Leaving the habit of natural track, suddenly arrived at the station, it is time to get off to change the train, standing on the platform, looking around, the heart from the feeling of strangeness, to a little bit of fear, to the beginning of anxiety, to sleepy. This kind of state of mind repeats itself over and over again throughout the day. It's only been two days since I got off the train, and it seems like a million years have passed, and I'm four pounds lighter. I've felt like this before in the first half of my life, and I can remember 2 times, once when I was just in high school and once when I was just in college. This is the third time, and whenever I encounter a new situation, pessimism always checks in first. I can't even bring myself to do anything about it, it's like it's unbreakable. I'm not sure if I've ever had a good time, but I'm sure I've had a good time, and I'm sure I've had a good time, and I'm sure I've had a good time, and I'm sure I've had a good time.
Until one weekend I opened the "get" APP, a window popped up that said reward me for signing in on the weekend, and gave me "listen to a book every day" "live out the most optimistic self", how do I feel this is the Buddha manifested it. I listened to the book once, and immediately bought the e-book, like looking for a treasure map to explore the book described in the book that "permanently effective, and will not be repeated," the method of clearing this kind of emotion. When I read it, I was delighted that it worked immediately. So I decided to write this book note to happily tell you that optimism can not only be acquired but also passed on to the next generation. Whether it is really effective for life as described in the book, I think due to individual differences, this needs to be practiced and verified together.
This book analyzes from the perspective of positive psychology that people are pessimistic because they have the experience of learned helplessness. Just like learned helplessness, optimism can be learned if you consciously change your explanatory style. This book comes from a scientific experiment and teaches you how to acquire lifelong optimism.
Martin E.P. Seligman 1942- ), one of the founders of contemporary cognitive psychotherapy, was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1998 by the highest vote ever. He is recognized worldwide as the "Father of Positive Psychology" for his strong advocacy of the establishment of positive psychology and for laying out the structure of this new discipline.
This picture is a little too detailed to be clear, so please leave a comment with your micro-signal if you need the original picture.
1 Why are we depressed?
2 Want to measure whether you are an optimist or a pessimist?
2 Is there salvation for pessimists?
3 Why do some people break down easily while others are always indomitable?
4 Is pessimism good for nothing? Is optimism all good?
5 Is your child pessimistic? (The Children's Attributional Styles Questionnaire, a measurement scale for children, is included)
6 How can you teach your child to be optimistic?
7 Is pessimism bad for your health? Do optimistic people live longer than pessimistic people?
8 Does Acquired Optimism Last?
9 Why are people more likely to be depressed the more technology advances?
The authors have demonstrated through numerous scientific experiments that human pessimism stems from learned helplessness, that is, from past experiences of powerlessness to develop the "nothing will work" interpretation, and that the style of interpretation determines whether you are optimistic or pessimistic. Optimism, like helplessness, can be learned, and once learned, it lasts forever. This method is called ABCDE.
First Positive Discipline Why Neither Punish Nor Reward
A while ago, it seems that both the written word and the radio are introduced to the study of learned helplessness experiments "triadic experiments" in this book not only describes in detail the process of the genesis of the experiment, but also about a Japanese-American student, Hirohito, who used the same principle to design a new experiment. In this book, the origin of this experiment is not only described in detail, but it is also told about a Japanese-American student, Hiroto, who used the same principle to design a new experiment to study human beings, and found that the learned helplessness proved in dogs also exists in human learning. People only give up when they feel that nothing they do will help. On the contrary, people do not give up when they feel they have control over something. The experience of learned helplessness is what creates a person's pessimistic way of thinking. Even when rewards and punishments occur, they don't change the idea that "nothing will work".
Another side effect of this experiment was to shake up the behaviorist gurus who dominated American psychology at the time (1965). It demonstrated that the central premise of learning theory was wrong, namely that learning can only occur when behavior produces reward or punishment. Behaviorists insist that all of a person's behavior is determined only by the rewards and punishments he receives: a rewarded behavior may be repeated, while a punished behavior may be repressed, and so on. Whereas something like consciousness, i.e., thinking, planning, anticipation, memory, experience, etc. (the main job of the prefrontal cortex) does not affect behavior. Behaviorists believe that man's behavior is completely shaped by his environment and not by his inner thoughts. They feel that consciousness is like the speedometer of a car; it doesn't make the car go, it just reacts to the state in which the car is traveling.
Gosh, it's a good thing we're living in the 21st century; if that were true, there would be no such thing as artificial intelligence. However, if you look around, such behaviorists still abound in the twenty-first century, not to mention parents.
Do you believe that children are consciously choosing what is good for them, rather than just relying on rewards and punishments? For example, a behaviorist might think that people go to work to get paid (and maybe the boss promises more bonuses), and that children go to school to get high grades (and maybe the parents promise extra rewards). In fact, humans go to work with the expectation that they will get more than a paycheck, and children go to school with the expectation that they will get more than a high grade. What is this expectation? I think there is at least a thirst for growth and progress, and the sense of hope that comes with it. It is precisely for this reason that it is difficult to retain talented people with high salaries and good students tend to drop out of school. People with high incomes can be passive, and students with high test scores can dislike school.
In turn, when we parents want our children to study well, behave, or do whatever we want them to do, material rewards or behavioral punishments are easily our first choice. It may seem like this is because it is easier and more effective than reasoning and baiting, but we forget that once this external force is not present, everything will go back to the way it was. Otherwise, we wouldn't often hear parents complaining, "I've said it many times," "It's all the same old stuff," "I've used everything". Have we really used everything? Have you ever used a method called "real trust"?
Is there such a thing as fake trust? Of course there is. Many parents will describe it as "I didn't start out angry, I didn't lose my temper until the third time I reminded you." "The first time I saw this was when I was in the middle of the night, when I was in the middle of the night, when I was in the middle of the night, when I was in the middle of the night. "Talking nicely doesn't work. You have to be tough and intimidating." I don't call this "trust", I call this kind of education "experimental skepticism". It means that I don't believe that my child will listen to what I say properly, I have to try, and the result of the experiment is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The result of the experiment is a self-fulfilling prophecy, which in turn reinforces our belief that "nothing we say will work". In fact, we're missing a key point: you don't trust your child to make decisions that are good for them in the first place. So you just try. Of course, maybe you don't admit that you think this way because you have learned helplessness. We are always afraid that our children will be "wrong" once in a lifetime, we can only accept that our children are "all right" and it is difficult to accept that they are "sometimes wrong".
Much of the human suffering comes from being in a hurry, and this is especially true for parents today. There is no or very little time set aside for "corrections", so punishments and rewards seem like shortcuts that can be generated in a click of a button. It's as if we're not nurturing the seeds of thinking human beings, we're just charging machines and feeding them commands, and even when that's easy, it's still annoying.
I'm one of these parents myself, and despite constant improvement, I'm still on the road. I remember one day when I was in labor, my son refused to drink my milk, and cried with hunger. I insisted not to use the bottle, afraid that once the nipple will never drink the nipple again, so the struggle for three hours, and finally the nurse could not stand it, advised me to use the bottle to drink less, the child does not cry and then drink your, can not be hungry and cry ah. As a result, I gave my son a little bit from the bottle to stop crying, and then I brought him over to drink my milk, and the little guy accepted it. At that time, I was just stubborn, but now I realize how much that "doubt" killed me at that time. The Buddha said, this is the obsession, can not let go of the pain.
I don't know if it's a problem, but I'm not sure if it's a problem for me. The first thing I'd like to do is to get a little bit more information about what I'm talking about. The child went to kindergarten, dinner in the garden, eat earlier. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that, but I'm going to be able to do it. We never suspect that the child is hungry and wants to eat, so we give it to him, and the child ends up vomiting at night. The next day decided not to give food, but the result is to go to bed when the child is clamoring for food, or hungry. Now I'm confused. I'm afraid that if I give it to him, he'll eat too much, and if I don't give it to him, he'll be hungry at night. Give a little food, okay? Can the child control himself? I began to doubt again. As a result, this day after school, I discussed with them, home at night to eat a fruit, and then we will read books and play Lego no longer have to eat, okay? The kids all said yes. And that's what they did. They didn't throw up at night, and they didn't make a fuss. It's great that the kids have self-control and do what they say they're going to do. Sometimes it's better not to be skeptical. Can they do what they say they're going to do? The first thing you need to do is to get your hands on some of the most popular products in the world, and you'll be able to get them to work.
I remember a story in the book Positive Discipline in the Classroom, where a child studied very hard and got good grades, and the teacher wanted to give him extra honors and rewards in the classroom, and he said to the teacher: "I don't want rewards, because the effort and good grades brought me this sense of achievement is a reward. Yeah, humans are conscious. Why does positive discipline advocate neither punishment nor reward? Because it's ineffective in the long run, and who would do it for nothing. Then why don't parents see, because we are anxious, we want to see immediate results.
We often only care about the results, the child ate the meal, finished homework, to the point of sleep. We always forget that the child is hungry to eat incense will eat fast and clean, the child because of writing homework to test whether to learn to write homework (of course, to the behaviorism of teachers and parents to write homework is not a minority), the child because they said to go to bed at the time so to go to bed at the time. The fulfillment that these processes bring to the child, the good habits that are developed, the values that are formed, we don't see, so it's easy to ignore or instinctively disbelieve in the unseen.
Behaviorists care more about outcomes and will use punishment and rewards to reinforce learning and cooperation. They don't believe that humans are subjective and can discipline themselves to make favorable decisions without outside influence. Essentially they don't believe that they are subjective either. Such parents say, "There's nothing I can do," "What can I do," and "This is the way it's going to have to be".
So what about you? Are you an insecure behaviorist? If you are, I recommend you read another book by the author, Teaching Optimistic Kids.
Secondly, how parents can help their children to prevent "helplessness"
There is a chapter on why our children are pessimistic, and experiments have shown that children are naturally optimistic, and that even those who are closest to the pessimistic scores on a scale have similar scores to optimistic adults. So if your child is pessimistic, it's regrettable and needs to be taken seriously by parents. The book describes the following three influences that have been found to cause pessimism in children by way of scientific experimentation, so see if you've been hit, and if you have, change your mind, and if you haven't:
01 Parental Influence
"Small children are very attentive to what their parents say and do, and in particular to their mother's explanations of emotional events. Children ask a lot of 'why' questions. This is because they want an explanation of what is happening around them, especially in social life. When parents become impatient and stop answering their children's never-ending whys, children look elsewhere for answers. In the vast majority of cases, they listen carefully to an adult's explanation of something, and in our normal speech, there is an explanation about once a minute, they just don't feel it themselves. Your child will listen to that explanation word for word, especially if it's an explanation of something bad. Not only will they listen, but they will also notice whether the explanations are permanent or temporary, specific or universal, your fault or someone else's."
Think back to how you, or your parents, explained something in your life. What were some of the verbalizations they often had? Do you say things like this often?
Don't panic if you do think this often. The good news is that the authors proved experimentally that optimism doesn't come from genetics; optimism is learned. So both you and your child are saved.
02 The way adults criticize children
What do you say to your child when he does something wrong? And what does his teacher say to him? Pay attention to the fact that children don't just hear what we say to them, but also how we say it. This is especially important when it comes to criticism; children believe the criticism of these people and use it to develop their own interpretive style. If these criticisms are permanent, pervasive, and personified (internalized) then the child's view of themselves will turn pessimistic. Depersonalization controls how you see yourself, how you feel about yourself, your level of self-esteem. When bad things happen, pessimistic people blame themselves and optimistic people blame others or circumstances. When good things happen, the pessimist blames others or circumstances, and the optimist blames himself.
Research by Dweck, a world-renowned developmental psychologist, shows how optimism develops, or what this can tell us about what happens to women in childhood that makes them more likely to be depressed than men. One thing he noticed in a third grade classroom was that boys and girls had completely different demeanors. The girls sat quietly, paid attention to the teacher, and were largely disciplined. The boys, not so much, squirmed around even when they were barely sitting quietly, they didn't seem to be paying attention, they yelled and chased each other out of class. The class takes a quiz. What does the teacher say to the students who fail?
If the boys fail, the teacher usually says:
The girls get a different kind of criticism because they seem to be paying attention and trying hard in class, and the teacher can't criticize them on those grounds. So the teacher usually says:
Dweck gave the fourth-grade girls an unsolvable puzzle and then tested their explanations for their failure. When the time was up, the teacher asked "Why didn't you come up with an answer?"
How we speak to our children has always been much more important than what we say to them (16 times more important, according to Hrabain's Law), and it's especially important when we criticize them. I remember when I was a child, my father's most common criticisms of me were, "You like to be different" (personalized), "You can't be praised as a child, but when you are praised, your tail will go up" (personalized), and "You're always careless, and you don't take anything seriously" (permanent). "You're always careless, you don't take anything seriously" (permanent generalized). At the end of each semester, my teacher's comments would invariably include two sets of words, "careless" and "lively and cheerful," and at the end of the first semester of sixth grade, there was only "lively and cheerful" but no more "careless. When I wrote "careless" again, my father thought the teacher had forgotten to write it and always reinforced it. He thought the teacher had forgotten to write "carelessness" and always reinforced it, but he didn't think that "lively and cheerful" was the right word to use. I don't mean to criticize my father, but when I tested the theory with my life, I found that it was true. However, everyone needs a process to grow up, and there was no one to teach parents how to be a parent back then, it was all up to their own realization, so there is nothing to complain about. If you have realized it yourself, you are repaying your parents for their kindness, and you have not raised us in vain. Bacon said that reading makes people wise, and every day a nanometer is enough to be wise.
So what about you?
So what about you? How do you criticize your children? Why not try to record the words of your criticism, analyze, you let the child learn optimism or pessimism. The results may surprise you.
03 Avoiding Big Changes in Your Child's Early Life Experiences
Optimistic and pessimistic interpretive styles are pretty much set in stone by the time a child is about 8 years old, but of course they are not permanent and can be acquired. Until the child is about 14 years old, if there have been such events in the family, such as divorce or death of a parent, or bankruptcy of the family, or frequent moves to unfamiliar environments, and the child has always followed the change of schools and classmates, the child will be more optimistic if these events get better. If the change is permanent and widespread, then the seeds of despair are likely to be buried deep in the child's heart.
I was so afraid of death when I first had my baby that I was careful about crossing the street. Now I think of it as an instinctive mother's love. But even to prevent children from forming a "helpless" personality, parents should protect themselves, pay attention to diet and exercise, often exercise, maintain a healthy state of mind, and most importantly, in the love of the body more effort, husband and wife, the child can hope to form an optimistic personality.
I've seen a lot of couples, a talk about the child on the eyebrows, a talk about the child's father (mom) on the long and short sigh. They say that they love their children and are willing to pay for everything, but the result is that the couple quarrels with their loved ones to say a good word, is a look of death, I really do not know where the books are read. Of course, I said this, I have been a member of the "would rather die than give in", until I realized that if you can regard your lover as a child as their own flesh, can not be cut off, you will want to do everything possible to run the marriage, rather than fantasizing about once and for all, think that there is no need to work hard from now on the prince and the princess will be living in a happy life.
I've never heard talk who got rhinitis with the nose said: nose I want to divorce you, do not want you. I've never heard of anyone who has a headache and says to their head: "I'm going to divorce you, I don't want you". Because you can't let go of it, you will try to save it, or protect it, maintain it, prevent it and treat it aggressively from the beginning. Marriage is the same, if you heart when your lover is an integral part of you will maintain, prevent and actively treat. On the contrary, when there is friction, instead of thinking about how to solve it, you think, "I'm so blind to see the wrong person." "If only she/he was not like this, but like that." "I can't go on, let's get a divorce." ? It's exhausting, your body parts will never say no because it hurts, and there's only one. So marriage, frankly speaking, is the confidence in the lover, do you really believe that "only one".
Of course, there is still a long way to go from knowing to doing, but an inch of progress is an inch of joy. Your behavior in the moment determines whether or not your child will be pessimistic. Your little capriciousness will be magnified in the child's life, rather than let him remember your positive problem-solving bright image, even if it can not be solved, the need to amputate a limb, at least you have done everything you can.
The book mentions that many experiments on learned helplessness have shown that only 1 in 3 subjects do not become helpless. And even if they never get frustrated, 1 in 10 subjects will adopt a giving up attitude at first. This subject has the same result whether it's a human or a dog or a rat. So what makes some people indomitable and what makes others give up at first? The answer is precisely optimism and pessimism.
3 Pessimism is bad for your health
Can mental activities such as emotions lead to physical illness? Look at what science says, the book describes a large number of experiments, both on animals and people, which have proven that optimistic beings live longer. The theory of learned helplessness emphasizes the health benefits of optimism in four ways:
First, rats with learned helplessness are more likely to develop cancer. Think about humans, isn't that true?
Second, an optimistic person will maintain good health habits and ask a doctor if he or she is sick, whereas a pessimistic person will think that being sick is permanently universal and personalized. He will think "what I do is useless" and "why bother". This is true not only of the habit of seeking medical attention, but also of the habit of learning. Optimistic people tend to live and learn because they are used to believing in hope. Pessimistic people are more likely to refuse to learn new things for reasons such as, "What's the point of learning that when I'm this old." (Personalized Permanent) "I'm too old to learn." (Permanent) "I'd like to change jobs, but it's probably the same everywhere." (generalized)
Third, optimism reduces the number of times bad things happen. Statistics show the more bad things a person experiences in a given period of time, the more likely they are to get sick. People who go through relocations, layoffs, and divorces within a six-month period have the highest chance of getting sick, and even get heart disease and cancer at a higher rate than the general population. You may wonder who encounters more unfortunate events. The answer is pessimistic people. Because they are more passive, they are less likely to take proactive action to avoid bad things, and they are less likely to take action to end things after they happen. So pessimistic people have a higher chance of having an unfortunate event than the average person, and if unfortunate events tend to lead to illness, pessimistic people are more likely to get sick.
Fourth, optimistic people have more social support, and having deep friendships or warm kinship is important for good health. People who are not married have a higher rate of depression than those who are married. Even if they are just friends in general, they can be helpful in fighting off illness.
In other words, sadness and depression turn off the immune system, so getting sick is almost a given.
The good news is that there are no unmeasurable processes at each point in the pathogenic process, so treatment and prevention can take place at each point. The authors applied for a MacArthur grant that year to study whether cognitive therapy could cure cancer, and the results of the experiment found that the activity of NK cells (natural killers in the bloodstream that pounce on any invading foreign body) increased very rapidly in patients who received cognitive therapy, but not in the control group of patients (just chemotherapy without cognitive therapy). This suggests that cognitive therapy can enhance immune system function to improve patient health. Then this approach is also more often used in the prevention of disease. For example, this book already tells you that pessimism leads to a short life and how to acquire optimism. If you're a pessimist, it's great that you know and are willing to try to be optimistic, and instantly you've done the "prevention" itself.
Is there nothing good about pessimism? The authors use extensive research to show that people who are mildly pessimistic are wiser, judge things more accurately, and are more likely to make wise choices. So if you can be a very optimistic, sometimes mildly pessimistic person, you couldn't be better off. Fortunately, optimism can be acquired and works for life, and there is still salvation for everything. And that's even better news for children, isn't it?
1. Depression is the ultimate expression of pessimism, and right now there is a huge epidemic of depression. Suicides caused by depression have already claimed as many lives as deaths from AIDS, and the suicide epidemic is far more widespread than AIDS. Ten times more people are now severely depressed than 50 years ago, twice as many women as men, and the onset of the disease is 10 years earlier than in previous generations.
2. To find temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of gaining hope; to find permanent and universal causes for misfortune is to practice despair.
3. Success = Motivation + Ability + Optimism; Motivation determines whether to start, Ability determines whether to continue, Optimism determines whether to last.
4. Your habit of interpreting doom and your style of interpretation is more than just the words that come out of your mouth when you fail. It is a habitual way of thinking that you developed in childhood or adolescence. Your explanatory style indicates whether you are optimistic or pessimistic.
5. I am unwilling to deepen the social damage caused by avoiding responsibility, and I don't think everything should be changed in my mind and blamed on others. There is only one situation in which this should be done: in times of depression. Because depressed people often take blame for things that aren't his fault, they often take on responsibilities that don't need to be taken on by him.
6. If you have an average pessimism score, then in the normal course of events, there is no problem, but when you are hit by a serious setback, you find yourself more depressed than you "should be. The spark of life seems to have gone out, you're completely demoralized, you can't get back on your feet, and your future is in the dark. You'll be like this for days, even months, and you've probably been like this several times.
7. When you're depressed, your view of yourself, the world and your future is gray. When you're depressed, the slightest little obstacle seems like an insurmountable mountain, you believe that everything you touch with your fingers will turn to ash, and you have a million reasons why your success is actually a failure.
8. Depression is usually at its lowest when you first wake up. You lie in bed thinking about all the failures that have happened in the past, and you think about the failures that you will face today, and if you lie in bed and don't get up, these thoughts of failure wrap around you like a quilt. If you crawl out of bed and start the day's activities. Usually the mood gets better. By 3-6 p.m. mood will be low again. Evening is usually the least depressing time of the day, and early morning from 3-5 am, if you're not asleep, is when mood is at its worst.
9. Pessimism is a fertile ground for depression to grow, especially when the environment is unfriendly. If you think that things are not going well because "I am the reason, and this bad thing is destined to be with me for life, all my efforts have been in vain", then you are ready to get depressed.
2017.9.2 in Beijing
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