​January 1, 2006/2 Comments//by Martha Beck

​It was a problem I’d never anticipated: My brainy daughter was having trouble in school. Katie began teaching herself to read at 15 months and tested at a “post–high school” level in almost every subject by fourth grade. Yet her middle-school grades were dropping like a lead balloon, and her morale along with them. I cared more about the morale than the grades. I knew Katie was quickly losing something educational psychologists call her sense of self-efficacy—her belief that she could succeed at specific tasks and life in general. People who lack this trait tend to stop trying because they expect to fail. Then, of course, they do fail, feel even worse, shut down even more, and carry on to catastrophe.
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I couldn’t understand what put Katie on this slippery slope. True, some people seem genetically inclined to believe in themselves—or not—but experience powerfully influences our sense of self-efficacy. I knew Katie had been confident as a preschooler, but her current trouble at school was destroying her optimism. I tried to help in every way I could. I created homework-checking systems, communicated with teachers like bosom buddies, doled out penalties and rewards. Mostly, though, I just kept cheering Katie on. I was sure that if she would stop hesitating, believe in herself, and just throw herself into the task at hand, she’d get past the problem.
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Boy, was I ever wrong.
It took years of confidence-battering struggle—for both Katie and me—before I finally got the information I needed. It came from a no-nonsense bundle of kindly energy named Kathy Kolbe, a specialist on the instinctive patterns that shape human action. Kathy’s father pioneered many standardized intelligence tests, but Kathy was born with severe dyslexia, which meant that this obviously bright little girl didn’t learn in a typical way. She grew up determined to understand and defend the different ways in which people go about solving problems.

The day Katie and I met her, Kathy was wearing a T-shirt that said “do nothing when nothing works,” a motto that typifies her approach. On her desk were the results from the tests (the Kolbe A and Y Indexes) that my daughter and I had just taken to evaluate our personal “conative styles,” or typical action patterns.
“Well,” said Kathy, glancing at a bar graph, “I see you both listen better when you’re drawing.”
Katie and I stared at each other, astonished. Bull’s-eye.
“And you’ve both had a zillion teachers tell you to stop drawing. They said you could do only one thing at a time, but that’s not true for you two, is it? You have a hard time focusing if there’s nothing to occupy your eyes and hands.”

Unexpectedly, I found myself tearing up with gratitude. I’d never realized how frustrated I’d been by the very situation Kathy was describing. Katie sat up a little straighter in her chair.
“But,” Kathy went on, “Martha, you go about problem-solving in a different way from Katie. There are four basic action modes, and you’re what I call a Quick Start. When you want to learn, you just jump in and start messing around.”

Another bull’s-eye. I cannot count the times I’ve been defeated, humiliated, or physically injured immediately after saying the words, “Hey, how hard can it be?” But that never seems to stop me from saying them again.
“Now,” Kathy went on, “Katie’s not a Quick Start. She’s a Fact Finder. Before she starts a task, she needs to know all about it. She needs to go through the instructions and analyze them for flaws, then get more information to fill in the gaps.”

To my amazement, my daughter nodded vigorously. I’ve never understood why some people hesitate before diving into unfamiliar tasks or activities. I couldn’t imagine wanting more instructions about anything.
“There are two other typical patterns,” Kathy explained. “The people I call Implementors—like Thomas Edison, for example—need physical objects to work with. They figure out things by building models or doing concrete tasks. Then there are the Follow Thrus. They set up orderly systems, like the Dewey decimal system or a school curriculum.

“And that, Katie,” she said, “is why you’re having trouble. The school system was created mainly by people who are natural Follow Thrus. It works best for students with the same profile. Your teachers want you to fit into the system, but you have a hard time seeing how it works. If you question the instructions—which you absolutely need to do—they think you’re being sassy.”

Katie nodded so hard I feared for her cervical vertebrae. I was stunned. I’d spent years trying to understand my daughter, and a veritable stranger had just nailed the problem in ways I’d never even conceptualized. Katie wanted more instructions? You could have knocked me down with a feather.

Basic InstinctI’ve told this story in detail because since meeting Kathy, studying her work, and seeing how dramatically it affects people and their productivity, I’ve become convinced that many of us feel like failures because we don’t recognize (let alone accept) that our instinctive methods of acting are as varied as our eye color. Our modus operandi shapes the way we do everything: make breakfast, drive, learn math. Not recognizing natural differences in our conative styles—assuming instead that we’re idiots because we do things unconventionally—can destroy that precious sense of self-efficacy.

Imagine a race between four animals: an otter, a mole, a squirrel, and a mouse. They’re headed for a goal several feet away. Which animal will win? Well, it depends. If the goal is underground, my money’s on the mole. If it’s in a tree? Hello, Mr. Squirrel. Underwater, it’s the otter. And if the goal is hidden in tall grass, the mouse will walk away with it. Now, all these animals can swim, dig, climb, and find things in the grass. It’s just that each of them does one of these things better than the others. Putting all four animals in a swimming race, say, would lead to the conclusion that one was better than the others, when the truth is simply that their innate skills are different.
If we’re in an environment (such as school, a job, or a family tradition) that asks us to act against our natural style, we feel uncomfortable at best, tormented at worst. Even if we manage to conform, we don’t get a high sense of self-efficacy because although we’ve managed the efficacy part of the equation, we’ve lost the self. When we fail, we feel like losers; when we succeed, we feel like impostors.
Thanks to Kathy’s work (and centuries of psychological work on conation), I’ve stopped asking others to match my instinctive style. I no longer expect squirrels to swim and otters to climb trees. As a result, I’m better able to support myself, my children, and everyone else I know. Here’s a quick primer on how you can do the same:
ACCEPT THAT YOU HAVE AN INBORN, INSTINCTIVE STYLE OF ACTIONJust learning that there are four distinct patterns of action was a huge aha for me. When Katie and I accepted that we simply had different ways of doing things, our relationship and her confidence began to improve immediately. To identify your own action-mode profile, you can take a formal online test (the Kolbe Index at kolbe.com; there is a charge), or just observe your own approach to getting something done. To give you an example, people with different profiles might respond to a challenge—let’s say, learning to crochet—in the following ways:

• Quick Start: If you’re a Quick Start who wants to crochet, you’ll probably buy some yarn and a hook, get a few tips from an experienced crochetmeister, and jump right into trial and error.

• Fact Finder: You’ll spend hours reading, watching, asking questions, and learning about crocheting before actually beginning to use the tools.

• Implementor: You pay less attention to words than to concrete objects, so you might draw a pattern of a crochet stitch or even create a large model using thick rope, before you go near a needle.

• Follow Thru: You’ll likely schedule a lesson with a crochet teacher or buy a book that proceeds through a yarn curriculum, learning new stitches in order of difficulty.

None of these approaches is right or wrong. They can all succeed brilliantly. But someone who’s programmed to use one style will feel awkward and discouraged trying to follow another. We can all master each style if we have to, the way a mole can swim or an otter can climb trees, but it’s not a best-case scenario.
So I finally stopped pressuring Katie to act like her Follow Thru teachers or her Quick Start mother. Instead I helped her find detailed information and gave her time to absorb it. She recently devoured a 1,000-page book on Web site design that I would not read if the alternative were death on the rack. It took her a month to finish the book. The next day, she made a Web site. Spooky.

Play to your strengthsOnce you know your instinctive style, brainstorm ways to make it work for you, not against you. For starters, choose fields of endeavor where you feel comfortable and competent. If you love systematic structure, don’t become a freelancer. If you are crazy about physical models, don’t force yourself to crunch financial statistics for a living.
To really boost your sense of self-efficacy, think of ways you could modify your usual tasks to suit your personal style. For example, Kathy suggested that Katie might ask for permission to do detailed research reports in place of other school assignments. I nearly threw up at the very thought, but to my astonishment Katie agreed enthusiastically.
Of course, you’ll inevitably interact with people whose instinctive patterns are different from yours. Otter, Mole, Squirrel, and Mouse may all show up in the same family, workplace, or book club. Occasionally, it’s fine to conform, using styles of action that don’t come naturally—but do it consciously and for a limited time, or your sense of self-efficacy will suffer. And finally…
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Team up with unlike othersAs long as Otter, Mole, Squirrel, and Mouse are forced to race in the same terrain, at least three of them will be out of their element, looking and feeling like failures. But think what they could do if they pooled their skills. They could access resources from the water, earth, trees, and fields, combining them in ways none of the animals could achieve alone. They could rule the world! (Or at least the backyard.)
This is the very best way to leverage an understanding of conative style—to create useful, complementary strategies instead of disheartening, competitive ones. Many of us have spent a lifetime trying to be what we’re not, feeling lousy about ourselves when we fail and sometimes even when we succeed. We hide our differences when, by accepting and celebrating them, we could collaborate to make every effort more exciting, productive, enjoyable, and powerful. Personally, I think we should start right now. I mean, hey, how hard can it be?

Please click HERE for the original link to the original article

Eric Barker, Barking Up The Wrong Tree     

​You get all kinds of happiness advice on the internet from people who don't know what they're talking about. Don't trust them.Actually, don't trust me either. Trust neuroscientists. They study that gray blob in your head all day and have learned a lot about what truly will make you happy.

UCLA neuroscience researcher Alex Korb has some insights that can create an upward spiral of happiness in your life.
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Here's what you and I can learn from the people who really have answers:

1. The most important question to ask when you feel down
Sometimes it doesn't feel like your brain wants you to be happy. You may feel guilty or shameful. Why?
Believe it or not, guilt and shame activate the brain's reward center.

Via The Upward Spiral:
Despite their differences, pride, shame, and guilt all activate similar neural circuits, including the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, insula, and the nucleus accumbens. Interestingly, pride is the most powerful of these emotions at triggering activity in these regions — except in the nucleus accumbens, where guilt and shame win out. This explains why it can be so appealing to heap guilt and shame on ourselves — they're activating the brain's reward center.
And you worry a lot, too. Why? In the short term, worrying makes your brain feel a little better — at least you're doing something about your problems.

Via The Upward Spiral:
In fact, worrying can help calm the limbic system by increasing activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and decreasing activity in the amygdala. That might seem counterintuitive, but it just goes to show that if you're feeling anxiety, doing something about it — even worrying — is better than doing nothing.
But guilt, shame, and worry are horrible, long-term solutions. So what do neuroscientists say you should do? Ask yourself this question:

What am I grateful for?
Yeah, gratitude is awesome … but does it really affect your brain at the biological level? Yup.
You know what the antidepressant Wellbutrin does? Boosts the neurotransmitter dopamine. So does gratitude.

Via The Upward Spiral:
The benefits of gratitude start with the dopamine system, because feeling grateful activates the brain stem region that produces dopamine. Additionally, gratitude toward others increases activity in social dopamine circuits, which makes social interactions more enjoyable …
Know what Prozac does? Boosts the neurotransmitter serotonin. So does gratitude.

Via The Upward Spiral:
One powerful effect of gratitude is that it can boost serotonin. Trying to think of things you are grateful for forces you to focus on the positive aspects of your life. This simple act increases serotonin production in the anterior cingulate cortex.
I know, sometimes life lands a really mean punch in the gut and it feels like there's nothing to be grateful for. Guess what?
Doesn't matter. You don't have to find anything. It's the searching that counts.

Via The Upward Spiral:
It's not finding gratitude that matters most; it's remembering to look in the first place. Remembering to be grateful is a form of emotional intelligence. One study found that it actually affected neuron density in both the ventromedial and lateral prefrontal cortex. These density changes suggest that as emotional intelligence increases, the neurons in these areas become more efficient. With higher emotional intelligence, it simply takes less effort to be grateful.

And gratitude doesn't just make your brain happy — it can also create a positive feedback loop in your relationships. So express that gratitude to the people you care about.
For more on how gratitude can make you happier and more successful, click here.
But what happens when bad feelings completely overtake you? When you're really in the dumps and don't even know how to deal with it? There's an easy answer …
Point out the things that upset you.ibm4381/Flickr


2. Label negative feelings
You feel awful. OK, give that awfulness a name. Sad? Anxious? Angry?
Boom. It's that simple. Sound stupid? Your noggin disagrees.

Via The Upward Spiral:
[I]n one fMRI study, appropriately titled "Putting Feelings into Words" participants viewed pictures of people with emotional facial expressions. Predictably, each participant's amygdala activated to the emotions in the picture. But when they were asked to name the emotion, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex activated and reduced the emotional amygdala reactivity. In other words, consciously recognizing the emotions reduced their impact.
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Suppressing emotions doesn't work and can backfire on you.
Via Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long:
Gross found that people who tried to suppress a negative emotional experience failed to do so. While they thought they looked fine outwardly, inwardly their limbic system was just as aroused as without suppression, and in some cases, even more aroused. Kevin Ochsner, at Columbia, repeated these findings using an fMRI. Trying not to feel something doesn't work, and in some cases even backfires.
But labeling, on the other hand, makes a big difference.

Via Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long:
To reduce arousal, you need to use just a few words to describe an emotion, and ideally use symbolic language, which means using indirect metaphors, metrics, and simplifications of your experience. This requires you to activate your prefrontal cortex, which reduces the arousal in the limbic system. Here's the bottom line: describe an emotion in just a word or two, and it helps reduce the emotion.
Ancient methods were way ahead of us on this one. Meditation has employed this for centuries. Labeling is a fundamental tool of mindfulness.

In fact, labeling affects the brain so powerfully it works with other people, too. Labeling emotions is one of the primary tools used by FBI hostage negotiators.

To learn more of the secrets of FBI hostage negotiators, click here.
Okay, hopefully you're not reading this and labeling your current emotional state as bored. Maybe you're not feeling awful but you probably have things going on in your life that are causing you some stress. Here's a simple way to beat them.

3. Make that decision
Ever make a decision and then your brain finally feels at rest? That's no random occurrence.
Brain science shows that making decisions reduces worry and anxiety — as well as helping you solve problems.

Via The Upward Spiral:
Making decisions includes creating intentions and setting goals — all three are part of the same neural circuitry and engage the prefrontal cortex in a positive way, reducing worry and anxiety. Making decisions also helps overcome striatum activity, which usually pulls you toward negative impulses and routines. Finally, making decisions changes your perception of the world — finding solutions to your problems and calming the limbic system.
But deciding can be hard. I agree. So what kind of decisions should you make? Neuroscience has an answer.
Make a "good enough" decision. Don't sweat making the absolute 100% best decision. We all know being a perfectionist can be stressful. And brain studies back this up. Trying to be perfect overwhelms your brain with emotions and makes you feel out of control.

Via The Upward Spiral:
Trying for the best, instead of good enough, brings too much emotional ventromedial prefrontal activity into the decision-making process. In contrast, recognizing that good enough is good enough activates more dorsolateral prefrontal areas, which helps you feel more in control …
As Swarthmore professor Barry Schwartz said in my interview with him: “Good enough is almost always good enough.”  So when you make a decision, your brain feels you have control. And, as I’ve talked about before, a feeling of control reduces stress. But here’s what’s really fascinating: Deciding also boosts pleasure.

Via The Upward Spiral:
Actively choosing caused changes in attention circuits and in how the participants felt about the action, and it increased rewarding dopamine activity.
Want proof? No problem. Let's talk about cocaine.
You give two rats injections of cocaine. Rat A had to pull a lever first. Rat B didn't have to do anything. Any difference? Yup: Rat A gets a bigger boost of dopamine.

Via The Upward Spiral:
So they both got the same injections of cocaine at the same time, but rat A had to actively press the lever, and rat B didn’t have to do anything. And you guessed it — rat A released more dopamine in its nucleus accumbens.
So what's the lesson here? Next time you buy cocaine … whoops, wrong lesson. Point is, when you make a decision on a goal and then achieve it, you feel better than when good stuff just happens by chance.
And this answers the eternal mystery of why dragging your butt to the gym can be so hard.
If you go because you feel you have to or you should, well, it's not really a voluntary decision. Your brain doesn't get the pleasure boost. It just feels stress. And that's no way to build a good exercise habit.

Via The Upward Spiral:
Interestingly, if they are forced to exercise, they don't get the same benefits, because without choice, the exercise itself is a source of stress.So make more decisions. Neuroscience researcher Alex Korb sums it up nicely:  We don't just choose the things we like; we also like the things we choose.

OK, you're being grateful, labeling negative emotions and making more decisions. Great, but this is feeling kinda lonely for a happiness prescription. Let's get some other people in here.
What's something you can do with others that neuroscience says is a path to mucho happiness? And something that's stupidly simple so you don't get lazy and skip it? Brain docs have an answer for you.
Have fun with friends.

4. Touch people
No, not indiscriminately; that can get you in a lot of trouble.
But we need to feel love and acceptance from others. When we don't it's painful. And I don't mean "awkward" or "disappointing." I mean actually painful.  Neuroscientists did a study where people played a ball-tossing video game. The other players tossed the ball to you and you tossed it back to them. Actually, there were no other players; that was all done by the computer program.

But the subjects were told the characters were controlled by real people. So what happened when the "other players" stopped playing nice and didn't share the ball?
Subjects' brains responded the same way as if they experienced physical pain. Rejection doesn't just hurt like a broken heart; your brain feels it like a broken leg.

Via The Upward Spiral:
In fact, as demonstrated in an fMRI experiment, social exclusion activates the same circuitry as physical pain … at one point they stopped sharing, only throwing back and forth to each other, ignoring the participant. This small change was enough to elicit feelings of social exclusion, and it activated the anterior cingulate and insula, just like physical pain would.Relationships are important to your brain's feeling of happiness. Want to take that to the next level? Touch people.

Via The Upward Spiral:
One of the primary ways to release oxytocin is through touching. Obviously, it's not always appropriate to touch most people, but small touches like handshakes and pats on the back are usually okay. For people you're close with, make more of an effort to touch more often.  Touching is incredibly powerful. We just don't give it enough credit. It makes you more persuasive, increases team performance, improves your flirting … heck, it even boosts math skills.  Touching someone you love actually reduces pain. In fact, when studies were done on married couples, the stronger the marriage, the more powerful the effect.

Via The Upward Spiral:
In addition, holding hands with someone can help comfort you and your brain through painful situations. One fMRI study scanned married women as they were warned that they were about to get a small electric shock. While anticipating the painful shocks, the brain showed a predictable pattern of response in pain and worrying circuits, with activation in the insula, anterior cingulate, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. During a separate scan, the women either held their husbands' hands or the hand of the experimenter. When a subject held her husband's hand, the threat of shock had a smaller effect. The brain showed reduced activation in both the anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex — that is, less activity in the pain and worrying circuits. In addition, the stronger the marriage, the lower the discomfort-related insula activity.

So hug someone today. And do not accept little, quick hugs. No, no, no. Tell them your neuroscientist recommended long hugs.

Via The Upward Spiral:
A hug, especially a long one, releases a neurotransmitter and hormone oxytocin, which reduces the reactivity of the amygdala.

Research shows getting five hugs a day for four weeks increases happiness big time.
Don't have anyone to hug right now? No? (I'm sorry to hear that. I would give you a hug right now if I could.) But there's an answer: Neuroscience says you should go get a massage.

Via The Upward Spiral:
The results are fairly clear that massage boosts your serotonin by as much as 30 percent. Massage also decreases stress hormones and raises dopamine levels, which helps you create new good habits … Massage reduces pain because the oxytocin system activates painkilling endorphins. Massage also improves sleep and reduces fatigue by increasing serotonin and dopamine and decreasing the stress hormone cortisol.
So spend time with other people and give some hugs. Sorry, texting is not enough.
When you put people in a stressful situation and then let them visit loved ones or talk to them on the phone, they felt better. What about when they just texted? Their bodies responded the same as if they had no support at all.

Via The Upward Spiral:
[T]he text-message group had cortisol and oxytocin levels similar to the no-contact group.
Author's note: I totally approve of texting if you make a hug appointment.
To learn what neuroscience says is the best way to get smarter and happier, click here.
OK, I don't want to strain your brain with too much info. Let's round it up and learn the quickest and easiest way to start that upward spiral of neuroscience-inspired happiness.
Sum upHere's what brain research says will make you happy:

• Ask "What am I grateful for?" No answers? Doesn't matter. Just searching helps.
• Label those negative emotions. Give it a name and your brain isn't so bothered by it.
• Decide. Go for "good enough" instead of 'best decision ever made on Earth."
• Hugs, hugs, hugs. Don't text — touch.

So what's the simple way to start that upward spiral of happiness?
Just send someone a thank-you email. If you feel awkward about it, you can send them this post to tell them why.

This really can start an upward spiral of happiness in your life. UCLA neuroscience researcher Alex Korb explains:
Everything is interconnected. Gratitude improves sleep. Sleep reduces pain. Reduced pain improves your mood. Improved mood reduces anxiety, which improves focus and planning. Focus and planning help with decision making. Decision making further reduces anxiety and improves enjoyment. Enjoyment gives you more to be grateful for, which keeps that loop of the upward spiral going. Enjoyment also makes it more likely you'll exercise and be social, which, in turn, will make you happier.

So thank you for reading this.  And send that thank-you email now to make you and someone you care about happy.

Please click HERE for link to original article from Business Insider

After growing up with Transcendental Meditation as a spiritual practice, the author visits public schools where it’s being used as a simple tool for stress-reduction and well-being. 
-  Jennie Rothernberg-Gritz ​​

 1974, the year before I was born, my parents had a small wedding in my aunt’s living room and then spent their honeymoon becoming teachers of Transcendental Meditation. Those were the days when just about everyone seemed to be doing it. “Plainly,” wrote the author Adam Smith in The Atlantic’s October 1975 cover story on meditation, “TM was the greatest thing since peach ice cream.” Meditation was enough of a cultural phenomenon that Woody Allen could use it as a punch line. The L.A. party scene in Annie Hall ends with Jeff Goldblum’s character placing a businesslike call to his instructor: “Yeah, I forgot my mantra.”
Considering how many 20-somethings learned to meditate in the 1970s, one might have predicted an explosion of meditating schools in the 1980s. Instead, Americans mostly forgot about the trend as they settled into the Reagan era. My parents were exceptions: They enrolled me in a small private school where the day began and ended with TM. It was an idyllic childhood in many ways, but my classmates and I always knew we lived in a bubble. One summer, at a resort in the Catskills, I listened as my aunt tried to explain my upbringing to a couple of her friends.

“Sure, I remember TM,” one woman replied. “I guess some people got caught up in meditation, just like some people got caught up in drugs.”
“And the rest of us,” her husband finished, “grew up and moved on with our lives.”

So I was fascinated when meditation recently started becoming mainstream again. Coworkers told me about mindfulness apps they were trying and friends mentioned yoga retreats they were planning to attend. The general idea seemed to be that meditation was not so much a technique for spiritual enlightenment as a common-sense lifestyle habit, like getting enough exercise or eating green vegetables. The insurance company Blue Shield featured a silhouette of an iconic meditator—legs crossed, hands turned upward on knees—in a recent brochure called “Ways for a balanced well-being.” A July New Yorker article by Jon Lee Anderson described a Cuban-born Miami entrepreneur as “a man of earnest American discipline. He meditates and does a hundred push-ups each morning.” In March, The Onion ran an article headlined “Annoying, Well-Adjusted Friend Even Fucking Meditating Now.”

​Over the past 10 years, small meditation programs have started cropping up at public schools around the country, in major cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. They’re most often found in low-income areas, where stresses have a way of compounding. When you spend time in these schools, as I recently did, you meet a staggering number of students who have been abandoned by at least one parent and left with relatives who are either overworked or unemployed. The kids themselves frequently take on after-school jobs and a lot of responsibility at home. One principal told me his students rush to and from school to avoid getting jumped or shot. All of this stress can put kids’ minds and bodies on high alert, making them fidgety and uneasy. A 2014 paper from the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child compared the overload to “revving a car engine for hours every day. This wear and tear increases the risk of stress-related physical and mental illness later in life.”

It’s hard to change the circumstances that create this kind of stress, though plenty of people are trying. But if you teach kids to meditate in the meantime, the thinking goes, you can help them reduce the stress itself. That reasoning always made sense to me, as someone who has been practicing TM since childhood and seen the research on adults, especially for stress-related problems like heart disease. Struggling schools need lots of things: better food, stronger math programs, and higher-quality teachers, to name just a few. One of those needs seems to be a way to reduce stress so kids can absorb information and go into the world as well-balanced, successful people.

Still, I had a hard time envisioning how meditation programs actually worked when they were dropped suddenly into public schools. Who were the principals who brought them in—did they have hidden mystical streaks, or were their motivations purely practical? Were the teachers enthusiastic or did they see meditation as yet another gimmick imposed on them from the outside? And how did the students really feel about it? Did they roll their eyes when the meditation bell rang or did they actually enjoy it? What was it like to grow up with just meditation—and no spiritual trappings surrounding it?

Vsitacion Valley Middle School sits at the top of one of San Francisco’s dramatic roller-coaster hills. It’s a deceptively pretty location: The surrounding neighborhoods, Visitacion Valley and the Bayview, are home to housing projects and the highest rates of violent crime in the city. Eighty-two percent of students at the middle school take part in the government’s free- or reduced-lunch program. “This is a neighborhood that’s had a lot of murders,” said Jim Dierke, the former Visitacion Valley principal, when I first visited a few years ago. “A lot of death, a lot of incarceration, and a lot of poverty and unhappiness.” In 2004, two of Dierke’s eighth graders found the decomposing body of a 19-year-old stabbing victim lying along the school fence. A few months after that, a gunman burst into the main office, threatening to shoot everybody in sight. Dierke vowed to make his school “an island of safety in a sea of trouble.” As he saw it, that meant not only improving their physical security but improving their ability to cope with the violence and tensions around them. That’s when he decided his school should try meditation.
Here, it’s worth noting that “meditation” is an extremely broad term. In schools, it can be used to describe a breathing exercise, a visualization, a positive affirmation, or even a mindful minute paying attention to the taste of a raisin. Transcendental Meditation is somewhat distinct among meditations because it’s a well-defined, trademarked program: Everyone who learns TM gets a mantra (a specific meaningless sound) and the same instructions for using it. Unlike mindfulness, TM doesn’t involve actively trying to change your mindset or be in the moment. All you do is mentally repeat your mantra, and it gets subtler and subtler, dissolving into an expansive silence. People describe the after-effects in different ways: In a recent BuzzFeed video, new meditators said they felt more “chipper,” less prone to tension headaches, and better equipped to deal with problems. But TM doesn’t involve a conscious effort to achieve any of these things. There’s something very automatic about it: You just start your mantra and transcend.

In public schools, TM is offered through a program called Quiet Time. The meditation itself isn’t mandatory: When kids don’t want to meditate, or their parents won’t sign their permission forms, they can just sit quietly, reading a book or staring out the window. In Northern California, Quiet Time is run by a local nonprofit called the Center for Wellness and Achievement in Education, which licenses the TM technique from a central organization and covers the cost of the program. (The fee for learning TM typically ranges from $360 to $960. In schools, it’s around $150 per student, including follow-up for the year.)

Dierke first heard about Quiet Time at a 2005 education conference. One of the speakers was George Rutherford, the African American principal who pioneered the Quiet Time program at his school in southeast Washington, D.C. “If you’d asked me 10 years ago if this was a good program to have, I would’ve looked at you silly,” said Dierke, a rotund man with a gray mustache and ruddy cheeks. “But Dr. Rutherford had the same sort of phenomenon going on his neighborhood that I had in my neighborhood. So I had the Quiet Time folks come over to meet my faculty, and the teachers wanted to do it. It’s been a very good partnership, assisting all of us in dealing with stress—not only the kids but the adults. My blood pressure got lower. I became less prone to yelling at people. And I see it in the kids. Meditation is kind of like the glue that holds everything together.”

​Dierke retired a few years ago, but the Quiet Time program he started has carried on. On last year’s California Healthy Kids Survey, Visitacion Valley scored higher for happiness than any other school in San Francisco, including much more affluent ones. “A prime source of happiness at Visitation Valley is Quiet Time, a stress reduction program used at several Bay Area middle and high schools,” reported the research agency WestEd, which develops and administers the survey for the California Department of Education. In an article for The San Francisco Chronicle, a UC Berkeley public policy professor wrote about the happiness survey and other changes at Visitacion Valley: “In the first year of Quiet Time, the number of suspensions fell by 45 percent. Within four years, the suspension rate was among the lowest in the city. Daily attendance rates climbed to 98 percent, well above the citywide average. Grade point averages improved markedly.”
As a result of all this publicity, Visitacion Valley has earned a unique reputation among San Francisco educators. A few weeks ago, I watched the current principal, Joe Truss, lead a seventh-grade assembly. “When I meet people out in the community sometimes, they tell me, ‘I hear really good things about this school!’” Truss boasted to the students. “And the first thing they always talk about is Quiet Time. A lot of other principals are trying to copy our style.”

One of the first principals to adopt the program after Dierke was Bill Kappenhagen, the principal of Phillip and Sala Burton Academic High School, just down the street from Visitacion Valley. Kappenhagen told me that after he became Burton’s principal, he started turning to Dierke for regular advice. “He was the president of the principals’ union, an older guy who was revered in the community, revered by the board of education.” During one of their phone check-ins, Dierke invited Kappenhagen to an eighth-grade assembly.

Kappenhagen welcomed the chance to sell the students on the virtues of Burton. But before he began his pitch, Dierke said he had something to show him. “He turns to me and says, ‘Watch this, Kappenhagen!’ Then he rings a little bell--ding, ding, ding!—and all of a sudden, all these eighth graders, who are squirrely as all get-out, become really centered and a hush falls over the auditorium. I was floored. I was like, ‘What is this?’”

At first, Kappenhagen wasn’t sure he wanted to bring Quiet Time to his own school. He’d just taken the helm there and he didn’t want to change the daily class schedule. But he was reluctant to say no to Dierke right away. So he put the program to a vote, telling his teachers it would extend the school day by 30 minutes. “I never expected them to go for it. But they were so interested! I think they were exhausted because they’d been trying all kinds of strategies and nothing yet had stuck. They were like, ‘We’ll try anything to get these kids to stop fighting and swearing at each other.’” That was in 2009. Since then, Kappenhagen said, “It’s a calmer school. And it’s not like I have more deans or security guards or teachers. It’s the same staffing structure. The school community has been given space to decompress.”

Another principal, Miguel Rodriguez at Redwood High School in nearby Redwood City, told me he heard about TM from the previous San Francisco superintendent, Carlos Garcia. “I asked him, ‘How do you do good work in this job—but not at the cost of your life or your family, not at the price of a divorce or health issues?’” recalled Rodriguez. “TM was one of the tools he recommended to me.”

Last year, Rodriguez brought Quiet Time to Redwood, an alternative public school for kids who are behind in credits at traditional high schools. Most of the students come from high-poverty backgrounds—they share homes with numerous families and work after school to help their parents pay the bills. All of that makes it hard for them to do their homework or stay focused in class. Their fatigue was obvious during the Quiet Time session I observed there: At least two students fell into a sleep deep enough that the teacher had to wake them afterwards.  
“The meditation is not just for students, to be honest with you,” Rodriguez told me. “It’s also for staff. Because this work can be daunting.” Rodriguez said he originally went into education instead of going to law school because it seemed like a more powerful form of social-justice work. “It has the power to eradicate the cycle of poverty forever.” But at Redwood, he said, “We don’t get the kind of gratification that you might get at a lot of other schools: ‘Look, Johnny got into UC Berkeley! Woo-hoo!’ We don’t see a lot of letters of acceptance.”
Unlike his students, who get dedicated periods for Quiet Time, Rodriguez has to find creative ways to fit his meditation in. On his way to work each morning, he charges his electric car for 20 minutes and meditates inside. In the evenings, he takes Ed.D. courses at Mills College and squeezes in a meditation during the dinner break. “When I stick to that routine, I’m able to come home and be present for my wife and our little daughter,” he said. “I’m able to process the burdens of this lifestyle much, much better.”

One of the first things I noticed, after speaking to several Quiet Time students and site leaders, is that inspiring kids to meditate regularly is hard work. The meditation part is opt-in, and students need to bring back signed permission slips if they want to learn. I was told that 95 percent of Burton’s freshman class learned it this year. But that doesn’t mean they necessarily do it. Unlike school mindfulness programs, TM isn’t guided through verbal cues. The technique itself isn’t difficult; it’s not one of those meditations where you’re supposed to sit rigidly upright and push away thoughts. But for high school kids, just taking the first step—sitting down and closing their eyes—doesn’t always come naturally.

“Whenever Quiet Time actually came around, I was always like, ‘Yeah, but there’s this really great book I want to read,’” said Samantha Rae Hall, who graduated from Burton in May. “Or I just wanted to stare off into space and contemplate my life. That’s something I really like to do.”

Other kids told me they often felt too jittery to meditate, or they were nervous about closing their eyes. Middle schoolers wondered if someone would stick a pencil in their ear or give them a wet willy. Peer pressure is a big issue: If the person in the next seat doesn’t think meditating is cool, that can be a major deterrent. One girl told me she had an unsettling vision of opening her eyes and seeing another student staring at her, the way someone might look at you if you were wearing headphones on a bus and started accidentally singing along. “It’s like, what if I was so into it and they were watching me the whole time? What if I had a really weird face on?”

Matt Nguy, one of Hall’s former classmates, told me, “I didn’t exactly like it at first. It added another 30 minutes to our day. I didn’t get into it until sophomore year.”

A number of kids told me the same thing: It took them a while to get into meditation. At my school, if anything, it was the opposite: We were especially excited about meditation right at the beginning, when we learned at the age of 10. By then, we’d already spent years immersed in a meditation-centered worldview. We’d seen our parents go off to meditate twice each day, and we were curious to find out what they did when they closed their eyes. I still remember the first time I used my new mantra. I felt like I was riding a bicycle—like I’d turned the pedals a few times and then suddenly taken off with a frictionless momentum, turning deep inside myself.

When kids learn TM at a public school, there’s very little build-up. And of course, when they do their twice-daily meditations on weekends or vacations, their parents don’t encourage them the way my parents did. “Sometimes my mom would be like, ‘Open the door!’” said Hall. “I’d be like, ‘I’m meditating.’ She’d be like, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ I’d be like, ‘Yes it does! It absolutely does matter to me.’ So it’s a little more difficult to meditate in a place where no one else understands why you do it.”

This is one reason the Quiet Time program has full-time site managers, embedded there like guidance counselors or wellness providers. Their salaries come from grants, donations, and private foundations, including the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, the 1440 Foundation, and the David Lynch Foundation. Lynch, the avant-garde filmmaker, is one of Quiet Time’s biggest supporters nationwide; on November 4, he hosted a Carnegie Hall benefit for the program featuring Katy Perry, Sting, and Jerry Seinfeld. His co-host for the evening was George Stephanopoulos. (When I interviewed Lynch in 2008 for an Atlantic video, I asked him to reconcile his interest in meditation with his dark, surreal films. “A lot of artists think suffering is necessary,” Lynch told me. “But in reality, the artist doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand the suffering. Any kind of suffering cramps the flow of creativity.”)

Laura Osborne and Jamie Bowers, a couple in their late 30s who run the program at Burton, told me they became TM teachers after seeing some David Lynch Foundation videos. “You watch these kids talk and you think, ‘Wow, I’m going to do that work,’” said Osborne, who learned to meditate with Bowers in Orange County five years ago.

“The results are real,” added Bowers. “But you don’t know till you get here what’s happening behind the scenes.”

Osborne answers students’ questions after a Quiet Time session at Burton.Osborne said they spend a lot of time focusing on the most disruptive students, the few kids in the class who make it difficult for the others to meditate during Quiet Time. “We have to redirect them,” she said. “We have to say, ‘I can see that you’re not comfortable. How can we support you?’” They regularly take kids aside in small groups to answer questions about their experiences with meditation. When a class needs extra motivation, they often host challenges: Students who choose to meditate for three weeks celebrate with a party at the end. “We want them to be intrinsically motivated,” said Osborne. “But sometimes we use extrinsic motivators so they’ll do it just long enough to see the benefits.”

Hall, the recent Burton graduate, started meditating regularly after one of the three-week challenges. “I don’t remember anything spectacular happening,” said Hall, who now works part-time with the Quiet Time program. “Honestly, it just became a normal routine. And when you do normal routines, it doesn’t feel like you’re having some kind of change within yourself. But at some point, I realized I had so much more energy than I used to. I felt happier, a lot happier. I had way more self-confidence. And I used to be somebody who holds grudges: ‘If you messed up, you messed up!” Suddenly I was like, ‘You know what? It’s okay.’ And if I messed up personally, I wasn’t down on myself for the entire day. I was like, ‘Okay, I messed up on this one thing, but I’m going to be fine now.’”

At a time when school hallways are lined with positive affirmations—“You can be anything you want to be!”—it might seem odd that transcending thought altogether would help improve a student’s self-confidence. “We don’t tell them anything specific about why they shouldn’t get into fights, how to feel better about themselves, or why it is good to be kind to each other,” said Laurent Valosek, a former technology entrepreneur who is now the executive director of the Center for Wellness and Achievement in Education. “Those changes just start happening naturally when their brains function in a more integrated way.” He cited a 10-week study at American University, in which a group of students randomly assigned to practice TM developed more coherence between their left and right hemispheres than students just sitting with their eyes closed. The study, published in 2010, linked this increased brain coherence to a more fully developed sense of self.

Upperclassmen who are particularly enthusiastic about meditation can join a club called the Advanced Meditators Crew. They play an active leadership role in the day-to-day program, supervising Quiet Time in the various classrooms and giving introductory talks to new students. “I actually feel that they’re almost running the program more than we are because the kids respect them so much,” said Bowers. “When they go into a classroom, the kids just choose to meditate. It’s like a no-brainer.”

Ivan Garcia, a recent graduate of John O’Connell High School in the Mission district, helped establish the Advanced Meditators’ Crew during his senior year. He told me he was suspicious at first when the Quiet Time site leaders came to his freshman class. “We thought, ‘These people are just coming here to feel better about themselves. They don’t care about us. They don’t know our problems. They don’t know the challenges we’re going through. They don’t know that when we go home, sometimes we don’t even have a home to go to. Now they want us to close our eyes and pretend everything’s fine?’” That changed with the arrival of Matthew August, a 27-year-old site leader. (August is now 31 and still leading the program at O’Connell.) “He liked to have fun and joke around,” said Garcia. “He was honest, not coming from a script. He shared part of himself—that was the biggest thing. After I met him was when I finally started to experience all these beautiful things.”

At the end of one meditation, not long before he graduated, Garcia found himself thinking about the abusive father he’d left behind in Mexico City at age 13. “It felt like a huge bag fell off my shoulders. I realized at that moment that my father had done the best he could. He didn’t get an education like I was getting. He didn’t have the opportunity to talk to anyone who could really listen to him. He definitely didn’t have meditation.”
As I spoke to dozens of kids about Quiet Time, I found myself wondering whether the program could ever scale up in a big way. San Francisco’s superintendent, Richard Carranza, spoke about the Quiet Time program to the San Francisco Chronicle last year, saying, “I’d like to see it expand well beyond a handful of schools.” The Center for Wellness and Achievement in Education has a testimonial on its website from the previous superintendent, Carlos Garcia: “Quite simply, Quiet Time should be in every school.”
Still, it’s hard for any new education idea to enter the mainstream—as evidenced by the fierce debate over the Common Core curriculum—and all the more so when it’s something as novel as meditation. Kappenhagen, who was a principal in D.C. before coming to Burton, told me Quiet Time could work at any school in the nation “as long as there’s a community that embraces the idea that students should be calmer and more centered and this is one way to get them there.” But it’s not clear how many school communities currently fit that description.

A student meditates in Burton’s Quiet Time office.Quiet Time is also limited by funding: At Burton, one of the more cost-effective schools, the program adds up to $185,000 a year between site-managers’ salaries, the TM licensing fees, and occasional off-site retreats for faculty and students. In contrast, most mindfulness programs are run by classroom teachers, with occasional visits from outside experts. August said he couldn’t imagine a program succeeding that way at O’Connell. “Consistency is really important for these kids,” August told me. “Seeing you in the hallway, just being cool with them—that’s how you earn their trust.” He added that struggling schools often lack the stable leadership to keep programs going year after year. Visitacion Valley has been through three principals in four years. Kappenhagen was reassigned to another, more troubled school the week after I met him at Burton. And when August described the turnover at O’Connell during his time there, it sounded like he was listing the wives of Henry VIII: “The first principal got reassigned. The second one went back to L.A. for personal reasons. The third one has stayed so far.”

Joshua Aronson, a longtime professor of applied psychology at NYU, uses the word “artisanal” to describe school programs that are carefully cultivated by highly trained experts. Aronson helped develop the wildly popular ideas of stereotype threat and growth mindset, but he’s been dismayed to watch them reduced to superficial gimmicks: “I go to my kids’ school and have the surreal experience of having them telling me about my own work, in a way that is sure to not work.” He worries something similar could happen with a program like Quiet Time, which he admires. “When things contain a human element,” he told me, “you can scale them up, but if you’re not really meticulous about it, you’re going to lose a lot of the magic that made them work so well in the initial demonstrations. Even if we write really compelling recipe books, it takes a chef to pull it off. That’s the fundamental problem.”

I asked Jan Link, a silver-haired accountability supervisor at the San Francisco Unified School District, whether she thought Quiet Time could ever scale up in a big way. Link, who has been working in the district since the 1980s, got involved with Quiet Time a few years ago after the previous superintendent asked her to evaluate the program. She learned TM herself and was so enthusiastic that she arranged for 96 central-office administrators to learn it as part of a randomized controlled study.  

Link points to a graph from the book Learning to Improve, which illustrates the advantages of scaling up education programs slowly.“That’s a very, very interesting question,” she responded when I asked about the program’s expansion. She swiveled in her chair and carefully pulled a book called Learning to Improveout of the middle of a tall stack. Then she turned to a graph that plotted improvement against time. On the graph, the programs that grew quickly flatlined more quickly; the programs that grew slowly reached a higher level of improvement.

“This is the way I see it,” she said. “From my experience, having done portfolio work in the district, a program grows differently when you let schools approach it from their side—‘I’m interested!’ When it grows that way, it becomes part of each school’s culture. That’s what I think is happening now with Quiet Time. There’s already a waiting list of schools. Once a school wants to go, the teachers learn first, and then all the students who choose to do it. It’s all volunteer. That’s a little different than saying, ‘We have a professional development called Quiet Time and we want everyone to participate.’”

One reason there’s been so much interest is that San Francisco is one of eight major California districts that got a 2013 group waiver from No Child Left Behind. These districts are now allowed to create new evaluations: Only 60 percent of their achievement needs to be academic. The other 40 percent will be based on social-and-emotional skills and school climate. So far, though, there’s been no agreement on how to develop and measure that last 40 percent. Link is working on an evaluation program for San Francisco, using tools like the Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory and the DESA Behavior Index. She sees Quiet Time as a good way to develop the skills she’s measuring, and when schools inquire about the program, she wants to be able to show that it works.

In April, Link’s office and the Center for Wellness and Achievement in Education put together a white paper summarizing 17 studies on San Francisco’s Quiet Time programs. The studies showed reduced fights and suspensions in the schools that had adopted Quiet Time, along with improved attendance, GPAs, and test scores. The research has certain limitations, as the white paper itself notes. Schools are tricky settings, since they’re full of constantly changing variables: new faculty, changing curricula, events in the neighborhood, or other wellness efforts going on at the same time. Some of the studies are more descriptive—that is, they summarize the data rather than digging deeply into what’s causing it. Others are more rigorous, with randomized or matched controls. So far, two of the studies have been published in peer-reviewed journals. (One of those was led by WestEd, the independent research firm.) “In aggregate,” said Valosek, “this white paper is one of the strongest bodies of research on any meditation in school. The next step is to do studies with thousands of students and see if we find these results again at that level.”

Link sees the paper as a meaningful start. “Now you have a superintendent or a board of education who can say, ‘Look, you think this is ridiculous? That’s fine. Let me show you the data.’ You have to honestly say, ‘These are the strongest studies, and these are weaker ones.’ But it’s a good first step. It’s a body of work.”

Jamie Bowers helps teach Burton’s elective on social and emotional intelligence.Early on a Thursday morning, I sat in on Burton’s elective on social-and-emotional intelligence. The class is taught by Burton’s vice-principal, with help from Bowers, who was a classroom teacher before she became a meditation teacher. It's popular enough to have a waiting list. The curriculum focuses on familiar skills like self-discipline, grit, and teamwork. But it’s based on the idea that students need to “develop the internal capacity of a calm and alert readiness,” as its curriculum states—which is where Quiet Time comes in.

Toward the beginning of the class, Bowers put on a video—the scene from Kindergarten Cop where Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character walks into his chaotic classroom for the first time. He sees the children painting on the walls, dancing on the piano, and crashing around in a wagon, and he yells “Shut up!” over and over again. But then he races to his car and comes back with a ferret. Suddenly the kids are quiet and attentive, crowding around him and taking turns petting the animal. “Good,” Arnold says. “Now we are having fun.”
“So, wait,” one of the Burton students asked when the clip ended, “like, in any situation—if we have a ferret, we’ll be cool?”

“Of course!” Bowers joked back. Then she explained what the ferret scene represented: Instead of giving in to the chaos, Arnold had taken hold of himself, removed himself from the situation, and come back with an inventive solution. “What we’re going to talk about now is how to learn self-control,” she continued. “You cannot get things in your life if you don’t have self-control. You can’t be successful. You’re probably going to make some people mad and they’re not going to want to give you a chance. If you’re someone who just loses their cool, emotions can completely overwhelm you. Completely! So taking care of yourself, getting rid of your stress, it’s really important.”

Before my visits to the Quiet Time schools, I’d asked Joseph Durlak, an expert on social-and-emotional learning from Loyola University Chicago, whether he thought getting rid of stress could make it easier for kids to master skills like empathy, conflict resolution, and willpower. Durlak wasn’t familiar with Quiet Time, but he told me he’d learned TM himself decades ago. “The Transcendental Meditation should put kids at ease,” he said. “It should help them relax. It should help them be calmer. And then, hopefully, going beyond that, it should help them just become more reflective people, to be sensitive without overreacting. Once you get into that dimension, then you’re probably affecting classroom interactions, relationships with teachers. You’re probably helping the child be more open to learning. Still, they have to actually learn,” he added. “And part of that is learning how to modulate their own behavior. You still have to develop work groups. You still have to help them with cooperation.”

At Burton, the students spent several minutes talking about things they couldn’t control (the weather, racism, other people’s bad moods) and things they could (their attitudes, their lifestyles). Then they broke into pairs and talked about areas of their lives where they could have better self-control (doing homework, avoiding drugs, communicating more tactfully). At the end of the class, I asked the students why they’d signed up for the elective. A lot of teenagers, I pointed out, wouldn’t voluntarily sit in a classroom and have an adult teach them how to behave.

Students in Burton’s social-and-emotional-intelligence class take part in a group exercise.“School is basically to teach you for life after school,” said a boy named Leo. (I’ve withheld the last names of students under 18.) “In this class, we’re learning how to become who we want to be. I think it also helps that most of us here meditate.”

“Just to build on what Leo said,” a girl named Nikki added, “with Quiet Time, I feel like it makes you more self-aware. So it kind of goes hand in hand with learning about ourselves.”

What struck me about this discussion, and the class that preceded it, was how pragmatic it all was. When I was growing up, the adults around me shared a certain streak of 1960s and ’70s idealism. They actually had a lot in common with the Transcendentalists who’d lived 100 years earlier: They’d done their own version of going off to the woods to live deeply, and they’d found a lot of what they were looking for in Eastern philosophy. Even before my father discovered TM in medical school, he’d studied the Upanishads at Columbia and backpacked around Eastern Europe with a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita. I was raised with the idea that human consciousness is part of something immense and universal. As Ralph Waldo Emerson, an avid reader of Indian philosophy, put it in his essay “The Over-Soul”: “Within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.” It was a lovely way to grow up, and it shaped me in profound ways. But the Eastern spiritual bent would be entirely out of place at a public school.

I’d gone to the Quiet Time schools wondering whether it was really possible to teach kids to meditate without indoctrinating them, even subtly, in a certain worldview. Candy Gunther Brown, a professor of religious studies at Indiana University, doesn’t believe it’s possible. She was an expert witness in a recent court case, in which two parents sued the Encinitas, California, school district for bringing in a yoga program. The district argued that it was offering yoga as a simple tool for health and well-being. But Brown, supporting the plaintiffs, pointed out that the program was sponsored by the K.P. Jois Foundation, named for an Indian guru who explicitly taught yoga as a way to achieve union with God.

“If you look at Jois’s own words, he said, for example, that sun salutations are a form of prayer to the sun god, Surya,” Brown told me. Even when the sun god is never mentioned, Brown believes sun salutations will always remain an inherently religious practice. She offered this thought-provoking argument: “In the American cultural context today, people tend to work with a pretty Protestant definition of religion, just given how common Protestantism is. And in Protestant Christianity, there’s such a privileging of what you believe.” In other words, most Americans think there’s nothing religious about a practice if no one mentions God. “The issue is that this isn’t the case in many traditions, including Hinduism,” she continued. “It doesn’t really matter if you mention God. The meditation or the yoga posture is meant to give you a direct experience of the divine.”

Brown also pointed out that the founders of yoga and meditation programs often use different language when they’re talking to different audiences. For example, in a 2011 article for the journal Contemporary Buddhism, Jon Kabat-Zinn—the physician who founded Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)—openly described his efforts to secularize a Buddhist practice :
Why not try to make meditation so commonsensical that anyone would be drawn to it? Why not develop an American vocabulary that spoke to the heart of the matter, and didn’t focus on the cultural aspects of the traditions out of which the dharma emerged, however beautiful they might be, or on centuries-old scholarly debates concerning fine distinctions in the Abhidharma? This was not because they weren’t ultimately important, but because they would likely cause unnecessary impediments for people who were basically dealing with suffering and seeking some kind of release from it. And, why not do it in the hospital of the medical center where I happened to be working at the time?

The question is really this: Can meditation and other practices from the East be spiritual in one context and totally secular in others? Can one person do sun salutations as a form of devotion and another do them as a form of exercise? Brown says no. The courts that heard the Encinitas case said yes. “To be sure,” stated the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, upholding the decision in April, “if the District’s program instructed children that through yoga they would become one with God and that yoga could help end the karmic cycle of reincarnation … we have little doubt that the program would violate the establishment clause. However … there is no evidence of any religious indoctrination.”

Based on everything I observed, I would say the same about the Quiet Time schools. There are people who avoid bacon because they’re religious Jews or Muslims. There are other people who avoid bacon for health reasons. In much the same way, there are people who learn meditation in order to develop higher states of consciousness (I’ve known many of them). But in the United States, at least, there are far more people who meditate for very practical reasons. This is the way TM is taught at Quiet Time schools: as a tool for getting rid of stress, gaining mental clarity, and developing the resources to rise above adversity.

Tony, a Burton senior, says meditation has helped him deal with a “crazy and violent” world.  At Burton, I spent an especially long time talking to Tony, an ebullient 16-year-old who sat in the front row of Bowers’s class. Tony is the president of the Advanced Meditators Crew. He’s also the vice president of the student body and a member of the California YMCA Youth and Government, a mock legislature program for kids from all over the state. He’s actively involved in the Black Lives Matter movement. On top of all that, he plays basketball and has a job outside of school.

At home, Tony takes care of a sick father. “It’s always been just my dad and me,” he said. Sometimes he sees his mother wandering around with other drug users in the neighborhood, but he said he hasn’t spoken to her in 13 years. Before his dad got sick, he worked two jobs, as a Muni bus driver and a bouncer. So starting from the age of 7, Tony came home each night to an empty house. “I was scared of the dark, so I’d sit up all night and really just do nothing,” he said. In middle school, that lifelong feeling of abandonment started to take its toll. He got into fights and was suspended twice.

Once he started to meditate, he said, “the problems were still there, but I was more calm about it. The world outside might seem crazy and violent. But once you start your mantra, you feel great—you feel all the energy you have inside of you. And afterwards, you can see the bigger picture of things.”

As I was talking to Tony, I could almost see the grown-up he was about to become, just under his youthful skin. He seemed extraordinarily well-equipped for the challenges adults face: navigating relationships, juggling responsibilities, weathering successes and disappointments. “I know that as a young African American male, I’m going to be judged about a lot of stuff. But the meditation helps me filter that out and focus on my own goals,” he said. Right now, he’s in the running for a Posse Scholarship, a prestigious program for college-bound kids from low-income backgrounds. “I want to do all these great things, not for my own personal gain, but so I can help other people going through the same struggles I went through,” he told me. “And someday people will say, ‘Tony, he was this kid in high school who grew up to inspire a lot of people and really make a difference.’” I can believe it.

Please click HERE for original article from The Atlantic

By Lorraine Allen
When life throws us punches, a get-right-back-up attitude will help us bounce back and move on, and not grow depressed and despair. To help kids develop this sort of emotional strength, parents need to promote resilience, starting right now. Resilience can be reinforced and encouraged at any age, and some studies have shown that the earlier kids learn it, the better it will serve them. These three elements have been shown to help:

1. Offer kids a supportive environment to build their self-confidence. It’s important to remember that when children have a hard time, we shouldn’t belittle or ignore their struggles, which can make them feel alone, overwhelmed, and unimportant. If we support kids and listen to their issues, even when their little problems seem silly to us adults, kids will develop the confidence and hope they need to move on, even after a really difficult or traumatic event.
2. Always promote hope and optimism at home, in the face of struggles big and small. Whether your child is having a hard time with math, or your family is dealing with a move or a loss, finding ways to stay positive will teach kids a lesson in overcoming adversity. Share memories of happier times together, and remind them that there will always be more happy times ahead, even if things are really, really hard right now. 
   
   When a struggle feels insurmountable, or if kids feel they’re struggling alone, they might develop a sense of despair instead of hope or possibility for a better future. Kids learn mostly by example, so you can promote this attitude by practicing it yourself. When you get sick or have car trouble, for instance, don’t overreact so they think it’s the end of the world. Stay focused on a positive outcome, keep your chin up even when you’re upset, and they will learn from you.
3. Teach kids to problem solve, in big ways and small. This also builds the confidence and hope they’ll need to feel like they can fix or overcome whatever issues they face later. Invite your kids to help you with small problems you might encounter, like fixing a flat tire or troubleshooting a computer problem (or simply ask that they be supportive while you handle these tasks). Have them help care for an injured pet or sick relative. There are countless opportunities every day to show our kids how to solve problems and stay positive while they’re doing it.

​How do you help your kids develop their emotional resiliency?


Lorraine Allen is a writer and mom to one spunky first grader and one squirrel-obsessed dog. You can follow their allergy-friendly cooking adventures at Feeding Lina.
Image ©iStock.com/onebluelight

Most human misery can be blamed on failed relationships and physical and mental illness rather than money problems and poverty, according to a landmark study by a team of researchers at the London School of Economics (LSE).
Eliminating depression and anxiety would reduce misery by 20% compared to just 5% if policymakers focused on eliminating poverty, the report found.
Lord Richard Layard, who led the report, said on average people have become no happier in the last 50 years, despite average incomes more than doubling.
The economist and former adviser to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown said the study, called Origins of Happiness, showed that measuring people’s satisfaction with their lives should be a priority for every government. The researchers analysed data from four countries including the US and Germany.
Extra spending on reducing mental illness would be self-financing, the researchers added, because it would be recovered by the government through higher employment and increased tax receipts together with a reduction in NHS costs from fewer GP visits and hospital A&E admissions.
“Tackling depression and anxiety would be four times as effective as tackling poverty. It would also pay for itself,” he said.

The report supports the arguments put forward by Layard over several decadesthat social and psychological factors are more important to the wellbeing of individuals than income levels.“Having a partner is as good for you as being made unemployed is bad for you,” he said.
The report claims that state-run organisations, including schools, must become more focused on tackling anxiety and mental health issues.
“This evidence demands a new role for the state – not ‘wealth creation’ but ‘wellbeing creation’,” Layard said. “In the past, the state has successively taken on poverty, unemployment, education and physical health. But equally important now are domestic violence, alcoholism, depression and anxiety conditions, alienated youth, exam mania and much else. These should become centre stage.”
AdvertisementThe economist said it was a curse on children that they were judged by society solely on their educational attainment. The report adds: “The strongest factor predicting a happy adult life is not children’s qualifications but their emotional health. There is also powerful evidence that schools have a big impact on children’s emotional health, and which school a child goes to will affect their emotional wellbeing as much as it affects their exam performance.”
Layard rejected accusations that he was arguing against closing income inequalities but said improvements in mental health services would have a greater impact.
The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has pledged to increase funding for mental health services. In September he said the care offered to children and young people was the service’s biggest weakness.
But the Department of Health admitted last month that the number of mental health nurses working in the NHS in England has dropped by almost a sixth since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, from 45,384 in England to 38,774 in July this year.
The report will be presented to a conference in London on Monday that has been organised by the LSE and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Please click HERE for link to original article from The Guardian

Article originally published on TheMighty.com

High-functioning anxiety looks like…
Achievement.
Busyness.
Perfectionism.
When it sneaks out, it transforms into nervous habits. Nail biting. Foot tapping. Running my fingers through my hair.
If you look close enough, you can see it in unanswered text messages.
Flakiness.
Nervous laughter.
The panic that flashes through my eyes when a plan changes.
When anything changes.

High-functioning anxiety feels like…
A snake slithering up my back, clamping its jaws shut where my shoulders meet my neck. Punch-in-the-gut stomach aches, like my body is confusing answering an email with being attacked by a lion.

High-functioning anxiety sounds like…
You’re not good enough. You’re a bad friend. You’re not good at your job. You’re wasting time. You’re a waste of time. Your boyfriend doesn’t love you. You’re so needy. What are you doing with yourself? Why would you say that? What if they hate it? Why can’t you have your shit together? You’re going to get anxious and because you’re going to get anxious, you’re going to mess everything up. You’re a fraud. Just good at faking it. You’re letting everybody down. No one here likes you.

All the while, it appears perfectly calm.
It’s always looking for the next outlet, something to channel the never-ending energy. Writing. Running. List-making. Mindless tasks (whatever keeps you busy). Doing jumping jacks in the kitchen. Dancing in the living room, pretending it’s for fun, when really it’s a choreographed routine of desperation, trying to tire out the thoughts stuck in your head. 

It’s silent anxiety attacks, hidden by smiles.
It’s always being busy but also always avoiding, so important things don’t get done. It’s letting things pile up rather than admitting you’re overwhelmed or in need of help.
It’s that sharp pang of saying the wrong thing, the one that starts the cycles of thoughts. Because you said too much, and nobody cares, and it makes you never want to speak up again.
It’s going back and forth between everyone else has it together but you, and so many people have it tougher than you.

Get your act together.
Suck it up.
You’re not OK, you’re messing everything up.
You’re totally OK, stop being such a baby.

It’s waking up in the middle of the night sobbing because the worst-case-scenario that just went through your head at high speed seems so real, so vivid, that even when it’s proven to be untrue, it takes hours for your heart to slow down, to feel calm again.

Because how “OK” are you when a day without a plan is enough to make you crumble? When empty spaces make you spiral at the very anticipation of being alone with your thoughts? When you need to make a list to get through a Sunday: watch a show, clean your kitchen, exercise, answer five emails, read 10 pages, watch a show… ?

It’s feeling unqualified to write this piece because I’m getting by. It’s when you’re social enough to get invited to things, but so often find yourself standing in a room where it feels like no one knows you. It’s being good at conversation and bad at making close friends because you only show up when you feel “well” enough. Only text back when you feel ready. Because you’re afraid they’d hate you if they really knew you. That the energy would overwhelm them, and you’d lose them.

So you learn to rein it in. Channel it. Even though sometimes you do everything right (exercise, sleep, one TV show, five emails, 10 pages…) and you’re still left with racing thoughts, the panic. The not good enoughs.

​When will it be enough?
Having anxiety means constantly managing motion that can be productive or self-destructive, depending on how much sleep you got. Depending on the day. Depending on the Earth’s alignment with Mars. Depending on…

It’s when “living with it” means learning how to sit with it. Practicing staying in bed a little longer. Challenging the mean, unrelenting voices that say you’re only worth what you produced that day.
It means learning how to say, “I need help.” Trying to take care of yourself without the guilt. It means every once in a while, confiding in a friend. It means sometimes showing up even when you’re scared.
​
It’s when answering a text impulsively and thoughtlessly is an act of bravery.
It’s fighting against your own need to constantly prove your right to exist in this world.
It’s learning how to validate your own feelings. That even though you don’t feel like you’re enough, and you’ll never be enough, it’s knowing you’re at least anxious enough to benefit from help. That admitting you need it doesn’t confirm voices’ lies. That taking a break doesn’t mean you’re a failure.
It’s finding your own humanity in the anxiety, in your weaknesses. It’s trying to let the energy inspire you, instead of bring you down. It’s forgiving yourself when it wins.

It’s a way to live, with this constant companion. Your bullying twin. Collapsible luggage you can bury away at a moment’s notice. Shove it under the bed. Pretend it’s not there until you can’t fit anymore. Until you can no longer ignore it. Until you have to face it.

A first good step is staring at it straight on and calling it by its name.
High anxiety can be a natural consequence of a busy lifestyle, but its existence is akin to the chicken and the egg. Which came first, the anxiety or the busyness? Am I always moving because I’m anxious or am I anxious because I’m always moving?

Either way, it’s not a noble way to suffer. It’s not a “better” way to be anxious. Just because you’re “functioning” doesn’t always mean you’re happy. And just because you’re functioning doesn’t mean you shouldn’t slow down, breathe and take one damn second to be happy the way things are.
In this very moment.
This quiet, short moment.
To remember the peace you found in that second of silence, until the electricity starts again, and you’re forced to move.

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