World Economic Forum – This is how your relationships are affecting your sleep – Written by Royette Tavernier, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Wesleyan University in collaboration with The Conversation.

Studies have shown that the quality of our relationships may determine how healthy we are, how well we recover from illness and even how long we live.

However, little is known about how relationships affect sleep. This is especially true for young, unmarried individuals. Teens and emerging adults, in particular, generally do not get the recommended amount of sleep and report a number of sleep problems, such as difficulty falling asleep and daytime fatigue.

Researchers have now started to investigate how relationships with friends and family affect nighttime sleep – particularly among teens and emerging adults.

Results from our recent study with high school students suggest that, even when we go to bed alone, the company we keep by day may determine how well we sleep at night.

Romantic relationships and sleep

Most previous studies have focused on married couples and adults.

In one study of 78 married couples, being worried about a spouse’s availability was linked to more trouble sleeping.

In another study, researchers asked 29 couples to keep diaries on their daily relationship experiences and sleep habits. On days when women reported more positive interactions with their partner, they had more efficient sleep. In other words, they had a higher percentage of actual sleep time compared to the amount of time spent lying in bed.

Interestingly, men also had more efficient sleep when their female partners reported more positive relationship experiences.

Among U.S. college students, a general sense of security in relationships with others was linked to less disturbed sleep – regardless of whether or not students were currently in a committed relationship.

Social ties at college

In our research, we focused on how platonic relationships at college affect how well students slept.

In one study, we asked more than 900 Canadian students about their social life during their first year of college.

One year later, the students who had reported being more engaged in social activities had fewer sleep problems. They had less difficulty falling asleep and staying asleep throughout the night.

Having a more active and positive social life during the first year of college led to better stress management. That subsequently made it easier for students to fall asleep and stay asleep throughout the night. This pattern was still present in their third year of college.

The reverse was also true: Students with fewer sleep problems during their first year of college reported making more friends and participating in more social activities a year later.

It turns out that having optimal sleep promotes our ability to effectively deal with stress. That, in turn, allows us to be more socially engaged with others.

Friends, family and sleep among children and teens

Many studies ask participants to report on their own sleep. But does this information hold up when we objectively measure the quality of sleep?

In one recent study, we tracked the daily habits of 71 American youth for three days. Students wore a watch-like sleep monitoring device on their non-dominant wrist. This device uses a technique called actigraphy to track activity throughout the night. This eliminated the bias involved in having individuals personally tell us about their sleep.

We measured the total number of hours asleep, how long it took to fall asleep after going to bed and the actual percentage of time spent sleeping relative to how long they lay in bed. We also asked participants to report how much time they spent interacting face to face with friends and family.

Youth fell asleep more easily on days when they spent more time than usual interacting with friends. But they took longer to fall asleep on days when they spent more time than usual with family.

Time spent with family, specifically at night, may include highly emotional events, such as parent-child conflicts, chores or discussions about the day’s events. These family activities may subsequently delay the start of sleep.

We were particularly intrigued by age differences in these associations. Younger participants did not have the same experiences as older participants with respect to sleep efficiency.

Older teens – those over 16.3 years old – who spent several hours face to face with their family had 4 percent more efficient sleep than those who spent less time with their family. However, for children under 12.7 years old, family time did not affect sleep.

Perhaps older teens benefit more from longer family time because of increased academic and social problems, which may require extra family support.

Meanwhile, younger children who spent more time with friends slept 6 percent more efficiently than those who spent less. It may be because this age is a crucial transitioning period, when friends can provide emotional support and facilitate identity development.

Improving our sleep

Teens should heed the importance of their friendships as a vehicle for well-being. For pre-teen children, teens, and emerging adults, friends help regulate negative emotions in a way that consequently improves how well we sleep.

Poor sleep has been linked to a number of mental and physical health issues, including depression and cardiovascular disease.

Parents and teachers should be encouraged to facilitate environments that promote budding friendships among youth. Medical practitioners may also gain additional insight into adolescents’ health by assessing problems with friend and family relationships.

World Economic Forum – This is the secret to leading a good life. – Written by Frank T. McAndrew, Professor of Psychology, Knox College, in collaboration with The Conversation.

In the 1990s, a psychologist named Martin Seligman led the positive psychology movement, which placed the study of human happiness squarely at the center of psychology research and theory. It continued a trend that began in the 1960s with humanistic and existential psychology, which emphasized the importance of reaching one’s innate potential and creating meaning in one’s life, respectively.

Since then, thousands of studies and hundreds of books have been published with the goal of increasing well-being and helping people lead more satisfying lives.

So why aren’t we happier? Why have self-reported measures of happiness stayed stagnantfor over 40 years?

Perversely, such efforts to improve happiness could be a futile attempt to swim against the tide, as we may actually be programmed to be dissatisfied most of the time.

You can’t have it all

Part of the problem is that happiness isn’t just one thing.

Jennifer Hecht is a philosopher who studies the history of happiness. In her book “The Happiness Myth,” Hecht proposes that we all experience different types of happiness, but these aren’t necessarily complementary. Some types of happiness may even conflict with one another. In other words, having too much of one type of happiness may undermine our ability to have enough of the others – so it’s impossible for us to simultaneously have all types of happiness in great quantities.

For example, a satisfying life built on a successful career and a good marriage is something that unfolds over a long period of time. It takes a lot of work, and it often requires avoiding hedonistic pleasures like partying or going on spur-of-the-moment trips. It also means you can’t while away too much of your time spending one pleasant lazy day after another in the company of good friends.

On the other hand, keeping your nose to the grindstone demands that you cut back on many of life’s pleasures. Relaxing days and friendships may fall by the wayside.

As happiness in one area of life increases, it’ll often decline in another.

A rosy past, a future brimming with potential

This dilemma is further confounded by the way our brains process the experience of happiness.

By way of illustration, consider the following examples.

We’ve all started a sentence with the phrase “Won’t it be great when…” (I go to college, fall in love, have kids, etc.). Similarly, we often hear older people start sentences with this phrase “Wasn’t it great when…”

Think about how seldom you hear anyone say, “Isn’t this great, right now?”

Surely, our past and future aren’t always better than the present. Yet we continue to think that this is the case.

These are the bricks that wall off harsh reality from the part of our mind that thinks about past and future happiness. Entire religions have been constructed from them. Whether we’re talking about our ancestral Garden of Eden (when things were great!) or the promise of unfathomable future happiness in Heaven, Valhalla, Jannah or Vaikuntha, eternal happiness is always the carrot dangling from the end of the divine stick.

There’s evidence for why our brains operate this way; most of us possess something called the optimistic bias, which is the tendency to think that our future will be better than our present.

To demonstrate this phenomenon to my classes, at the beginning of a new term I’ll tell my students the average grade received by all students in my class over the past three years. I then ask them to anonymously report the grade that they expect to receive. The demonstration works like a charm: Without fail, the expected grades are far higher than one would reasonably expect, given the evidence at hand.

And yet, we believe.

Cognitive psychologists have also identified something called the Pollyanna Principle. It means that we process, rehearse and remember pleasant information from the past more than unpleasant information. (An exception to this occurs in depressed individuals who often fixate on past failures and disappointments.)

For most of us, however, the reason that the good old days seem so good is that we focus on the pleasant stuff and tend to forget the day-to-day unpleasantness.

Self-delusion as an evolutionary advantage?

These delusions about the past and the future could be an adaptive part of the human psyche, with innocent self-deceptions actually enabling us to keep striving. If our past is great and our future can be even better, then we can work our way out of the unpleasant – or at least, mundane – present.

All of this tells us something about the fleeting nature of happiness. Emotion researchers have long known about something called the hedonic treadmill. We work very hard to reach a goal, anticipating the happiness it will bring. Unfortunately, after a brief fix we quickly slide back to our baseline, ordinary way-of-being and start chasing the next thing we believe will almost certainly – and finally – make us happy.

My students absolutely hate hearing about this; they get bummed out when I imply that however happy they are right now – it’s probably about how happy they will be 20 years from now. (Next time, perhaps I will reassure them that in the future they’ll remember being very happy in college!)

Nevertheless, studies of lottery winners and other individuals at the top of their game – those who seem to have it all – regularly throw cold water on the dream that getting what we really want will change our lives and make us happier. These studies found that positive events like winning a million bucks and unfortunate events such as being paralyzed in an accident do not significantly affect an individual’s long-term level of happiness.

Assistant professors who dream of attaining tenure and lawyers who dream of making partner often find themselves wondering why they were in such a hurry. After finally publishing a book, it was depressing for me to realize how quickly my attitude went from “I’m a guy who wrote a book!” to “I’m a guy who’s only written one book.”

But this is how it should be, at least from an evolutionary perspective. Dissatisfaction with the present and dreams of the future are what keep us motivated, while warm fuzzy memories of the past reassure us that the feelings we seek can be had. In fact, perpetual bliss would completely undermine our will to accomplish anything at all; among our earliest ancestors, those who were perfectly content may have been left in the dust.

This shouldn’t be depressing; quite the contrary. Recognizing that happiness exists – and that it’s a delightful visitor that never overstays its welcome – may help us appreciate it more when it arrives.

Furthermore, understanding that it’s impossible to have happiness in all aspects of life can help you enjoy the happiness that has touched you.

Recognizing that no one “has it all” can cut down on the one thing psychologists know impedes happiness: envy.

 

World Economic Forum – How parents can help their children combat stress – Written by Joan Brasher, Public Affairs Officer at Vanderbilt University.

A new study outlines which coping strategies work best for stressed children and teens.
“Chronic stress is bad for adults, but it is particularly troublesome for children…”
The study is a meta-analysis of more than 200 coping and emotion regulation studies that included more than 80,000 young people. Learning effective ways to manage stress is especially important for children, says lead author Bruce Compas, professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University.
“Chronic stress is bad for adults, but it is particularly troublesome for children, because among many other effects, it can disrupt still-developing white matter in the brain, causing long-term problems with complex thinking and memory skills, attention, learning and behavior.
“We found that the ways children cope are highly personal, and the strategies they choose do not always lead to ameliorating the negative effects of stress.”
For the purposes of the study, common coping strategies were divided into five categories: problem solving, emotional suppression, cognitive reappraisal, distraction, and avoidance. Researchers measured the effect of these strategies on the subjects’ internalized symptoms like depression, anxiety, and loneliness, as well as external manifestations of stress like antisocial behavior and aggression.
“In this new work, we found that when the subjects used adaptive strategies, like looking at a problem in a different way, engaging in problem solving or pursuing constructive communication, they were better able to manage the adverse effects of stress,” Compas says. “Those who used maladaptive strategies like suppressing, avoiding, or denying their feelings, had higher levels of problems associated with stress.”
The findings echo what Compas has learned through his longitudinal studies of children coping with cancer and other chronic pediatric conditions.
“Most or all of the stressful aspects of cancer are uncontrollable, from the diagnosis itself to the treatments, to the side effects of treatments, and the uncertainty about the future,” he says.
“We have found time and again that the most effective strategies for coping with these types of uncontrollable stress are ones that involve adapting to the stressors rather than trying to change the stressors,” Compas says.
Whether a child or teen’s stress is triggered by anxiety about a new school or something far more serious, parents can play a key role in helping them manage their stress successfully.
He offers these tips:
1. Make time to listen to your child and let them share with you the stresses and challenges they are facing. No need to give any advice at first, just listen and let them share what they are struggling with.
2. Remind yourself and your child of the first rule of coping with stress: “Try to change the things you can change, and accept the things you cannot change.”
3. Think out loud with your child about how you have coped with similar situations in the past or how you might cope with the situation if you haven’t faced a similar stressor in the past.
4. Encourage your child to make a plan and then follow up in a day or two. If the first plan doesn’t seem to help, think it through together and try another plan until either the problem has changed or your child has been able to accept the problem and adapt to it.
“Stress is the single most potent risk factor for mental health problems in children and adolescents, including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress syndrome, eating disorders, and substance use,” Compas says. “But the good news is the brain is malleable. Once positive coping skills are learned and put into practice, especially as a family, they can be used to manage stress for a lifetime.”

From World Economic Forum, written by University of Arizona in collaboration with Futurity. – Why growing up in a high-stress environment could tap into hidden skills.

Children who grow up in high-stress environments may be at higher risk for learning or behavioral trouble, but new research suggests that their skills warrant more attention.

Stress-adapted youth may possess traits—such as heightened vigilance, attention shifting, and empathic accuracy—that traditional learning and testing situations don’t tap into. These skills may actually allow at-risk children to perform better than their peers from low-risk backgrounds when faced with uncertainty and stress.

Having a better understanding of those stress-adapted skills could help educators and other experts work with children and adults who have grown up in stressful circumstances more successfully, says JeanMarie Bianchi, a psychology lecturer at the University of Arizona and coauthor of the paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science.

“Once we are able to catalog the psychological advantages that are promoted by stressful early life conditions, we may be able to apply that to how we teach, from preschool through college, making learning more effective for individuals from different backgrounds.”

Existing research shows that the more stressors children are exposed to, the more their performance in traditional learning and testing situations is compromised. Those stressors might include things such as neighborhood danger, food insecurity, exposure to environmental chemicals, bad housing conditions, neglectful or abusive parenting, low-quality child care, and peer or school violence.

While the detrimental effects of growing up in a high-stress environment are real and well-documented, they represent only part of the picture, says lead author Bruce J. Ellis, a University of Utah psychology professor.

“…the dominant approach assumes at-risk youth are somehow broken and need to be fixed.”

“The other part is that children fine-tune their abilities to match the world that they grow up in, which can result in enhanced stress-adapted skills. We’re trying to challenge a world view and give consideration to an alternative adaptation-based approach to resilience.”

The prevailing idea is that interventions are needed to prevent, reduce, or repair the damage done to children who have grown up in high-stress situations. Most interventions are aimed at countering these deficits and getting “children and youth from high-risk backgrounds to act, think, and feel more like children and youth from low-risk backgrounds,” the authors write. In other words, the dominant approach assumes at-risk youth are somehow broken and need to be fixed.

“Our argument is that stress does not so much impair development as direct or regulate it toward these strategies that are adaptive under stressful conditions,” Ellis says. “Stress-adapted children and youth may perform better on tasks that involve situations and relationships that are relevant to them, such as social dominance. They also may perform better in settings that do not attempt to minimize the reality of daily stressors and uncertainties.”

There are several instances of studies with animals that show that developmental exposure to stress can improve forms of attention, perception, learning, memory, and problem solving.

“It was so fascinating when we looked at the animal literature, there is actually a large body of research that supports the idea that stressful and chaotic environments can enhance certain skills,” Bianchi says.