Category: The Happiness Prescription
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THE HAPPINESS PRESCRIPTION — PILLAR POST — HAPPY MIND, HAPPY LIFE?
The Question, Not the Slogan I’ve put a question mark on the title on purpose. Happy mind, happy life is the kind of phrase that gets embroidered on a pillow and stops meaning anything on its own. What I actually want to ask is narrower and stranger: is there a mind that, correctly trained, simply…
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THE HAPPINESS PRESCRIPTION GEAR 3: HEART
The Hormone Doing the Damage Cortisol is the one to watch. Not adrenaline — adrenaline is just alertness, and alertness isn’t the problem. Cortisol is what turns ordinary stress into something the body pays for later: impaired memory consolidation, suppressed immune function, worse sleep, and elevated cardiovascular risk, when it stays elevated over time as…
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THE HAPPINESS PRESCRIPTION — 2nd GEAR: AWARENESS
Living in the Moment, According to the Brain Salience network meditation is really just a more precise name for what this whole gear is training, and it’s worth saying plainly before going further. 🔬 The science Many contemplative traditions have taught, for millennia, that living in the moment increases happiness. In 2011, Judson Brewer and…
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Your Wandering Mind Is Unhappy 1st Gear
I want to start with a sentence that should stop you where you stand: a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is unhappy. That’s not a dharma teacher talking. That’s Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, reporting the results of a study that pinged nearly five thousand people at random…
