One Simple Exercise Sure to Make You Feel Better About Yours

I have been treating patients using cognitive therapies for almost 15 years and one of the most successful exercises I have ever seen work to help them re-engage their sense of well-being is so simple that each and every time I convince someone to do it, I am still remarkably struck by how effective it is.
Before I share this exercise with you, I want you to know that the difficult part is not doing the activity. It is making yourself believe that the activity will have enough benefit that you will put forth the actual effort to do it, and experience the results.
Often when I give this assignment to patients, they come back for two or three weeks afterward, still not having tried it. That's OK; I'm so certain they will not try it initially, that I generally don’t even assign it until I have been working with them for several weeks and have had sufficient time to coach them into understanding the benefits of shifting their attention and thinking; how it relates to brain functioning; and how it affects their mood, so that they understand the value of what I am asking them to do.

OK, so what is the exercise?

• Keep a pad of paper next to your bed and every night before you go to sleep, write down three things you liked about yourself that day.
• In the morning, read the list before you get out of bed.
• Do this everyday for 30 days.

These don’t have to be big things, like I am a kind person; they can be simple, such as I like that I held the door for my co-worker, or I like that I didn’t lose my temper in traffic today, or I like that I am making the effort to try this exercise even if I’m not sure it will work. . .
For someone who is depressed, this activity feels like a lot of effort. Why? Research shows that people with depression have what is referred to as an attentional bias for negative self-relevant materials. They also have impaired attentional control, which means that once a negative schema is activated, they tend to ruminate on it and have difficulty disengaging and shifting their attention to something else; consequently, there is sustained negative affect.⁽¹⁾ Essentially, people with depression generally spend a good deal of time thinking about what they don’t like about themselves—and they have a hard time stopping.
The more time you spend thinking about something, the more active it becomes in your mental space—and the easier it becomes to access. Also, the more you think of something, the more it primes our brain to keep looking for similar things in your environment, creating a selective filter that not only causes you to sift your environment for things that match up with what you are thinking about, it actually causes you to distort ambiguous information in a way that matches up with your dominant thoughts.
Someone with depression who goes to a party might get 10 compliments, but if one person mentions the shirt he is wearing is “interesting,” that person may likely go home and fixate on the ambiguous comment and turn it into a stream of thinking like this: I wonder what was wrong with my shirt, I probably looked silly in it, I bet they all thought I looked like an idiot. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I ever get anything right? This is so humiliating. The 10 compliments have long been forgotten.
So how will this exercise help you?
Research also shows that it requires more attentional effort to disengage from a negative thought process than a neutral one⁽²⁾. This simple-to-do but nonetheless effortful exercise essentially helps you build the strength to disengage from any negative thought stream; redirects your attention to positive aspects of yourself; and retrains your selective attention bias.
As you do this, you not only start to become aware of more of your positive attributes, they become more available to you as you interpret events around you. Compliments become something you can hear and accept because they are more congruent with your new view of yourself. You start to interpret events occurring around you in a less self-critical way. If you stick with it, over time this has a compounding effect that elevates your overall sense of self-worth—and, subsequently, your well-being.
But remember: There is no benefit to your mental health in just understanding how the exercise works, just as there is no benefit to your physical health in knowing how to use a treadmill. The benefit comes from the doing.

雨下个不听

雨下个不听，气温急降，到处一片潮湿。。

在空调房里都得穿长裤外套，方不会手冷脚冷。

晚上不用空调或风扇，仍感觉寒气逼人。

是这样的天气，再加上涨潮，所以到处传来水灾的消息。

下雨天，菜园的菜都被淋得一趟糊涂。

青菜受不了这样的天气，都不能生长。

餐桌上开始少了青叶子的菜。

现在能长的只有豆子。

菜价一直上涨。

雨下个不听，是这样的天气让我怀念不下雨的日子。

每一天，衣服都留有太阳的气味。

爱玩泥土的我，喜欢干燥的土壤，容易劳作。

现在泥土变成湿泥巴，即不能锄也不能种。

靠泥土吃饭的农人怎么办？

雨下个不听，出不了户外。

每天只能在家里做运动。

却不能做到满头大汗的那种淋漓爽快。

雨还是下个不听。

5 Ancient Guidelines We Should Follow Today

If you’re like me, you have the option of being able to sit inside all day long every day—doing, in terms of physical activity, pretty much nothing. DO NOT EXERCISE THIS OPTION. Our pre-agrarian ancestors did not have this choice; they moved around quite a bit on a very regular basis. You don’t have to join a CrossFit gym to approximate ancestral exercise regimens, although that certainly could do the trick, but we all need to do something. Our modern world is so mismatched from our ancestral environments in terms of required exercise that things like obesity and Type-II diabetes, our “diseases of civilization,” are way more common in our "modern" states than in nomadic societies. Run, hike, climb, ski, swim, bike, skate, lift weights, and, like our ancestors did in the African Savanna, do this regularly, as if your life depends on it and as if you had no choice! Guess what? For the lion’s share of your hominid ancestors, their lives did depend on such exercise and they had NO CHOICE! These were the conditions that the human body evolved to match.
4. Develop an evolutionarily appropriate eating regimen.
Instead of resolving to lose 15 pounds (or whatever amount you might think is right for you), resolve to treat your body the way it evolved to be treated—surrounded by natural food offerings. Human food has been cooked for thousands of generations (and our GI tract tells a story consistent with this), but, beyond cooking, the foods of our ancestors received very little in the way of processing—there were no Cocoa Puffs in the savanna 100,000 years ago. Want a simple dietary resolution that works, and is based on the keen insights of modern evolutionary science? Stay away from processed foods—those that would not have been in existence before the dawn of agriculture. Grains, breads, baked goods, cheeses, dairy products—it's all post-agriculture, and our bodies simply did not evolve under conditions in which this stuff existed.
3. Be kind to your mate, children, and pets.
Being kind, or selfless, in general is not a bad rule to live by—many key religions have figured this out. But if you’ve only got so much kindness to go around, I strongly suggest that you focus on your mate, children, and pets—the ones we live with day-in and day-out. Kindness to mates helps cultivate a strong bond that benefits a family across decades of thick and thin. Kindness to one’s kids helps them learn kindness ways from your modeling, and from the positive feelings about themselves that they can carry with them. And kindness to Fido will be paid back—when your pet greets you with that "You really are the best human ever—I mean it!” thing that he does when you walk in the door.
2. Keep your kin connections strong.  
Connections with kin were absolutely critical for the success of our ancestors—our entire social systems are based on such connections. Today, our kin are scattered all over—and you’re probably thinking, “Who has time to call?” Well, you do! Make the time. Call your mom in Florida, your dad in Jersey, your brother in LA. There are few things as evolutionarily important as kinship when it comes to being a human. Don’t blow it! Get on your phone or your Skype—whatever you’ve got—and call your family. And then make plans to see them regularly and patch up any rough spots among them. Life is too short—and our ancestors surely had to get beyond intra-familial squabbles in order to survive.
1. Show your love to those whom you love.
Love is a critical and complex human emotion that has helped keep individuals close to others who hold their interests in both minds and hearts. Having such loved and loving individuals in your life surely has benefits for you and your family as you navigate life.

How Reading Can Change You in a Major Way

William James said it over a 100 years ago: Personality is set in stone by the age of 30.

But despite a proliferation of data in the ensuing decades to counter this assertion, the myth remains firmly in place. Not only do many believe that personality is fixed by the age of 30, even some scholars maintain that your personality is pre-determined by your genetics.
All of this would be well and good, perhaps, if you like your personality just as it is. Maybe you’ve found exactly the right balance among the yin and yang of your various tendencies. However, the chances are probably pretty good that you'd like to tweak a few things. Just as many of us wish we could be more physically fit, smarter, or luckier in love, we also seek to improve our personalities.

Some personality traits make life particularly difficult. For example, being high in neuroticism, the chronic tendency to feel anxious and sad, can obviously affect your mood on a daily basis. The personality trait of introversion may have significant benefits, but introverts may also have difficulty advancing in a professional world that rewards its opposite, extraversion.
Other traits also have plusses and minuses: You may be highly agreeable, another of the basic personality qualities, making you a person that others like to have around. But if you’re too agreeable, you can find yourself pushed around by others; even people who everyone likes might need to tone their agreeableness down a bit. And if you’re cranky and cantankerous, in contrast, you might be seeking ways to be more likeable.
Openness to experience is the fifth of the “Big Five” personality traits that psychologists believe make up our basic dispositions. Being high on this quality, as the term implies, can make you intellectually curious and flexible. On the other hand, if you’re too open to experiences, you may become restless and easily discontented with the status quo.
Because so many people believe in the personality-set-in-stone myth, they may appraise their own traits as ones they’ll be stuck with throughout life.
You’ll be happy to learn that there may be hope.
University of Toronto researchers Maja Djikic and Keith Oatley (2014) decided to tackle the question of whether and how reading fiction can change personality. In a fascinating review of an emerging field of research, they propose that there are specific ways in which fiction can engage readers in ways that enhance important personality qualities.
One personality quality enhanced by literature is empathy, the ability to understand someone else’s point of view. Although not one of the cluster of 5 traits in the Big Five, empathy is tied into our basic ways of relating to others, including our intimate partners. Empathy is also related to openness to experience, in that the more open you are to your own experiences, the better you are at being able to feel and imagine the experiential world of others.
Djikic and Oatley concluded that, all other things being equal, people who read more fiction are also better at reading other people’s emotions. It’s not that empathic people read more, but that reading promotes empathy.
If you’re a “chick lit” fan (think Bridget Jones and her ilk), it turns out, you may be particularly likely to develop your empathic skills, especially compared to other types of readers. Romance novels are the most likely to promote empathy—and science fiction the least.
Correlational studies, although controlling for pre-existing personality, can’t determine cause and effect. Taking the experimental plunge, other studies have examined what happened to people’s empathy scores after reading narrative fiction. Not only did people become more empathic in terms of being able to interpret other people’s emotions, but they also acted in more altruistic ways. People low in openness to experience, specifically, also became more empathic after reading fiction but not after reading short non-fiction pieces.
According to Djikic and Oatley’s analysis, there are 3 aspects of art in literature that can affect not only short-term but longer-range changes in personality:

1. Literary fiction puts us inside the minds of others. Fiction gives us the opportunity to explore the subjective world of its characters. Reading fiction gives you social expertise, just as reading about science or history allows you to gain strengths in those areas.
2. Literature can temporarily destabilize personality. The style, figurative expressions, and invitations to involve the reader all help to put readers through an emotional roller coaster similar to what they might experience if they were the protagonists. Like dance or music, well-written narrative fiction can put you in a frame of mind that allows you to open yourself up to inner experiences.
3. Artistic literature is an indirect communication method. Unlike advertising, scientific writing, or propaganda, artistic literature offers cues and “invite[s] readers to draw their own inferences” (p. 502). By engaging the reader in drawing inferences about what characters in their stories are feeling, artistic literature is very much like a conversation. It’s through talking to others that we learn to understand how and why people feel the way they do; literature operates on the same principles.

If you’re already an avid fiction reader, the results of Djikic and Oatley’s analysis probably don’t surprise you. The enjoyment of exploring other people’s mental states is perhaps what drives you to be such an avid reader in the first place.
We don’t know yet whether reading fiction can directly change other personality traits in the same way it affects openness to experience. However, extrapolating from this ongoing and important area of research, it would seem plausible that the “destabilization” these researchers talk about can spread to other areas of personality beyond empathy.
Learning about the inner states of others through reading fiction may prompt us to explore our own selves and personalities and, in the process, gain insight if not instigation to change the parts of ourselves we don’t like. By becoming more open and aware of other people’s feelings, through empathy, it may also be possible to find the fulfillment you seek in your own long-term relationships.

美女的诞生

为了维持现代人对美女的标准，我们这一般女人其实都挨饿了好久了。

三餐不敢尽情的吃喝。

每天像羊吃草，咬着青菜。

美食离我们好远。

三餐之间都不敢动任何零食。

用尽办法克制自己的食欲。

连饿了吃的准则都不能守住。

穿衣服也是，现代潮流是越穿越少。

所以在空调房里，我们都挨冷了好一段年日。

为了尽显美丽线条，都穿的又少又挤。

为了做美女，我们都成了现代的一般另类难民。

受尽饥寒。

还得梳理整齐、笑眼迎人。

只求成为人见人爱，车见车载的美人儿。

美女A工作之余还得分出时间做运动。

三餐时间之外，虽然已经饿的昏昏的，仍然连一片饼干都不敢吃。

咬紧牙根忍阿！

但一踏入中年，不吃也会胖的。

身体总是向横发展，控制不了。

所以只得再减食再加强运动。

美女B几十年维持在一只猫的食量。

猫还可以吃油煎鱼，美女只能吃青菜。

Ordinary miracle

不过寻求平常的奇迹。

不求大富大贵。

只希望过一个平常的人生。

好象该结婚时，就能结婚。

该生儿育女时，就能生儿育女。

过着平凡食着人间油烟的普通老百姓的生活。

只是，这些都离我好远。

女人当自爱

爱情不是男人的全部，但爱情却是女人的一切。

所以女人阿，女人，当自强自爱阿！

Miracle

渴望神迹。

平淡的生活过太久了，就有这样的渴想。

可日出而作、日落而息，舍新事都没。

莫怪圣经里连智者所罗门王都说：“虚空的虚空，凡事都虚空，如捉影，如捕风。“

人生很无奈，只能尽量自我调适。

本来很爱吃，以食物来调剂生活的平淡。

但吃多了，身体开始向横发展。

好多衣服都难穿下，即便穿上了也这里凸一点肥肉，难看至极。

所以决定节食。

生活都这样沉闷了，现在唯一的快乐还被剥夺。

所以脾气越来越暴，动不动都大声说话。

旁人都不敢靠近。

渴望神迹，非常。

10 Ways to Get Happier

It pays to be happy. Happy people live longer and, by definition, they lead happier lives. They make better decisions and have more fulfilling relationships. They also make more money, being as much a consequence of happiness as a cause.
The psychology of happiness attempts to answer some very fundamental questions pursued over the years by philosophers, theologians, and politicians—specifically, three types of questions.
The first series of questions is really about the definition and measurement of happiness; the second is about why certain groups are as happy or unhappy as they are; and the third concerns what a person should do (or not do) to increase happiness.
The research suggests that happy people have strong immune systems. They tend to be more successful at work and have better personal relationships at the office and outside of it. They are more attractive to others. They seem to like themselves more than unhappy people and to cope better with setbacks. Happy people make better decisions and tend to be more creative. Unhappy people seem to waste time and effort being vigilant for signs of failure. This saps their energy.

There is evidence that subjective well being is partly inherited. Twin studies have shown that just as people inherit a propensity or predisposition for depression, so they do likewise for happiness. But environmental factors inevitably play a part, particularly early family home environments which can mark us for the future. We also know that although people can experience events that cause them extreme happiness or unhappiness in the short term, they tend to return to their normal happiness levels relatively quickly.
It seems that some societies and individuals are simply happier than others. For example, Latin nations seem happier than Pacific Rim nations. Several factors seem to relate to overall national happiness—the wealth, stability and democratic nature of the society in which people live, and the social norms and conventions governing the desirability of experiencing positive and negative emotions. The evidence shows that dire poverty certainly makes people unhappy, but at the other extreme, great wealth has little effect on subjective well-being. Studies also show that the more materialistic an individual, the less happy he or she is.
And the happiest people all seem to have good friends.
So even if you have not inherited a “sunny disposition," or a family fortune, you can become happier. The gurus in this game have made the following observations:

1. Don’t count on money. Wealth is only weakly related to happiness, both within and across nations, particularly when income is above the poverty level. You become no happier after reaching an income of around £40/$50,000 per annum.
2. Don’t count on retail therapy or eating out. Activities that make people happy in small doses—such as shopping or good food—do not lead to fulfillment in the long term, indicating that these have quickly diminishing returns.
3. Get creative and let your juices flow. Engaging in an experience that produces "flow" is really gratifying and happy-making. Flow is experienced when one’s skills are sufficient for a challenging activity, in the pursuit of a clear goal, when immediate self-awareness disappears and sense of time is distorted.
4. Be thankful for what you have, and for what others have done for you. People who express gratitude on a regular basis have better physical health, optimism, well-being, and progress toward goals—and they help others more.
5. Get on with it. Happiness is journey, not a destination. It is a process, not a goal. Trying to maximize personal happiness can lead to unhappiness.
6. Watch the Good Samaritan. (Observe selfless volunteers.) People who witness others perform good deeds experience an emotion called "elevation," which motivates them to perform their own good deeds.
7. Learn to see the glass half full. Optimism can protect people from distress. Optimism is self-fulfilling—as is pessimism. Whether you believe you can or you can’t, you are right.
8. Start early. People who report more positive emotions in young adulthood live longer and healthier lives.
9. Take the knocks. Healthy human development can take place under conditions of even great adversity due to a resilience that is common and completely ordinary.
10. Scribble away your woes. Individuals who write about traumatic events are physically healthier than control groups who do not. Writing about life goals is significantly less distressing than writing about trauma, and is associated with enhanced well-being.

Should happiness be a competency at work? Should employers seek out inspiring, spirit-lifting, life-enhancing types, and reject gloom-mongering heart-sinkers? Is happiness easy to fake at an interview? Probably. But ask a referee to rate a person’s base level of happiness and they will have no problem doing so accurately.

Love

君是否还记得我？