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Leaning into difficult feelings can help you find the way forward, according to a refreshing new wave of books, says Jamie Waters

Eight years ago, when Whitney Goodman was a newly qualified therapist counselling cancer patients, it struck her that positive thinking was being “very heavily pushed”, both in her profession and the broader culture, as the way to deal with things. She wasn’t convinced that platitudes like “Look on the bright side!” and “Everything happens for a reason!” held the answers for anyone trying to navigate life’s messiness. Between herself, her friends and her patients, “All of us were thinking, ‘Being positive is the only way to live,’ but really it was making us feel disconnected and, ultimately, worse.”

This stayed with her and, in 2019, she started an Instagram account, @sitwithwhit, as a tonic to the saccharine inspirational quotes dominating social media feeds. Her posts included: “Sometimes things are hard because they’re just hard and not because you’re incompetent…” and “It’s OK to complain about something you’re grateful for.” It took off: the “radically honest” Miami-based psychotherapist now has more than 500,000 followers.Advertisementhttps://18e4ae5cc7d2f5569a049dd5b1530509.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Goodman’s new book, Toxic Positivity, expands on this thinking, critiquing a culture – particularly prevalent in the US and the west more broadly – that has programmed us to believe that optimism is always best. She traces its roots in the US to 19th-century religion, but it has been especially ascendant since the 1970s, when scientists identified happiness as the ultimate life goal and started rigorously researching how to achieve it. More recently, the wellness movement – religion for an agnostic generation – has seen fitness instructors and yogis preach about gratitude in between burpees and downward dogs. We all practise it in some way. When comforting a friend, we turn into dogged silver-lining hunters. And we lock our own difficult thoughts inside tiny boxes in a corner of our brains because they’re uncomfortable to deal with and we believe that being relentlessly upbeat is the only way forward. Being positive, says Goodman, has become “a goal and an obligation”.

Toxic Positivity is among a refreshing new wave of books attempting to redress the balance by espousing the power of “negative” emotions. Their authors are hardly a band of grouches advocating for us to be miserable. But they’re convinced that leaning into – rather than suppressing – feelings, including regret, sadness and fear brings great benefit. The road to the good life, you see, is paved with tears and furrowed brows as well as smiles and laughter. “I think a lot of people who focus on happiness, and the all-importance of positive emotions, are getting human psychology wrong,” says Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at Yale and the author of The Sweet Spot, which explores why some people seek out painful experiences, like running ultra marathons and watching horror movies. “In a life well lived, you should have far fewer negative than positive emotions, but you shouldn’t have zero negative emotions,” adds Daniel Pink, the author of The Power of Regret. “Banishing them is a bad strategy.”

Fear and sadness are a natural response to the world right now

The timing of these new works – which also include Helen Russell’s podcast (following her book of the same name) How To Be Sad – is no coincidence. In light of the pandemic and now the conflict in Ukraine, it seems trite to suggest a positive outlook is all we need. Strong negative emotions – fear, anxiety and sadness – are a natural response to what’s happening around the world right now and we shouldn’t have to deny them.

These authors want you to know that “negative” emotions are, in fact, helpful. Russell talks about sadness being a “problem-solving” emotion. Research from the University of New South Wales shows that it can improve our attention to detail, increase perseverance, promote generosity and make us more grateful for what we’ve got. “It’s the emotion that helps us connect to others,” she adds. “We’re nicer, better people in some ways when we are sad.”

It’s tougher making an argument for regret, which might be the world’s most maligned emotion, but Pink is game. From a young age we are instructed to never waste energy on regrets. The phrase “No regrets” is inked into arms and on to bumper plates and T-shirts. Seemingly every famous person has a quip about living without regrets (I would know: as someone who tends to linger on thoughts of what might have been, I’ve read them all). Pink says we’re getting it all wrong. “A ‘No regrets’ tattoo is like having a tattoo that says ‘No learning’,” says Pink, who was also a speechwriter for Al Gore, speaking from Dallas, Texas. He became interested in this topic because he couldn’t shake his own regrets about the fact that, while a university student, he wasn’t kind to fellow pupils excluded at social events. “If it has bothered me for a month, a year, or in this case 20 years, that’s telling me: ‘Hey, you might not realise it, but you care about kindness,’” he says. “Regrets clarify what matters to us and teach us how to do better. That’s the power of this emotion – if we treat it right.”

The problem? We’re not taught how to effectively process these difficult emotions. A good starting point is to familiarise ourselves with these feelings by acknowledging them and sitting with them for a beat. That takes practice, says Goodman. “It can include learning how your emotions feel in your body, and what to call them. When we’re able to put a name to a feeling, it makes it less scary. And when something is known, we can figure out what we want to do with it.”

When we are able to put a name to a feeling, it makes it less scary

Telling others about it lightens the weight. Complaining is perfectly natural, says Goodman. And articulating it helps us pinpoint what it is that’s bothering us, because language converts this “menacing cloud” into “something concrete”, says Pink. That disclosure could be to a friend, therapist or total stranger. In his Regret Survey, 18,000 people anonymously shared their biggest regrets, while Russell suggests a “buddy” system, in which you make a reciprocal agreement with someone to talk about your worries without interruption. (A note, if you are comforting a friend: listen and ask questions rather than immediately reaching for pick-me-ups.)Advertisement

Your next step will likely depend on the nature – and severity – of the emotion. To help us sit with sadness, Russell advocates being in nature. Cultural pursuits can help, too. “It sounds a little ‘woo’, but there are lots of studies about the effectiveness of reading therapy and looking at a piece of art – and how music can change our moods,” she says. “Sad music can act as a companion when we’re feeling sad, rather than making us feel lower. I do think it’s liberating when you finally kind of surrender to it all.”

Pink, whose approach is a little more structured, differentiates between regrets of action (wrongs you’ve committed) and inaction (opportunities not seized). For both, you must comfort yourself with the knowledge that everyone has regrets – and recognise that that single thing doesn’t define you. “Don’t look at a mistake as St Peter at the gate passing final judgment on your worth,” he says, but as “a teacher trying to instruct you.” He recommends stepping outside yourself and considering what you would recommend a friend do in a similar situation, whether that’s making amends for past acts, grasping a new opportunity, or ensuring you don’t make a similar misstep in the future.

Crucially, processing negative emotions “should all feel somewhat productive in the end”, says Goodman. Meaning: instead of ending up in a funk of wallowing, with your feelings replaying on a loop, “the wheels are turning, you’re making connections, you’re figuring things out,” she says. That doesn’t mean you need to come out of it feeling happy, or with a neat fix. “Sometimes you just get to a place where you say, ‘That was really hard, and now it’s over or now I’m not dealing with that any more’,” says Goodman. “And if it comes up for me again, I’ll deal with it.”

Leaning into negative thoughts should ultimately leave you with a sense of fulfilment. While we might instinctively think that filling our days solely with joy and excitement is the dream, “if we want to live a meaningful and purposeful life, a lot of pain is going to be part of it”, says Bloom. “What I really want is for people to be able to enjoy the full range of the human experience,” adds Goodman. Armed with the knowledge that you can do it in a methodical way, don’t be afraid to let the darkness in.

Reference From: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/apr/24/dont-insist-on-being-positive-negative-emotions-much-to-teach-us

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.

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Here’s some very bad happiness advice based on very solid happiness research: Feel important. Be happily married. Be Danish.

Depending on how happiness is measured, all of these things really are associated with a happier life. But they’re unhelpful because they are not actionable in any practical way. Very few people slap their foreheads and say, “It all makes sense now—I thought a tense, angry marriage was the secret to happiness, but it isn’t!”

This is the big weakness of a lot of the social-science research to which I have dedicated my academic life. Much of it is descriptive and explanatory, but doesn’t necessarily help us live better lives. It can even drag us down when the secret to happiness is unattainable. I am very unlikely to become a Dane, for example (although my grandfather was one, so maybe I have a little hygge sitting somewhere in my genome).

Every once in a while, people in my profession need to get practical. Based on what they see in the data from experiments and surveys, what should we do that is both effective and feasible for increasing our happiness, starting today?

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In 2020, an international team of scholars tried to find out. They came up with 68 ways that people are commonly counseled to raise their own happiness, then asked 18 of the most distinguished and prolific academic experts on the science of happiness to rate them in terms of effectiveness and feasibility. In other words, according to the experts, these ways to get happier both work and are workable.

Here are the top 10, in order, with my own assessments as a happiness researcher added in for good measure.

1. Invest in family and friends. The research is clear that though our natural impulse may be to buy stuff, we should invest instead in improving our closest relationships by sharing experiences and freeing up time to spend together.

Read: How to buy happiness

2. Join a club. The “social capital” you get from voluntarily and regularly associating with other people, whether or not you do so through a formal club, has long been known to foster a sense of belonging and protect against loneliness and isolation.

3. Be active both mentally and physically. You can make this advice as complicated and expensive as you want. But if you like to keep things simple, just try to walk for an hour and read for an hour (not for work!) each day.

Read: Go for a walk

4. Practice your religion. This might sound impractical if you don’t have a traditional faith or practice it traditionally. However, for the purposes of happiness, religion can be understood more broadly, as a spiritual or philosophical path in life. Search for transcendent truths beyond your narrow day-to-day life.

5. Get physical exercise. This is a slightly souped-up version of No. 3 above: Your daily walk should be supplemented with a purposive exercise plan. This is consistent with the research showing that regular exercise of all different types enhances mood and social functioning.

Read: Sedentary pandemic life is bad for our happiness

6. Act nicely. Agreeableness is consistently found to be highly and positively correlated with happiness, and it can be increased relatively easily.

7. Be generous. Behaving altruistically toward others rewards the brain with happiness-enhancing boosts of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin.

8. Check your health. Of all health issues, those that create the greatest unhappiness are typically chronic pain and anxiety. Don’t neglect your visits to the doctor and the dentist, and seek mental-health assistance if your emotions are interfering with your work, relationships, or social activities.

9. Experience nature. Studies have shown that, compared with urban walking, walking in a woodland setting more dramatically lowers stress, increases positive mood, and enhances working memory.

Read: How microdosing on nature can help with stress

10. Socialize with colleagues outside of work. Data have shown that work friendships increase employee engagement, which is associated with both happiness and productivity for workers. I believe that the move to remote work during the pandemic has inadvertently lowered the true compensation of work for millions, explaining in part the so-called Great Resignation. Bonding with your co-workers is a way to take it back.

This list is quite similar to the advice routinely dispensed by top academics writing for popular audiences, such as the UC Riverside psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky (who was also one of the 18 experts in the study), and by nonacademics who write about the science of happiness, such as Gretchen Rubin. “These ideas are terrific—and familiar,” Rubin told me recently. What impressed her wasn’t their originality (your grandmother might’ve told you most of them); rather, it was the fact that they were both effective and practical. “For many of us, the bigger challenge isn’t knowing what actions would make us happier, but actually doing those things,” she said.

Other common happiness advice is ineffective, infeasible, or both. In the 2020 study, the lowest-ranked ideas included working part-time (infeasible for many people) and building wealth (wealth explains only about 1 percent of happiness differences). The 18 experts also weren’t fans of creating a “pride shrine”—an area of your home devoted to mementos to your successes and accomplishments. That isn’t surprising: As I show in my recent book From Strength to Strength, reminding yourself of your own past greatness is actually a very good way to lower your current satisfaction.

Read: How to succeed at failure

Debunking common-but-bad happiness guidelines could be a full-time job. Beyond those mentioned above, my favorites are “If it feels good, do it” (which can lure us toward bad habits and away from deep purpose) and “Let your anger out” (which research clearly shows leads to more anger, not relief). In my experience as a researcher, nearly all advice to let yourself be managed by your emotions and desires is bad.

If one thing bothers me about the list of happiness ideas above, it is that they are incomplete, insofar as they are disconnected tactics. If you really want to get happier, you need a full-on integrated strategy.

A happiness strategy has three parts to it. First, you need to commit yourself to understanding happiness. That can mean many things, whether it’s learning about the science of happiness, studying philosophy, or immersing yourself in a faith practice. Second, you need to practice good happiness hygiene. That’s where the ideas on the list above come in. Treat them as systematic habits, not occasional hacks, and think consciously about whether each action is consistent with your understanding of happiness. Finally, share your knowledge and progress with others. Beyond being an ethical thing to do, teaching will cement your philosophy and habits into your consciousness.

Read: Don’t wish for happiness. Work for it.

The most important thing to remember is this: You don’t have to leave your happiness up to chance. No matter where you live or what you do, you can manage your own joy and share it with others.Arthur C. Brooks is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, the William Henry Bloomberg Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School. He’s the host of the podcast seriesHow to Build a Happy Life and the author of From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life.

Reference From: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/04/happiness-research-how-to-be-happy-advice/629559/

Loneliness dissolves during the flow-inducing pursuit of challenging activities.

KEY POINTS

• In the 1970s, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified a sweet spot between “boredom and anxiety” that facilitates flow state experiences.
• During COVID-19 lockdowns, people who pursued flow-inducing challenges during their free time experienced less loneliness.
• Flow is elusive. People tend to experience flow during hard-but-not-too-hard daily challenges that are meaningful and require concentration.

In the mid-1970s, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi published “Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play.” In this book, he identifies a blissful “flow channel” that’s created when someone steadily increases the level of challenge as skill levels improve.Source: Duppydupdup/Shutterstock

New research suggests that international students studying abroad who were isolated and alone during COVID-19 lockdowns experienced less loneliness and more happiness if they could lose themselves in meaningful activities that required focus and created flow states. These findings (Chang, Dattilo, & Huang, 2022) were published on April 4 in the peer-reviewed journal Leisure Sciences.

“Loneliness is associated with depression and other mental health challenges. By engaging in meaningful activities that demand focus, people can reduce loneliness and increase momentary happiness,” co-author John Dattilo of Penn State said in a news release.

Anecdotally, I know that when I was a lonely student, pouring my energy into skill-based challenges—such as dedicating my free time to marathon training—was a remedy for the severe perceived social isolation I felt during the loneliest period of my life, which occurred during another global pandemic (HIV/AIDS) that first took hold when I was in high school.

Want to Create Flow? Gradually Increase Challenge Levels to Match Improving Skill Levels

As a gay teen in the early 1980s, I found myself isolated and alone at a homophobic boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut. During my first and second years at prep school, I struggled with crippling anxiety, depression, and not self-determined solitude (NSDS). I also developed a substance use disorder during adolescence, which made me feel even more “sad and hollow” inside.

Luckily, just as the spring semester of my junior year was ending, I stumbled on the power of flow to dissolve loneliness and stopped self-medicating with recreational drugs and alcohol. It was June 1983 when I accidentally discovered that pouring myself into something challenging that required laser-like focus and skill was a way to reduce feelings of loneliness.

For me, the motivation to start pursuing what I now know as “flow” by becoming a long-distance runner was sparked by seeing a matinee of the ’80s pop culture phenomenon known as Flashdance on a big cinematic screen. The grit, gutsiness, and joie de vivre of that movie’s protagonist—who was a Pittsburgh welder turned world-class dancer—were contagious.article continues after advertisementhttps://665cfd5f3d208dd5c9dabbcbef789c43.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

“First, when there’s nothing but a slow glowing dream that your fear seems to hide deep inside your mind. All alone, I have cried silent tears full of pride. In a world made of steel, made of stone.” —”Flashdance…What a Feeling” by Giorgio Moroder, Irene Cara, and Keith Forsey (1983)

I know it’s cliché, but watching Jennifer Beals’ character metamorphosize and break free from a bleak steel town by “taking her passion and making it happen” inspired me. Armed with a mixtape of the Flashdance soundtrack blasting on my Walkman, I cut off my t-shirt sleeves and romanticized the grueling challenge of becoming an ultra-distance runner.

All I wanted to do with my leisure time in the summer of ’83 (when the AIDS pandemic started decimating people in the LGBTQ community) was sweat like a “Maniac” while visualizing myself breaking free and experiencing eudaimonia in an MTV-inspired version of my otherwise fear-filled and socially isolated daily life.

Through trial and error, I figured out that the key to creating this euphoric feeling was constantly pushing against my limits by upping the challenge and running a little bit faster and farther as my endurance and stamina gradually increased.

As a teenager in the early ’80s, I didn’t know about the concept of “flow.” Nor did I know that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi had figured out in the 1970s that the secret to dialing up this elusive state and losing oneself in what he called the “flow channel” is to constantly nudge up against one’s skill level by slightly increasing the degree of challenge and finding a sweet spot between boredom and anxiety (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975).

I did know that losing myself in a so-called “flow channel” made me feel less lonely. Creating flow states on my own also made my solitude feel self-determined (SDS). I wanted to be alone in “the zone” and chose to spend solitary time pursuing flow states every day because it made me feel good. (See, “Motivations for Solitude Explain Why Loners Love Being Alone.”)

Source: Chris Bergland

In 2004, my lifelong pursuit of “frictionless flow” state experiences and what I call superfluidity led to breaking a Guinness World Record by running six back-to-back marathons during a 24-hour fundraiser for an HIV/AIDS nonprofit organization.

Flow State Experiences Helped People Reduce Loneliness During COVID-19 Lockdowns

The latest (2022) research by Chang, Dattilo, and Huang found that international students studying abroad who weren’t able to maintain face-to-face contact with their social support networks during pandemic lockdowns experienced less loneliness if they pursued a daily activity that created flow during their free time.article continues after advertisementhttps://665cfd5f3d208dd5c9dabbcbef789c43.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

The researchers discovered that those who experienced less loneliness during the pandemic tended to spend their leisure time pursuing relatively challenging activities that required both concentration and skill.

“Flow can be achieved by engaging in mental or physical activities that we value and that require us to concentrate fully to use our skills,” Dattilo said in a news release. He adds that the best way for people to achieve a state of flow during their leisure time is to find an activity they enjoy that requires a good deal of skill and demands concentration but isn’t so difficult that it seems overwhelming or impossible.

According to Dattilo, “Some activities never induce flow, while other activities may or may not, depending on the individual.” He notes that there’s nothing wrong with surfing the internet or watching television during one’s free time. However, these activities typically don’t induce a state of flow because they don’t involve a meaningful challenge that requires focused attention or mastering a skill.

“Learning which activities might enable someone to enter a state of flow requires asking questions and listening,” Dattilo concludes. “People tend to thrive on healthy engagement and challenge. My collaborators and I hope this research will help people live fuller, happier, healthier lives.”

Reference From: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/202204/want-less-loneliness-lose-yourself-in-the-pursuit-flow

KEY POINTS

• To become a peacemaker, it is necessary to be connected to one’s own heart.
• This connection to our own heart is created through compassion meditation.
• Tonglen meditation, a Tibetan form of compassion meditation, builds on the awareness of all our interconnectedness.
• There are five easy practices to follow that help us become peacemakers.

Source: Kits Pix/Shutterstock

Since returning home from four weeks of a silent mindfulness retreat without access to WiFi or news sources and taking a break from a busy practice as a clinical psychologist, I have been feeling raw and overwhelmed by the pain and suffering in this world. The invasion of Ukraine started just before I began my retreat on Feb. 27. During the retreat, the locus of my awareness sank from my thinking mind, my pre-frontal cortex, to my heart. It seems to me that wisdom and compassion arise from the heart, allowing a person to engage as a peacemaker with this wounded world.

To become a peacemaker, a person first needs to build peace within their hearts—that mysterious organ of physiological, psychological, and spiritual perception and connection. A year after the start of World War II, author Henry Miller wrote in a quiet moment while visiting Epidaurus, “What rules the world is the heart, not the brain.” He continued, “In Epidaurus, in the stillness, in the great peace that came over me, I heard the heart of the world beat. I know what the cure is: it is to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world.”

From my experience in this exquisitely silent retreat month, I can deeply relate to these sentiments. I took time to explore what it means to be aware and to be human. Modern culture often divides awareness from feeling, with awareness regarded as something that has only to do with attention and thinking. However, awareness has a profoundly feeling, relational quality. We might call this the heart’s intelligence. Rumi talks about the heart’s intelligence when he says, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” The heart feels the whole, while the conceptual mind usually analyzes and takes it apart. Love or compassion arises when awareness and its feeling quality are fused.

There are five steps that help prepare a person to become a peacemaker capable of healing personal and societal wounds:

1. Recognize that peace, deep peace, is possible.
2. Listen deeply to the other side, especially when others’ opinions differ from your own.
3. Set an intention for practice, which means setting aside time to stay connected to our hearts and the great heart of the world.
4. Recognize interdependence and our part in the order of things; then we know that we all are kin, we are all family.
5. Engage from a place of compassion and wisdom.

While on retreat, I found it was important to practice Tonglen, one of the forms of meditation I describe in my book, Heart Medicine: How to Stop Painful Patterns and Find Peace and Freedom—at Last. Tonglen, or “giving and receiving,” opens the heart and allows mental and emotional barriers to soften and eventually dissolve. In Tonglen meditation, one takes in the sorrows of others and gives blessings back to them in return. This practice may seem counterintuitive. One may wonder whether it is harmful to receive the darkness of others and risk depleting one’s own stores of goodness. The most important aspect of Tonglen meditation is the understanding that everyone is joining in the interdependent web of life. When a person accepts that every aspect is interconnected, not isolated or separate, then the personal heart, which is interconnected with the great heart of the world, can fearlessly take in that suffering, and surrender it to the great heart of loving awareness. From that wide and inclusive space, it is possible to share care and compassion in a loving way.

Usually, one leaps into action, usually with good intentions, before settling into the heart. But when one takes the time to practice heartfulness, or heart awareness, then every contribution will come from a qualitatively much higher place. The place of engagement can be abstract or practical, in fact, it can have innumerable forms. The Dalai Lama said, “I can trust my heart’s intentions.” When intentions and engagements come from the place where “our little hearts beat in unison with the big heart of the world,” then a person can trust themselves. With faith in one’s heart’s intentions, it is possible to become a peacemaker.

Reference from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/heart-medicine-changing-world/202204/how-become-peacemaker

An ongoing coronavirus outbreak that started in Wuhan, China in December and has since sickened more than 20,000 people across the globe has raised plenty of questions: How long will the outbreak last? Can it be contained? Will scientists find a treatment?

These questions don’t yet have clear answers, making them difficult for even adults to wrap their minds around. That uncertainty, in turn, leaves many parents nervously wondering what they are supposed to tell their kids.

Molly Gardner, a pediatric psychologist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio, has some simple advice: Stay informed, keep perspective and be honest.

Sign up for our daily coronavirus newsletter by clicking on this link, and please send any tips, leads, and stories to virus@time.com.

“Kids’ emotions feed off of parents’ emotions,” Gardner says. For that reason, it’s important that adults stay up-to-date on the news, so they can answer kids’ questions to the extent possible, but avoid falling into a pit of anxiety about the outbreak.

“Being informed and being anxious are two different things,” Gardner adds.

Parents should also tailor their approach depending on their child’s age, information processing style and exposure to news about the virus, says Ellen Braaten,co-director of the Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital. “You have to know your child,” she says. “Does more information help them cope, or does more information make them anxious?”

Adolescents, who have likely been exposed to information about the outbreak online or at school, can probably handle a frank discussion, Braaten says. She suggests asking them what they think about the outbreak or if they’re worried about anything in particular, then sharing your own thoughts about the situation.

For younger kids, Braaten suggests listening more than you talk. “Find out what it is they’re fearful of and what they already know about it,” she says. Try to answer any specific questions they have, even if those questions feel uncomfortable.

“It’s okay to use words like death and dying,” Gardner says. “The more we beat around the bush with kids, the more they might get confused.” (That said, Gardner says it’s probably smart to turn off the news — which could contain scary images — when young children are around.)

It can be helpful to put things in perspective for a child by explaining that it’s unlikely they or anyone they know in the U.S. will get sick, but Gardner urges parents to avoid over-promising, given all the unknowns about the outbreak. “Just say, ‘We’re going to do everything we can to stay healthy. We’re going to keep informed, and if we have other questions we don’t know the answer to, let’s go talk to your doctor about that,’” she suggests.

It can also be comforting to reiterate that doctors around the world are working to find solutions and care for people who are already sick, Braaten says.

But perhaps the most useful approach for kids of any age, Braaten says, is reminding them of things that are in their power, like washing their hands and covering their sneezes and coughs to avoid getting and spreading illnesses of all kinds. “Knowing there’s something we can do makes us feel less powerless,” she says.

Even after following all of this advice, parents may notice that their kids are worried or anxious about coronavirus. That’s a perfectly normal reaction, Braaten says — adults should just keep an eye on it. If kids are worried to the point of struggling to sleep or being afraid to go to school for days on end, for example, it may be time to call a mental health provider for extra help.MORE MUST-READ STORIES FROM TIME

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Reference from: https://time.com/5776857/how-to-talk-to-kids-coronavirus

At Delta Air Lines’ Atlanta headquarters in late January, 24 employees are arguing over which of them has the worst disease. Half of them had been given cards naming a physical or mental health diagnosis and were told to line up, from the least debilitating to the most.

The woman holding “gingivitis” quickly takes a place at the far left of the line. But everyone further down to the right—low back pain, moderate depression, paraplegia, severe PTSD—keeps switching spots.

“Severe vision loss,” someone says to the man holding the corresponding card, “are you a pilot?” He doesn’t know. There is no further information: not what the person does for a living, whether their condition is well managed, or if they have health care coverage.

“We’re in a pickle down here,” a woman pleads to the instructor, Rochele Burnette, who’s standing by, silent and smiling. Burnette waits until someone finally suggests the right answer: they should be in a vertical line, not a horizontal one. “How we look at a mental disorder and how we look at a physical condition should be the same,” Burnette says. “One could be just as debilitating as the other.”

This is the first lesson of Mental Health First Aid at Work, a training that the National Council for Behavioral Health provides, for a cost, to a growing number of corporations. Of the people taking today’s class, some were there because they had seen firsthand how much a mental health crisis can impact the workplace. A Delta employee killed himself several months ago, and counselors were brought in to help the many people who were affected. Others wanted to improve their mental-health vocabulary, and their confidence in handling related issues. “When someone says, ‘Hi, do you have a minute?’ we never really know what’s going to follow,” one HR employee says in the class. “Sometimes it’s very easy, and sometimes we quickly find ourselves in uncomfortable situations.”

Over the next four hours, the Delta employees learn how to spot symptoms and warning signs of possible mental health concerns in a colleague, reach out and offer initial help, then guide them to professional help and the resources the company offers, like short-term counseling through the free employee assistance program (EAP) and a confidential app that lets you chat immediately with behavioral health coaches. Getting the words right can be tricky; much of the class is devoted to figuring out what to say to a coworker in distress. On everybody’s desk is a handout of helpful and harmful phrases. “One of the things you’ll see on your card is How are you doing, really?” says Burnette. “That ‘really’ really pulls out something extra.” In the potentially harmful category: putting off the conversation until later in the week, suggesting they simply work it out with their manager, or telling them to “just hang in there.”

The office may seem an unlikely place for such a class, but Burnette reminds her students that the historical norm to keep your personal life at home is unrealistic. “What affects you in your life affects you in your work,” she tells the group.

There are no requirements that U.S. employers provide mental health training. But as mental illness diagnoses and suicide rates rise in the U.S., while the stigma of talking about them drops, companies are finding that their employees want a bigger focus on mental health at work. “A little over a year ago, we really started to hear more and more from employees about the need for these kinds of services,” says Rob Kight, senior vice president of human resources at Delta. “It caused us to take a deep look at what we were providing. And we decided, you know, it’s not enough.”

Prioritizing employees’ mental health has become not just a moral issue, but also a tool to recruit and retain young talent. A 2019 poll by the American Psychiatric Association found that millennials—who now comprise the largest generation in the U.S. workforce—tend to be more comfortable than their older peers discussing their mental health at work. Investing in this area may also make financial sense, since untreated mental illness and substance abuse issues can be costly for employers. Untreated depression alone costs the average 1,000-person U.S. company more than $1.4 million per year due to missed days and lost productivity, according to the Center for Workplace Mental Health at the American Psychiatric Association Foundation.

Corporate trainings have emerged as popular solutions, and Mental Health First Aid at Work is among the most widely used. Mental Health First Aid started in 2000 in Australia as a way to educate people about what to do when they encounter someone experiencing mental health problems, which are much more common than the emergencies traditional first aid courses teach. It later spread to 27 countries, each with their own licensing organizations. In the U.S., the National Council for Behavioral Health runs the program, and in 2013 it launched a version tailored for the workplace. More than 200 companies—including Bank of America, Gillette, Starbucks and Unilever—have offered one or both of its four- and eight-hour training programs to employees, says Betsy Schwartz, vice president for public education and strategic initiatives at the National Council for Behavioral Health.

“We’ve seen a significant increase in corporate interest,” Schwartz says. “In companies that train a larger number of employees, we get feedback about a whole culture shift.” Though there hasn’t been much research on the work-specific training, some studies have found that Mental Health First Aid improves knowledge about mental health, and confidence in responding to related issues, for the people who take it. The benefits to the person receiving help from a person who’s gone through the training, however, are not clear.

The number of organizations that run this type of training is growing. The Center for Workplace Mental Health at the American Psychiatric Association Foundation is developing a digital training for managers called “Notice. Talk. Act. at Work,” which teaches the early warning signs of mental health issues and how to have empathetic, compassionate conversations. “We cannot talk about mental health enough in the workplace,” says Darcy Gruttadaro, director of the Center for Workplace Mental Health. “We have a long way to go—the more we can reinforce it, the better.” Some companies have developed their own programs. The consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton trained all employees in 2018 and 2019 to spot the five signs of emotional suffering—depression, in other words. The professional services firm EY (formerly Ernst & Young) offers digital training to help employees recognize the signs that a colleague is struggling and connect them to company resources.

Merely offering services and resources isn’t always enough. Employees have to know about and trust them. Most large companies have a free EAP, for example, which typically offers short-term counseling sessions and other wellbeing services for employees and their family members through outside providers. But even when people are aware that their company has an EAP, they often fear their HR department is monitoring who uses the programs, and that doing so could be a black mark on their employment record. As a result, many studies show that EAPs have historically been underused. “There shouldn’t be, but there is a stigma around this that exists in our country,” says Kight. “We have to help break that down and let people know that it’s okay to take advantage of these services.”

Soon, the two dozen Delta employees in today’s training will join the more than 600 who have completed Mental Health First Aid at Work since the airline started offering it in 2019. Though it’s not mandatory, the goal is for all 90,000 employees to take it, according to Delta’s HR team.

After Burnette gives the students a lesson in what to do if a coworker is having a panic attack, she ends on a hopeful note: proven ways a person can help themselves feel better. Exercise is one, and so are sleep, relaxation and 12-step programs. “But let me tell you something about this one right here,” she says, pointing to a slide on family, friends, faith and other social networks. “When you know you have people you can talk to that are nonjudgmental—I can go to you and have the conversation, and no matter what, you’ll listen—people have had better outcomes, because they have support.”

“I want to speak to that, because I’ve been thinking about how I can articulate this,” says a young man sitting in the front row. “Very early on in life, I found myself trying to remove stigma around mental health and talk about it, because I saw it in my family. It made me say to myself, I don’t want this to happen to me, so how can I make it normal? I started to talk to my friends and people that I’m close with. I say, hey guys, let’s get together and have drinks, and talk about what’s really going on.”

There’s no reason why conversations like these can’t happen in the workplace, too, the new thinking goes. “We’ve all grown up thinking certain conversations are professional and certain conversations are not professional,” Burnette says. “We bring our whole selves to work, so why can’t we talk about our whole self?”MORE MUST-READ STORIES FROM TIME

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Reference from: https://time.com/5783009/first-aid-mental-health

KEY POINTS

• Wonder is a fleeting experience of the world that lets us concretely know how little we know.
• The feeling of wonder directs our attention to the “big-picture” entities in life.
• This type of spiritual sense leads to the motivation to fix things.
• While not without risk, a spiritual sense can make our post-pandemic work lives a renaissance, and not a return to the grind.

Source: Nina Uhlíková/Pexels

Most of us are fairly comfortable with holding on to the expectation that the work we do somehow contributes to our life-long search for meaning. Furthermore, a central piece of the meaning puzzle is the value we place in the interpersonal connections that emerge from our cooperative partnerships, be they in our personal or professional lives.

But equally important to building trusting relationships in meaningful work is the occasional experience of awe-inducing wonder. Unfortunately, the pursuit of wonder tends to be a blind spot in most work settings. This is a mistake, which hampers our ability to maximize happiness and productivity.

What Is Wonder?

Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Rabbi who marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, lamented that with technological advancements and social progress, our collective sense of wonder declines. To motivate a change in course, Heschel asserted, “The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.” I would add that work without wonder is not worth doing.

Researchers identify the experience of a positive feeling of wonder as a response to perceptions that transcend our current frames of reference. In other words, a feeling of wonder emerges when our existing abilities to neatly explain what we are seeing fail us. Wonder is a fleeting experience of the world that lets us concretely know how little we know. It is an indicator that our mental frames have been broken by the new content we are trying to insert. Wonder comes from the recognition that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.

Recent research has come to a somewhat unsurprising conclusion: that the feeling of wonder directs our attention to those “big-picture” entities in life. It encourages us to think more about the collective dimensions of our identity, and less about the signifi­cance we tend to attach to personal concerns and goals. While some of us might consider this finding to be rather obvious, it nonetheless brings scienti­fic legitimacy to the traditional understanding that a spiritual sense can be transformative.article continues after advertisement

The experience of wonder changes the way we think about ourselves and our place in the world. This transient sensation shifts our long-term attention to bigger ideas and deeper attachments. It lessens the power of our biases toward greed and sel­fishness. This shift is critical to enabling the type of transformative cooperation required to be happier and more productive in our work.

Source: Wendelin Jacober/Pexels

Fixing What Is Broken

A former Google executive explained to me how wonder plays a critical role in tech culture, and Googlers are encouraged to let their curiosity be the driver of their work. But the thinking that gets them there is as simple as it is profound: Things break, let’s fix them.

This echoes the question Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the charismatic scholar and spiritual leader of one of the largest contemporary Hasidic sects, insisted his followers ask themselves: “Why did this broken thing come into your world?”

A spiritual sense leads to the motivation to fix things. It is hopeful, suggests discontent with the status quo, and encourages resiliency. The feeling of wonder is as important as meaning and connection, even if we don’t always pay attention to it when we experience it.

The key precursor of wonder is perceiving something that messes with our mental frames. It upsets our confi­dence in the systems we rely on for inferring meaning. While not without risk, a spiritual sense can make our post-pandemic work lives a renaissance, and not a return to the grind.

Reference from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/managing-meaning/202204/how-spirituality-increases-happiness-and-productivity