By ofwisdomowl 
“What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind. “BUDDHA
The lesson Buddha and Aurelius had taught centuries earlier: “Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.
Break the cycle by changing the thoughts
- Depressed people are convinced in their hearts of three related beliefs, known as Beck’s “cognitive triad” of depression. These are: “I’m no good,” “My world is bleak,” and “My future is hopeless.” A depressed person’s mind is filled with automatic thoughts supporting these dysfunctional beliefs, particularly when things goes wrong. Depressed people are caught in a feedback loop in which distorted thoughts cause negative feelings, which then distort thinking further. Beck’s discovery is that you can break the cycle by changing the thoughts.
- A big part of cognitive therapy is training clients to catch their thoughts, write them down, name the distortions, and then find alternative and more accurate ways of thinking. Cognitive therapy works because it teaches the rider how to train the elephant rather than how to defeat it directly in an argument.
FULL SUMMARY
Chapter 1 – The Divided Self
To understand most important ideas in psychology, you need to understand how the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. In some ways we are each more like a committee whose members have been thrown together to do a job, but who often find themselves working at cross purposes.
The brain divides its processing of the world into its two hemispheres—left and right. The left hemisphere takes in information from the right half of the world and sends out commands to move the limbs on the right side of the body. The right hemisphere is in this respect the left’s mirror image, taking in information from the left half of the world and controlling movement on the left side of the body.
The left hemisphere is specialized for language processing and analytical tasks. In visual tasks, it is better at noticing details. The right hemisphere is better at processing patterns in space, including that all-important pattern, the face. (This is the origin of popular and oversimplified ideas about artists being “right-brained” and scientists being “left-brained”).
THIRD DIVISION: NEW VS. OLD
Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior, but emotion (a major part of the elephant) does most of the work.
FOURTH DIVISION: CONTROLLED VS. AUTOMATIC
Controlled processing is limited—we can think consciously about one thing at a time only—but automatic processes run in parallel and can handle many tasks at once.
Automatic processes have been through thousands of product cycles and are nearly perfect. The automatic system has its finger on the dopamine release button. The controlled system, in contrast, is better seen as an advisor. It’s a rider placed on the elephant’s back to help the elephant make better choices.
In sum, the rider is an advisor or servant; it is conscious, controlled thought. The elephant, in contrast, is everything else. The elephant includes the gut feelings, visceral reactions, emotions, and intuitions that comprise much of the automatic system.
FAILURES OF SELF CONTROL
An emotionally intelligent person has a skilled rider who knows how to distract and coax the elephant without having to engage in a direct contest of wills.
It’s hard for the controlled system to beat the automatic system by willpower alone; Once you understand the power of stimulus control, you can use it to your advantage by changing the stimuli in your environment and avoiding undesirable ones;
Chapter 2 – Changing Your Mind
The whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it.—MARCUS AURELIUS1
What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind.—BUDDHA
Events in the world affect us only through our interpretations of them, so if we can control our interpretations, we can control
The lesson Buddha and Aurelius had taught centuries earlier: “Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”
NEGATIVITY BIAS
One final point about the amygdala: Not only does it reach down to the brainstem to trigger a response to danger but it reaches up to the frontal cortex to change your thinking. It shifts the entire brain over to a withdrawal orientation.
When Shakespeare’s Hamlet later offers his own paraphrase of Marcus Aurelius—“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”
THE CORTICAL LOTTERY
happiness is one of the most highly heritable aspects of personality.
A person’s average or typical level of happiness is that person’s “affective style.. Your affective style reflects the everyday balance of power between your approach system and your withdrawal system,
People showing more of a certain kind of brainwave coming through the left side of the forehead reported feeling more happiness in their daily lives and less fear, anxiety, and shame than people exhibiting higher activity on the right side.
research showed that these cortical “lefties” are less subject to depression and recover more quickly from negative experiences.
HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND
The discovery is that meditation tames and calms the elephant. Meditation done every day for several months can help you reduce substantially the frequency of fearful, negative, and grasping thoughts, thereby improving your affective style.
Buddha said: “When a man knows the solitude of silence, and feels the joy of quietness, he is then free from fear and sin.”
Cognitive Therapy
Meditation is a characteristically Eastern solution to the problems of life. Even before Buddha, the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu had said that the road to wisdom runs through calm inaction, desire-less waiting. Western approaches to problems more typically involve pulling out a tool box and trying to fix what’s broken.
Depressed people are convinced in their hearts of three related beliefs, known as Beck’s “cognitive triad” of depression. These are: “I’m no good,” “My world is bleak,” and “My future is hopeless.” A depressed person’s mind is filled with automatic thoughts supporting these dysfunctional beliefs, particularly when things goes wrong.
Depressed people are caught in a feedback loop in which distorted thoughts cause negative feelings, which then distort thinking further. Beck’s discovery is that you can break the cycle by changing the thoughts.
A big part of cognitive therapy is training clients to catch their thoughts, write them down, name the distortions, and then find alternative and more accurate ways of thinking.
Cognitive therapy works because it teaches the rider how to train the elephant rather than how to defeat it directly in an argument.
Chapter 4 – The Faults of Others
Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? . . . You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.—MATTHEW 7: 3
FINDING THE GREAT WAY
Meditation has been shown to make people calmer, less reactive to the ups and downs and petty provocations of life.
Cognitive therapy works, too. Write down your thoughts, learn to recognize the distortions in your thoughts, and then think of a more appropriate thought. In a conflict, look at the world from your opponent’s point of view, and you’ll see that he/she is not entirely right or wrong
By seeing the log in your own eye you can become less biased, less moralistic, and therefore less inclined toward argument and conflict.
Chapter 5 – The Pursuit of Happiness
Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.—EPICTETUS
Happiness can only be found within, by breaking attachments to external things and cultivating an attitude of acceptance.
THE PROGRESS PRINCIPLE
When it comes to goal pursuit, it really is the journey that counts, not the destination.
THE ADAPTATION PRINCIPLE
It is change that contains vital information, not steady states.
Good fortune or bad, you will always return to your happiness set point—your brain’s default level of happiness—which was determined largely by your genes.
AN EARLY HAPPINESS HYPOTHESIS
Buddha, Epictetus, and many other sages saw the futility of the rat race and urged people to quit. They proposed a particular happiness hypothesis: Happiness comes from within, and it cannot be found by making the world conform to your desires.
THE HAPPINESS FORMULA
Noise, especially noise that is variable or intermittent, interferes with concentration and increases stress. It’s worth striving to remove sources of noise in your life.
Overall, attractive people are not happier than unattractive ones. Yet, surprisingly, some improvements in a person’s appearance do lead to lasting increases in happiness.
Good relationships make people happy, and happy people enjoy more and better relationships than unhappy people.
FINDING FLOW
Csikszentmihalyi’s big discovery is that there is a state many people value even more than chocolate after sex. It is the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one’s abilities. It is what people sometimes call “being in the flow“
The keys to flow: There’s a clear challenge that fully engages your attention; you have the skills to meet the challenge; and you get immediate feedback about how you are doing at each step
Choose your own gratifying activities, do them regularly (but not to the point of tedium), and raise your overall level of happiness.
Chapter 6 – Love and Attachments
LOVE CONQUERS FEAR
If you want your children to grow up to be healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, cuddle them, and love them. Give them a secure base and they will explore and then conquer the world on their own.
IT’S NOT JUST FOR CHILDREN
Bowlby had been specific about the four defining features of attachment relationships: 23 1. proximity maintenance (the child wants and strives to be near the parent) 2. separation distress (self-explanatory) 3. safe haven (the child, when frightened or distressed, comes to the parent for comfort) 4. secure base (the child uses the parent as a base from which to launch exploration and personal growth)
Once you think about it, the similarities between romantic relationships and parent-infant relationships are large
For adults, the biggest rush of oxytocin—other than giving birth and nursing—comes from sex. 28 Sexual activity, especially if it includes cuddling, extended touching, and orgasm, turns on many of the same circuits that are used to bond infants and parents. It’s no wonder that childhood attachment styles persist in adulthood: The whole attachment system persists.
Chapter 7 – The Uses of Adversity
MUST WE SUFFER?
People who are mentally healthy and happy have a higher degree of “vertical coherence” among their goals—that is, higher-level (long term) goals and lower-level (immediate) goals all fit together well so that pursuing one’s short-term goals advances the pursuit of long-term goals.
BLESSED ARE THE SENSE MAKERS
Optimists are more likely to benefit than pessimists. They have a high happiness setpoint, they habitually look on the bright side, and they easily find silver linings. Life has a way of making the rich get richer and the happy get happier.
ERROR AND WISDOM
Wise people are able to balance their own needs, the needs of others, and the needs of people or things beyond the immediate interaction
Second, wise people are able to balance three responses to situations: adaptation (changing the self to fit the environment), shaping (changing the environment), and selection
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” If you already know this prayer, your rider knows it (explicitly). If you live this prayer, your elephant knows it, too (tacitly), and you are wise.
Chapter 10 – Happiness Comes from Between
LOVE AND WORK
We get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them because, as Shakespeare said, “Joy’s soul lies in the doing.”