Mental Health Awareness Month: Positive Thinking
What you think shapes who you become and where you go.
Self-talk is the endless stream of unspoken thoughts that run through your head. These automatic thoughts can be positive or negative. Some of your self-talk comes from logic and reason. Other self-talk may arise from misconceptions that you create because of lack of information or expectations due to preconceived ideas of what may happen.
If the thoughts that run through your head are mostly negative, your outlook on life is more likely pessimistic. If your thoughts are mostly positive, you’re likely an optimist — someone who practices positive thinking.
There are numerous health benefits associated with positive thinking. Researchers continue to explore the effects of positive thinking and optimism on health. Health benefits that positive thinking may provide include:
- Increased life and health span
- Lower rates of depression
- Lower levels of distress and pain
- Greater resistance to illnesses
- Better psychological and physical well-being
- Better cardiovascular health and reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease and stroke
- Reduced risk of death from cancer
- Reduced risk of death from respiratory conditions
- Reduced risk of death from infections
- Better coping skills during hardships and times of stress
It’s unclear why people who engage in positive thinking experience these health benefits. One theory is that having a positive outlook enables you to cope better with stressful situations, which reduces the harmful health effects of stress on your body.
It’s also thought that positive and optimistic people tend to live healthier lifestyles — they get more physical activity, follow a healthier diet, and don’t smoke or drink alcohol in excess.
References:
Tax Everyone But Me – The Rich
Congress! Congress! “Don’t tax you. Don’t tax me. Tax the guy behind the tree.” ~ U.S. Senator Russell B. Long
Regarding taxing the other guy, “Most people have the same philosophy about taxes,” says U.S. Senator Russell B. Long, (D-LA), Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which handles tax legislation.
“All taxes discourage something. Why not discourage bad things like pollution rather than good things like working or investment?” – Lawrence Summers
Making federal tax policy is hard work because virtually any path chosen by Congress will have different impacts on sectors, regions, and tax payers no matter how hard one tries to make it as even-handed as possible.
“It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low, and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the tax rates.” – John F. Kennedy
In recent years, governments seem to have even stopped trying for tax policy neutrality and instead have embarked on tax policy competitiveness—using it as a bribe to entice companies to locate in their territory and as a weapon to punish companies that are either out of favor or attractive targets for easy money, writes William Reinsch, the Scholl Chair in International Business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
“For a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.” – Winston Churchill
Recently, the European Union has begun to weaponize its tax policy as a search for easy money from foreign (almost entirely American)—marks and a way to disadvantage foreign companies in areas where the Europeans are having a hard time competing. The best current example of this is EU efforts, as well as those of individual member states, to impose a digital services tax (DST), according to Reinsch.
References:
- https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/04/04/tax-tree/
- https://www.csis.org/analysis/dont-tax-me-dont-tax-thee-tax-fellow-behind-tree
13 Habits Linked to a Long Life
13 Habits Linked to a Long Life (Backed by Science) from Healthline.com
Eating a nutritious diet and exercising regularly may increase your life expectancy. Other factors, like overeating and drinking more than a moderate level of alcohol, may reduce your risk of certain diseases.
Many people think that life expectancy is largely determined by genetics. However, genes play a much smaller role than originally believed. It turns out that environmental factors like diet and lifestyle are key. https://t.co/jUsYwShaJG pic.twitter.com/M0svEerZKu
— Healthline (@Healthline) May 9, 2023
Investing Advice
Investor Stan Druckenmiller says one of his mentors taught him two crucial things:
• Never invest in the present; look 18 months out.
• The central bank moves the market, not earnings.
“If you invest in the present, you’re going to get run over!”
"To get a bargain price, you've got to look for where the public is most frightened and pessimistic." pic.twitter.com/AeyxQEcZpK
— LCTempleton (@LCTempleton) May 25, 2023
Compound interest – By saving $10, you are really saving $100 or $1,000 [because of the future compound growth of the $10], and this compounding growth requires a little wait and patience.
https://twitter.com/joincommonstock/status/1661902483147612160?s=61&t=8ACS6bcx2PFMgdLuBnL1JQ
Viktor Frankl and the Search for Meaning in Life
“Striving to find meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.” ~ Viktor Frankl
As Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, devoted his life to studying, understanding and promoting “meaning.” He developed the psychological approach known as logotherapy (from the Greek logos, meaning “reason” or “principle”).
While observing the brutality and degradation within the Nazi concentration camps during WWII, he theorized that those Jewish concentration camp prisoners who tended to survive the experience, were not those who were physically strong, but those who retained a sense of control over their environment, and had some meaning and purpose in their lives.
These prisoners with meaning and who retained a ’sense of control’ were more likely to survive the dehumanizing experience; he himself tried to recreate the manuscript of a book he had been writing before his capture.
“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except for one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.” ~ Viktor Frankl
According to Frankl, meaning can be found through:
- “Experiencing reality by interacting authentically with the environment and with others,
- Giving something back to the world through creativity and self-expression, and
- Changing our attitude when faced with a situation or circumstance that we cannot change.”
He observed:
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.”
For Frankl, joy was an important byproduct of finding meaning in life. He points to studies where there is marked difference in life spans between “trained, tasked animals,” i.e., animals with a purpose, than “taskless, jobless animals.”
Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.
— Viktor Frankl | Man's Search for Meaning 📖 (@ViktorFranklll) March 7, 2023
In his famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he tells the story of how he survived the Holocaust by finding personal meaning in the experience, which gave him the will to live through it. He concludes that “without meaning, people fill the void with hedonistic pleasures, power, materialism, hatred, boredom, or neurotic obsessions and compulsions.”
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.” ~ Viktor Frankl
In “Man’s Search For Meaning”, he says for a person to be happy they need 3 things:
1. Someone to love (relationship).
2. Something to do (meaning and purpose).
3. Something to look forward to (vision and hope).
References:
Always Believe in Yourself
“Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.”. ― Norman Vincent Peale.
When you believe in yourself, it can help you achieve your goals, manifest your dreams, and increase your well-being.
At the core of Dr. Peale’s message was a call to take charge of your life.
- “Believe that problems do have answers. Believe that they can be overcome. Believe that they can be handled. And finally, believe that you can solve them.”
- “Change your thoughts and you can change the world.”
- “When obstacles or difficulties arise, the positive thinker takes them as creative opportunities. He welcomes the challenge of a tough problem and looks for ways to turn it to advantage.”
- “Never talk defeat. Use words like hope, belief, faith, victory.”
Source: https://fee.org/articles/norman-vincent-peale-s-timeless-advice-take-charge-of-your-own-life-first/
ChatGPT to Explain AI
Recently, I asked ChatGPT to explain artificial intelligence and ChatGPT to a novice. Below is the response:
”AI stands for artificial intelligence which is the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think and learn like humans¹.
ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot developed by OpenAI¹ which uses natural language processing capabilities to interact with humans³. It was built on a family of large language models (LLMs) collectively known as GPT-3⁴.
ChatGPT can be used for a variety of tasks such as answering questions, generating text, and even writing code⁵.”
References:
(1) Demystifying ChatGPT for Government Leaders | LMI. https://www.lmi.org/blog/demystifying-chatgpt-government-leaders.
(2) ChatGPT: 30 incredible ways to use the AI-powered chatbot. https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/chatgpt-30-incredible-ways-to-use.
(3) ChatGPT explained: everything you need to know about the AI chatbot. https://www.techradar.com/news/chatgpt-explained.
(4) ChatGPT explained: Everything you need to know about the AI chatbot …. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/chatgpt.
(5) AI And You: How ChatGPT Can Take Your Career To The Next Level – Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2023/03/15/ai-and-you-how-chatgpt-can-take-your-career-to-the-next-level/.
(6) ChatGPT for dummies. I asked chatgpt to explain me chatgpt… | by …. https://medium.com/geekculture/chatgpt-for-dummies-6dd542c60cf9.
May 2023 — Mental Health Awareness Month
No matter what my depression tells me, I am worthy of love, I am worthy of acceptance, I am worthy of fulfillment. I Am #MoreThanEnough.
We are not born feeling inadequate. Life experiences and emotions create that sense within us in a variety of ways. For example, when we were little, and we felt afraid or anxious, our mind told us something was wrong with us, not our environment. A child’s mind, not yet rational, concludes, “There must be something wrong with me if I feel so bad.” That’s why children who were abused or neglected grow up to be adults who carry so much shame. They likely spent years telling themselves: “I must be bad if I’m being treated badly.”
As adults, armed with education on emotions and how childhood adversity affects the brain, we can understand that feeling “not enough” is a byproduct of an environment that was insufficient. We are in fact enough! Yet to feel more solid, we must work to transform that “not enough” feeling.
What Can We Do to Help the Parts of Us That Feel “Not Enough?”
- We can remind ourselves again and again that our feelings of “not enough” were learned. It’s not an objective fact, even when it feels so instinctually true.
- We can connect to the part of us that feels bad and offer it compassion, like we would for our child, partner, colleague, friend or pet.
- We can practice deep belly breathing, five or six times in a row, to calm our nervous system.
- We can exercise to get adrenaline flowing and create a sense of empowerment.
- We can remember this very helpful phrase: “Compare and Despair!” When you catch yourself making comparisons to others, STOP! It only hurts, by fueling feelings and thoughts of “not enough.”
In the long run, we heal the parts of us that feel inadequate by first becoming aware of them. Once aware, we can listen to them and try to fully understand the story of how they came to believe they were “not enough.” Over time, by naming, validating and processing the associated emotions both from the past and present, “not enough” can become enough.
Source: https://www.nami.org/Blogs/NAMI-Blog/June-2018/Why-Do-We-Have-the-Feeling-that-We-Are-Not-Enough
One of the most beneficial things individuals can do to improve their mental health is to stay active and engage in frequent exercise. Exercise can increase the brain’s levels of dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine, which can lead to reduced stress levels, happier moods, increased cognitive function, and higher self-esteem.