You Can Buy Happiness, but Not with Money — An investment in gratitude pays valuable dividends, especially when times are tough — Many people today are struggling to make do with less. What’s the secret to finding happiness when you’re coping with loss? If we observe people who know how to be happy, we find that they make a point of being grateful for whatever they have. And it’s not related to how much material wealth you may or may not possess. A growing body of research has demonstrated that grateful people are happier than their less-grateful counterparts, regardless of their income level.
THE DETAILS:
Gratitude has also been found to be a powerful antidote to depression. Martin Seligman, PhD, a pioneer in the positive psychology movement, and colleagues at University of Pennsylvania delivered gratitude instructions to 50 severely depressed visitors to a self-help website. They recommended that individuals take time each day to write down three things that went well that day, and why they thought so. Fifteen days later, 94 percent of the 50 individuals reported feeling significantly less depressed. Their scores on a widely used depression inventory dropped by 50 percent—equivalent to improvement seen with medication treatment or psychotherapy, although the latter interventions generally take longer to work. Individuals in a placebo-controlled group who wrote down three childhood memories each day did not experience an improvement in their depressive symptoms. More important, the effects for the group practicing gratitude lasted for a full 6 months. The researchers repeated the same study several months later with a different group of depressed Web users and obtained substantially the same results. Seligman’s group also found that writing in a gratitude journal had a mood-boosting effect for depressed patients in a 12-week therapy group, as well as for patients in individual therapy.
WHAT IT MEANS:
Cultivating gratitude is a powerful way to overcome adversity and depression. By choosing to focus on your blessings, rather than ruminating on your disappointments and deficits, you nourish positive feelings about yourself, your life, and others. As an ongoing attitude, gratitude will help you cultivate happiness throughout your life. It is no accident that the individuals in Seligman’s study maintained their gains long after they completed the online intervention. Gratitude is habit-forming. The number of things you can be grateful for is infinite. As a happiness resource, gratitude is free and inexhaustible.
There are many ways you can weave gratitude into the fabric of your life:
Never underestimate the power of gratitude.
• Keep a gratitude journal. At the end of each day, write down three things you experienced that you feel grateful for. They could be as varied as the buds appearing on the trees in your yard and appreciation for the kindness extended to you by a stranger. As you chronicle the things you feel grateful for, make a point of not repeating any of the prior entries in your journal.
• Write and deliver a gratitude letter to someone in your life whom you have not properly thanked for what they have given to you. You can deliver the letter in person or read it over the telephone. It’s a powerful experience, for you as well as for the person you’re thanking.
• Say grace before each meal to express your thanks for the food you are about to eat.
Use whatever language you’re comfortable with, whether religious, spiritual, or just an informal expression of gratitude for the meal.
• Make a point of thanking anyone who serves you in any way — the cashier at the checkout counter, your child for clearing the dinner table, the tech-support person who helped you fix your computer.
• Take gratitude breaks during the course of each day to simply appreciate the myriad blessings, large and small, that are present in your life. ( rodale.com )
How to Fight Fracking in Your Neighborhood — The use of local ordinances to keep natural gas drilling activities out of communities is becoming a popular tactic, even though ordinances might not hold up in court. —Think clean air and water are among your basic rights? They are, but you may have to fight for them, according to an organization helping towns and cities adopt local ordinances to prevent natural gas drilling in their area.
Unconventional natural gas drilling activities, including the toxic fracking process, are under fire as reports of well blowouts, wastewater treatment problems, toxic air pollution, and drinking-water pollution garner stronger citizen opposition to the practice. In fact, the New York Attorney General filed a lawsuit this week to prevent drilling in the Delaware River watershed before the state can finish a study aiming to find out if this type of natural gas drilling is safe. So far, most independent science being published finds that fracking is a potential threat to human health.
Although much of the recent news about natural gas drilling involves the gas-containing Marcellus Shale formation located on the East Coast, and the Barnett formation in Texas, 37 U.S. states harbor rich deposits of natural gas. Since natural gas drilling activity ramped up in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia in the last few years, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) has been inundated with calls from desperate parents and community members seeking to keep the industrial activity out of their backyards. "This is a civil rights movement, and the only way we're going to change the unjust laws is by challenging them," says Ben Price, projects director of CELDF. "We can't regulate our way out. We can't protect our communities by regulating how fast they're destroyed."
The city of Pittsburgh is among the municipalities that have so far adopted anti-fracking ordinances drafted by CELDF. And while these ordinances may wind up being tested in court, Price says they are necessary in turning the current broken system on its head. "Just like with slavery or women's rights, it will take a long time, but I think the fact that we're in such deep trouble with the environment, there's more power in it right now," explains documentary filmmaker Anneke Campbell, coauthor of Be the Change: How to Get What You Want in Your Community (Gibbs Smith, 2009).
CELDF's work isn't limited to protecting communities from fracking. In fact, it's drafted ordinances in the past to help local municipalities keep human sewage sludge and aerial pesticide spraying outside municipal borders. CELDF's general theory is that the current regulatory system does not protect the health of people and the environment, but rather issues permits that allow activities that make us sick. The group hopes its community-based rights ordinances put the power back into local communities' hands, not the state's. "These communities don't have a fracking problem, they have a democracy problem," says Price. "Fracking is a symptom of a disease. We wouldn't have that symptom if it weren't for the underlying disease—the stripping of the rights of the people to govern themselves and make decisions for their own communities."
And while asserting citizens rights and local community power over one-size-fits-all state mandates may seem extreme, Price says it's what makes sense. "It's radical for the state to say that corporations have more rights than people. It's fairly conservative to say people have a right to protect their own homes and communities from harmful practices," he says. "It may seem radical because it goes against the current. Legislators believe they need to make law benefit wealthy corporations and regular citizens will just have to accept that. They don't."
If you want to fight fracking and assert your rights, here's how to start harnessing your community's power:
1. Learn about the hazards.
Watch the documentary Gasland with your family, friends, and neighbors and learn the facts on how natural gas drilling affects human health. Once you know the basics and know that you don't want something in your community, move from the fact-gathering phase into organizing mode.
2. Seek like-minded movers and shakers.
Chances are, there are already people in your area who are concerned, or who have found similar environmental threats in the past. Tap the Oil & Gas Accountability Project and the Energy Justice Map to look for movers and shakers to team up with in your area. Leveraging your community efforts with a local or regional nonprofit can also help bolster your presence and spread the word about your town's anti-fracking efforts.
3. Set up a free screening.
Organize a larger free screening of Gasland to capture the attention of your community. Look for a local church, recreation center, or even township building that would be willing to let you use the space for free, and then advertise the screening using fliers and good old-fashioned door-to-door information sharing. Set up an event page for your screening on Facebook as another means of free advertising. Be sure to invite your township supervisors or city council members, solicitor, and other local lawmakers. Check out the home screening toolkit at GaslandtheMovie.com.
Invite a CELDF speaker or other expert to your free Gasland screening and engage in a Q&A after the film. Look for vocal, driven community leaders to emerge as leaders of your core group in this discussion. Be sure to have people sign in and provide email addresses at the screening, so you can keep them updated.
4. Develop a plan of action.
Once your core group emerges after your screening, it's time to start developing a plan of action so you can draft a local ordinance. During this time, you'll be working with CELDF and continuing your organizing efforts to reach more people in your community. "Organizing is about talking to people, it's about networking, knocking on one door at a time and saying, 'Hi, I'm worried about this, here is some information,'" explains Michael Ewall, cofounder and director of Energy Justice Network. "There are no shortcuts on this. We can't rely on Erin Brockovich to come and save us."
Meetings that once formed around a coffee table will likely soon require a church basement space or larger venue. Ewall also suggests you make sure your local government has legal liability insurance before you start developing an ordinance. Otherwise, if the municipality tries to purchase the insurance after stirring things up, it could be denied coverage. "Make sure you have it at least one day before starting controversy," he says.
As with your screening events, be sure to reach out to local media to cover the event.
5. Keep your local elected officials on their toes.
As you work with your local group and CELDF on the ordinance, be sure to continue inviting your local elected officials to your meetings. If they continue to resist, don't give up. "It's not going home and saying we lost. Trying is not the outcome that is sufficient," Price says. "Communities need to continue to keep the pressure up and let elected reps know in order to be of use, they need to represent community."
If your local representatives refuse to adopt an ordinance for your community, Ewall suggests finding out your local procedure for getting a new candidate on the ballot, and urging someone from your community group to run opposing them in the next election. ( rodale.com )
When Is Tweeting Cheating? - Apart from the eerie similarity to the opening plot point of the Matt Damon vehicle The Adjustment Bureau (handsome potential New York City mayor brought down by ill-advised photograph), the most striking thing about the spectacle of the slow-motion Weinermobile crash that took place on Monday is how it divides the sexes.
As my colleague James Poniewozik points out, right after the last surreal moments of New York Congressman Anthony Weiner's already bizarre press conference — during which he admitted that yes, it was he who accidentally posted a picture of his unders on Twitter, and oh yeah, he'd kind of used electronic communication with strangers to get his rocks off before — most of the news channels went straight to a bunch of guys to figure out what it all meant.
The men looked a bit puzzled, many of them arguing — especially if they were Democrats — that because Weiner hadn't broken the law, they weren't quite sure what the big deal was.
There was the sticky issue of the wife, the woman to whom barely a year ago he'd pledged eternal troth. But if Weiner didn't actually meet any of the several women he admitted to having flirty and sexually charged communication with, let alone sleep with them, then where was the harm? After all, the men noted, some of it even took place before Weiner was married. Until the inadvertently public tweet, it was private, consensual social-media contact between grown people.
In the game of Monogamy, the consensus among the blokes was: Weiner deserves the equivalent of being sent to jail. No passing Go, no collecting $200, but a few rolls of the die and he's back on the streets.
For many women, on the other hand, perhaps especially wives, the whole thing is galling. How could sending dirty e-mails — or in the case of Twitter and Facebook, direct messages — to other women possibly be the faithful and loving thing to do?
It's not a hard science, but if the spectrum of infidelity has the Full Arnold (secret child with another woman) and the Semi-Eliot (occasional use of prostitutes) at one end and saying something flirty to the person handing you a caffe latte at the other, then sending pictures of your congressional member to women you don't know is somewhere in the middle, a gray area.
Social media has vastly widened the borders of this misty territory, making it easy to find former flames on Facebook, admirers on Twitter and people you liked the look of from across the conference facility on LinkedIn. Once you've found them, it's up to you and your moral compass as to what you do with them. Because of the disembodied nature of electronic communication, people are often much less guarded about how they express themselves.
There's a concept that marriage therapists talk about, emotional infidelity, where a person doesn't actually sleep with another person, but they have a relationship that's intense and intimate in every other way. Sometimes these are gateway friendships to full-blown affairs, other times they blow over. Generally guys tend to dismiss these as no big deal, a technical foul at best.
But to many women, for whom physical and emotional intimacy are kind of a package deal, these can be devastating. Why, these women like to know, is sharing intimacy with them not enough? While Weiner's biggest crime against the state seems to be subjecting it to a spectacle of ginormous cheesiness, his wife, the accomplished knockout Huma Abedin, has got to be weighing her future with a man who cannot call a moratorium on the sexy talk with strangers even in the first flush of wedded bliss.
In the end, what Weiner did was spectacularly stupid. It's forgivable to send a public tweet when you meant to send a private one (I say this as TIME magazine's reigning queen of the inadvertent "reply all"). But it's stupid to lie about it.
It's foolish, as even tweens know, to send risqué photos to people you haven't met. But it's witless to send them to the opposite sex if you're married or in a committed relationship. (How did Weiner think Abedin would feel?) It's imprudent to lie to the press, your family and supporters, and it's chowder-headed to do it if you know that you can be easily found out.
While we're at it, it's injudicious to organize a press conference so badly that there's nobody but yourself to cut off questions and let it be hijacked by a blogger and a shock-jock sidekick. And finally, it's not fair but it's true that it's particularly harebrained to do all this if you have a family name that is as memorable as Weiner.
Maybe elected Representatives don't have to be faithful or clever or honest to be decent leaders. But is a little wisdom too much to ask? ( time.com )
