Personal Growth Tips

If you made shopping quite before Christmas Days, you probably stood in line for minutes or hours to buy presents, food, etc. While shopping on crowded days you have to choose the shortest possible line to stand in, if you want not to wait for a long time. But even so you have to wait and your patience is tried. So, shopping on crowded days is a good opportunity to try and measure your patience.

What happen in your inner world while standing in line for quite a while?! There seem to be three possibilities:

• you don’t have patience and check all the time if other lines advance more rapidly than yours;
• you have patience and while standing in line talk to others, relax yourself thinking at something else or organize your agenda;
• you oscillate between first two possibilities;

If you fall in first category and check all the time other lines then you have problems with your patience. You must be aware of these problems and use such situations (as shopping on crowded days) to try and work out your patience.

If you are one of second category then your patience is just fine. But there is always the possibility to improve even more some of your traits.

If you fall in the last category then it is a sign that you try to train your patience. You are on the good track to a strong patience. It’s very important to be conscious of what happen in your inner world and also in your proximate one.

But why patience is so important?! I think that without patience our subjective wellbeing will suffer a lot. We live in a real world and there are many situations when our needs and wishes can’t be fulfilled at once. And this is a good thing because only so we may shape our patience and character.

It seems that fat people are happier than thin ones. The studies have concluded that:

• thin people are much more likely to commit suicide than large ones (suicide decrease by 15 percent for each 5kg per square meter increase in BMI - body mass index);
• as the BMI rose the risk of depression decrease;
• fat people are more jovial and content than skinny ones;

Not fatness alone cause people to be happier, but increase in body mass index (fat & muscle mass) which, think researchers, is correlated with insulin resistance, and insulin associated with serotonin - the feel-good hormone. So increase in your BMI determine a rise in the quantity of serotonin in your body, which leads to a happy state.

What if we think this causal chain conversely - fat people are happier not because of fat but they get fat because they are jovial, cheerful and content. Because they see life and all what happen to them in a more optimistic way. This can be a “vicious circle”, we don’t know which one happen first: happiness or fatness. And we may say that if we are happy then we get a little fat, and if we got fat then our level of happiness rise, this new level of happiness will determine a new increase of our weight, and so on. Here rise two questions: Which one occur first? When stops this causal chain?

I think it’s a matter of balance, if we fall in one of these extremes we can’t be happy at all. One may say that even if fat people are happier than thin ones, the latter ones are more healthier, good-looking and physically active than first ones. Obese people can’t be happy even if they live in a juice of serotonin. How may they be if their health suffer a lot, if they don’t look very good, and aren’t physically active (physical exercise and activity correlate strongly with happiness)?! Very skinny people can’t be happy either. Their level of serotonin is too low, health isn’t too good, whole energy level is low.

The middle way was always the golden way. The fit people (naturally or through light and regularly exercises) aren’t too fat but have enough fat and muscle mass to be happy. They aren’t too skinny but are thin enough to be healthy, to look great and to be physically active.

If we classify people by financial criterion in three classes: rich people, average people and poor people, which class do you think is the happiest? Our culture has determined us to think that if we get richer then we’ll get happier automatically, that more and more money does bring us more and more happiness. Over time, there was assumed a close connection between richness and happiness. But are there strong evidences for this assumption or is this only a popular and illusory belief.

Almost all agree that rich people can’t be otherwise than happy, because they may fulfill nearly all their needs and desires. I agree that rich people may have a full access to happiness but don’t think that being rich is enough or is a sufficient condition to be happy. There are a lot of other factors that compete for our happiness. Yes, they compete and if one of them is less fed your whole happiness is affected. But I’ll not talk here about these other factors.

Let’s analyze the condition of poor people. It’s evident that these people can’t reach happiness if they may not satisfy first their basic needs: food and shelter. And if others don’t help them to cope with their problems. Is too much to say that they are unhappy? No, it isn’t. Imagine a beggar who have no shelter, sleeping on streets and eating only as much as to survive. Can he be happy? I think he can’t.

What about average people?! Are they less happy than rich people?! The studies show that difference between level of happiness reported by rich people and that reported by average people isn’t significant. So, we can’t say that rich people are happier than average people.

The big difference occur when an individual advance from the poor class to the average class. This happen because he get enough food, a fine house, a nice car and enough money to travel and fulfill other reasonable desires. But when we buy a bigger house than our fine one, when we buy a more expensive car than our nice one, the difference isn’t significant on the long run. Our level of happiness will rise at the beginning but for a short time only, because we get used to these new things. So, our level of happiness get back and we’ll need something new in order to increase it over another short period of time.

In our daily life we make use, less or more conscious, of a powerful process called feedback. Feedback is that process by which a system (biological, social, ecological, etc.) maintain and improve its own performance. The system return to the start of an action a part of the information about the action flow and its results. It’s an evaluative and corrective information.

If we begin our actions and activities with some goals in mind then at the finish we will (or should we) compare the results with the goals. In this way we can see if the activity was a success or not, and if we may improve something in order to be a success.

Almost all our activities include trial and error actions. If you don’t know a pattern or an well established path to success, in a certain case, then you’ll resort to trial and error actions. It means you think of a possible solution and try it. If it works then all it’s ok, but if it don’t work you have to try something else. All these are possible through the feedback process. There is a permanent transfer of corrective information between input and output in order to succeed.

The most important kind of feedback for our life are biological and social or interpersonal feedback. If these are well used they can make a huge difference in our daily life.

Biological feedback

At a given time we become less or more conscious of a certain aspect of our body and mind (a pleasant or unpleasant sensation, a tension, a pain, a thought, etc.). Then our mind send, less or more conscious, a command of adjustment to our body or to itself. And so have place the most fine tweaking process of body and mind. It is responsible for our daily physical and psychological states. Imagine what will be if we make this process more conscious. There is even a relaxation method called biofeedback that uses monitoring instruments to adjust and improve our mental and bodily processes.

Interpersonal feedback

It means providing evaluative and corrective information to others and receiving it from others. It’s responsible for the quality and efficiency of our relationships. The social or interpersonal feedback it’s a key to maintain a good relationship and to improve it to the best. We all need feedbacks from others to understand their attitude towards us and to take the pulse of the relationship. And we have to send regularly constructive feedbacks to significant others in order to help them understand our attitude and to improve the relationship.