Tag: Parents

Laughter therapy, sometimes called humour therapy, is the deliberate use of humour to improve how a person feels. Hospitals run programmes. The claims attached to it have grown enormous, and that is a pity, because the modest true thing underneath is genuinely interesting and gets buried under the rest.

The claim that holds

Robin Dunbar and colleagues ran a series of studies in which people watched either comedy or neutral material and then had their pain threshold measured. Threshold rose after genuine, helpless, breathless laughter, and it did not rise after material that people found pleasant but did not actually laugh at.

That distinction is the whole finding. The active ingredient appears to be the physical exertion of laughing, the repeated forced exhalation, which is the kind of effort that triggers endorphin release much as other exertion does. Polite social laughter does not involve that exertion, and it does not produce the effect.

This also explains why laughter is so relentlessly social. Laughing is many times more likely in company than alone, and the pain threshold that rises is a rough measure of endorphin activity, which is the same system implicated in social bonding across primates. Shared helpless laughter is closer to grooming than to medicine.

The claims that do not hold

Ten to fifteen minutes of laughter burns forty calories. This traces to a single small laboratory study of energy expenditure while people watched comedy. Forty calories is a few almonds. It is a charming fact and it is not a plan.

Laughing releases endorphins that outdo an equivalent dose of morphine. Nobody ever measured any such thing. The sentence sets a hormone against a drug in units that do not exist, and it has survived for decades purely because it startles.

It protects against heart disease, builds immunity, and lowers the blood sugar spike after a meal. Each of these rests on a small study measuring a marker, not on any study showing fewer heart attacks or fewer illnesses. A marker moving is where research starts, not where advice starts.

What to do with all that

Nothing medical. If something is wrong, the person to talk to is a doctor, and no amount of comedy substitutes for that.

What the evidence does support is smaller and easier. Laughing properly, with other people, for long enough to lose your breath, makes the next hour more bearable and the people you did it with feel closer. That is not a miracle cure. It is a decent reason to spend an evening with the friends who make you laugh like that, which very few of us schedule and most of us miss.

You did everything correctly. You set the goal, you took action, and somewhere along the way it did not work and the result you wanted did not arrive.

Then comes the account of why. It was a bitter winter. The supplier delivered late, or delivered the wrong item, or the right item in the wrong colour. The schools closed and the children were at home. You caught a cold. The dog died. You have heard every one of these and you have offered most of them.

The test

Here is the thing that makes this hard. Every sentence in that paragraph may be entirely true. A reason and an excuse are not distinguished by honesty, because both of them are usually honest. They are distinguished by what happens next.

A reason changes the next attempt. The supplier was late, so this time there is a second supplier, or a longer lead time, or a penalty clause. An excuse changes nothing. It closes the matter and leaves the arrangement exactly as it was, ready to produce the same result.

So the question is not whether it was your fault. It is whether anything about Monday is different because of what you have just explained.

Start with what actually matters

A great deal of time goes on work that does not really matter, and the tasks that do matter go unfinished. The excuse then arrives to account for the productivity problem, which is a neat way of justifying poor decisions about where the hours went. Identify the few tasks that genuinely matter, finish those, and give the remainder whatever is left over.

Watch for a belief that has set a ceiling

What you hold to be true about your own limit governs what you attempt, and what you attempt governs what arrives, so a belief of that kind behaves less like an observation and more like a forecast that quietly arranges its own weather. It shows in the thinking, then in the talking, and most of all in the doing. Conceding that one of these is wrong is uncomfortable, and it is the only thing that opens the loop.

Or is the method itself the problem?

Where the same approach keeps producing the same disappointing result, change the approach. Most people will not, because an untried method carries risk while the familiar one has a known ending, even a mediocre known ending. Courage is cheaper here than it looks, precisely because the familiar method has already shown you where it stops.

Or are you simply being impatient?

In an age of immediate everything it is easy to forget that some things take the time they take. You may not have failed at all. The results may simply not have arrived yet, and doubt at this stage will stop you taking the one action that would let them. Decide in advance how long you will keep going, and do not hold the verdict before the window has closed.

And sometimes it is genuinely not you

Worth saying plainly, because the whole genre pretends otherwise. Take the economy as an excuse for a business that will not grow. People are spending more cautiously and the easy customers are not there any more. That is real. What is also real is that the remaining customers, higher up, are committed and keen, harder to find and worth considerably more when you find them. The external condition was true. It just was not the end of the sentence.

Cicero said that the face is a picture of the mind, and two thousand years later it is still the first thing we read in a room. A micro expression is the involuntary version: a flicker that appears for a fraction of a second, driven by an emotion actually being felt. Held expressions are easy to fake. The flicker is much harder.

So the promise attached to this is tempting. Learn the signals and you can tell what somebody is thinking. Here is what the signals are, and here is what they are honestly worth.

Blinking

People who are uncomfortable blink more than people who are at ease. The claim usually attached to this is that a rise in blink rate exposes a lie. Discomfort is real and visible. What causes it is not written on the face.

The pupils

This one is genuinely outside anybody’s control. Look at something you find appealing and your pupils widen, whether or not you would like them to. It is as close to an honest signal as a face produces, and it reports interest rather than truthfulness.

The mouth and the exit

A hand drifting across the mouth. A swallow. A glance towards the door. These are collected as the tells of somebody managing a lie, and the reasoning is that a person who wants to be truthful and is not feels the tension of it.

Now the part that is usually left out

People are poor at detecting lies from behaviour. Charles Bond and Bella DePaulo gathered the research on this and published the result in 2006, pooling hundreds of studies in which people judged whether someone was telling the truth. Ordinary people and trained professionals alike landed only a little above a coin toss. Confidence rises with practice. Accuracy does not.

The reason is that every cue on the list above is a sign of stress, and being disbelieved is stressful whether or not you are lying. An honest person under suspicion produces the whole set.

So the superpower is real but pointed the other way. Faces are excellent at telling you that something is going on, and unreliable at telling you what. Treat a cluster of signals as a reason to ask a question, never as a verdict.

One more lens

Age changes what a face is even being asked to do. People who grew up with a screen between themselves and the conversation often say the hard things in writing and keep the face out of it. People who did not will want the difficult conversation in a room. Neither is avoidance. Knowing which one you are facing tells you where to hold the conversation.

Every decision you make about money runs on a belief you have probably never stated. It was assembled out of how money was handled in the house you grew up in, and it is doing more work than any spreadsheet. Five of these turn up again and again.

No philosophy at all

Money arrives and money leaves. There may be a steady income and the feeling is still one of being short, often with a card balance that never quite closes and a permanent sense of catching up. Some people spend an entire working life here.

The way out is unglamorous. Shrink the life temporarily and do the dull work of getting straight. Start refusing things, including some obligations you took on because refusing felt impossible. Telephone the bank or the card company and ask for a repayment arrangement, which they will usually discuss. Take extra work for a defined stretch if that is available to you.

Handing it to somebody else

A common pattern, and one the source page described in a way I am not going to repeat, because it blamed a group of people rather than describing a habit. The habit is this: one adult in a household manages the money and the other stays out of it entirely.

The problem is not the division of labour. It is the absence of ownership. The person who has stepped back cannot answer basic questions about their own position. The fix is not a takeover. It is periodic oversight, and stating plainly where you want your money to be and at what rate you expect it to grow.

The simple approach

Provident fund, fixed deposits, sometimes property, sometimes an insurance policy treated as a savings plan. It feels safe, and it usually underperforms, because the whole position is defensive and inflation quietly removes the value of money sitting still.

The balanced approach

A spread across several kinds of asset, with a fixed share of income invested steadily month after month regardless of what the news is doing. The defining feature is not any particular product. It is the spreading of risk across categories and the willingness to let time do the compounding.

The aggressive approach

Heavy exposure to equities, and often to start-ups, active trading, attempts to time the market, or a second property bought to be sold on. High risk in the literal sense: the large gain and the heavy loss are the same strategy seen on two different days.

One structural note

The page set out the usual shape of a balanced position. A defensive core that protects against inflation and bad years. A solid middle with moderate risk. And, because the base is secure, a meaningful share pointed at growth.

Which of the five you are in is worth knowing. Which you should move to is a question for a qualified adviser who can see your actual numbers, not for an article.

Most of us were taught young that some feelings are unacceptable. Anger, resentment, fear, sorrow. Not argued out of them, simply given to understand that they should not be shown. What follows is predictable. A feeling that cannot be stated does not evaporate. It looks for another exit.

The shapes it takes

Someone who feels guilty saying no agrees to things, then breaks the promise later. They could not refuse when refusing was the honest answer, so the refusal arrives as unreliability instead.

Someone else substitutes a compliment with an edge on it for the insult they will not say. The words are warm and the meaning is cold, and the distance it creates is the point.

Underneath both is usually a person in more difficulty than the behaviour suggests. More often than not it is a request for help made by somebody who has no other way to make it.

Where the power actually sits

Here is the part worth holding on to. Passive aggression is most often used by people who feel powerless, not powerful. Faced with feelings they have been taught to treat as unacceptable, they avoid the confrontation entirely, and the avoidance itself feels like control. Because nothing overt is ever shown, they frequently cannot understand why the people around them have drifted away.

Which tells you what not to do. Do not be drawn into a contest of power with somebody who is behaving this way because they feel they have none. You will be fighting the symptom.

Three responses that work

When a person close to you is visibly frustrated and insists nothing is wrong, say what you are actually seeing. The tone, the shortness, the gesture. Then invite them to tell you. Naming the mismatch without accusation gives them a way to speak that does not require them to admit they were sulking.

When a compliment arrives with a blade in it, explain calmly how it landed and why. Not as a complaint. As information they may not have.

When somebody breaks promise after promise, tell them plainly that they are allowed to say no to you. That is often the whole cure.

And then the uncomfortable part

Once you can see this clearly in other people, you will start to catch it in yourself. The remedy is smaller than it sounds. Say the true thing while it is still small.

The feelings we are taught to suppress are usually the ones pointing at something that needs to change. Passive aggression is the method by which we avoid changing anything at all.

We see what we would like to see, which is why the plainest facts about our own lives are the ones we notice last. That a person we love has offended us. That a friendship we counted as close is not held that way on the other side.

Life is not all sunshine. It is also an ordinary Thursday at ten at night, an empty wallet, and the discovery that some people are warm to you when you are struggling and cool when you begin to do well. Here is the short list.

On ourselves

We are excellent judges of other people’s lives and very good defence lawyers for our own. The same act gets a verdict when somebody else does it and a justification when we do.

The rat race has a problem nobody mentions at the start. If you win it, you are still a rat.

Conversations go far better in our heads than they do in rooms. The version you rehearse has a cooperative other person in it.

The sentence “I do not need to write that down, I will remember it” is false almost every time it is spoken.

We overestimate what we can get done in one day and badly underestimate what we could do in twenty years. Both errors come from the same place, which is that a day is easy to picture and a decade is not.

On other people

Most people want to see you doing well. Rather fewer want to see you doing better than them, and the second group overlaps with the first more than is comfortable.

One person’s loss really is another person’s gain, and both of them are usually decent people.

The people who can make you happiest are the same people who can make you saddest. That is not a warning about them. It is the definition of having let somebody close.

People take the path that returns the most for the least effort. This is not a character flaw, it is how effort works, and it explains more behaviour than malice ever will.

And the one that stings: the more you depend on other people to have a good time, the lonelier you tend to be when nobody is available.

What to do with a list like this

Nothing dramatic. Notice which one you reacted to. The item that irritated you on the way past is usually the one that applies.

Neighbours are worth having. Most of the time the arrangement is quietly useful, and a street where people know each other is a better street to live on. Then there is the other kind. The one you can neither avoid nor particularly want near you, who knows what time you came home and asks you why.

First, decide which problem you have

There are two of them and they need different answers. One is a neighbour who is actually doing you harm, interfering in something that matters, repeating things that damage you. The other is a neighbour who is merely irritating. People often spend the energy for the first on the second, and then wonder why the irritation grew.

If it is the smaller one, a plain word usually does more than a strategy. Say, politely and directly, that what they are doing makes you uncomfortable. Many people have genuinely not noticed. Say it once, without a speech attached.

Then be straight about the boundary

If the polite version does not land, the clear version is not rude. Tell them you would rather they did not involve themselves in your personal matters. A boundary stated plainly is easier for everyone than one enforced by atmosphere.

The counter-intuitive move

Invite them in for a coffee. It sounds like the opposite of what you want, and it works more often than it should, because it is much harder to talk about somebody you have started to like. A stranger next door is material. A person you have sat with is not.

Where the person cannot be spoken to at all, someone else in that house usually can. Say how it is affecting you and ask for help stopping it.

Why the supply matters more than the speech

Here is the mechanism under all of it. Talk needs new material. A story that gets no fresh detail runs out on its own, and the habit moves to whoever is still feeding it. That is why the quiet responses so often beat the confrontational ones.

Two of them are commonly recommended and both carry a cost. You can answer a question about your private life with a question about theirs, chosen to be equally uncomfortable. You can also ignore the person deliberately and let them see that you are doing it. Both work. Both also mean you are now playing the same game, and the street is small.

The cheaper version is simply to stop being interesting. Answer briefly, say nothing new, and let the subject starve.

When an infestation of head lice fails to clear promptly under the commercial preparations sold for the purpose, the word attached to it is super lice.

A disputed term

Voices within medicine had been predicting their arrival for years, arguing that it was only a question of when.

Other practitioners will not accept the category at all. In their reading, whatever resistance is being seen has more to do with the person than with the insect.

The theory behind the name

The reasoning behind the term runs like this. Strain by strain, over a long period, lice have developed an immunity to the active ingredients in the shampoos and similar products sold over the counter.

Stated that way, nothing exotic remains in it. Insects of every sort acquire immunity to a product they are exposed to for long enough.

Pretty pictures and silly animal stories is what people assume children’s books amount to. A good many of them are timeless instead, and they are inspiring, insightful and wise.

Sharing, the force of love, the business of becoming what you could be: none of these lessons were ever really aimed at children alone. They were aimed at the child that survives in everybody. Take the cue and see where the messages land in your own life.

We must take care of the planet

Nothing improves until somebody cares an enormous amount. Absolutely nothing.

Nearly all of us met that message early, in books and in cartoons about rescuing the world. It was among the first lessons we were given, and among the first we put down.

Love is powerful

How a thing was manufactured has no bearing on whether it is real. Realness is something done to you, by somebody who loves you over a long stretch of years.

Every story in which a toy or an animal longed to talk and dance the way people do rested on that. Somewhere a character loved without limit, and the unreal wanted to cross over because of it. That was the message underneath all of them.

Happiness has no value unless it is shared

Give away more, and what comes back is more delight, not less.

Certain books left something lovely here, which is that friendship and happiness both consist of handing your joy to other people rather than hoarding it.

Face challenges head on

Over is not an option. Under is not an option. The way out is forward, through the middle.

Hard times have unpleasant sections and no path goes round them. You plough into them instead. Book after book puts its characters in serious trouble, has them face it with courage, and has them make peace for themselves and for their friends.

Learning is a lifelong journey

Why travel from one place to another? Chiefly to see everything lying between the two.

Arriving is not the valuable part, and neither is the satisfaction that follows a milestone. The value is in the travelling, and in whatever gets learned along the way. That learning is meant to continue for as long as the journey does, which is to say for life.

Make things up as you go

No moon to see by? Then draw one. Hungry? Draw a pie. Lost? Draw somebody who can point you the right way.

Grown up, we tend to forget the point being made. The best chances life offers are usually the ones a person invents.

Networking sites and the applications built around them have worked their way into ordinary daily life. We talk to the people near us through them, we look for work through them, and we find others who care about the same things.

A few habits will make the whole experience a better one.

The things to do

Pick a strong password and switch the privacy settings on. Then press your friends to do the same, because their carelessness eventually arrives at your door.

Hold things back. Anything you would not want the whole world looking at should not be uploaded at all.

Never take it on faith that a post is secure simply because the settings say so.

Check who is asking before accepting a request to connect. Be certain whose hands your information is passing into.

Read what the network itself publishes about security, and read what trusted security professionals say about it too.

The things not to do

Never hand out a password, and never let one password cover every service you use.

Put no more about yourself online than the thing genuinely requires.

Announcing your travel plans is unwise, and so is showing off the expensive item just bought. Both are useful information to precisely the wrong reader.

Watch for automatic geotagging. Certain services will attach your location to an update without troubling to ask.

Two things worth remembering

Whatever is posted, shared or uploaded remains out there. The internet does not really let go of things.

And at work, guard against the accidental disclosure of something sensitive. That particular slip is the one that ends careers.