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How You Tell the Story of Your Life By Senia Maymin (Positive Psychology News Daily) Jennifer
Aniston will be starring in a movie about Positive Psychology. The
movie is expected to be called “Counter Clockwise,” and Aniston will
play Harvard Professor Ellen Langer studying how to turn back the clock
on aging. In
1979, Ellen Langer undertook a study in which she
put elderly men into a setting that made them think that the year was
1959. According
to the Harvard
Crimson, “The magazines,
newspapers, and music the men saw and heard were all 20 years old and
the men themselves were told to behave and talk as if it were 1959. … Over
the course of a week, signs of aging appeared to reverse and the
men looked visibly younger. The subjects’ joints became more flexible,
their posture straightened, and the lengths of their fingers, which
typically shorten with age, actually increased.” Examples
of how their work was exercise were
provided. Langer
and Crum told the control group nothing. Four
weeks later, Langer and Crum returned to find some measurements of
both groups: the control group hadn’t changed physically, but the test
group had decreased all of the following: weight, blood pressure, body
fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index. Furthermore,
we can ask, what are the stories that these
hotel workers are telling themselves? Why do the hotel workers suddenly
believe that they actively affect their exercise regiment? In his
book Learned
Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life The
“nun study” outlined on
the first page of Seligman’s book Authentic
Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential
for Lasting Fulfillment Furthermore,
in Learned Optimism, Seligman
describes that he and colleague Christopher Peterson had access to a
large body of data about men from a young age to an older age (the
Grant Study of George Vaillant). Seligman
and Peterson looked at the
words that the men used at age twenty-five and determined how
optimistic or pessimistic the men sounded. Seligman
and Peterson
found that the degree of optimism at age twenty-five predicted healthy
at age sixty! At
Northwestern University, Jonathan Adler, a
doctoral candidate and Dan McAdams, a professor, study how people
describe their problems in therapy (whether a fear of flying or
depression or relationship issues). Adler
describes that some
people tell a story of “victorious battle: ‘I ended therapy because I
could overcome this on my own.’” McAdams
sees the relevance of
stories in all parts of a person’s life: “We find that when it comes to
the big choices people make — should I marry this person? should I take
this job? should I move across the country? — they draw on these
stories implicitly, whether they know they are working from them or
not.” Another
key to leaving an issue behind, states the article,
may be whether a person recounts a story in the first person (”I, me”)
or in the third person (”her, Senia”). Half
the
students were asked to recall the story in the first-person and half
were told to imagine it in the third-person. Those
who recalled
it in the third-person then rated themselves as having become less
socially awkward since high school. Furthermore,
both sets of
students then had to wait in a room with a researcher posed as a
waiting student, but the researcher was really taking notes on the
sociability of the research students. The
result? The
third-person imaginers started up a conversation much more frequently
than the first-person imaginers. Lisa
Libby says of the research, “People who
are looking for change in themselves don’t sense that they’ve made as
much progress when they look back in first-person, and that could be
discouraging. … "Using
the third-person is a good technique to see the
positive changes you’ve made in your life, and that is likely to lead
to greater satisfaction with your efforts. That, in turn, should make
it easier to continue with your efforts to reach your goals.” Even
for a child, you can ask specific questions to
learn about identification with a character: Could
there be an exercise along the lines of the
following: “Imagine a difficult time in your childhood. See the
little boy or girl who was you, and forgive that little person. "See
all the details and all the injustices. And then let them all
go. And think about how you have changed from that person.”
This
sounds remarkably similar to an exercise I was once asked to do in
a health psychology class. Senia
Maymin, MBA, MAPP is an Executive Coach, and presents workshops to
corporations about Positive Psychology. Senia is the Editor of Positive
Psychology News Daily, and posts her latest ideas about positive
psychology, business, and coaching at Senia.com. Senia’s bio. Article
from Positive Psychology News Daily - May 25, 2007 ~ ~ ~ Ellen Langer is
author of The
Power of Mindful Learning. 'Blackdog' drawing
above
by Blaqriot
 Related
Talent Development Resources pages:mental
health...[front
page] counseling / therapy ~ ~ ~ |
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In the February, 2007 issue of Psychological Science,
Langer and colleague Alia Crum reported that they took 84 hotel workers
and told one group that “the work they do (cleaning hotel rooms) is
good exercise and satisfies the Surgeon General’s recommendations for
an active lifestyle." 
,
Seligman outlines that HOW a person tells a story can be an indicator
of physical health and mental health. 
describes how
different nuns of a sample of 180 told their life stories: those that
described the world in optimistic terms and using positive emotions
tended to live longer. 
, suggests that there are
simple ways to find out what stories people make up for
themselves. 