【哈佛积极心理学笔记】第18讲睡眠、触摸和爱情的重要性

第18讲睡眠、触摸和爱情的重要性

Sleep

8 hour sleep
It’s not enough to… It’s a third of 24 hours .That’s too much. I can’t afford it.

You can afford it if you look at it as an investment, if you make it a priority.

More sleep is generally better up to a certain point.
lack of sleep - weight not just correlational, causation.

Lack of sleep to putting on weight. And if we try diet, we are fighting our nature again. Simple sleep enough, one of the contributing factors to effective weight management.

Cognitive functioning - whether it’s creativity, productivity as well as memory that is hurt when we don’t sleep, which is why sleep is such an important investment.

Lack of sleep affects depression in a even more significant way for two reason:

pure physical level of needing sleep.
what happens at night is that our mind processes a lot of the things that we have gone throughout the day. And very often it solves unresolved issues that we have gone throughout the day.

enervated 衰弱的

It’s a good investment on every level.

Some brief tips on sleep:

more or less 8 hours a day (total)
So naps are also very good investment.
take a power nap for 15,20 minutes during the day that to an extent-not like a full night sleep, but to an extent restores some of the cognitive as well emotional capacity.

Internal rhythm
Try and create a life that is in line with your natural needs.

The work of William Dement:
“Effects of sleep deprivation on health and well-being have been documented by research. Cognitive skills and physical performance are impaired sleep deprivation, but mood is affected even more. People who get less than a full night’s sleep are prone to feel happy, more stressed, more physically frail and more mentally and physically exhausted as a result. Sufficient sleep makes us feel better, happier, more vigorous and vital.”

Touch

tactail 迟钝 autistic 患自闭症的
touch is a physical need
It’s our immune system strengthens significantly with touch, weakens drastically without sufficient touch. It helps with up injurys.

--------> 0 --------> +

We need touch. It is an innate instinctual need.

Virginia Satir who’s a phychologist has this to say:
We need 4 hugs a day for survival. We need 8 hugs a day for maintenance. We meed 12 hugs a fay for growth.

Here is the prescription:

4 times at least a week, 30 minutes of physical exercise at least.
Mindfulness meditation, every day 10, 15 minutes. A few deep breaths strategically place throughout the day.
8 hours of sleep at night
at least 5, ideally 12 hugs a day.
And all it does is bring us back to our base level of well being, our God Given or genes given level of happiness.

Relationship

love

Relationships-close, intimate relationships, whether it’s with lovers, whether it’s with family members, whether it’s with close soul mates, friends, is the No.1 predictor of happiness.

romantic relationship, the tip of the stem.

Relationships are a natural need. No person is an island. No one can survive. No one can certainly thrive without relationships.

The key though in relationships is to know yourself, meaning to know your needs. Because we don’t all have the same relationship need. It’s different with different people.

lasagna principle 千层面定律:
OLA optimum level if arousal

introversion and extraversion

Brian Little, we cannot act out of nature, meaning an introvert can act like an extravert。
while we can act out of nature, very often this enervates us. It take us energy.

restorative niche, a place to restore

Intimate relationships

David Myers, “There are few stronger predictors of happiness than a close, nurturing, quitable, intimate lifelong companionship with one’s best friend.”
companionship, romantic relationship that is life-long. Same sex or opposite sex.

Marriages

2/3 marriages today end up in divorce. It does not means that the other 1/3 are thriving.
Very often, people stay together out of a sense of duty, out of habit, because of a lack of alternative, because they think this is their lot in life.

quiet desperation 安静的绝望 inertia 惯性

When people go into a relationship, their thought, their hopes is to continue the exact same love and passion that they have at the begining of the relationship. This is how relationships start. This is the promise of love. And yet more often than not, evidently things don’t turn out as we expect them to have turned out.

Love and especially lust and passion wears over time. Because we know that novelty produces higher levels of arousal.

Daryl Bem, “the exotic is erotic”.

Is that necessarily part of our nature.
And the answer is yes and no.
It’s necessarily part of our nature that novelty excites us more that we adapt to what happens. Remember we are change detectores. We become much more aroused whether it’s cognitively, psychologically, or physically, physiologically when there’s something new. And adapt over time it for good and ill.

How we can take relationships, given the fact that novelty excites, given the fact that on physiological level the arousal will be higher by the way that applies for men and women. The excitement will be higher when there’s a new person. Given all that, how can we create relationships that thrive, that soar, that go beyond the zero to the positive.

The first step before accepting reality, is understanding what true love reality means.
Many people ask, does it even exist in reality?
Can I ever live up to the kind of the relationship?

Leo Buscaglia, “Perfect love is rare indeed-for to be a lover will require that you continually have the subtlety of the very wise, the flexibility of the child, the sensitivity of the artist, the understanding of the philosophy, the acceptance of the saint, the tolerance of the scholar and the fortitude of the certain.”
So beautiful, so detrimental.
There is no perfect love. We can’t expect our partner of the above.

While perfect love do not exist, true love exist.
True love exists between imperfect humans.

“Why is that many people who do stay together are no longer thriving?”
One of the answer they got was because novelty arouses us. Because it’s human nature to seek exitement.
The erotic is the exotic.
It’s a true answer, it’s an important thing to take into consideration. It’s part of reality whether we like it or not. But that qustion is not enough.
When we only asking this question, we quite literally miss a very important part of reality.

“What makes some relationships thrive and grow stronge over time?”

We are going to look at the best relationships and ask what can we learn from it and apply to our lives.
4 different topic:

relationship is about hard work.
how to invest
That the best relationships are ones that create high levels of intimacy that get to know one another in a deeper level. And these are the relationshps that thrive. These are the relationships that also maintain passion and enhance passion 5,10 and 50 years hence.
The best relationships are not relationships that are devoid conflict.
it is about appreciating the postive.
because when we appreciate the good, the good appreciates, whether in ourselve or in others.