Tag: Christine Carter

Three Risky Ways to Fall Deeply in Love

Love feels magical and biological—something that just happens to us, something beyond our control. Research shows, however, that love is better thought of as behavioral—or even transactional. Yes, hormones play a role, but much more important is how we act with the object of our affection. We do certain things, and those actions foster the emotions we associate with being in love. According to researcher Barbara Fredrickson, author of Love 2.0, we create our feelings of love, day after day. Or we don’t create them, and love fades.

So what actions lead to love? Here are three – in honor of Valentine’s Day – all based on fostering vulnerability. Before you run for the woods, hear me out. Yes, vulnerability can be uncomfortable because it involves, by definition, emotional exposure, uncertainty, and risk. But vulnerability allows trust and intimacy to develop and deepen, creating strong feelings of connection and love.

Action #1: Take a risk together.

Researchers think we tend to unconsciously conflate the high-arousal induced by doing something risky with the high-arousal of intense attraction—the two states feel similar. This creates a similar biochemistry and physiology as when we are first falling in love.

This Valentine’s Day, go straight for that adrenaline rush by doing something risky. Venture to an unknown place that feels a little daunting. Visit a karaoke bar, and actually sing. Try a new sport, one where you risk feeling silly or uncoordinated.

Action #2: Get naked…emotionally.

What can you reveal to your partner that he or she doesn’t already know about you? Ask your date intimate questions to which you aren’t sure you know the answer. We come to like people more when we engage in escalating, gradual back-and-forth “personal self-disclosure.”

Love comes from action, not waiting to be adored. Share on X

Researchers have long been able to create profound feelings of being in love through self-disclosure (even between strangers!). Check out the 36 questions that Arthur Aron and his colleagues used to do this in the lab. And don’t forget: How you respond when your partner is making him or herself vulnerable is also important. (Hint: turn off your phone and pay attention.)

Action #3: Gaze into each other’s eyes.

Directly, for four full minutes. Set a timer. Don’t talk. Breathe. Relax.

This technique has been widely cited as a part of the experiment by Arthur Aron and pals—though I haven’t been able to find reference to it in a published study. Still, this seems like a very solid tactic for creating feelings of intimacy and love.

Stanford researcher Fred Luskin has people do this in his workshops, and it definitely creates big feelings of vulnerability. (Which is good, remember. The exposure is terrifying, but that is what we are after here.)

Take Action: Choose one or more of the three actions above to do with your Valentine and then make a plan for making it happen.

Join the Discussion: What other ideas do you have for making yourself vulnerable in the service of greater intimacy and connection?

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If you want more intimacy in your key relationships, you will love my eCourse, The Science of Finding Flow! Enroll now for $99 using the coupon code FLOW99. This is a steal, friends–that’s more than half off! Enroll here.

Photo by James Marvin Phelps

What’s a Good Friend Worth?

We spend a lot of time working, hoping to increase our feelings of well-being by making more money. But we’d do better to cultivate our close connections to other people because when our relationships flourish, so do we. This is because love sets into motion the same physiology of ease that other positive emotions do, but often more powerfully.

This short video is from a series about fostering social connections from the “Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. Want to go on to the next class or start the course from the beginning? It’s free! Just go to The Science of Finding Flow course page. Enjoy!

by Christine Carter

Tuesday Tip: The Best Habit To Start Now

You already know, of course, that getting into a regular exercise routine is probably the best thing you can do for yourself — whether you want to be happier, healthier, skinnier, or smarter. Even though you already know this, I’m going to remind you. Why? Because I think we sometimes forget that the hassles of exercise don’t usually outweigh the benefits. Reams of research show that:

1) Exercise boosts your energy by delivering oxygen and nutrients to your brain and muscles. It helps your cardiovascular and muscular system work more efficiently, which gives you more strength and endurance (and therefore energy). Exercise also triggers the production of insulin receptors, which means that your body is able to better utilize glucose, or blood sugar — the raw energy that your body runs on.

2) Exercise reduces stress and anxiety. While aerobic exercise has been shown to alleviate anxiety disorders, even people who don’t struggle with a disorder report feeling less anxious after exercise.
3) Physical movement makes us happier, in part by fostering the neurochemicals in your body and brain that leave you happier and more relaxed. Doctors in the UK often prescribe exercise as a first-line treatment for depression, it’s so effective!

“At every level, from the microcellular to the psychological, exercise not only wards off the ill effects of chronic stress; it can also reverse them. Studies show that if researchers exercise rats that have been chronically stressed, that activity makes the hippocampus grow back to its preshriveled state. The mechanisms by which exercise changes how we think and feel are so much more effective than donuts, medicines, and wine. When you say you feel less stressed out after you go for a swim, or even a fast walk, you are.”

― John J. Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain

4) Physical movement improves sleep — and better sleep also tends to makes us happier, healthier, and more productive during the day.

5) Exercise makes us healthier physically and helps us control our weight, so much that it increases longevity — the amount of time that we live. Physically active people have:

Reduced risk of heart attack
Lower blood cholesterol
Lower risk of Type 2 Diabetes
Lower risk of cancer
Lower blood pressure
Stronger bones, muscles, joints — and therefore lower risk of osteoporosis and risk of injury from falls.

6) It’ll improve your ability to focus, resist temptations, and make good decisions. According to John Ratey, author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, participants in an Australian study who exercised:

Reported that an entire range of behavior related to self-regulation took a turn for the better. Not only did they steadily increase their visits to the gym, they reported that they smoked less, drank less caffeine and alcohol, ate more healthy food and less junk food, curbed impulse spending and overspending, and lost their tempers less often. They procrastinate less and kept more appointments. And, they didn’t leave the dishes in the sink — at least not as often.

7) Physical activity conditions your brain for improved memory and learning. Exercise increases brain chemicals called “growth factors,” which help the brain both grow new neurons and establish new connections between existing neurons. This helps us learn, adapt to change, and move what we learn into long-term memory.

I hope, looking at this long list of benefits — which is not even exhaustive, by the way — that you are feeling more motivated to make a plan to get in a daily exercise habit! If you know you want to get in an exercise habit but aren’t sure where to begin, please let me help! Enroll in my 21 Day Exercise Mini-Course — it’s only $9.99, and you’ll get free live coaching from me as a part of it.

by Christine Carter

FREE Live Webinar: Awakening Joy in Kids

Mark your calendars! I’m hosting a free, 45-minute online webinar on January 10, 2017 with James Baraz and Michele Lilyanna. We’ll be talking about their new book Awakening Joy For Kids and sharing our top tips for resolving the issues that parents struggle with most. During this free, 45-minute webinar you’ll learn how to:

Support kids who are down or anxious.
Foster gratitude instead of entitlement.
Incorporate habits for more fulfilling parenting and happier kids.
Get kids to do boring but necessary tasks (like chores!)

Wouldn’t you and your family benefit from a little more joy? Learn more or register here.

by Christine Carter

Health & Happiness Reminder: Try Meditation

I’m sure you already know this: Scores of studies have shown the benefits of meditation to be broad and profound, including the inducement of positive emotions like feelings of calm.

Personally, I have a long history of intending to meditate (more), and then not doing it. Sometimes it helps me to remind myself that meditation is not wasted time, and it is not time during which I’d be better off doing something else.

Meditation lowers our stress and anxiety, helps us focus, and (somewhat ironically since it involves time dedicated to doing nothing) makes us more productive.

Meditation even makes us healthier! After meditating daily for eight weeks, research subjects were 76 percent less likely than a non-meditating control group to miss work, and if they did get a cold or a flu, it lasted only five days on average, whereas control group illness lasted an average of eight days.

Click here to download the meditation PDF

“Meditation lowers our stress and anxiety, helps us focus, and (somewhat ironically since it involves time dedicated to doing nothing) makes us more productive..” Share on X

This post is taken from “The Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. I’m sharing “lessons” from this online class here, on my blog. Want to see previous posts? Just click this The Science of Finding Flow tag. Enjoy!

by Christine Carter

Flow Class Video: Introduction to Unit 4 – Focus!

This video is the first in a series about how to focus from my online course, the Science of Finding Flow.

“If you can’t focus enough to think deeply, you won’t ever fulfill your potential.”

This video is from “The Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. Want to go on to the next class or start the course from the beginning? It’s free! Just go to The Science of Finding Flow course page. Enjoy!

by Christine Carter

How do you want to feel?

This post is from a series about how we choose to spend our time in my online course, Science of Finding Flow. Read the rest here.

Pause for a moment and think about how you want to feel when you find your flow. Don’t think about what you want to achieve or accomplish; think about how you want to feel. Shooting for the feeling-state that you want more of (maybe you want more happiness, confidence, or fulfillment) will always take you down a different path than setting your sights on a particular achievement. Emotions are more motivating—and far more fulfilling—than an achievement goal in the long run.

Maybe you you really want to grow your business, but you’re too exhausted and overwhelmed right now and you need to learn how to accomplish more by doing less. An achievement goal would be to grow your business by 25%. But probably what you want to feel is successful, while at the same time feeling well-rested.

Next, we are going to identify the activities in your life that already produce the feeling-state you are looking for. These activities don’t need to be habits or things you have done recently; they just need to be things that have produced the emotions you are after in the past. We human beings are terrible at predicting what will make us feel happy (or feel anything positive) in the future. Although we think we know what will make us happier, plenty of research shows that we tend to be wrong about what actually does.

We have better success in the future when we look at what has produced the results we are looking for in the past.

For example, a client of mine identified that she wanted to feel more calm, and two activities that make her feel calm are walking her dog in the morning and meditating.

Having a nice long list of the tasks, circumstances, behaviors and activities that already make you feel how you want to feel is going to be handy for the next few activities we’ll introduce.

Join the Discussion

Spend some time reflecting on the feeling state that you are after. How do you want to feel when you find your flow? Which activities and pastimes have produced the feelings that you want to feel?

This post is taken from “The Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. I’m sharing one “lesson” from this online class per week here, on my blog. Want to see previous posts? Just click this The Science of Finding Flow tag. Enjoy!

by Christine Carter

How to Amplify Your Positive Emotions

Sometimes good things happen to us, but we don’t really register them — we hardly look up from our phones, we barely slow down to notice.

Fred Bryant is a social psychologist and author of Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience. He researches the benefits of being really aware of your feelings when something is going right. Bryant and his collaborators have found that savoring can strengthen your relationships, improve mental and physical health, and help you find more creative solutions to problems. In other words, savoring creates the physiology of ease, along with all the benefits.

You can amplify your positive emotions with this savoring technique:

Take a mental photograph of something that you are enjoying. Pause, and “swish the experience around in your mind,” as Bryant instructs, making yourself more aware of your positive feelings and what you want to remember, such as the sound of your children giggling or the sight of a beautiful vista.

Celebrating good news is also a form of savoring, as is repetitively replaying and reveling in happy moments—like a graduation, a fantastic soccer game, or a vacation. A more extreme form of savoring is Rick Hanson’s method of “taking in the good.” Hanson, a neuropsychologist who writes about how we humans are hardwired to mostly remember bad things while forgetting the good ones, puts it this way: Our mind acts “like Teflon for positive” memories and “Velcro for negative ones.” This is not good for our emotion ratios: If most of the memories we store are negative, we come to perceive the world as depressing, even threatening.

Fortunately, Hanson gives us a method for making our positive feelings and events more “sticky.” Here’s how to “Take in the Good:”

Click here to download the taking in the good PDF

by Christine Carter

Why It’s Generous to Ask for a Favor

A fun fact: Asking for favors can strengthen your connections to other people. Because giving to others brings the giver such huge benefits, when we give others the chance to help us out, we are also giving them the opportunity to reap the benefits of being a giver. But asking people for favors also strengthens our connections by increasing our own likability. Although we typically assume we do favors for people we like, it turns out that we also report liking someone more once we do them a favor! This phenomenon has been dubbed the “Franklin effect” because Benjamin Franklin once said, “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.” Franklin was right.

What favors do you need from others? Who can you ask to fulfill those favors?

This post is from a series about social connections from the “Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. Want to go on to the next class or start the course from the beginning? It’s free! Just go to The Science of Finding Flow course page. Enjoy!

by Christine Carter

Flow Class: The Perils of Multitasking

This post is from a series about how to focus from my online course, the Science of Finding Flow.

It is incredibly easy to tip into “cognitive overload” these days, as we have information (and stuff) coming at us from all angles. In 1976, supermarkets stocked, on average, 9,000 items. Today, they stock an average of 40,000 items. According to cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, information scientists have quantified how overwhelmed by information the poor human brain is. “In 2011, Americans took in five times as much information every day as they did in 1986–the equivalent of 175 newspapers. During our leisure time, not counting work, each of us processes 34 gigabytes or 100,000 words every day.”

So how do we deal with this overwhelming amount of stuff and information?

We multitask.

The corollary to the belief that busyness is a sign of success is that multi-tasking is necessary for productivity (or even survival).

But skilled multi-tasking is actually nothing to brag about. Multi-tasking is the enemy of focus. The human brain did not evolve to focus on many things at once; it evolved to focus on one thing at a time. And so the brain does not actually ever multitask. It can’t actually run multiple apps at any one time; it can only switch rapidly between tasks. This is a giant energy drain for your brain.

Multi-tasking is the enemy of focus. The human brain did not evolve to focus on many things at once. Share on X

Research has shown that multitasking:

1. Keeps us from learning easily and recalling what we need to know. When we constantly switch our attention from one thing to another, which we do super-rapidly when we multitask, our overloaded brain stops using the hippocampus, which is the area of the brain responsible for learning and memory. This makes it nearly impossible to learn something new while multitasking, and it hinders our ability to recall what we already know.

2. Makes it harder for us to ignore irrelevant information. Which ironically makes us feel more overwhelmed.

3. Hinders our ability to organize our thoughts, which slows us down and makes us prone to doing unimportant and irrelevant work.

4. Cripples our ability to transition from one task or activity to another. Another irony, giving that multitasking IS rapid switching (from the brain’s perspective).

5. Increases the odds that a person will suffer from anxiety and depression. It also makes it more likely that we will experience boredom.

6. It increases our stress and tensions levels, and this is exhausting.

7. It slows down the speed of our work, but increases our error rate. Despite the widespread belief that multitasking is a productivity technique, wouldn’t you say that anything that makes us slower and decreases the quality of our work is, um, not really a best practice?

When we just focus on one task at a time, we’re actually more productive in the long run, and we’re less exhausted at the end of the day. This is because multitasking exhausts more energy and time than single-tasking does.

Distractions are costly

Take it from productivity experts Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy:

A temporary shift in attention from one task to another—stopping to answer an email or take a phone call, for instance—increased the amount of time necessary to finish the primary task by as much as 25 percent, a phenomenon known as “switching time.”

It used to actually be harder for me to single-task than it was to multitask; true focus can require a lot of willpower in this day and age. But when we set ourselves up to focus–to single-task–we allow ourselves to access that unique brain state that allows us to do our best work. And time seems to stand still. This is the very opposite of busyness.

The first and most important step to finding your flow is to build yourself a fortress against interruption so that you can single-task instead of multitask. If you can’t concentrate, you can’t be in your sweet spot. Period.

Multitasking is a state of continual interruption.

And if you keep getting interrupted, you can’t achieve the state of deep concentration that you need for flow. Even if you like the interruptions (as when you get funny texts from a friend). Even if the interruptions are good for your work (as when a colleague stops by to answer a question). If you take one thing away from this unit, let it be this: No focus, no flow.

This “class” is from “The Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. Want to go on to the next class or start the course from the beginning? It’s free! Just go to The Science of Finding Flow course page. Enjoy!