Wonder Drug — Fountain of Youth and Happiness

A POWERFUL drug that raises your mood has been discovered, and it is available without a prescription. The drug makes people feel calm and relaxed, trusting, generous, and affectionate. It makes people feel unstressed.

This drug has some odd side-effects, however: It sometimes causes a marked improvement in face-reading, a dramatic opening of communication and feelings of connection, and it makes many people feel less isolated.

It can also reduce pain and improve sociability.

All these results add up to one of the best moods users have ever experienced.

But you don't take the wonder-drug in pill form. It has to be rubbed into your skin. And in fact, the drug is produced by your own body in response to the rubbing. The "drug" is oxytocin, a naturally-produced hormone. A massage stimulates your body to release oxytocin into your bloodstream.

Read more about its effects and how you can get some.

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Good Moods Help You Lose Weight

CORTISOL is known as "the stress hormone" because it's released in the bloodstream when you feel stressed. Cortisol raises your insulin level which makes you store fat, especially around your midsection (the least healthy place to store it).

Cortisol also stimulates your appetite, especially for sweet and starchy foods, which makes you take in more calories.

This is how stress and bad moods can contribute to weight gain. The antidote is to lower your stress level, and the most enjoyable way to lower stress is to raise your mood.

The more often you're in a good mood, the lower your daily cortisol level will be, and that will help you lose weight and stay slim.

Below are three quick and easy ways to raise your mood (each link goes to an article). Use these tools often:

1. Behave your way into a better mood.

2. Ask yourself one easy question.

3. Become less certain about something.

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Raise Your Mood With One Finger

BY MOVING ONE finger, you can raise your mood and the moods of everyone in your family for a week. Simply push the off button on your television. You can join over 20 million people and observe the annual TV Turnoff Week.

What's wrong with TV? As I say in my book, Principles For Personal Growth:

Studies at the University of Chicago found that when people are engaged in an activity like reading, talking, or pursuing a hobby, they become happier. Research also shows that the longer a person sits in front of a TV, the more irritable and dissatisfied they become. TV is entertaining, but it presents no challenge. Our minds and bodies start going stir crazy without a challenge. That’s bad enough, but on top of that, commercials are specifically designed to make you feel dissatisfied (so you will buy their product to satisfy your “need”). Read the whole chapter.

As I've said elsewhere, using your hands is a powerful mood elevator. So is exercise. But television doesn't. The problem is, it sometimes seems like it does.

Turning off the TV, however, is very likely to raise your mood. But this is like telling a heroin addict that giving up the drug will make him happier. It doesn't seem like it. It doesn't feel like it. And he may be considerably unhappier for awhile first.

Television is surprisingly addicting, and that's why, even though it is a voluntary activity, it is hard to turn away from (especially news) and that is the cause of these alarming statistics.

The purpose of TV Turnoff Week is to give you enough TV-free time to discover how much more moodraising the alternatives can be, and this hopefully leads to lifestyle changes and a more fulfilling life. According to surveys, taking a week off from television caused ninety percent of the participants to reduce the amount of TV they watched afterwards. Here are some ideas people have used to change their television watching habits.

What can you do instead of watching television? Try wasting time the old fashioned way. When the TV is off, one of the most entertaining things available is interacting with other people, which studies show will make you happier. Ideally, you would rediscover things you now "don't have time to do" — things that are more constructive, healthy, and rewarding to do. Here's a list of ideas.

As one second grader said, "I didn't like TV Turnoff Week except that I did notice my grades went up and I was in a good mood all week." On a parent handout (PDF document), they had this sage advice: "Don't fret if children claim 'I'm bored!' For children, boredom often leads to creativity." And I would add, "Same for adults."

Every year, TV Turnoff Week is held in April and September. Find the dates by clicking here: TV Turnoff on Wikipedia. We invite you to participate and see what happens. Did you gain insights? Did you enjoy your life more? How did it change your mood? (We'd love to read about your experiences in the comments below.)

Find out more on these websites:

The White Dot
Unplug Your Kids

Books for further reading:

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
Alternatives to TV Handbook
Living Without The Screen
The Big Turnoff: Confessions of a TV-Addicted Mom Trying to Raise a TV-Free Kid
Amusing Ourselves to Death

Read some interesting facts about television and answers to frequently asked questions about TV Turnoff Week here.

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100 Great Tips To Improve Your Life

IN THE excellent post, 100 Great Tips to Improve Your Life by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, Leo compiles a list of principles, each with a link to an article. Improve your life in almost any way and it will improve your mood.

These were some of my favorites:

The Power of Ten Minutes. Ten minutes has gotten a bad rap. You can get an amazing amount of work done in a short spurt, and thinking about doing something for only ten minutes isn't daunting in the slightest, which encourages you dig in.

What Google Can Teach Us About Self-Image. The Google focused on what they did well and made their search engine as great as possible. Their success gave them confidence to branch out. But they do not rush into new things. They take their time and do things well.

Photographing Your Mementos. Save on space and lower clutter. A trophy, a teddy bear, and that gift from Aunt Mildred are great mementos but they all take up space. Digital photographs of those things can serve as mementos but don't take up any space.

Increase Personal Productivity with the Top 11 Multiple Positives. A multiple positive is something that benefits you in multiple ways, like biking to work (you're getting to work and exercising) or listening to audiobooks in the car (you're going where you need to go and reading a book you want to read). "The more multiple positives you use, the easier it is to get everything you want done without feeling stressed. They also free up loads of time and create a pleasant feeling of satisfaction and efficiency."

A Primer on Getting Things Done. David Allen's book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, is full of fundamental insights on staying organized while staying flexible. This article shares the meat of Allen's work.

Stick to a Regular Schedule of Exercise. The list of benefits you get from exercise is enormous. The hard part is doing it regularly. Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, shares 14 hot tips on how to make exercise a regular part of your life. Excellent.

How NOT to Multitask – Work Simpler and Saner. Multitasking is more complicated and less efficient than doing one thing at a time. This article has some great principles and tips on how to prevent yourself from falling into the trap of multitasking.

Getting Things Done Cheatsheet. This is kind of a CliffNotes for Getting Things Done. It's a great overview of the process.

Eliminate All But the Absolute Essential Tasks. If you find that your workload just keeps increasing, and you find yourself squeezed for time you don't have, this is a good checklist for how to reduce and eliminate what isn't vitally important.

Use some of these great ideas to improve your life and improve your mood. Don't overwhelm yourself: Just choose one that seems promising, and put it into action. You can always come back to the list later and find another one.

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Lower Stress With Less Responsibility (or More)

GETTING CRITICIZED BY your supervisor; finding out that someone you love has lied to you; receiving some bad news — these things cause stress. And stress has negative consequences, as you well know. But these are only stressful events. The source of stress that wreaks the greatest havoc on your health and sanity is ongoing stressful circumstances.

Like what? Like when a stepchild moves in with you, permanently disrupting the privacy you had with your spouse; or when your younger brother marries someone who verbally abuses your favorite niece. These are the kinds of stresses you have to live with. They don’t just come up and rock your world for a little while and then go away. They stay. And, like living in a house with a fire alarm going all day long, it starts to wear you down.

But there is something you can do about it. When you have an ongoing stressful circumstance in your life, you can modify your level of responsibility. Either take more responsibility or less. Start by asking yourself, “Am I trying to control something I can’t or shouldn’t control?” or “Is there something I should take responsibility for that I have been leaving out of my control?”

It might help to write it out. Write the questions and then jot down some ideas — where are you taking too much or too little control of some aspect of your life?

Be specific. You are responsible for your child in general, for example, but specifically, do you control what he wears or what he eats or when he goes to bed? You must decide. What exactly do you control and what is either out of your control or none of your business? You must decide.

If something is out of your control (or is none of your business and you’ve been trying to make it your business), you will relieve yourself of a lot of stress by letting go of it. Drop that one. Recognize it’s out of your control and busy yourself with things that are in your control. You may be in the habit of trying to control that thing, so you’ll have to remind yourself again and again for a couple weeks: “Oh yeah, I’m not trying to control that anymore.” Write it on a card and carry it with you. Post notes to yourself on your bathroom mirror. Do whatever you have to do to remember you no longer have to waste your energy trying to control that thing.

Now, if you find something you should and can control and haven’t been, roll up your sleeves and get to work on solving the problem. Use the problem-solving method. Deliberately take steps to repair the troubling circumstances. That’ll relieve your stress better than anything else. It may be difficult at first; it may actually cause you extra stress to face the situation and try to deal with it, but in the long term, your stress level will go down.

Take responsibility for what you are responsible for, and stop taking responsibility for what is not your responsibility. It’s that simple. Control what you can control, and let the rest go. It will relieve a great deal of your stress. Control stress by stressing control.

Excerpted from the book Principles For Personal Growth.

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Lower Stress: The Top Seven Ways

A CERTAIN amount of stress is a good thing. But too much is bad for your health, bad for your relationships, and no fun. If you feel you're experiencing too much stress, use one of these to help lower your stress level:

1. Compare your situation to something worse. This is an easy mental action that can have a measurable impact on your feeling of stress.

2. Reduce the number of goals you're trying to accomplish. It is a common human tendency to continually increase the number of projects and goals you've decided to accomplish. You're not trying to add more goals. They just naturally tend to accumulate. To keep yourself from becoming buried in projects and overwhelmed, sort through your goals once in awhile and give up on some of them.

3. Make more money. The lack of money can obviously cause stress. If you can make more money without adding more stress, you'll be better off.

4. Get a dog. Having a dog measurably reduces your daily stress level, which has a greater impact on your health and mood than even deeply relaxing once in a while.

5. Meditate. Meditation is easier than most people realize. You don't have to "become a meditator" to benefit. You can do it once in awhile when you feel you need it, and you'll relieve yourself of stress.

6. Use Benjamin Franklin's technique for difficult decisions. Hard decisions can be stressful, and the lack of forward motion caused by indecision can be even more stressful. Franklin's technique will ease the strain of making difficult decisions and help you get moving forward again.

7. Take good care of yourself first. When you're taking care of others, it can be so time-consuming, you stop spending any effort taking care of yourself. This is not only unhealthy, it will ultimately impair your ability to take care of others by reducing your energy and perhaps even affecting your health.

Look at this list and find the principle you feel is most blatantly missing in your life. Follow the link, read the article, and take action starting today. It will lower your stress and improve your mood.

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