It seems that with each day comes a barrage of negative news. The Dow finished down 411 points or 4.7% yesterday at 8282. Initial Jobless Claims, a good leading indicator on the health of the job market, showed 516,000 new claims, far worse than expectations of 479,000. Additionally, the Continuing Jobless Claims reached 3.89 million, their highest level in 25 years. GM’s stock price slid to $3.08, teetering on the edge of the abyss, when just 8 years ago it was worth over $90 share and the end of 2007 it was over $40 share.
How important is it to control your emotions and mood?
Did you cause Alzheimers?
Epidemiologist David Snowdon did a study of 678 nuns in the School of Sisters of Notre Dame Congregation. Snowdon set out to study the factors that differentiate nuns who eventually got Alzheimer’s disease from those who did not. All of the nuns he studied were required to write a personal essay when they came into the order in their early twenties. Upon analysis, Snowdon discovered that those nuns whose writing expressed a preponderance of positive emotions tended to live longer and more productive lives. Nuns with the highest number of positive-emotion sentences had half the risk of death at any age as those with the lowest number of such sentences. This is consistent with the findings from several other studies suggesting that a history of depression – the most insidious of all negative emotions – increases twofold the likelihood of eventually developing Alzheimer’s. These findings deeply influenced Snowdon not just professionally, but also personally. “I now make a conscious effort to regain my physiological balance quickly after an upset,” he explains. “I try not to stay stuck in negativity. My goal is to return to its normal, healthier state as soon as possible.”
What can you do about it?
Some simple suggestions are: Do an inventory of your influences. Who are you spending your time with and what is their mood? What are you listening to and what are they saying? What are you reading? What are you watching and what is there message and motive?
Surround yourself with people who are positive. Not people who are blindly optimistic, but people who are realists looking for the opportunity in all they see. Read uplifting material. Turn off the TV. Listen to books and programs that will increase your capacity to think and act. Work out.
The great James Allen wrote in his bestseller, As a Man Thinketh, “As a being of power, intelligence and the lord over his own thoughts, man holds the key to every situation, and contains within himself that transforming and regenerative agency by which may make himself what he wills.”
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