Week 7 post two

A lot of the routes to happiness are mental, and one can to train their mind to be happy. People tend to be their worst enemies, slipping into thought patterns that bring anguish and anxiety. Looking to internal, global, enduring stable conditions to make sense of faults can lead to depression. There are four toxic patterns of thought: perfectionism, social comparisons, materialism, and "maximizing", which is trying to maximize pleasure in our decisions, and is associated with less happiness. Maximizers have been found to be more regretful after purchases, less satisfied with life, more depressed, less satisfied with their success, and less optimistic. Training the mind to be happy centers around the implementation of self-compassion into one's thoughts. Self-compassion is also known as the practice of quieting the inner critic, replacing it with a voice of support, understanding, and care for oneself. There are three main components to self-compassion: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. Self-kindness centers around treating one's self with care and understanding, instead of harsh judgment, a desire to alleviate one's suffering, and the action of actively soothing and comforting oneself. Common humanity focuses on seeing one's own experience as part of a larger human experience, not feeling isolated or abnormal, and recognizing that life is imperfect in one way or another for everybody. Evolutionarily, we do not like feeling different than the rest of the human population, because being different is not safe. Common humanity works away from this. Mindfulness avoids extremes of suppressing painful feelings, and allows people to "be" with painful feelings as they are. Self-compassion is different than self-esteem because self-esteem requires being special or better than others while compassion is accepting of the person that one already is. Self-compassion has been proven to lower levels of anxiety and depression, lower levels of cortisol and increased heart-rate variability, the strength of the vagus nerve, for self-soothing, make one better at coping with life's stressors, and allow one to have a greater willingness to validate their negative emotions.

Another way to train one's mind is to discover how to find their "flow", or an intrinsically rewarding or optimal state that results from intense engagement with daily activities. It has also been described as a mental state where hours pass by and one can work without distractions or too many breaks needed. This almost meditative state connects with being mindful; people are the most happy when they are focused on the present task at hand, "in their flow". Flow arises from the right balance of challenge and skill level, when one is paying attention. Students need flow. All across the US, students have reported being bored in class (Indiana University’s 2009 “High School Survey of Student Engagement). Memorization, a tactic many students fall to in order to achieve the grades they want, is not good in the long run and does not stay in the brain. Real learning requires student engagement, (flow being the optimal level of engagement) and that involves a combination of motivation, concentration, interest, and enjoyment derived from the process of learning itself. Flow can be fostered in classrooms through lessons that offer choice, are connected to students’ goals, and provide both challenges and opportunities for success that are appropriate to students’ level of skill.

Self-compassion and flow both promote meaningfulness.