Cognitive reappraisal

Steps to Turn Off the Nagging Self-Doubt in Your Head
Most of us lose time to negative thoughts; reframe your thinking and feel more positive
June 13, 2016
http://www.wsj.com/articles/steps-to-turn-off-the-nagging-self-doubt-in-your-head-1465838679

The more we have a thought, the stronger this circuit grows.

Alex Korb, a neuroscientist and author of “The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Rev erse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time.”
https://www.newharbinger.com/upward-spiral

With intent and practice, you can create another path. Psychologists call the technique cognitive reappraisal.

This technique is at the heart of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

“I tell clients to think like a scientist,” says Hooria Jazaieri, … who studies emotion regulation. “You are using your observations and descriptions about yourself non-judgmentally

“Writing strengthens the memory,” says  Jeffrey Borenstein, president and CEO of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation in New York.

Steve Orma, a clinical psychologist in San Francisco, and author of “Stop Worrying and Go to Sleep.”

Cognitive Reappraisals as part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy were able to significantly reduce their negative emotions in 16 weeks.

The goal is repetition. “If you want to get in shape physically, you can’t just work out once,” Dr. Orma says. “It’s the same with the mind.”

Create an Imaginary Friend
We’re often nicer to our friends than we are to ourselves.

Job crafting

How To Build A Better Job
March 29, 2016
http://www.npr.org/2016/03/28/471859161/how-to-build-a-better-job

Why do you work? Are you just in it for the money or do you do it for a greater purpose? Popular wisdom says your answer depends on what your job is. But psychologist Amy Wrzesniewski at Yale University finds it may have more to do with how we think about our work. Across groups such as secretaries and custodians and computer programmers, Wrzesniewski finds people about equally split in whether they say they have a “job,” a “career” or a “calling.”
… how we find meaning and purpose at work.

Job crafting: what employees do to redesign their own jobs in ways that foster engagement at work, job satisfaction, resilience, and thriving.”
Berg, Wrzesniewski, & Dutton, 2010

November 10, 2014
Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski, professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management

Job crafting takes 3 forms:

1. Task crafting: alter number, type, nature of tasks
2. Relational crafting
3. Cognitive crafting: alter how one perceives tasks and their meaning

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http://www.npr.org/2016/04/08/473277814/the-larger-than-life-legend-of-the-ballpark-aisles

https://franzcalvo.wordpress.com/2014/03/28/the-exact-same-experience-good-or-bad-depending

https://franzcalvo.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/person-environment-fit

cited by:

https://franzcalvo.wordpress.com/2016/09/25/our-loss-of-wisdom

The Science Of Self-Talk

Why Saying Is Believing — The Science Of Self-Talk
October 07, 2014
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/10/07/353292408/why-saying-is-believing-the-science-of-self-talk

body image

David Sarwer is a psychologist and clinical director at the Center for Weight and Eating Disorders at the University of Pennsylvania. He says that, in fact, a mirror is one of the first tools he uses with some new patients. He stands them in front of a mirror and coaches them to use gentler, more neutral language as they evaluate their bodies.

In a 2013 study from the Netherlands, scientists watched women with anorexia walk through doorways in a lab. The women, they noticed, turned their shoulders and squeezed sideways, even when they had plenty of room.

“Their internal representation — their brain perspective on their body — is that the body is much, much bigger than, in fact, it is,” says Dr. Branch Coslett, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. He says studies like this one aren’t actually new.

related:
To reach beyond your limits by training your mind
Marisa Peer
TEDxKCS

Enhance Your Resilience

Enhance Your Resilience
Scientific American Mind. July 1, 2013
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=enhance-your-resillience-stress

Resilience is the ability to modulate and constructively harness the stress response—a capacity essential to both physical and mental health.
Success can hinge on resilience. Setbacks are part of any endeavor, and those who react to them productively will make the most progress.
A person can boost his or her resilience. Strategies include reinterpreting negative events, enhancing positive emotions, becoming physically fit, accepting challenges, maintaining a close social network and imitating resilient role models.

There are numerous strategies for regulating emotions and enhancing resilience. Two approaches that have received increasing scientific support in recent years are:

• Cognitive reappraisal
  Using reappraisal, individuals reinterpret the meaning of an adverse event so that they see it as less negative. Doing so tends to attenuate physiological and emotional reactions to the event.
  For example, psychologist Kevin Ochsner and his colleagues at Columbia University have shown that when people intentionally reinterpret a situation such as a rejection for a job or the loss of a friend as being less negative, they report a decrease in unpleasant emotions.
  [related: https://franzcalvo.wordpress.com/2014/01/02/editing-your-lifes-stories-can-create-happier-endings ]
  [related: https://franzcalvo.wordpress.com/2013/09/22/diet-of-defeat ]
• Mindfulness meditation

… teach children the skills needed to become socially competent, such as:

• knowing how to listen to,
  [related: https://franzcalvo.wordpress.com/2014/01/08/the-social-animal ]
• empathize with and
• give support to others

The Neuroscience of Emotions

The Neuroscience of Emotions
Dr. Philippe Goldin
September 16, 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tShDYA3NFVs

Search Inside Yourself program, Google

Classes of Emotion
6 Primary:
happiness
surprise
fear
sadness
disgust
anger

Background; mood
– wellbeing/malaise, calm/tense, pain/pleasure

Secondary (social)
– embarrassment, jealousy, guilt, shame, pride

over 600 words in English to describe different emotions

Facial Action Coding System (Paul Ekman, PhD)

Marcus Aurelius (Meditations) 167 A.C.E.
If you are distressed by anything external [or internal], the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it;
and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

Stages of Emotion Regulation
Pre-Conscious
Immediate attention shifts
Emotion appraisal
Cognitive reappraisal
Meta-Cognitive processing
[Adapted from Gross, J Pers Soc Psychol, 1998]

Neuroplasticity

39:18 Learned Control Over Neural Activity in Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Pain
deCharms, et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci, 2005, 102(51):18626-18631

39:28 Navigation-related Structural Change in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers
Maguire et al, 2000 PNAS, 97, 4398-4403

46:20 re-interpretation strategies (cognitive re-appraisal, cognitive re-structuring) to an emotional probe was actually predicted by cognitive development
The older you are, the more cognitive developed
The more cognitive developed, the more you are able to use cognitive re-appraisal strategies to down-regulate emotional reactivity
This is age-dependent, at least from 8 to 22

Skepticism:
cognitive behavioral therapy is change-oriented: identify mistakes in thinking
… find evidence that those thoughts are either not accurate or not beneficial. A heady, logical, linguistical, language approach.

49:26 Meditation is not good for everybody. We know that as a fact.

50:05 Exercise is a powerful mood regulatior.

50:30 Not studied: As we are so embedded in logos, language: Communication skills
How we actually process language?
Can we be trained to use language and linguistic processing in a way that is less harmful, to self and others?

Mindfulness meditation is ONE type of meditation. There are many kinds of meditation.

53 emotion labeling
emotion expression
catharsis

59:25 emotional contagion

relationship with psychoanalysis

We are all humans. We can use different vocabulary but it’s the same suffering with slightly different flavors

restore psychological flexibility

Believing that I actually can do something.
… I can expand. I can be more than this.
hopefulness and hopelessness

Diet Of Defeat

Diet Of Defeat: Why Football Fans Mourn With High-Fat Food
September 20, 2013
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/09/20/224148230/diet-of-defeat-why-football-fans-mourn-with-high-fat-food

After a defeat, the researchers found that saturated fat consumption went up by 16 percent, while after a victory it decreased by 9 percent.
“After a victory, people eat better,” says Pierre Chandon, a professor of marketing at the business school INSEAD in France. “After a defeat, people eat a lot worse.”

In many ways, the research fits with what we already know about the psychology of eating.
When many of us feel miserable, we’ll down a big bag of candy.
Call it a form of self-medication – when your happiness levels are low, junk food and high-calorie food provide the brain with much-needed pleasure.

“Sports defeats, especially football defeats, increase the chances of people getting a heart attack, it increases domestic violence and it also increases traffic fatalities,” Chandon says.

The most interesting part of Chandon’s research might not be the effects of defeats, but the effect that victories seem to have on fans. Winning seems to make people think long-term – they look forward to the next match, for example. The satisfaction of winning increases the capacity of people to withstand difficult choices – to pick the salad over the fries.

Indeed, Chandon and Cornil find that asking people to think about other things in their life that are valuable to them diminish the impacts of sports defeats on losing. Putting a sports loss into perspective, in other words, reduces how miserable you feel – and how much comfort food you crave.

– It really comes down to how much fans identify with their team. The question is when your team loses, do you say, “they lost,” or do you say, “we lost”?

– Oh, that’s huge in the language.

– Exactly. And when you identify with a team, when it’s a close match against an archrival, that’s when you see the biggest effects.

– Although I’m also thinking, I’ve noticed many, many people over the years who say “we won,” “they lost.”

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http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/05/07/404976537/are-you-sick-and-sick-of-hearing-everything-happens-for-a-reason