Category Archives: Health

After posting about positivity the other day, I went into a yoga class themed around joy. We read a passage about joy from Barbara Kingsolver, and then Keith, the teacher, talked about how joy is a skill. We practiced the skill in yoga by attempting to notice three things in 90 minutes that we thought glorious. At the end of the class we shared those “finds” with each other.

Another thing we did in class to discover joy was partner assists in different poses. We gave our partner a quick massage, but before we began, we silently said to ourselves, “I come in peace.” We also briefly meditated across from our partner, and were encouraged to notice something beautiful about them.

Once I got going, I noticed a lot of glorious things: the rich tones of Keith’s “om,” the clean wooden floor, the red curls of a woman named Anna, my own ability to put my foot in my hand and extend my leg (almost) all the way out, the excitement of discussing Kingsolver’s books with my classmates before we left to go home, and the beautiful skin of my partner.

Here is the Kingsolver passage, from High Tide in Tucson: Essays From Now or Never:

In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: a perfect outline of a dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with life again, like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.

I try to shut off the part of my mind that objects to the corniness of this passage and the practices in yoga, and keep looking for the joy. And as I sit down to my computer to start work for the day, I try to say I come in peace.

Awhile back, I posted about positive-to-negative ratios in meetings, and how the ideal ratio in meetings between positive and negative comments is at least 3 to 1. Danuta McCall helpfully posted a link to the original research (my information came from an interview Barbara Fredrickson did with The Sun).

My goal for graduate school has always been to enjoy the experience. At times, that has seemed impossible–even laughable. However, Fredrickson & Losada say that even fleeting positive emotions can accrue over time, giving one a storehouse of positivity that can:

1. widen the scope of attention
2. facilitate flexibility and a broader range of thoughts & responses
3. increase intuition & creativity
4. promote adaptability to new situations
5. increase immune system functioning
6. promote resilience to adversity
7. reduce inflammatory responses to stress

You don’t have to be happy every moment to get these benefits–brief positive emotions help you in the present but also the future. This is partly because positive emotions trigger more positive emotions.

Let’s go back to #2 for a moment: positive people are less predictable, which indicates a greater ability to come up with original thought and meaningful insight. (Incidentally, positive people have better marriages, too, precisely because they are less predictable.)

Interestingly, there is an upper limit to how positive one should be. At a positive-to-negative ratio of 11.6 to 1, flourishing decreases. Intuitively, this makes sense to me: people who are incessantly cheery often seem fake or just ignorant. Indeed, the research shows that positivity perceived as fake is basically the same as negativity.  And you can imagine how hard it would be to learn in an environment where you were never criticized.

The Future Mister Doctor is my role model for positivity: he has a great capacity for gratitude, confidence in his accomplishments, and a tendency to dwell on the positive in conversations. Work colleagues of his frequently gush about all the wonderful things he’s told them about me. In contrast, my friends know about the Future Mister Doctor’s hot temper, his chronic lateness, etc. Indeed, during marriage preparation workshops we discovered that he was, in a sense, in a better relationship than I was. But more importantly for the purposes of productivity, the Future Mister Doctor works long hours, has a huge number of meetings and social interactions per day, and yet succeeds because he is  what he calls “actionable”–he gets his clients results. Not only that, but he has liked every job he’s ever had.

In a way, I don’t want to praise the Future Mister Doctor too much, because I don’t think he works at being positive. For whatever reason (nature/nurture), it comes easily to him. But I do think it’s possible for the more chronically negative person to build up their stores of positivity–exercising to release endorphins, keeping a “gratitude diary” of good things in one’s life, saying small prayers of thanksgiving, wearing ultra-soft socks, etc.

I think most of us get into academia looking for meaningful work. Like Lloyd Dobbler, we don’t want to “sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed.”

When doing meaningful work, it’s easy to conflate your identity and your career. And that’s not good, especially when your dissertation writing isn’t going well. The natural cycles of writing and revision that involve frustration, inspiration, procrastination start to feel like endless cycles of self-destruction and self-reconstruction. It wears a person out.

In my undergraduate days, I believed I could have an extreme version of loving my job, where I was happy all the time. But that’s not what teaching or writing have been for me. And here I am in Missouri, surrounded by people who have made a commitment to meaningful work–they grow their own sustainable food, they tend their chickens and their bees and their maple trees. But guess what? They did not leap out of bed with glee yesterday in their non-air-conditioned houses on a 97 degree day. They complained all through lunch. And the rain that brought relief from the heat also brought a little relief from work–most of them weren’t sad to delay some of their outdoor projects.

In trying to dissociate my dissertation from myself sometimes I have pushed it too far away–it seems irrelevant, uninteresting, and not meaningful. Today I am thinking about how to work outside of these extremes. The dissertation is not me, but there is something about it that I want to keep pursuing.