59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot (22 page)

Spend a few moments thinking about the positive aspects of the event that you found hurtful. For example, did the event help you …

• grow stronger or become aware of personal strengths that you didn’t realize you had?
  

• appreciate certain aspects of your life more than before?
  

• become a wiser person?
  

• enhance important relationships or end bad ones?
  

• become more skilled at communicating your feelings?
  

• bolster your confidence?
  

• develop into a more compassionate or forgiving person?
  

• repair and strengthen your relationship with a person who hurt you?
  

• identify any of your own shortcomings that may stand in the way of your happiness?
  

Write down how you have benefited from the experience and how your life is better as a result of what happened. Do not withhold anything and be as honest as possible.

   
FOUR 15-SECOND TIPS FOR CONQUERING STRESS

When you sense danger, your body gears up for action as you prepare either to run away or stand your ground. Unfortunately, the stress of modern-day life can result in this system’s being triggered constantly. Whether it stems from not being able to find a parking space or an argument with the kids, most people hit the “fight or flight” button on an all too regular basis. Although mild amounts of stress may help some people focus on the task at hand, constant problems can take their toll, eventually sending the stress meter rocketing and causing increased blood pressure, concentration difficulties, worry, weight gain, and a weakening of the immune system. However, there are several quick and easy ways of bringing your blood pressure back down to earth.

Help Yourself by Praying for Others
. Research conducted by Neal Krause at the University of Michigan suggests that praying for others might be good for your health.
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After interviewing more than a thousand people about the nature of their prayers, finances, and health, Krause discovered that praying for others helped reduce the financial stresses and strains of the person doing the praying and improved their own well-being. Interestingly, praying for material things, such as a new car or a better house, offered no such protection.

Study the Classics
. Sky Chafin at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues at other universities examined which music best reduces blood pressure after a stressful event.
⁷
Their work involved making people anxious by having them count down aloud from 2,397 in sets of 13, i.e., 2397, 2384, et cetera. To make matters worse, every thirty seconds the experimenter harassed the participants with negative feedback (“Come on, get a move on”) and urged them to speed up. Afterward, some of the participants were left alone to recover in silence, while others were played either classical music (Pachelbel’s
Canon
and Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons: Spring
, movement 1), jazz (including “Flamenco Sketches” by Miles Davis), or pop music (Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” and the Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash into Me”). Blood pressure readings revealed that listening to pop or jazz music had the same restorative effect as total silence. In contrast, those who listened to Pachelbel and Vivaldi relaxed much more quickly, and so their blood pressure dropped back to the normal level in far less time.

Here Comes the Sun
. Work conducted by Matthew Keller at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics, and outside colleagues, looked at the relationship between the sun and emotion.
⁸
The team discovered that hot weather, indicated by higher temperatures and barometric pressure, caused people to be in a better mood and improved their memory, but only if they had spent more than thirty minutes outside. People who had spent less than the magic half hour in the sun were actually in a poorer mood than usual. Perhaps, as the authors suggested, people resent being cooped up when the weather is pleasant.

Get in Touch with Your Inner Clown
. Laugh and the whole world laughs with you, cry and you increase your chances of a heart attack. Well, at least that is the general conclusion from research examining the psychology of humor and stress. People who spontaneously use humor to cope with stress have especially healthy immune systems, are 40 percent less likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke, experience less pain during dental surgery, and live four and a half years longer than average.
⁹
In 2005 Michael Miller and his colleagues at the University of Maryland showed people scenes from films that were likely to make them feel anxious (such as the opening thirty minutes of
Saving Private Ryan)
or make them laugh (such as the “orgasm” scene from
When Harry Met Sally)
. Participants’ blood flow dropped by about 35 percent after watching the stress-inducing films, but rose by 22 percent following the more humorous material. On the basis of the results, the researchers recommended that people laugh for at least fifteen minutes each day.

PAWS FOR THOUGHT

There are many ways in which a dog can make you feel better. Scientists have conducted numerous studies that examine how you might benefit from having a four-legged friend.

Some of the best-known research, run by Erika Friedmann at the University of Maryland, and outside colleagues, investigated the possible relationship between dog ownership and cardiovascular functioning.
¹⁰
After carefully following the recovery rates of patients who had suffered a heart attack, Friedmann discovered that those who were dog owners, compared
to those without a canine pal, were almost nine times more likely to be alive twelve months later. This remarkable result encouraged scientists to explore other possible benefits of canine companionship, resulting in studies showing that dog owners coped well with everyday stress, were relaxed about life, had high self-esteem, and were less likely to be diagnosed with depression.
¹¹

The magnitude of these benefits should not be underestimated. One study measured the blood pressure and heart rate of dog owners as they carried out two stressful tasks (counting backward by threes from a four-digit number and holding their hand in a bucket of ice water) while in the presence of their pet or spouse.
¹²
The participants had lower heart rates and blood pressure and made far fewer errors on the counting task in the presence of their dog than they did if their partner was present—scientific evidence, if any is needed, that your dog is better for your health than your husband or wife is.

Interestingly, the same cannot be said for cats. Some studies show that living with a cat may help alleviate negative moods but is unlikely to make you feel especially good,
¹³
and others suggest that cat owners may actually be more likely than others to die in the twelve months following a heart attack.
¹⁴

Promising as they may seem, such studies do have one huge problem. Although dog ownership is related to a more relaxed attitude toward life and a healthier cardiovascular system, that doesn’t necessarily mean that having a dog is the cause of these benefits. People who own a dog may have a certain type of personality, and it could be that which is responsible for their longer and less stressful lives.

To help separate correlation from causation, Karen Allen at the State University of New York at Buffalo conducted a much-needed study.
¹⁵
She assembled a group of city stockbrokers who suffered from hypertension, randomly divided them
into two groups, and gave each person in one group a dog to look after. Both groups had their blood pressure monitored over a six-month period. The results revealed that the stockbrokers with dogs were significantly more relaxed than those in the control group. In fact, when it came to alleviating the effects of mental stress, the dogs proved more effective than one of the most commonly used drugs to treat hypertension. More important, as the people were randomly assigned to the “dog” and “no dog” condition, there was no difference in personality between the groups, and so that factor could not account for the findings. In addition to feeling less stressed, the hard-nosed city types had become emotionally attached to their animals, and none of them accepted the opportunity of returning their newfound friends at the end of the study.

Several theories have been proposed to explain why owning a dog should be good for you. It could be that the exercise associated with daily walking benefits your physical and psychological health. Others have argued that dogs act as the ultimate “nonjudgmental friend,” patiently listening to your innermost thoughts and never passing your secrets on to others. Seen in this way, dogs are like a devoted therapist, albeit one with woolly ears, a wet nose, and low fees. An alternative theory is that simply touching or stroking a dog could have a calming and beneficial effect (evidence shows that even a nurse holding a patient’s hand significantly lowers the patient’s heart rate).
¹⁶

However, most researchers acknowledge that one of the most important factors centers on the social benefits of owning a dog. Spend time in a park frequented by people out walking their dogs and you will quickly see how man’s best friend encourages strangers to talk to one another (“Aw, how cute. … What breed is he?” “What a lovely dog … How old is she?” “Look at what I’ve just stepped in … Did he do that?”). A large body of research has demonstrated that spending
time with other people is a major source of happiness and health, and dogs’ inadvertent but effective ability to bring people together is likely to play a major role in promoting the well-being of their owners.

But just how good are dogs at initiating such meetings, and what kind of dog is best for networking? To find out, animal psychologist Deborah Wells from Queen’s University Belfast arranged for a researcher to give up several lunch hours in order to walk back and forth along the same stretch of road with a variety of dogs. Each walk continued until the researcher had passed three hundred people coming in the opposite direction. Another experimenter, walking a few paces behind, secretly noted whether each passerby looked at the researcher, smiled at her, or stopped to talk. For three of the trips the researcher was accompanied by a yellow Labrador puppy, an adult Labrador, or an adult Rottweiler. As a control experiment, on three other days she walked alone, carrying a twenty-inch brown teddy bear (chosen to have attention-grabbing big brown eyes, short limbs, and a high forehead) or a yucca plant.

Finally, 1,800 passersby and 211 conversations later, the results revealed that the teddy bear and the plant initiated lots of looking but did not result in very much smiling and resulted in almost no chatting. In contrast, the dogs caused people to look, smile, and chat. The Rottweiler produced a very low chat rate, presumably because people associated the breed with aggression and liked the idea of keeping their throats intact and fully functional. In contrast, around one in ten people stopped to chat to the researcher when she was with the adult or puppy Labrador.
¹⁷

This study is not the only one to support the notion that people talk to those with animals. Previous work found that a female experimenter sitting on a park bench received more
attention from passersby when she had a pet rabbit or turtle at her side than when she sat alone blowing bubbles or next to a working television set.
¹⁸

IN 59 SECONDS

There are two key messages from this research. First, owning a dog helps to relieve the stresses and strains of everyday life, in part because it promotes social contact. Second, to maximize the chances of such meetings, choose a Labrador rather than a Rottweiler, teddy bear, yucca plant, television set, or bubble mixture.

However, if your lifestyle is incompatible with owning a dog, there are still two things that you can do to gain the benefits of a four-legged friend.

i-dog

You could consider getting a robotic dog, rather than a real one. Recent research by Marian Banks and her colleagues at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine examined the effects of robot dogs and real dogs on patient loneliness in long-term-care facilities.
¹⁹
The research team took a living dog or a Sony AIBO to each facility on a weekly basis, spending about thirty minutes with patients on each visit. During the course of eight weeks, patients formed the same strength of emotional bond with both types of dog, and both helped to alleviate feelings of loneliness to the same extent.

Tune in to Animal TV.

In an innovative study, Deborah Wells examined whether merely looking at a video of an animal can have the same type of calming and restorative effects as those created by being in its company.
²⁰
She created three short videotapes (ten fish swimming in a plantfilled
aquarium, ten parakeets in an aviary, or ten monkeys sitting in trees) and took participants’ blood pressure before and after they watched the videos. In one control condition, Wells organized another group of people to watch a videotape of a well-known soap opera, and still another to watch a blank television screen. Two main findings emerged. First, physiologically speaking, watching the soap opera was almost identical to staring at a blank television screen. Second, compared to the two control conditions, all three animal videos made the participants feel much more relaxed. To help reduce your heart rate and blood pressure in less than a minute, go online and watch a video of a cute animal.