal also stated lived better and lived longer. And all individuals have to do is view stress and all of its reactions as good and not negative.

 

As I was watching this video I went through several phases of reactions. At first I was confused about how stress can actually be good for people’s health; then I become startled by the research that proves that stress can be healthy; and lastly I became hopeful and elated because I go through so much stress and it frustrates me and the thought that I can actually make stress a positive influence on my life just sounded miraculous. And to add to my happiness I discovered that the information that Kelly McGonigal discussed is actually very credible. In the footnotes of this Ted Talk she referenced several website sources that not only support her findings, but also contain the information in which she was discussing in her presentation.

 

After watching Kelly McGonigal Ted Talk video I plan on implement some of the ideas into my life. I am usually become very stressed in my daily life as a college student because I just have so much to do, very little time to get it all done, and then finding time to the other things I need to accomplish. This is video is helpful because it can teach me to be more positive, change my perspective on stress, try to become closer to my friends and family, and be more willing to help others when they are in trouble, instead of just focusing on the mountain of paper work I need to complete. By implementing viewing stress as a positive reaction, I can hopefully become healthier, more social, and live longer. On a ending note I found this Ted Talk video be very reasonable but also very inspiring and educational.

 

 

Works Cited

 

McGonigal, Kelly. “How to Make Stress Your Friend.” Kelly McGonigal: How to Make Stress Your Friend | TED Talk | TED.com. TED Talk, June 2013. Web. 15 Apr. 2017. <https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend?language=en&gt;.


The Keys to Success

In today’s competitive society, students are constantly searching for ways to succeed.  Researchers have determined that students who possess self-compassion and a growth mindset will be the best equipped to face challenges.  What is a growth mindset you may be wondering? This phrase was coined by Carol Dweck of Stanford University.  A growth mindset belongs to those who believe they can always learn even from mistakes, while those with a contrasting fixed mindset believe their knowledge and abilities are limited and may be critical of themselves, especially when they make mistakes.  Recently, two psychological studies were published which address the impact these factors have on students.

The first study, from Michigan State University, “Neural evidence for enhanced attention to mistakes among school-aged children with a growth mindset,” was published online in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. The second study, from the University of British Columbia, was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, “Don’t be so hard on yourself! Changes in self-compassion during the first year of university are associated with changes in well-being.”  I happen to be a college freshman therefore the focus of this article will be on the UBC research on first year college students, with a quick overview of the MSU study.

The MSU research came from Jason Moser’s Clinical Psychophysiology Lab, evaluating the benefits of a growth mindset and the significance of young students learning from their mistakes. This study observed seven-year-old students and then classified them into two groups: fixed or growth mindset.  The researchers then used an EEG to measure the brain waves of the students when they made mistakes playing a computerized game.  The children who had higher brain activity when making a mistake were more likely to have greater success when continuing to play the game and were dubbed to have a growth mindset. This higher brain activity signaled their focus on attempting to understand what they had done wrong while looking for ways to improve their performance.  The researchers stated that parents and educators should encourage students not to ignore their mistakes or believe they are bad, but rather to utilize them as a learning opportunity.

The second psychological study was performed by researchers from the University of British Columbia.  The UBC study tied the success of college freshman to how they handled themselves in times of stress.  They focused on the “self-compassion” of college freshman and how it corresponded to their attitude and adjustment to changes and failures in their first semester. The research built upon several prior studies.  One showed college freshman students experiencing declines in their psychological and social well-being as their living arrangements, responsibilities, and social interactions change during their first year at school leading to increased stress levels.  However, self-compassion during times of stress could be one factor helping students.  Self-determination theory is a set of principles used by the researchers to understand the association between self-compassion and well-being.  What exactly is self-compassion?  It is defined as self-kindness (not being too critical of yourself), common humanity (understanding that we all make mistakes), and mindfulness (keeping balance in your life).  But exactly how self-compassion equates to a student’s well-being has not been examined.  So, the UBC researchers’ intent was to evaluate if changes in self-compassion were somehow related to changes in an individual’s personal needs satisfaction (PNS).  If personal needs were being met, then maybe this could lead to improved well-being.  PNS is defined as competence (one can complete difficult tasks), autonomy (being in charge of yourself), and relatedness (connecting with others).

The research took place at a Canadian university in which 189 freshman college students, recruited through course websites and recruitment booths, participated in the study.  Most of participants were women, 77.2%, including a wide range of ethnicities, 50% of which lived on campus, 49% knew their roommates before school began, and 99% were single. These individuals took an online questionnaire their first month of school and another five months later.  The questionnaire consisted of three self-assessments. The first measured mindfulness, self-kindness, and common humanity; the second was a basic psychological need satisfaction questionnaire; and the third was a subjective vitality scale measuring well-being of the students.  Each of these questionnaires allowed the students to rate their responses on a numeric scale.  The researchers did not assign the participants into groups, nor did they observe the students over the course of their school year.

The results of the study validated the researchers’ hypothesis proving that if a student experienced an improvement in their self-compassion, they also had an improvement in their personal well-being because self-compassion improved their psychological need satisfaction.  Those who were kinder to themselves, or less critical, were able to better adapt to changes and setbacks. While the research is insightful, it does have several limiting factors.  Research was only conducted at one university.  Having a larger and more diversified group of students from different universities would make the data more meaningful.  Also, how accurate is self-reporting by students?  The researchers stated their study design did not allow for causal claims and that the results cannot imply self-compassion leads to an increase in well-being.  So in future research, the study design should be enhanced to determine if one does directly impact the other.

Although the UBC study does have limitations, it makes one step back and conduct a self-examination.  Do we treat ourselves with compassion? Or do we get mired in frustration at our failures?  Hopefully, the research will make students examine their attitudes as well as push researchers to conduct further studies to aid educators in helping students cope with stress.

The Process of Writing a Psychological News Article

 

THE CHALLENGING

Writing a news article summarizing a psychological study is challenging!  My article is based off of Christopher Bergland’s psychological news article “Self-Compassion, Growth Mindset, and the Benefits of Failure.”  I appreciate the art of creating an article that is both informative and entertaining for the reader.  Research materials are factual and parts can be difficult to understand.  Bergland’s article was entertaining but left out numerous important facts that I believe the readers need so they can draw their own conclusions.  He had many quotes and antidotal information that was interesting, but it took away from the actual research findings.  So, my challenge was to include sufficient information for the reader in an understandable format.   It is a difficult balance to include enough information without bombarding the reader with facts. The previous research included in the UBC study was a building block to their research but included so many citations for researchers, acronyms and definitions that putting all of that information into a concise format was challenging.

 

MUCH NEEDED SACRIFICES

In order to provide details left out of Bergland’s article, I did not include the various quotes or the Ted Talk video.  These were informative but did not leave sufficient space for every piece of information needed from the scholarly research. I did attempt to provide a good overview of the research; however, I did leave out details surrounding how the data was analyzed. I believe the readers would want to have all of the facts on the participations, the questionnaires, and the results, and not the details of analyzing the data. A short article does not allow for all of the details to be presented.

 

A WHOLE NEW PERSPECTIVE

After reading the research materials and writing my own article, my perspective of journalists has changed.  Before this project I was too trusting towards journal articles believing they correctly summarized the material, but now I have learned to be more cautious.  I realize that journalists do not include all the information that they should.  They are focused on delivering an entertaining message rather than an in-depth report.  After reviewing the scholar research, I realized how much information was missing from Christopher Bergland’s article.  He did not include all the information necessary that I needed to make my own assumptions on the research studies. I also learned how difficult it can be for journalists to include and exclude certain types and amounts of information, for it to not only sound accurate, but for it also to be relevant. Overall, this project provided a valuable learning experience that was challenging yet enlightening.

 

 

Works Cited

 

Bergland, Christopher. “Self-Compassion, Growth Mindset, and the Benefits of Failure.” Psychology Today. N.p., 30 Jan. 2017. Web. 4 Feb. 2017.

file:///Users/MatthewBMonter/Downloads/For%20Matthew%20M%20(2).pdf

 

Gunnell, Katie E., Amber D. Mosewich, Carolyn E. McEwen, Robert C. Eklund, and Peter R.E. Crocker. “Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself! Changes in Self-compassion during the First Year of University Are Associated with Changes in Well-being.” Personality and Individual Differences. N.p., 17 Nov. 2016. Web. 20 Mar. 2017.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201701/self-compassion-growth-mindset-and-the-benefits-failure


Stress

          Kelly McGonigal is a health psychologist who discusses stress in her TED talk. She says that she used to see stress as an enemy, but she has changed her perspective. She cites a study that tracked 30,000 people throughout a year. In the study, people who had a high level a stress and also believed stress was bad for your health were 43% more likely to die, but people who had high levels of stress and did not consider stress to be bad for you did not have a higher rate of death. The study estimated that over the eight years they tracked deaths, 182,000 people died prematurely from believing stress is bad for you. She also discusses the social stress test which involves a speech and a math test while people are giving negative feedback. People who viewed their body’s responses as helpful were less stressed out and their physical stress response changed. Normally, people’s blood vessels constrict when under stress which is bad for the person’s health, but if a person saw their stress as helpful, their blood vessels did not constrict.

          She then discusses oxytocin which is a stress hormone that promotes social contact. In the stress response, it directs you to find support. It is an anti-inflammatory hormone, and it helps heart cells to regenerate and heal from damage from stress. The benefits of this hormone are increased from social support. She then discusses another study that tracked 1,000 individuals. They found that every major stressful experience increased the rate of dying by 30%, but the people who spent time with others found no stress-related increase in dying. She concludes that choosing the way we view stress and act can change our lives for the better.

          I really enjoyed this TED talk. I thought the speaker was credible since she is a health psychologist and backed her claims up with scientific studies. I think for me to fully believe her claim that your perception of stress can change your physiological reaction to it, I would need to see more studies done, but she points out something really interesting that I had never considered before. I found the message to be reasonable, and I want to believe her claim. It seems evolutionarily beneficial for the stress response to help, rather than to hurt you, and I thought the studies she cited helped her claim to seem reasonable. She did not discuss how these findings may differ for people with anxiety or depression, and I would imagine that having a mental disorder would make it much more difficult to simply change the way you view stress.

          I definitely want to try having this more positive outlook on stress! I find myself being so stressed out that I become stressed about having stress, which is a cycle I would like to break out of. There is no harm in viewing stress from a more positive angle, and I hope this helps me to use stress to my advantage.

 


First Impressions: Emotions

This week we were asked to watch a Tedx talk and share our reactions as well as commenting on the credibility of the presenter. https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy. In this talk by Dan Gilbert, a professor from Harvard university, it is proposed that the way our emotions work and the way in which we perceive our emotions may be different than we think. In particular, this talk focuses on synthesized happiness which refers to a defense mechanism innate in human beings. When humans do not get exactly what they want or are forced to make a choice between two things, we can not only convince ourselves that the choice we made was correct, but there can actually be changes in our opinions of things that are involved in this choice. Gilbert studied this by presenting a person with some prints of some paintings and asked the person to rank the paintings based on which one the person liked the best/was the better painting. Then the researcher told the person that they only had the ones the person ranked third and fourth and asked the person to choose between those two. The vast majority of people chose the third one and then weeks later were asked to rank the paintings again based on which ones they like the best. Almost all the subjects ranked the one that they received higher than 3, and the one that was in the 4 spot lower than 4. But this was just because they convinced themselves that it was better and they just wanted to be consistent right? Gilbert did the exact same test but on the elderly who had Korsakoff’s syndrome, which causes problems forming new memories. The subjects chose the 3rd painting just as the other set of subjects had, but then the researcher said they had to go get the painting. They stepped out for thirty minutes and then returned and asked the person if they wanted their painting. The subject of course did not remember the researcher or the conversation where they made the decision for the 3rd painting on their list. The researcher then asked the person to order the paintings again, and the results showed the same trend as those from the other group even though the person had no memory of the previous interaction. This suggests that “settling” can actually cause changes in our brains that cause us to like the thing that were are forced into having more than we did before. Or in other words, we can synthesize happiness. I thought this talk was incredibly interesting, and Gilbert seems to be very credible as he is a well known professor from Harvard who presented data, and has gathered data that supports his theory.


Happiness :)

happiness

“Not getting what we want can make us just as happy as getting what we want” (Dan Gilbert).

In the Ted Talk given by Gilbert, I discovered that over time human beings evolved not only physically to adjust to their physical environment, but they have also evolved to mentally cope with the everyday mental hardships in life. There were two main types of happiness that Gilbert discussed: synthetic happiness and natural happiness. In the above quote, natural happiness would be described as the joy we get from “getting what we want” while synthetic happiness is described as the joy we get from “not getting what we want”.

Initially, while listening to the speaker discuss synthetic happiness I immediately asked myself, “Why would anyone want to be synthetically happy”? As he continued to discuss how synthetic happiness was a defense mechanism that allows us to remain happy in times of stress or misfortune, I realized that it would be reasonable to incorporate this form of happiness into my everyday life. There are many ways that we seek happiness from misfortune. For instance, when an exam doesn’t go as planned, we always keep in the back of our minds that the next exam will be better. Or maybe if we lose a significant other, we may tell ourselves that we are better off without them and that the right one will come along soon. This way of thinking is what helps us remain happy when things do not go our way. I didn’t realize until now that I had been healing emotional wounds by falsifying my happiness. To my surprise, synthetic happiness is just as effective as natural happiness.

In my opinion, Dan Gilbert is a credible source when discussing this topic due to the extensive research that he and his lab partners have been conducting overtime. I would say that the study is considerably reliable in that it included random sampling in participants. The amnesiac and non-amnesiac participants do differ in a major way which helped the final results of the study due to different outcomes when questioned/examined by the researchers.

Furthermore, Gilbert discusses how “some things are better than others”. Preferences that drive us “too hard and too fast” could cause us to be at risk. He added, when our ambition is unbounded we are liars, cheaters, and etc. When our fears are unbounded we are cowardly, reckless, and etc. However, when our ambitions and fears are bounded we are cautious, joyful, prudent, and thoughtful. Living a life that is bounded and free of unrealistic expectations allows us to manifest our “synthetic” happiness into “natural” happiness that will last a life time.


Happiness

For this weeks blog I watched A Ted talk by Dan Gilbert which covered ideas about happiness. I found the Talk to be quite enjoyable and thought provoking. I have always believed happiness is what you make of it and that nothing can truly get in the way of a person’s ability to be happy. Being able to come to terms with our actions and the situations we are in and letting ourselves be happy despite how bad thing may seem may seem bleak, but I have always found that I was happy whenever I accepted the worst of a situation and moved on. For instance, I have been through two tornadoes which both took my entire house away, but I found that after the shock went away I was still happy. Looking back at it now, I would never change what happened to me and my family, because It is what lead me here and I have accepted it and moved on. So the message that we can create synthetic happiness by accepting our situations at face value seems reasonable to me from my experience. Dan Gilbert seemed very credible and his experiments were very well thought out and support his interpretations very well. I believe that I incorporate a good amount of synthetic happiness in my life already and I just didn’t realize it because I accept the outcomes in my life and move on pretty easily.