NetSujit World

I probably don’t go a week without hearing some form of this complaint — life is unfair. It’s usually in the form of:

I can’t believe this happened to me! Why do bad things always seem to happen to me!?
Why shouldn’t I be treated like someone special?
Why does everyone else seem to succeed where all I can do is fail?
I didn’t make the team/get the job/get asked out on a second date/get any of the attention my other siblings got.

You see how it goes. On and on, we don’t run out of examples of where we believe we’ve been untreated unfairly in life. Here’s how I try and look at it though — life is a never-ending game of learning. When something bad happens to you (or when something good doesn’t happen to you), it may not just be something bad happening to you. It might be a chance to learn something new — about yourself, about the way the world works, about someone else’s feelings toward you.

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“In meditation, effort must be applied in a direction opposite to what we are used to. Our ‘effort’ must be to relax ever more deeply. We must ultimately release the tension from both our muscles and our thoughts. When we relax so deeply that we are able to internalize the energy of the senses, the mind becomes focused and a tremendous flow of energy is awakened. Meditation is a continuous process, and can be said to have three stages: relaxation, interiorization, and expansion.” – John Novak, Lessons in Meditation.

Even if you don’t practice meditation – or, like me, you try to but have no real understanding of the different kinds of meditation – chances are you probably have at least a working knowledge of meditation.

Meditation is a great way to relieve anxiety, manage stress, and focus your mind. And, according to researchers at UCLA, meditation is also a way to build a bigger brain.

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New York Times reporter Benedict Carey referred to tears in a recent piece as “emotional perspiration.” Given that I sweat a lot and hate deodorant, I suppose it makes sense that I weep often. But I’m not going to apologize for that, because after a good cry, I always feel cleansed, like my heart and mind just rubbed each other’s backs in a warm bath.

In his article, “The Miracle of Tears” , from which I’ve lifted some of the research for this post, author Jerry Bergman writes: “Tears are just one of many miracles which work so well that we taken them for granted every day.” Here, then, are seven ways tears and the phenomenon we call “crying” heal us physiologically, psychologically, and spiritually.

1. Tears help us see.

Starting with the most basic function of tears, they enable us to see. Literally. Tears not only lubricate our eyeballs and eyelids, they also prevent dehydration of our various mucous membranes. No lubrication, no eyesight. Writes Bergman: “Without tears, life would be drastically different for humans–in the short run enormously uncomfortable, and in the long run eyesight would be blocked out altogether.”

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I know that the fastest way to despair is by comparing one’s insides with another’s outsides, and that Max Ehrmann, the author of the classic poem “Desiderata,” was absolutely correct when he said that if you compare yourself with others you become either vain or bitter, or, as Helen Keller put it: “Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.”

But Helen and Max don’t keep me from going to the land of comparisons and envy. Before long, I’m salivating over someone else’s book, or blog, or “Today Show” appearance. Then I have to pull out my set of directions–these 8 techniques–that will lead me out of the continent of jealousy and home, to self-acceptance:
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We tend to think of our emotions as having laws unto themselves, but one psychological researcher has suggested that our emotions do follow certain general rules.

This post begins a new series on the psychology of emotions with Professor Nico Frijda’s twelve laws of the emotions (Fridja, 2006). As for most laws there are exceptions, but these have been synthesised from years of psychological research and hold true much of the time.

1. The Law of Situational Meaning

The first law is simply that emotions derive from situations. Generally the same types of situation will elicit the same types of emotional response. Loss makes us grieve, gains make us happy and scary things make us fearful (mostly anyway – see all the other laws).

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According to researchers in Taiwan, the answer is “Yes.”

The researchers (Ko & Kuo, 2009) administered a 43-item self-report survey to 596 college students who were mostly between ages 16 and 22 and female (71 percent). The college students were young adults who had blogging experience, and specifically with blogging for the purpose of keeping a personal journal.

The researchers found support for deeper self-disclosure from bloggers resulting in a range of better social connections. These included things such as a sense of greater social integration, which is how connected we feel to society and our own community of friends and others; an increase in social bonding (our tightly knit, intimate relationships); and social bridging — increasing our connectedness with people who might be from outside of our typical social network.

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We live in a society of total consumption: not just the physical consumption of things but also the conceptual consumption of ideas. We’re always on the lookout for tasty new morsels of information and unusual experiences to add to our ever-expanding mental collections.

Mere things like your wattle and daub hut, several oxen and a shiny necklace are no longer impressive; now you need to have followed the Inca trail, formed an opinion on G. K. Chesterton’s Christian apologetics and be familiar with the Higgs boson’s role in a grand unified theory.

Negative conceptual consumption

The idea that people are voracious consumers of concepts is far from new, but it is only just starting to filter into the psychological literature. In an article published in the new Annual Review of Psychology, Dan Ariely and Michael I. Norton point out that conceptual consumption is especially useful for explaining why people choose certain types of apparently negative experiences (Ariely & Norton, 2009; PDF).

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World Philosophy Day has been and gone again, and again it seems to have left little trace in the UK. It was apparently celebrated in 80 countries, with the main international event taking place in Istanbul last week, starting with an an opening dinner on Wednesday evening and winding up on Friday lunchtime.

Despite its neglect in the UK, UNESCO World Philosophy Day has by now become a fixture on the third Thursday of November (although confusingly the Istanbul event spanned the fourth). Uprooted from its homeland in Paris where it all started in 2002, it has become an itinerant event, held in Chile in 2005 and Morocco in 2006. Next year it will be Italy’s turn. This time it was co-hosted by UNESCO, the UNESCO National Commission of Turkey and the Philosophical Society of Turkey.

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