Deans' stroke musings: Overthinking Happiness Can Lower Life Satisfaction

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Saturday, August 3, 2024

Overthinking Happiness Can Lower Life Satisfaction

This kinda falls under the Buddhist teaching: Desire is the underlying cause of dissatisfaction. When I was in Bhutan, the country measures Gross National Happiness and is part of their countries makeup.

For us stroke survivors, desire to get fully recovered can only lead to dissatisfaction. Since there is NOTHING in the stroke medical world that even remotely will get you there!

Overthinking Happiness Can Lower Life Satisfaction

Summary: Obsessing over personal happiness can actually decrease life satisfaction, according to new research. In three studies involving over 1,800 participants, individuals who judged their own happiness reported lower well-being, increased negativity, and more disappointment in positive events.

While the pursuit of happiness itself was not harmful, constant self-judgment about happiness levels was linked to greater depressive symptoms. The findings suggest embracing emotions with acceptance, rather than constantly evaluating happiness, may enhance well-being.Key Facts:

Impact on Well-being: People who constantly evaluate their happiness tend to experience lower life satisfaction and greater depressive symptoms.
Negativity About Positivity: Participants who focused on judging their happiness felt more negative about positive events.
Acceptance Over Judgment: Accepting emotions, rather than judging them, may lead to better psychological well-being.

Source: APA

Judging how happy you are could backfire and negatively impact life satisfaction and psychological well-being, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

In three experiments comprising more than 1,800 participants, researchers found that having concerns or judgments about one’s own level of happiness were associated with lower well-being, due in part to greater negativity and disappointment about positive events.

The research was published in the journal Emotion.

Thinking too much about one’s own level of happiness could be related to fears about not measuring up or not being as happy as other people, said lead researcher Felicia Zerwas, PhD, who was a doctoral student at the University of California-Berkeley during this research and is now a postdoctoral researcher at New York University.

“There are plenty of societal pressures, at least within the United States, which encourage the fallacy that people must feel happy all of the time to achieve greater well-being,” she said.

“Overall, allowing yourself to experience your emotions, whether they are positive or negative, with an accepting attitude could be a useful tool for pursuing happiness and increasing well-being.”

Contrary to some previous studies, the current research found that the pursuit of happiness, or viewing happiness as a very important goal, didn’t have any detrimental impacts on well-being.

However, judging one’s own level of happiness did. The research included various samples of participants, including Yale University students, community members from Denver and Berkeley, California, and online studies with participants from the United States and Canada.

The participants answered questions about their beliefs about happiness, as well as their psychological well-being and depressive symptoms.

Being concerned about one’s own happiness was associated with lower overall life satisfaction and psychological well-being, as well as greater depressive symptoms.

The research also found that having concerns about one’s own happiness was associated with greater negativity about positive events.

“Having high expectations for one’s happiness can be detrimental because it makes it more difficult to achieve the level of happiness that we are expecting from a positive event,” Zerwas said.