The Simple Secrets to Happiness

While reading this interesting article on how habits, especially, healthy habits helps us achieve balance in life & work, & hence, achieve happiness, I couldn't help but think how Islam tells Muslims to create good habits, too. Nowadays, Muslims complain that they can't fast for a month in Ramadan or can't even pray the 5 daily mandatory prayers. But, Islam asks parents to make these as habits for children, as young as, 7 year olds. Praying or fasting constantly for a few years make those as habits, & then those habits continue on for a Muslim, for their whole life. Then, they don't seem difficult to do, be it the fasting during long days of summer or praying after a hard day of work.

Some other good & healthy habits from the life of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) includes, for instance, laying down for about half-an-hour after lunch & taking a light walk after dinner. Making yourself to take a walk after dinner may seem daunting for a person at first, especially, if they have gained weight & not used to doing it on a regular basis, but after a few nights, it will become a habit, which will help in losing weight & keeping it off, while helping to keep the person healthy.

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Fogg is perfectly placed to train himself into a healthy habit. He is an expert on the subject, having studied human behaviour for 20 years, mostly at Stanford University, where he’s the director of the Persuasive Technology Lab. From his research, he’s learned that the best way to automate a new habit is to set the bar incredibly low. ... “You pick something so small, it’s easy to do. Motivation isn’t required to do it,” he says. ... “If you want to maintain the habit, you will always be okay with just doing the tiny version of it,” he says.
 
Habits are important because, as Gretchen Rubin puts it, “what we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while.” In her new book, Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives, Rubin narrows her view dramatically, turning to the daily routine actions that make up our days. “Habits are the invisible architecture of our lives,” Rubin says in an interview. In fact, studies have shown that approximately 40% to 45% of what we do every day is a habit—something we do by default. When we wake up, we brush our teeth. We get in the car to go to work &, without thinking, we put on our seatbelt. There’s no decision-making at work. It’s automatic. “If you have habits that work for you, you’re much more likely to be happier, healthier & more productive.”
 
“We are what we repeatedly do,” wrote historian & philosopher Will Durant, paraphrasing Aristotle, in The Story of Philosophy. “Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” And in his defining treatise on the subject, the 19th-century philosopher William James referred to humans as “mere walking bundles of habits.” But which ones? If almost half the things we do are out of habit, it’s a smart plan to make those habits the right ones. Good habits, in effect, can be the prelude to happiness.
 
But developing a good habit, or breaking a bad one, isn’t easy, as anyone who has made a New Year’s resolution can attest. The reason: There is no one-size-fits-all solution for habit change, & surprisingly little consensus on how we make habits or break them.
 
There’s no magic time interval to make a habit, however. “The speed of the habit formation is directly connected to the strength of the emotions you feel,” says Fogg.
 
In looking at how we develop routines, she identifies 4 broad human tendencies in her book. There are “upholders,” such as Rubin herself; she wakes up to a to-do list, knows any expectations of her—whether from other people or herself—& avoids letting anyone down. There are “obligers,” who are motivated by external accountability. “Questioners” respond to expectations, if they make sense based on their own judgement, & “rebels” resist control, even self-control. ... In their own lives, rebels may respond better to an angle that reflects their individualism, instead of, say, being lectured about the benefits of a spin class.
 
Rubin believes that knowing how you tend to behave better equips you to shape your habits—&, sometimes, to outwit yourself. We may be lovers of familiarity, who enjoy rereading a favourite novel, or novelty-seekers, for whom the same breakfast day after day is anathema. For an abstainer, cutting back on that bad ice-cream habit may require never bringing ice cream into the house, whereas a moderator may be able to take a spoonful or two and put it back in the freezer.
 
Part of the trick is actually seeing our habits as such. Routine actions can be so ingrained, we continue to take them, even when they don’t make sense.
 
A habit has 3 components, says Charles Duhigg, a New York Times reporter & author of The Power of Habit. There’s the cue, which is the trigger for an automatic behaviour to start. There’s the routine, which is the behaviour itself. Last, there’s the reward, which is how one’s brain learns to latch onto that pattern in the future. “When most people think about changing their habits, they just focus on the behaviour,” he says. “What studies have shown is it’s really diagnosing & understanding the cue & the reward that gives you the ability to shift automatic behaviour.”

Duhigg had a bad habit of going to his work cafeteria every afternoon for a chocolate-chip cookie. The daily snack caused him to put on 8 pounds, so he decided to study his craving. It happened consistently around 3 p.m. That was his cue: the time of day. His routine was straightforward. He got up from his desk, went to the cafeteria, grabbed a cookie & chatted with his colleagues while eating it. Figuring out the reward he was seeking took some trial & error. “Is it that I’m hungry, in which case, eating an apple does the job?” he says. “Or a boost of energy, so coffee should work just as well?” Duhigg tried buying a candy bar & eating it at his desk. He tried going to the cafeteria, buying nothing, but socializing as he normally would. It became clear that the reward was the social time. Now, he’ll just get up & chat with a colleague for 10 minutes before going back to his desk. The cookie has become a thing of the past.
 
One of Rubin’s bad habits was night snacking, so she developed the new habit of brushing her teeth right after dinner. “It signals to your brain, ‘We’re done here. The gates are coming down. The locks are on the doors,’ ” she says. Now the urge to snack at night is gone. The cue to snack has been disrupted by another habit. “People will say, ‘Make healthy choices,’ ” Rubin says. “I would argue: Don’t make healthy choices. Make one choice & then no more choosing.”

And be patient. New habits, on average, take 66 days to form, according to research from University College London. Depending on the person and the habit, it can take months longer. Meanwhile, there are temptations. A mother says her child can’t have a popsicle after soccer practice, but the child convinces her to make this time the exception. With enough persistence, the exception becomes the rule.
 
William James equated suffering each lapse in a good habit to dropping a ball of string. Every fall undoes enough string to require many turns to wind it back to where it was before. And loopholes come in many forms. There are moral licensing loopholes: giving ourselves permission to eat a bag of chips as a reward for losing pounds. Or false choices, such as avoiding the gym because there are so many emails to catch up on. “We are just masterful advocates for ourselves & why we should be off the hook,” says Rubin, who lists 10 potential loopholes in her book, but adds she discovers more all the time. And yet, she says, by catching ourselves trying to use a loophole, we can choose to reject it. “Just spotting them is enough to disrupt their power.”

Little fixes can make a big difference. Disorder in our lives can act as a “broken window,” Rubin writes in her book, citing the 1980s crime-prevention theory that claimed communities that tolerated little things such as graffiti or the breaking of windows were more likely to attract more serious crimes. So what are the “broken windows” in our everyday lives? It could be letting the laundry pile up at home or having a cluttered desk. Making your bed each morning, Duhigg writes, is correlated with better productivity & an ability to stick to a budget. The bed-making itself doesn’t lead to smarter shopping choices, but it lays the right foundation for other good habits.
 
The key is not to think about grand, sweeping changes, but rather, small ones. Fogg would say very, very small. ... It runs counter to the way we think about changing habits. ... Maybe we think aiming big is important because, that way, at least we’ll do half of it. It turns out the exact opposite is true.
 
To build a habit, Fogg says, you use an existing routine, such as brushing your teeth, as the anchor. That anchor becomes the reminder. Next, you do an incredibly simple version of the target behaviour. If you want to develop the habit of flossing, you make your goal to floss one tooth. That’s it. The habit isn’t learning how to floss, because everyone knows how to do it. The habit, Fogg says, is remembering to do it. Then, the final step is to celebrate instantly. Maybe shout “Victory!” or think of the theme music to Rocky. “What you’re doing is, you’re hacking your emotional state,” says Fogg. “You’re deliberately firing off an emotion right after you floss.” It sounds odd, especially because your fingers are probably messy & your gums could be painful. But, says Fogg, “emotions create habits. The habits that form quickly in our lives have an instant emotional payoff.”

Convenience has a major influence on our choices. It’s the reason hotels have mini-bars or leave the overpriced chocolate bars on the counter in plain sight. The converse strategy, for individuals, is to make bad choices harder. Regret pushing the snooze button on the alarm clock each morning? Put the alarm clock on the other side of the room. And, no matter the routine, it’s only a habit if it actually sticks. That’s the reason Rubin thinks timed habit changes—the 30-day detoxes or the year without sugar—can be dangerous. “Why a year? And what happens in month 13?” she says. “You need to have a plan for that.”
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Rubin identifies 4 broad tendencies when it comes to adopting behaviours: Upholder, obliger, questioner & rebel.
 
Upholder: ‘I do what others expect of me—& what I expect from myself’

Obliger: ‘I do what I have to do. I hate to let others down, but I often let myself down.’

Questioner: ‘I do what I think is best, according to my judgment. If it doesn’t make sense, I won’t do it.’

Rebel: ‘I do what I want, in my own way. If you tell me to do something, I’m less likely to do it.’
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http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/how-to-be-happy/

Inside Your Teenager's Scary Brain

Teen years always the most troubling & scary part of our years. Although, this article is a good one, every parent has a different way & experience of bringing up their teen through those difficult years. Some pass with flying colours, while others crash & burn. Every parent has their own story & wisdom to pass on to other parents. What actually works is different for everyone. But then, it never hurts to learn from others, either, or at least keep these thoughts in the back of one's mind.
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Conventional wisdom has long held that our brains are largely developed by puberty. However, research in the past 10-15 years has shown that our brains continue to develop in fundamental ways through the teen years & even into the late 20s & 30s. In fact, Jensen argues in her new book, The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents & Young Adults, the teenage years comprise one of the brain’s most critical periods for development—likely every bit as crucial as early childhood. “That 7 years in their life is, in a way, as important as their first 7 years of life,” Jensen says. “It is probably one of the most important 7-year [periods] in their entire life.”

Among the most popular misconceptions about brain development is the idea that the most important changes happen in the first 3 years of life. This “myth of three,” has been the source of intense parental anxiety over the fear that “adults are in a race against time to provide stimulation to their infants before their synapses are lost,” writes Paul Howard-Jones, a professor of neuroscience & education at the University of Bristol in the journal Nature. ... Behind the seemingly invincible teenage boy with the booming voice & adult body is a brain that is still incredibly vulnerable to everything from sports-related concussions to mental illness & addiction. New research is uncovering ways in which the activities that so often typify teenage years, such as experimenting with cigarettes & marijuana & alcohol, can lower a teen’s IQ or increase susceptibility to mental illness later on. Chronic stress stemming from family violence, poverty or bullying has also been linked to changes in the teen brain that can raise the risk of mood disorders or learning disabilities.
 
At the heart of our understanding of brain development are 2 basic concepts: grey matter & white matter. Grey matter consists of neurons, the brain cells that form the building blocks of the brain. White matter, axons, are the connections that form between grey matter, helping to move information from one area of the brain to the next.
 
While grey-matter growth is indeed almost completely finished by the age of 6, white matter—the wiring between brain cells—continues to develop well into the 20s. In fact, says Jensen, that wiring is only about 80% complete by the age of 18.
 
Along with new wiring, the brains of teens & young adults are also undergoing a process called myelination, in which those white-matter connections are being coated in a protective fatty material. Myelin acts as a form of insulation, allowing signals to move faster between brain cells, helping to speed the flow of information in the brain. Since both the wiring to the prefrontal cortex, & the insulation, is incomplete, teens often take longer to access their prefrontal cortexes, meaning they have a harder time making accurate judgments & controlling their impulses. The process of myelination continues into the 30s, giving rise to questions about how old someone must be to be considered to have a fully developed “adult” brain.
 
At the same time that teens’ brains are laying down connections & insulation, puberty has triggered pituitary glands to release hormones that are acting on the limbic system, the brain’s emotional centre. The combination of heightened emotions & an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex explains why teens are often prone to emotional outbursts, says Jensen, & also why they seek out more emotionally charged situations, from sad movies to dangerous driving.
 
Hormones also appear to have a different effect in teens than they do in adults. The hormone THP, which is released by the body in response to stress, has a calming effect in adults, but actually seems to have the opposite effect in teens, increasing stress. It’s one reason why teens are prone to anxiety & post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s also a good reason, Jensen says, why parents & schools should be sensitive to the problem of bullying.
 
Along with new wiring, insulation & hormones, teen brains are highly sensitive to the release of dopamine, which plays on the areas of the brain that govern pleasure & helps explain why teens seem to take so many risks.
 
It’s not that they don’t know any better. In fact, reasoning abilities are largely developed by the age of 15 & studies have shown that teens are as accurate as adults when it comes to understanding if an activity is dangerous. Their brains are just more motivated by the rewards of taking a risk than deterred by its dangers. So even if they know something might be bad—speeding, drinking too much, trying new drugs—they get more pleasure from taking the risks anyway.
 
Central to our understanding of how teens learn is “pruning”—a period when the brain begins to shed some of the grey-matter cells built up in childhood to make room for the growth of white matter. A long period of grey-matter growth in childhood, followed by vigorous pruning in adolescence, has been linked to higher intelligence, Jensen says.
 
It’s for this reason that Jay Giedd, an expert in child & adolescent brain imaging at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, describes the teen years as a special period of “use it or lose it” for the brain. Brain cells grown in childhood that continue to get used in adolescence form new connections, while those that go unused wither away. It’s also another reason why parents should be anxious about what happens during the teen years—adolescence now appears to be a period that can make or break a child’s intelligence.
 
A significant consequence of pruning is that IQ, once thought to be fixed for life after childhood, can in fact change dramatically during the teen years.
 
Learning is a process of repeatedly exposing the brain to something that stimulates the production of dopamine, which strengthens connections in the brain’s reward centre & helps form new memories. Addiction, therefore, is simply a form of “overlearning” by the brain, Jensen says. That process can be controlled by the prefrontal cortex, but since teens are so primed for learning & have less of an ability to access the prefrontal cortex, they’re also more susceptible to addictions.
 
In an era marked by the ideological tug-of-war over how best to raise our teenagers, what’s a parent to do with this new science of the teenage brain? More rules—an approach exemplified by Yale professor Amy Chua’s 2011 Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother? Or in intervening too much, do parents risk raising teens whose brains never learn how to become an adult—an approach typified by the backlash against “helicopter parenting” & movements like “slow parenting” & “free-range kids.”

In Teenage Brain, Jensen puts herself squarely in the camp of the highly involved parent. She encourages parents to proof-read their teen’s homework, help them make lists to prioritize their assignments, watch them as they do schoolwork to see if they’re getting distracted & to not be afraid to “sound like a broken record” in reminding teens over & over again about the dangers that could befall them.
 
She encourages parents to “be your teen’s frontal lobes” & to “try to think for your teenage sons & daughters until their own brains are ready to take over the job.”

Jensen argues that it’s a parent’s job to protect their teens from their own often short-sighted behaviour, while allowing them enough room for “safe failures.”

In the quagmire of parental advice, it’s no surprise that the counterargument to the neuroscience approach to parenting is robust, & passionate. Psychologist Robert Epstein, author of The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, believes that adolescent rebellion has little to do with brain development & lots to do with how society treats teenagers. He argues scientists have it backward: teens don’t act out because they have immature brains struggling to navigate an adult world, but because they have adult brains railing against a society that treats them like children.
 
Other research is challenging the notion that teens have a less mature & less connected prefrontal cortex & are therefore inherently more impulsive than adults.
 
At Temple University, Steinberg has used a car-racing video game to show that when teens are alone they perform as well as adults on tasks involving a tradeoff of risk & reward. But when other teens are in the room watching, adolescents tend to make far riskier decisions. Adults show no difference if other adults watch them, suggesting that teen risk-taking is likely social.
 
BJ Casey, director of the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Cornell University, found that teens could be less impulsive if they were offered rewards. The greater the reward, the longer teens took to make a decision, suggesting that parents trying to control a hot-headed teen might want to offer rewards for good decisions rather than punishing bad ones.

“You look at the high school dropout rates & the people that fall off the curve not because of academic reasons, but because of peer pressure or drugs,” Jensen says. “It’s so sad because this is a time where you can actually make up for your innate weaknesses. We could get so much more out of our teenagers—& who they become later in life, in many cases—if we took a different approach to this window of time.”

http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/inside-your-teenagers-scary-brain/