Happiness Tree

What is Emotional Hygiene, Why is it Important and How Can You Attain It?

What is EMOTIONAL HYGIENE?

Put simply, it's a set of strategies we put in place to ensure we can reach and maintain emotional health. Guy Winch, author of "Emotional First Aid" who holds a PhD in Psychology, is a frequent speaker on TED talks and writes for the Huff Post asks

"Why is it that our physical health is so much more important than our emotional health?"

Highlighting the often under appreciated dichotomy maintain between our physical and emotional health he says:

"When someone is depressed, they are told to just shake it off. Can you imagine saying that to a person with a broken leg? Oh, just walk it off"

Some of the emotional states that cause us the greatest grief are: 

Loneliness - "It creates a deep psychological wound that scrambles our thinking and makes us afraid to reach out for fear of rejection. I causes you to feel emotionally disconnected from those around you" says Dr. Winch.

"It increases the likelihood of an early death by 14%. It causes high blood pressure, high cholesterol and impairs the functioning of your immune system. It even has been concluded poses a risk equal to cigarette smoking.That is why we must practice Emotional Health".

Whether we see or care to make a connection between our minds and bodies, one does exist. And when we choose to ignore or neglect the integrity of our emotions, we cause ourselves great and lasting harm. 

Another catalyst in the breakdown of our emotional health is Failure

Dr Winch recalls an experiment where in 3 children were presented with identical toys. If the correct button was pressed, a cute little doggy would pop out. The wrong button would have no effect. The first girl tried to open the box by pressing the wrong button and soon became frustrated. The second boy, seeing this, didn’t even try and began to cry. The 3rd girl pressed the right button and squealed with glee when the puppy appeared. 

He concludes that, "each toddler was perfectly capable of opening the box by pressing the right button, but the only thing that prevented them was that their mind tricked them into believing that they could not". 

"And adults get tricked this way all the time as well. If your mind tells you that you are incapable of something and you believe it, you’ll feel hopeless and stop trying too soon or not try at all. That will reinforce your belief that you cannot succeed".That is why so many function below their actual potential, because somewhere along the way, they became convinced they could not succeed. “But you must fight feelings of hopelessness and gain control over the situation”. 

Stop Emotional Bleeding - “Our brain and our feelings are not the trustworthy friends we thought they were. They’re more like a really moody friend, who can be totally supportive one minute and really unpleasant the next.” Says Dr. Winch.

We tend to reinforce negative feelings more often the positive ones and with greater passion through the process of Rumination.  You just cannot stop replaying a scene of embarrassment, conflict or disappointment over and over in your head.

“This can easily become a habit and it is a very costly one. By spending so much time focused on upsetting and negative thoughts, you are actually putting yourself at significant risk for developing clinical depression, alcoholism, eating disorders and even cardiovascular disease”. 

I can say this nefarious, negative thought pattern has been a feature of my emotional landscape in the past. Once a moment of embarrassment, failure, disappointment or fear entered my mind, I could not seem to evict it. It would carry me down into a dark, dank rabbit hole and I felt unable to regain control. 

Then one day, the thought occurred to me to capture my emotional state on a canvas. I bought some paints and just began using bright colors in various random shapes and strokes to illustrate the chaos raging inside myself. Soon, I found the time whizzing by effortlessly and I became aware of the fact that I no longer felt imprisoned by my thoughts. I found a healthy therapy that pulled me out of my downward vortex

And Dr Winch underscores that this can be a very effective strategy to combat negative thinking: "Studies tell us that as little as a two minute distraction has the power to break a rumination in that moment". Each time you find yourself spiraling down into a counterproductive pattern, have a method for distraction waiting, ready to be engaged in. It could be listening to comedy, working on a creative project, going for a swim or reading a book. "By taking action when you’re lonely, be changing your responses to failure, by protecting your self esteem, by battling negative thinking, you won’t just heal your psychological wounds, you will build emotional resilience”. 

"A hundred years ago, people began practicing personal hygiene and life expectancies rose dramatically within a decade. By working to improve our emotional hygiene, we can improve the quality of our lives". 

The most common form of emotional disturbance is depression. It tends to make us withdraw from those people and things we once enjoyed. Furthermore, unlike a physical symptom, that often have outward signs, depression leaves no physiological scars or handicaps. When the depressed person does encounter others in the course of work or social situations, his downward gaze, poor posture and sad facial expression reveals that something is wrong, but the lack of a "real illness or injury" that might otherwise gain sympathy, only distresses others, adding guilt to the weight of his emotional despair. 

This is not to say that gaining and maintaining emotional health is easy. It's not. But to ignore it or presume that it's less important than caring for our body is to assign ourselves to an existence devoid of feelings like accomplishment, love, understanding and happiness. It is not easy, but absolutely attainable and necessary. Here are some resources that will build hope and lead toward better self discovery and understanding.

Life Hacker: "Where to Start When It Feels Like Nothing is Going Right in Your Life

Huffington Post: The Benefits of Good Emotional Hygiene

The Happiness Tree: What Does Happiness Feel Like in the Body?

Having this "self knowledge is essential for avoiding or controlling negative thinking patterns. 

“Can you imagine a world where there was less loneliness, less depression, where people knew how to overcome failure? If they felt better about themselves and more empowered?” That is the kind of world Guy Winch says he wants to live in and so do I.

-Shane Eric Mathias

 

The Local Solution to Global Warming and Environmental Degradation

In Southern California, it feels like we are at the epicenter of the climate change phenomenon. Though living only a few miles from the coast, we still experience temperatures well in excess of 100 degrees throughout much of the Summer. 

Here in San Diego, we've often been associated with a temperate climate. "Sunny and 70's" was a slogan that was so often repeated by weather anchors on the local news that their existence seemed almost pointless.

Now however, even well into Fall, we experience wide fluctuations on the thermometer, with maybe a 20 degree spit between one day and the next. That is why the term: "Global Climate Instability" is actually more accurate than "Global Warming".

As satellites and computer modeling have improved weekly weather forecasting, long term trends have become much harder to predict. The severity of Droughts, Hurricanes and what is considered here in California to be year round fire season underscore that whether through human generated carbon emissions or other celestial forces, our environment is changing dramatically and there seems to be nothing we can do to stop the juggernaut. 

Or is there?

We decided to take a road trip, up the West Coast to Ashland Oregon. Partly to escape the heat and partly to see how other areas are being affected by and coping with our changing climate. What we found was confirming and also eye-opening and caused me to realize a simple fact:

Those areas with an abundance of trees were cooler, wetter and had fewer and narrower temperature fluctuations. 

 

Now one could effectively argue that cooler, wetter weather gives rise to more trees, not the other way around. But studies of rainforests around the world have proven that they do in fact create their own weather conditions, through the absorption of carbon from the atmosphere; the transport of moisture from the ground into the air, causing localized cloud formations; the preservation and recycling of nutrients in the soil that support colonies of beneficial fungi, bacteria and plant life, which further broadens the carbon sink and the retention of essential water stores. 

When rain does occur, these forest canopies diminish the potentially destructive impact of falling water by acting as a catch and release system, dripping moisture delicately onto the soil to prevent erosion. That water sinks into the spongy, nutrient rich soil and is held there, until aquifers are full and saturation is established. When that happens, water begins seeping out, forming rivulets, then creeks, eventually swelling rivers and filling reservoirs. 

As this simple cycle is repeated over and over, water stores increase, the forest grows, weather patterns begin to stabilize, rain becomes more frequent, droughts diminish and fires become far less frequent severe. 

What Can You Do to Slow or Reverse
the March of Climate Change?

Plant more trees!

It's a simple as that. Plant trees in your yard and encourage others to do the same. Work at your community, town and city level to bring greater awareness to the issue, gaining political and financial support for greater governmental involvement in forest planting, cultivation and maintenance. 

For more information, visit the Arbor Day Foundation. Start working toward your own local movement today. It may be the best way for you to make a lasting and positive impact on our precious planet.

-Shane Eric Mathias

 

 

YIKES! Content Marketing Overload

When I was a child, a small, seemingly insignificant gesture left a lasting impression on me.

My grandmother was very interested in her ancestry. Now bear in mind, this is deep into the last century, long before computers and internet, snail mail was king and the post office was still making a profit. 

She had read that one of her ancestors may have lived in a small town in Virginia. She somehow found the address of a library in that little town and addressed a letter: To Whom It May Concern, asking about this mysterious figure from the past.

Two weeks later, she received a letter back. In beautiful cursive script, a researcher at the library detailed the painstaking effort he made to find a record of this individual. 

"Dear Madam", it began. "I received your request and with great pleasure, I now can reveal what has been found about your relative". After the lengthy description of his research, he ended by saying: "Should you have need of any other information, please do not hesitate to contact me. I am always here, at your service. Sincerely, _____________"

I still have that letter and revisit it now and again when I feel overwhelmed by the profit-driven, automated, superficial, redundant, barrage of marketing mislabeled as "making a connection". 

Don't get me wrong, I think the internet and many of the free applications we use daily to learn from and communicate with each other are amazing. I am glad to be living in this time, when while sitting in my arm chair, I can meet and converse in real time with someone across the globe.

But I am also grateful that I have seen with my own eyes the selfless passion and enthusiasm for helping a stranger and the art with which that short interaction was curated. The tactile nature and smell of the paper, the character of the individual's unique handwriting, the courtesy and decorum evident in the writer's personality, that communicated respect and sophistication. Sadly, these seem all but lost in many forms of digital exchange. But they don't have to be. 

I get that we are all attempting to build our brand, to make an impression, to gain an audience, be heard, understood and monetized. I'm in the same boat. 

But when the same Tweet goes out to every follower, when purveyors of this or that service are blindly marketing to each other. When the dissemination and consumption of "content" has replaced writing for the sake of expression, for the sheer joy of the art form... something is lost. Something valuable is disappearing from the human experience. 

 

I am not in the league of receiving hundreds of new followers each week. Nor am I on the NY Times best seller list, or deciding which TV interview to accept. If I were, perhaps I might find it impossible to answer each "Follow" with a personal message of thanks or to read and really take in what others are saying and writing about. 

If and when that day comes, it will be bittersweet. 

Until then, I will remain committed to using language as the marvelous tool that it is to communicate thought, feeling, creativity and empathy first and foremost and let that be the means by which I either sell or fail to sell my product. 

It is a delicate balance I know, when we're all trying to make a living and leave our mark. But let's not forget the "Human Factor" in all our promotions. 

There was something special about writing a letter by hand, a sensual quality that has been lost in today's "sound byte" world. But try to imagine your computer more like a pen than a cash register and maybe, just maybe, we can get back some of that precious sentimentality.

-Shane Eric Mathias

What is the Happiness Tree? A Practical System for Cultivating Success In Life.

Happiness need not be a mysterious, elusive condition. The chart above demonstrates that happiness can result from a holistic approach to life and that success can be achieved by working simultaneously on foundational elements or "Limbs" Love, Health, Freedom and Purpose. 

The Happiness Tree is a way of visualizing the anatomy of happiness as one would view a family tree, to understand how each component is related to the whole. Just as science has mapped the human genome to understand the very code that supports life itself, it stands to reason that Happiness (a condition so fundamental to the human experience that it is synonymous with “quality of life”) can also be broken down into its elemental parts and then reassembled into a system for understanding and creating a successful life.

It took me 3 years of introspection, deconstructing my own struggles with sustaining satisfaction in my work, relationships and life, coupled with research into the many emotional, physical and spiritual factors that influence how we view, respond to and evolve from our life experiences, to arrive at this deep understanding of the ways in which we, and our life experiences, co-create each other.

It turns out how those experiences are guided, crafted and responded to is of critical importance to our personal evolution and level of satisfaction. 

This led me to the realization that the four limbs of Love, Health, Freedom and Purpose could be viewed as the robust structural members of our lives, like the columns of a cathedral, the piers of a bridge or in this case, the limbs of a tree. I chose a tree because it is a living, evolving entity that is rooted to the ground and yet reaches for the clouds. A quality I believe represents the need-in our human lives-for a healthy balance between being grounded, (through our need for security and stability) and being aspirational, through the boundless force of our imagination.

Additionally, like human life, a tree has a complex structure, reaching in many directions, with an intricate interplay between major and finite elements. With the trunk defining our core, I could see that limbs and branches could perfectly represent and illustrate the many ways our desire for Love, Health. Freedom and Purpose are expressed and experienced in our lives. 

Finally, the Canopy, composed of leaves, the most delicate components of a tree, reach out to receive sunlight. They are kissed by the rain and cooled by the breeze. They provide nutrients for and are simultaneously supported by the whole system. It is through these thousands of delicate wonders that we-as humans-metaphorically connect with the world around us. 

And just aa a tree must be properly fed, pruned and cared for, our lives also require ongoing maintenance and attention. And a healthy tree, just like your healthy life, develops a well-rounded Canopy: balanced, comfortable in its niche and a joy to behold.

Please feel free to copy and save the Happiness Tree chart to study and share.

And for a complete description of how to understand and apply this revolutionary system in your own life, read "The Happiness Tree". Now available in paperback and e-book format from all fine online book retailers.