Category: Life & Style

It’s an established fact that it’s a big bad world you are living in and at almost every step you face, and would continue to face, obstacles. They may come from your enemies, or your friends or families or strangers, or even from inanimate objects or the circumstances, but they will be there. If you accept it, there is only one person who can overcome your difficulties, and that’s you. So, when you take charge and take 100% responsibility for choosing your reaction towards all that comes your way, you are bound to move towards success.

Continued happiness, exciting career options, nurturing family time, and blissful personal relationships wouldn’t exist by default, or someone or something from outside wouldn’t provide us these on a platter; “you” have to work towards them despite how this world is moving and what experiences you are gathering in the process.

Don’t Blame

Most of us blame someone or something else for our failures, irritations and hurts in life, while the truth is that all of us have a choice how we react in a particular situation or towards someone or something. Of course, when someone shouts at you for nothing, when there is an accident, when someone misunderstands you, or when it rains just before you are leaving for an important meeting, you are not responsible for the circumstances. But, and here’s the beauty of it, in all these cases you have a choice of reaction. You may blame and fret, and spoil what happens next, or you react in the best possible way under the circumstances and make the best of what happens next.

If “you” want to create a life as you dream it, then “you” have to take 100% responsibility for your life. You need to give up all your excuses, victim stories, reasons why you haven’t reached where you wanted to, and how circumstances held you back. You have to give them all up forever. You must understand that you have and always had the power to change things when they were happening or later, but because of something, be it your ignorance or fear, or your desire to be safe or right, you didn’t use that power. Nobody is concerned why you didn’t use that power, the fact is that you didn’t and because of that your past is the way it is. But, once again good thing about all of this is that the past is the way it is. It can’t be changed. Good! You have understood it. So accept it and let it be the way it is. Now, start working on your present and future!

Accept Your Past and Work Towards Your Future

If something didn’t happen in the past you must ask yourself how did you create it, or what were you thinking, or what were your beliefs, or what did you say or didn’t say, or what did you do or didn’t do, or what do you need to do to get different results the next time. Whatever happened, happened. But, if you want to change its effect or if you want to happen it in your desired way the next time, take responsibility for it and do it.

Is your work killing you? Or, do your wife and kids eat away your energy? Experts say you can simply smile through your stress and be healthy in the long-term. Minor stresses attack every person throughout the day; however, some people fail to maintain cheerfulness or calmness and live in a state of elevated levels of inflammation.

Inflammation means an immune-compromised state of a body part, i.e. it fails to protect itself via the immune system of the body. Long-term or chronic inflammation leads to life-threatening ailments such as obesity, heart disease and cancer.

Inflammation

According to Nancy Sin from the Pennsylvania State University in the US, a person’s frequency of stress is not as much related to inflammation as it is to his/her responses to stress. Thus, more than anything else what is important is how a person reacts to stress. In the short-term, when the body falls ill or when the person exercises, the body repairs itself to a high immune system. However, in the long-term, heightened inflammatory immune responses are adverse to health.

Those individuals who find it difficult to regulate their responses to stress, age early and have cardiovascular diseases, frailty or cognitive decline. The participants in the study reported daily stresses and emotional reactions for eight consecutive days. Later, participants’ blood samples were collected during a separate clinic visit and were tested for inflammatory markers. It was found that those participants who responded to stress in a positive way and chose to smile away the daily irritants and problems were healthier than those who let the stress affect their emotions and in turn their body.

Forced Smiles

Similar studies have been conducted by other researchers as well. Kraft and Pressman experimented with 169 volunteers, and trained and tested them. In the training stage, some were taught to hold fake smiles on their faces, while others were asked to smile naturally and a third set of people were asked to smile genuinely while feeling the smile.

It was found that holding a neutral, fake or forced smile would only exercise your muscles around your eyes and mouth. The genuine smiles with feeling made positive emotions flow through the participants’ entire body. During the research, the participants were given stressful tasks such as using their non-dominant hand to trace a path while looking in a mirror, or multi-tasking or plunging one’s hand into a bucket of ice water, while holding the smile on their face. Heart rates of participants were monitored during the experiment. The results showed that those participants who had genuine smiles on their faces recovered quickly from those stressful situations they were subjected to. Those who kept their faces neutral were the next to recover and in the end those who had forced smiles on their faces. Smiling through a traffic jam even for a limited time is more helpful than fretting about it or keeping yourself busy in something else. Of course, you may smile your way and smile the stress away!

We all want to have happy happenings in our life, and when something good happens we want to preserve that feeling or emotion for as long as possible to prolong our positive attitude for other things we do in life. We want to forget negative experiences and be positive in the hope that all our further decisions will be good if taken with a light, happy and positive mindset.

However, a recent new study has brought forward the “banker’s fallacy”, according to which we are naturally inclined to deliberately go for “happy endings” thus ascribing greater value to experiences than they are worth. It further means that we overvalue our last experiences in any situation with a final happy ending mental note in the hope that it will positively affect our next experience.

Decision Making

Now, our brain works like a logbook, where it keeps storing every new experience and keeps ranking them against the previous few for context. Thus, over a period of time we collect a mix of positive and negative emotions. This affects our decision-making power because last good experiences make us high-esteemed and we are more prone to take risks, and last few bad experiences make us low-esteemed and we tend to hold back.

The fallacy is named after bankers who are generally trained to close on a positive note. However, anyone who is doing it is actually thinking of the immediate next few results only. Thus, happy endings are actually trapping people into making lousy long-term decisions. People are focusing on immediate growth at the expense of longer-term stability, and our quick decisions may actually be strategically wrong affecting us adversely in the long run.

The Research Study

The study was conducted by Martin Vestergaard from the University of Cambridge, who found that most people in the test fell foul of the banker’s fallacy and made poor, short-term decisions as a result. The experiment involved participants trying to accumulate money by gambling between two sets of gold coins of varying sizes at high reaction times. The researchers found that the most immediate experiences carried much more weight in decision making than they should have, which means that a recent happy ending has a hugely disproportionate influence. The final result were thus false and delusional beliefs that in turn led to wrong decisions despite historical experience that could convince us of the contrary.

The results of the study are beneficial in all spheres of life including social, political and familial decision making as well. People in a relationship tend to make lighter decisions which may have long-term impact when they are happy with each other. However, the right decisions would be those which are taken considering the history of relationship. The same logic applies to political and social decisions too. However, the results of the study apply more to individual decisions rather than organisational or structural decisions, where a body of decision makers generally makes policy-based decisions. Though group decisions may also be affected by banker’s fallacy, the chances are less as several people are involved simultaneously and each one’s experience may differ on the last outcome.