Does Honesty Help You Stay in a Better Mood?

DOES HONESTY help you have a better mood? In an article on the practical advantages of honesty, I look at the research, and the answer appears to be yes, in the long run. Below are some of the reasons. You can read the whole article here: Deep Honesty. These are some of the ways greater openness and honesty can make you feel good more often:

1. More closeness in relationships. One of the biggest advantages of becoming more honest is that your relationships will be closer. That is, you'll have a greater feeling of connection to the people you're honest with and you'll feel more love for them. John Gottman, a researcher at the University of Washington and the author of The Relationship Cure, found to his surprise that some couples who avoid disagreements stay together. Yes, you read that right. These marriages are "successful" in the sense that they are long-lasting. But Gottman also found they are lonely marriages.

You can avoid conflict by hiding your likes and dislikes, but you forfeit closeness. Part of feeling close to someone is that they know you. And the only way for someone to get to know you is for you to be honest.

It's ironic that the main reason people avoid conflict is because they want to be loved. We pretend to be what we aren't, to like what we don't like, we don't speak up about what we really want or feel. We don't want disagreements. We don't want to be rejected. We don't want to hurt the other person or be hurt by them. We want love.

But love flows through communication. Communication is like a pipeline between two people. The more open we are, the more open the pipeline. And this same pipeline is how love and affection flow from one person to another, so the more open the pipeline, the more love and affection can flow through it.

By hiding parts of themselves, people narrow the pipeline, thus closing off the very thing that they want in their attempt to get it.

Become more open and honest with the people you love, and you open the channel. You'll experience greater love and affection, and that's the best possible thing you can do for your mood.

2. Relationships improve over time. Another thing Gottman discovered about "avoidant couples" (couples who tend to avoid disagreement) is that when they first get married, they were happier than honest couples. They were happier with their marriage.

But three years later, the situation had reversed. The avoidant couples weren't as satisfied with their marriage and more of them had divorced or were headed for divorce. And the more honest, open couples were now happier with their marriages because their marriages had improved.

Honesty helps relationships improve. Honesty allows problems to be solved. You can't solve a problem if you don't really know what it's about! It's like two people trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle when one of you has some pieces in your pocket. It doesn't matter how committed you are or how hard you try, you will never be able to solve that puzzle. Honesty helps relationships improve over time.

3. Higher quality people in your life. Julian Rotter of the University of Connecticut compared the social lives of habitually honest people with the social lives of people who agreed with statements like, "You have to hide your feelings from others," and "You can't afford to be honest." He found that honest people had a tendency to attract trustworthy, truthful, supportive people into their lives. The less honest people tended to attract disloyal, evasive, unreliable people into their lives.

Your honesty literally repels dishonest people away from you and attracts honest people to you. Dishonesty repels honest people and attracts dishonest people into your life.

So simply by becoming more honest, the quality of the people you interact with will improve over time.

4. Better physical health. Researchers have studied this one quite a bit. The leader of the pack is James Pennebaker of Southern Methodist University, author of Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have helped fund his research. Pennebaker found that people who habitually withhold information about themselves, especially about traumatic events, are much more susceptible to contagious diseases than people who are more open and honest.

One qualification you should know about is that you should only reveal your honesty to people you can trust. But given that limitation, honesty improves your immune system. It's good for your physical health, and that's good for your mood.

5. Better mental health. In a survey of 425 psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, and marriage and family counselors, almost all of them (96%) thought that becoming more "open, genuine, and honest" was an essential requirement for mental health. Let me point out that they didn't merely think honesty was a good idea. These people, who spend every day working with peoples' real-life problems, are convinced that honesty is essential for mental health. A requirement.

Of course. Think about it. Sanity entails dealing with reality. Honesty is about reality. It's about admitting the truth to yourself and also admitting it to others. Honesty equals sanity. Deceit and pretense are bad for your mental health.

6. Feel better in general. In a study by Santa Clara University in California, researchers found that people who habitually keep secrets, especially about embarrassing or painful experiences, tend to suffer from more colds, more fatigue, and more aches and pains. And they have higher levels of depression and anxiety.

Dishonesty produces unpleasant side-effects. Becoming more honest will make you feel better in general.

7. Suffer less stress. The reason a needle jumps around so much on a lie detector is that lying is stressful. So is pretending, withholding, and misleading. If a person is dishonest with a stranger, the event is only temporarily stressful. But in a close relationship, the deceit needs to be maintained, which causes prolonged stress.

You can't relax and be yourself when you're hiding and pretending.

Often honesty causes conflict, which also causes stress. But greater honesty will lower your stress level in the long run. Problems get solved and you no longer have the ongoing stress of hiding and pretending.

8. Trust. When you're honest, people tend to trust you. I have seen no scientific studies on this, but I'll bet the research will eventually prove it true. People can sense honesty.

And when you're honest, you trust yourself more. It takes a certain amount of discipline to be honest and in the demonstration of your honesty, you learn you can count on yourself. So another side-effect of being honest is that you'll feel better about yourself.

Honesty is the best policy. Not because someone in authority says it is. Not because you might get found out. But because it has practical benefits in your life — benefits that outweigh the costs in the long run by a long shot. Increase your level of honesty and you'll feel great more often.

Click here to read more about honesty.

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How to Have a Good Time With Your Family for the Holidays Even if Some of Them Drive You Crazy

ONE VERY good way of dealing with a predictably stressful situation is to prepare beforehand to respond differently than you normally do.

In an article in the New York Times about how to handle holiday family stress, the author gives this example:

Dr. Bulik told the story of a patient whose mother scolded her for not eating her homemade cookies. “You don’t like my cookies?” she asked. As a result, the daughter relented and took a cookie. But when she then reached for a second, her mother scolded her again. “Do you really think you need another one?” she asked her.

It's the kind of stuff that drives you crazy at the holidays, right? But at the end of the article, there is a good example of doing something about it, preparing ahead of time:

Betsy, a high school teacher in Boston, said she had longstanding issues with her mother-in-law, some of which began after she underwent a Caesarean section. After the delivery, her mother-in-law, a slim woman, brought her only light lunches of lettuce salad, even though she was famished after nursing her baby.

Betsy said her cousin also complained of holiday meal tension with her own family, so the two devised a strategy to help each other cope. Each made bingo cards, but instead of numbers, the squares were filled in with some of the negative phrases they expected to hear during the meal, like “That outfit is interesting” or “Your children won’t sit still.” As comments were made at the separate family celebrations, each woman would mark her card.

“Whoever fills up a bingo row first,” Betsy said, “sneaks off to call the other and say, ‘Bingo!’”

If you normally find it stressful to hang out with certain members of your family, try something new.

Read more about how to come up with new responses: Everyday Creativity

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Living an Awakened Life

I USED TO study and practice Zen. And at the time I didn't understand what relaxation had to do with enlightenment. I meditated for hours and became really relaxed. But so what? I was relaxed. What did this have to do with enlightenment?

But I've thought a lot about it since then, and here's what I've concluded: Developing a progressively deeper calm — through meditation or yoga or massage or long walks in the woods or changing the way you think or whatever — is the way to live the "awakened" life. Calmness is a "cure" for the normal feeling of stress we live with (read more about that here).

Whether or not you have a big epiphany (experience "satori" in Zen parlance) is not really up to you. But developing calmness is totally up to you. And you can live in an enlightened way even without the earthshaking realizations. Calmness makes the difference. But why?

When you feel deeply calm, all these are gone: greed, selfishness, anger, judgmentalness, fear, deficiency motivations, feelings of revenge, agitation, anxiety, frustration — feelings that provoke unenlightened action.

And when you feel deeply calm, all these come naturally and easily: forgiveness, compassion, peace, happiness, contentment, thoughtful decisions and actions, balanced thinking, cosmic or eternal perspective, patience, kindness to others, kindness to yourself — feelings and actions we might consider awakened or enlightened.

If you'd like to be the kind of person you really want to be, if you want to treat people better and take better care of yourself and respond to stressful situations with more compassion and wisdom, focus your efforts on one thing: Create more calmness in your life. Everything else will follow.

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The Shortest Path to Feeling Better

TAKE A DEEP BREATH. Right now. Go on, I'll wait here.

How does that feel?

You can do this anywhere, anytime, and it will almost always make you feel better, especially if you're feeling stressed.

One of the effects of stress is to constrict your breathing, making it faster, shallower, and higher in the chest. This stressed breathing style makes you feel psychologically more stressed, and so it can begin a negative feedback loop that might lead to health problems. In a study of a 153 heart attack patients, researchers found that almost all of them were primarily shallow breathers or "chest breathers."

The authors of New Directions in Progressive Relaxation Training say that shallow, rapid breathing stimulates the sympathetic nervous system — the part of your nervous system responsible for stress reactions. "People can predispose themselves to anxious and tense inner experience," write the authors, "by breathing in this way."

There is some evidence that people who suffer from panic attacks keep their carbon dioxide too low by shallow breathing, which keeps them in a state of semi-hyperventilation. Apparently panic-attack sufferers notice the symptoms of hyperventilation such as feeling dizzy or a pounding heart or feelings of suffocation, they think something terrible is happening, and it scares them, which of course makes their heart pound even more, making them breathe faster, etc. Taking a deep breath can often stop this cycle. And a deep breath can make anyone feel more relaxed.

Although we breathe automatically, without any conscious effort on our part, we can also voluntarily control the way we breathe, and when we do, we gain more voluntary control of our moods and our feelings of well-being.

The method is to take a deep breath, somewhat slowly, and let it out slowly. If you've got the time and inclination, do it a few times. This is one of the simplest things you can do to reduce your stress and feel better quickly.

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Communication Fast

I OCCASIONALLY FAST for a day. I have my last meal in the evening, eat nothing at all the next day, and resume eating the morning after that. I do it because the scientific evidence indicates it is healthy. The body is not really supposed to have three square meals a day every single day. It is unnatural.

It is also healthy for a relationship to go on a "communication fast" once in awhile. Choose a day you both have off from work and say your last words to each other the night before. Say nothing to anybody the next day and resume talking the morning after that.

To make it even better, fast from every kind of communication. Don't watch television, do email, or even read a book.

This is a powerful practice that will deepen your relationship. Why?

Because any time you can suspend the expression of well-ingrained habits, they become less ingrained.

You've had a negative example of this, I'm sure. Have you ever had a regular exercise routine or some other regular practice and after a vacation, neglect to resume it? Maybe weeks later, you'll realize you haven't been exercising and you'll think you've failed or perhaps you're weak-willed.

But it's not weakness. You've merely suspended a well-ingrained habit and made it less ingrained. You can use this phenomenon for your benefit instead of your detriment. When you want to be less automatic — when you want to enhance the freshness of your habits of communication — suspend communicating for a period of time. You'll come back to communicating with more awareness.

And anytime you stop doing something you have fully taken for granted, you'll find you appreciate it more. Appreciation improves your mood.

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