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| Category: Continuing Education |
Date published: June 25, 2007 |
Are Personality, Attitude & Longevity Connected?
Ask this question (as we did) of one thousand students and executives, and the response is 74% link-free. Most of us believe longevity is genetic, your parents and grandparents control your lifespan.
About 25% favor pure chance (getting struck down in your prime by a 16 wheeler) or God-driven. Religious folks see an analogy between splitting the Red Sea for Moses, and their own ability to live almost as long as Methuselah. The modern version is not 969 years, but a century.
The Greek Fates (Moirae)
No one voted for Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, the three ancient Greek sisters of fate. The first spins your thread of life; the second measures your hold on life by a thread, and Atropos, the fate who cuts your thread. Bye.
Epicurus (341-270 C.B.E.)
"Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not!" Go argue that.
Intuitive
Our non-reasoning belief (intuition) about natural stuff is mostly wrong. How can the planet earth move around the sun, we would all be falling down? The damn planet earth is revolving at 900 miles per hour. How about dropping a brick and a feather from the tower? Galileo allegedly dropped different weighted balls from the top of the Tower of Pisa and discovered the time of descent is independent of their mass. He contradicted Aristotle whose ideas about acceleration and velocity were wrong for about 500 years.
Longevity And Attitude
During 1972-3 ten thousand citizens of Heidelberg, Germany joined a research project by Dr. Grossarth Maticek. The purpose was to produce evidence about the relationship between Personality, Attitude and Health. It involved learning and using your coconut as a life style.
The results of having a positive personality, (measuring feelings of pleasure, well-being and learning), were tested again twenty-one years later. Folks who tested high on greeting each day with pleasure, expectation and learning (yes, you can test for it), were 30 times more likely to live twenty years later, than grouches, hypochondriacs and those with negative attitudes.
We all know our own personality style, right?
Dr. Hans Eysenck published Maticek's research in English and concluded your personality is more important than genetics, life style, smoking and diet in predicting longevity. Eysenck is no small potatoes; he is considered the father of personality and temperament theories used by scientists.
Four Types of Personality
The Greeks also believed in typing attitude.
a) Sanguine: cheerful and optimistic. It means blood, and an abundant supply of blood makes you ruddy in appearance and feels good.
b) Choleric: aggressive with a hot, quick temperament.
c) Phlegmatic: slow, lazy and dull (mucus in lungs. Cold!
d) Melancholy: (Gk for black bile) cause the temperament to make you sad, pessimistic and depressed.
Compare the above to these personality types: 1. Self-esteem 2. Emotional stability 3. Extrovert/introvert, and 4. Conscientiousness. Which lead to career success?
Today
Neuroscientists today know temperament is more about the dominance of our Sympathetic Nervous System (adrenalin a/ka/a epinephrine, and serotonin) and the power of fight-or-flight. Panic attacks and our emotional response to emergency situations often rule our lives. Some of us consider ambiguous circumstances as life threatening, right?
The other choice is our Parasympathetic Nervous System (acetylcholine), which leads to relaxation. Together both constitute our autonomic nervous system. Consider the personality trait of being an extrovert or introvert. Extroverts often have a strong inhibition toward fear and do not respond quickly to fight-or-flight.
Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz
If you had to read one book in the next five years on your brain, we suggest The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force by Dr. Schwartz. It truly rules.
Four approaches to run your mind.
a) Relabeling: means making mental notes of WHAT occurs. Consciously ask yourself what is happening? It changes your beliefs and behaviors.
b) Reattributing: why is it happening? Options change your thinking and behavior.
c) Refocusing: place your attention and focus on new adaptive behavior in place of the maladaptive one grinding you down.
d) Revaluing: our emotional reaction to the environment and our own body can be modified or inhibited. It deals with wise attention, the use of mindful awareness.
Endwords
What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind. T. H Key. If you aint got mind, nothing matters. Dr. Schwartz offers up the power of our conscious mind; he tells us Freud transferred too much strength to our subconscious.
He awakens us to the reality of our will, the power of Directed Mental Effort. There is no defined brain state until our attention is focused. No excuses, the responsibility is ours. Consciousness is subjective, an inner awareness.
What if life-long-learning produces added longevity of 10-20 health years? Use-it-or-lose-it means using your noodle to avoid standard resistance to change. We recommend learning and remembering three books, articles and reports in the time it presently takes you to hardly finish one. Ask us how.
See ya,
copyright 2007,
H. Bernard Wechsler
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