Inner Thoughts

The Color Wheel Model of Love

In his 1973 book The Colors of Love, John Lee compared styles of love to the color wheel. Just as there are three primary colors, Lee suggested that there are three primary styles of love. These three styles of love are: (1) Eros, (2) Ludos and (3) Storge.

Laughter: We all know it’s the best medicine, but it’s also an effective preventative. Experts have found that a sense of humor and not taking one’s self too seriously can lead to a happier disposition and healthier constitution.

Techniques that an individual can use to shift their mood from general sadness or clinical depression to a state of greater contentment or happiness.

Here are a few tips:

1. Eat a healthy protein-filled breakfast.

Suggestions:

Eggs, toast, bacon (or turkey bacon), sauteed chicken, oatmeal, grits, yogurt/granola + fruit.

Green tea (hot), Coffee, orange juice.

2. Stop doing harmful things.

Suggestions:

Breathe more slowly.

Strategies to Increase Motivation

Great article! 

Most people do what they have to do to get through the day. Though this may sound dire, let’s face it, it’s the human condition. Given the number of people who are depressed or anxious, it’s not surprising that big pharma is doing as well as it is. But for millennia before we turned to government-approved drugs, humans devised clever ways of coping: Taking a walk, eating psychedelic mushrooms, breathing deeply, snorting things, praying, running, smoking, and meditating are just some of the inventive ways humans have found to deal with the unhappy rovings of their minds.

Most people would agree that a lot of our unhappiness comes from the mind’s annoying chatter, which includes obsessions, worries, drifts from this stress to that stress, and our compulsive and exhausting need to anticipate the future. Not surprisingly, the goal of most adults is to get the mind to shut up, calm down, and chill out. For this reason, we turn to our diverse array of feel-good tools (cigarettes, deep breathing, and what have you). Some are healthier and more effective than others, and researchers are finally understanding why certain methods break the cycle and others exacerbate it.But which methods actually work?

Last year, a Harvard study confirmed that there’s a clear connection between mind wandering and unhappiness. Not only did  the study find that if you’re awake, your mind is wandering almost half the time, it also found that this wandering is linked to a less happy state. (You can actually use the iPhone app used in the study to track your own happiness.) This is not surprising, since when your mind is wandering, it’s not generally to the sweet things in your life: More likely, it’s to thoughts like why your electric bill was so high, why your boss was rude to you today, or why your ex-husband is being so difficult.

Another study found that mind wandering is linked to activation of network of brain cells called the default mode network (DMN), which is active not when we’re doing high-level processing, but when we’re drifting about in “self-referential” thoughts (read: when our brain is flitting from one life-worry to the next).

Meditation is an interesting method for increasing one’s sense of happiness because not only has it stood the test of time, but it’s also been tested quite extensively in the lab. Part of the effect of mindfulness meditation is to quiet the mind by acknowledging non-judgmentally and then relinquishing (rather than obsessing about) unhappy or stress-inducing thoughts.

New research by Judson Brewer, MD, PhD and his group at Yale Universityhas found that experienced meditators not only report less mind wandering during meditation, but actually have markedly decreased activity in their DMN. Earlier research had shown that meditators have less activity in regions governing thoughts about the self, like the medial prefrontal cortex: Brewer says that what’s likely going on in experienced meditators is that these “‘me’ centers of the brain are being deactivated.

They also found that when the brain’s “me” centers were being activated, meditators also co-activated areas important in self-monitoring and cognitive control, which may indicate that they are on the constant lookout for “me” thoughts or mind-wandering – and when their minds do wander, they bring them back to the present moment. Even better, meditators not only did this during meditation, but when not being told to do anything in particular. This suggests that they may have formed a new default mode: one that is more present-centered (and less “me”-centered), no matter what they are doing.

“This is really cool,” Brewer says.” As far as we know, nobody has seen this type of connectivity pattern before. These networks have previously been shown to be anti-correlated.”

So is being happy all about shifting our tendency away from focus on ourselves? Research in other areas, like neurotheology (literally the neurology of religion), suggests that there may be something to this. Andy Newberg, MD at the University of Pennsylvania has found that both in meditating monks and in praying nuns, areas of the brain important in concentration and attention were activated, while areas that govern how a person relates to the external world were deactivated. These findings may suggest that for people who practice meditation or prayer, the focus becomes less on the self as a distinct entity from the external world, and more on connection between the two.  This reflects the idea discussed earlier where shifting attention from inside to outside is at least part of what quells unhappiness.

What about using other tools like cigarettes, food, or alcohol, as a method for finding pleasure and calming the mind? Don’t these things take a person outside of him or herself, and move the focus from the inner world of stressful thoughts to something outside, or “other”? Looking forward to the next hit of caffeine, nicotine, or coke might seem like a valid method of moving attention from the inside to the outside, but if you look closer, it actually intensifies the unpleasantness.

Brewer uses the example of smoking to illustrate why addiction fuels negative thoughts rather than abates them. In addition to the pleasurable associations, smoking actually creates a negative feedback loop, where you are linking stress and craving with the oh-so-good act of smoking. So whenever you experience a negative emotion, craving returns and intensifies over time, so that you are actually even less happy than before. A cigarette may quiet the mind temporarily – during the act of smoking – but in between cigarettes is where things get bad, because craving creeps in. Though we’re using craving as the example, unhappiness, self-referential thoughts, or everyday worries can all be substituted in.

So if you’re dealing with unhappiness of any kind, whether it’s every day worries, or more severe depression or anxiety, the method you choose for coping matters. Finding one that solves the problem – breaking the cycle, rather than masking it – is crucial.Substituting a carrot stick or other behavior for your actual craving (or other form of unhappiness) is a typical method of treatment, but it doesn’t often work, says Brewer, because the feedback loop is still there. Addressing the process itself with other methods (like meditation), which allow you to ride out the craving/unhappiness by attending to it and accepting it, and then letting it go, has been more successful, because it actually breaks the cycle rather than masks it.

“In a non-labor caesarean birth, union with the mother is disturbed by the anaesthesia used in the surgery, followed by the cutting open of the mother, which is on some level experienced by the child who is still unified physically and psychically with the mother. The child, still very much in a state of cosmic union, then begins to emerge into the world and experiences being unwillingly and abruptly pulled out of the womb. Though the actual birth could be considered complete at this point, I have found it necessary to include the encounter with the obstetrician as part of the birth. The struggle with the doctor who forcefully stimulates breathing is like labor, and there may be bonding with the doctor following this struggle. Soon this new bond is broken as the child is taken away to the nursery, and a physical and emotional shutting down follows. This drama may be different for recent caesareans as some hospitals are using local anaesthesia, allowing the father to be present, and allowing the mother to make eye contact with the baby and even to hold and breastfeed it immediately. The last stage of birth extends over a period of many years as the caesarean born person transforms the patterns learned in the caesarean delivery and learns to make a more conscious choice to give birth to his or her self as an individual in the world.

Caesarean birth has an intense all-or-nothing quality, not like the give and take of the waves of labor

A caesarean birth is fast, taking only a few minutes rather than hours. Yet even within this quick experience there are abrupt swings between positive and negative feelings.

Or, looking at it more comprehensively, a caesarean is very slow, taking years to complete the sense of being born.

The caesarean born child is very sensitive to the ambient tone of the operating room, especially since he/she does not have the boundary-giving experience of labor through which to filter subsequent stimuli.

Habits, expectations, and patterns (some of them paradoxical and contradictory) that might be learned in non-labor caesarean birth.

The expectation that nourishment will be followed by poisoning and attack.

Defensiveness in relation to all approach; touch sensitivity and paradoxically a love of physical contact once the defensiveness has passed.

Habit of opening only when exhausted or invaded.

Residual body tension patterns that are different from those in vaginally born people, for example, neck tensions related to the head being pulled rather than pushed in birth.

Dependence, a feeling of needing to be rescued, inability to act on one’s own, and paradoxically, an unwillingness to ask for help.

Anger toward would-be helpers who fail to satisfy on a physical level the impossible demand of total rescue.

Distortion of relationship and sexual patterns with people of the same sex as the obstetrician. Expectations of struggle and defeat, and of merging, bonding, and being totally cared for.

Perception of self as separate, and paradoxically, less sense of personal boundaries.

Easy access to transpersonal awareness but lack of appreciation of this capability because of having less sense of personal boundaries.

Continual testing of limits and boundaries.

Relationship patterns that are colorful, abrupt, intense, and arrow-like rather than like the waves of contraction and expansion that would be learned in labor.

Little sense of process, expectation that a relationship either exists and doesn’t need to be nourished, or doesn’t exist and is impossible.

Being not particularly goal oriented and feeling criticized for this; wanting to have goals but feeling unable to find any that seem real.

Strong negative self-judgement for not meeting others’ unconscious expectations that one know the relationship patterns and sense of limit usually learned in vaginal birth.

Trust that help will always be there without one having to ask for it.