Scientific advice on happiness

I recently bought the new book "59 seconds" by Richard Wiseman. This is a book that claims to offer 'self improvement' advice based on REAL findings from psychological studies. It claims that much of the standard advice from self-improvement gurus has no basis or evidence to support it, or may even be incorrect. For example, one story you often see in self-improvement books and articles suggested that a study once showed that simply writing down a list of goals makes you dramatically more likely to succeed in life. Yet no-one has ever been able to locate this study.

Here is a summary of some of the advice he gives on increasing your happiness, based on scientific research:

(1) Spending money on material things doesn't make you happy, but spending money on experiences, such as holidays, shows, or even a meal, does. The key things seem to be that experiences offer the opportunity to interact with others, or having things to discuss with others after the experience. Equally, spending money on others does more to increase happiness than spending it on yourself.

(2) Smiling, sitting upright and generally ACTING happy, can make you feel more happy. The smile can't be fleeting, it must be for between at least 15 to 30 seconds or more.

(3) 'positive thinking', psychotherapy, or even just talking about your problems does not seem to make people happier. Instead, evidence suggests that writing a diary about your problems can be extremely beneficial to your happiness (the theory is that writing encourages one to structure your thoughts whilst chatting about them, less so).

(4) Similarly to (3), even if you don't have significant problems, keeping a diary in which you express gratitude towards all the good things in your life, positive thoughts about the future (e.g. imagine - realistically - things have gone as well as you can hope, and you have achieved your goals), and affection towards those you love/have loved. Part of the reason for why this works is that the human brain has a tendency to quickly 'habituate' to almost anything and thus we take things for granted and must remind ourselves of them.

IQs lower today than in the 1980s

Teenagers in Britain have lower IQ scores than their counterparts did a generation ago, according to a study by a leading expert. Tests carried out in 1980 and again in 2008 show that the IQ score of an average 14-year-old dropped by more than two points over the period. The trend marks an abrupt reversal of the so-called "Flynn effect" which has seen IQ scores rise year on year, among all age groups, in most industrialised countries throughout the past century.

Given our wealth, our vast knowledge and our freedoms, we should be living in a golden age of enhanced intelligence. And whilst there are plenty of trends towards increasingly sophisticated things in our culture (e.g. a lot of video games require complex problem solving, we can gain quicker and broader access to information via the web), these are counter-acted by politically correct teaching and institutions which hide the truth and stiffle the development of logical thinking.

Malcolm Gladwell on genius

Extract from his new book 'Outliers'

Video of an interesting talk by Gladwell on the subject

His argument is that very high achievement in many fields is a combination of two things:

(1) Being born at the right time in history to give you unique opportunities

(2) Spending around 10,000 hours of hard work to gain mastery in your field

Are children less happy if they don't know their father?

Theres something which I feel has been overlooked in the debates about single motherhood by choice (this, you will remember, is the abhorrent practice of aging selfish women to buy sperm over the internet (or similar) to create a child who will never have a dad in their life, or, indeed, even meet their dad). Whenever theres a debate on this subject, women who've had children in this fashion will say something like "Oh but my little johnny is a happy child, therefore not having a dad hasn't done him any harm." Many opponents to Single mothers by choice (henceforth: SMBC) find this point hard to counter, and usually simply say that "Well, maybe YOUR child is happy, but I bet a lot of them aren't".

However, I believe its useless trying to make a case against SMBC simply on the basis of the child's self-reported levels of happiness.

Recent research into happiness shows that particular events that happen to us - be they good, like winning the lottery, or bad, like being in an accident that renders us disabled - over periods of time longer than 3 months do NOT alter our happiness levels! People are basically, in general as happy or sad as they either make up their mind's to be, or as their physiological and brain composition renders them. Yes, there are exceptions (such as people who have a bad experience which triggers depression), but my understanding of the research is that this is not the norm. In fact, one psychologist summarised this as: if it happened more than 3 months ago, it has no bearing on your happiness. The second key point from the happiness research is that if something bad happens to us which we have no control over, then we do not let it make us continuously unhappy. One example given was of a man who was falsely imprisoned for almost all his adult life, then when he was released as an older man, he basically said that he had no regrets and he'd had a good life. This seems counterintuitive, but think about a similar instance in your own life where you've had no choice. For example, do you allow yourself to be depressed for months because you didn't win the lottery? Do you shake your fist at the sky in rage each day and curse the Gods that you weren't born with a higher IQ, better looks or greater entrepreneurial instincts? Of course not. We all, more or less, accept what we're born with. However, what DOES make people unhappy is when something bad happens which they feel they could have prevented. For example, when you make a choice which turns out to have been a mistake.

Put these two factors together and what do they predict about the children off SMBC? Of COURSE they are not going to report that they are 'unhappy' in general! Their position was something that they've known since birth, they've never known any different, and it was something they had no control over. There may, of course, be other effects than unhappiness. They may have an emotional longing for a father, which is quite a seperate thing from their general level of happiness. They may indeed be less likely to form emotional bonds, more likely to take up crime, less likely to do well in school, and more likely to suffer divorce, but none of these are, per se, their general happiness level!

Also, we don't always look at 'happiness' as a measure of desirability of a course of action, or of wellbeing. Children might be more happy, for example, not going to school, or by never eating any vegetables. But we recognize these things are good for them. Equally, we treat some things as immoral acts, even if no one person's happiness level was seriously affected by them. For example, shoplifting from a big store.

Furthermore, its perfectly possible that children brought up by SMBC are brainwashed by the mother into thinking that fathers are useless. So, when asked, they might be likely to say "I don't think I've missed having a father." simply because their mother's low opinion of men has rubbed off on them.

So, just because some children of SMBC are no less happy than other children, does not mean that it is right. You could go around and ambutate one leg off newborn babies, and those babies would grow up into children who would cope fine with their disability, and would not let it affect their general level of happiness. But does it make it right? Or, imagine if there was some evil scheme to lowwer the IQs of all babies born to mothers with ginger hair, or black skin, by exposing them to radiation when they were pregnant. The resulting babies are then born with IQs 10% lowwer than average. Would we accept as a valid excuse that those children's happiness levels will not be affected? Of course not, because its still affected their lives, and its evil. Just in the same way as SMBC is evil. It doesn't ruin their lives, children are amazingly resiliant. But its still evil.

SMBC deliberately deprives a child of a father, and all the benefits that can accrue from having a father. Because they don't know any better, and because they never had a chance to change it, such children don't let it get them down, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have other side-effects on them. They may do less well in school, have poorer relationships later in life, have a lack of someone to turn to if their mother isn't around, more likely to be a victim of child abuse, or be more likely to engage in crime etc etc. Many bad effects, and probably many more which are very hard to measure or prove. But simply saying that they are not 'unhappy' misses the point.

Happiness

Marshall Brain (The founder of 'How Stuff Works'): Wealth brings diminishing returns in terms of happiness. If you spend 10 times more for something it might not buy you any more happiness at all. The funny thing is, once this equation is understood, there is a tendency to stop buying extravagant things and to live more modestly. People look for happiness not in material objects, but in other ways.

Video Talk by Dan Gilbert: Why are why happy? Why aren't we happy?

The Meteorological Mind

This is just a little thought I had today:

We often think of the mind in terms of being like a computer. In fact, every age seems to use the technology of the day as a metaphor for the mind. People used to think of it in terms of wax tablets (a metaphor for memory), weaving looms and telephone exchange systems.

However, I think that using the planet's weather system as an analogy is an interesting one. For example, it highlights how our minds have different cycles of activity. I would say there are three main cycles:

Weather: this changes day-to-day, and can change within the day even. In effect, these are our moods. These moods are sometimes obviously linked to events (i.e. you have an argument with a family member and you feel negative all day), sometimes they just come and go for no apparent reason. You can counter-act them, but only usually with great effort, and also you would need to become conscious of them in the first place. Most of the time when we are in the grip of a particular mood we are just carried along by it, but, if we DO stop to think about it, we realise that it is a temporary feeling and will pass in a day or so.

Seasons: these are the longer term trends in how we feel. I'd say they last anything from a few months to a few years. An example would be a period of depression. Another example would be when a person suddenly becomes really interested in a particular topic and pursues it enthusiastically, only to look back in a few years time to realise they'd gradually lost that interest and moved on to other things. Again, like weather, seasons can be traced back to a particular event (i.e. someone's dad dies, they take it badly and enter a period of depression for a couple of years), or they can just occur for no immediately apparent reason. However, unlike 'weather' cycles, even if we stop to think about how we feel about a season cycle, it is hard to believe it won't pass. It just feels like 'the way we are'. If we REALLY think about it, and are honest with ourselves, we probably realise the feeling will pass in time, but its by no means as obvious as with a weather cycle.

Climate: these are the far more stable patterns of emotions. We think of these as being an inherent part of the person, and talk about them as 'temperaments' or 'personality'. However, they can change, over long periods of time. For example, most people in their late 20s become more conscientious than they were in their youth. Another example might be how many people who were typically bad-tempered in their adult life become more mellow with old age.

I suspect these factors are more closely 'anchored' in a person's individual physiology and their genetics (i.e. their whole nervous system), whereas the weather and season cycles are more like temporary patterns that are moving through a person's brain. The particular climate that we are in doesn't feel to us like a temporary or arbitrary state of affairs, it feels like the way the world is. For example, lets imagine that a person is born with a particular bias in their brain and nervous system that makes them a negative person. That person is unlikely to say something like:

"I'm a negative person because of the way my nervous system is wired up, therefore I have a bias in the way I process information about the world".

They are far more likely to say something along the lines of:

"Sure people call me a negative person, but I'm only like that because the world IS a dangerous place, and full of bad things."

In other words, whilst we are able to 'see through' the weather and season cycles and see them as temporary, passing trends in how we feel, the climate cycles are more like personal biases that we don't know we have. What could change the particular climate we are under? Not as many things as can change our weather or seasons, but there are some. I think they would include:

Change in diet
Major life event (e.g. trauma of war)
Seriously adopting meditation as a regular discipline
A major operation
A serious drug addition

These are all things which could alter our nervous system, as opposed to the weather and season cycles which I liken more to temporary patterns of thinking. The former probably have their origins in our neurology, the latter in ideas we come across and somehow 'take hold' of us for a period of time.

Is there anything good about men?

Interesting talk, which explains some interesting things like why more of your ancestors were female than male, and why men are more motivated towards novelty and risk-taking and women are more motivated towards just going along with the crowd.

Sample quotes:

"Culture has plenty of tradeoffs, in which it needs people to do dangerous or risky things, and so it offers big rewards to motivate people to take those risks. Most cultures have tended to use men for these high-risk, high-payoff slots much more than women. I shall propose there are important pragmatic reasons for this. The result is that some men reap big rewards while others have their lives ruined or even cut short. Most cultures shield their women from the risk and therefore also don’t give them the big rewards."

"A pattern of more men at both extremes can create all sorts of misleading conclusions and other statistical mischief...Thanks to grade inflation, most students now get A’s and B’s, but a few range all the way down to F. With that kind of low ceiling, the high-achieving males cannot pull up the male average, but the loser males will pull it down. The result will be that women will get higher average grades than men — again despite no difference in average quality of work. The opposite result comes with salaries. There is a minimum wage but no maximum. Hence the high-achieving men can pull the male average up while the low-achieving ones can’t pull it down. The result? Men will get higher average salaries than women, even if there is no average difference on any relevant input. "

"It’s not that the men pushed the women down. Rather, it’s just that the women’s sphere remained about where it was, while the men’s sphere, with its big and shallow social networks, slowly benefited from the progress of culture. By accumulating knowledge and improving the gains from division of labor, the men’s sphere gradually made progress. Hence religion, literature, art, science, technology, military action, trade and economic marketplaces, political organization, medicine — these all mainly emerged from the men’s sphere."

Science round-up

Creating new life forms: Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of "wet artificial life."

Extending life: A controversial biologist at Harvard claims he can extend life span and treat diseases of aging.

Origins of life: Could extraterrestrial life be made of corkscrew-shaped particles of interstellar dust? Intriguing new evidence of life-like structures that form from inorganic substances in space have been revealed in the New Journal of Physics.

Memory: Neuroscientists have discovered that long-term memories are not etched in a "clay tablet"-like stable form as once thought. The process is much more dynamic, involving a miniature molecular machine that must run constantly to keep memories going, and jamming this machine briefly can erase long-term memories.

Aerogel: A MIRACLE material for the 21st century could protect your home against bomb blasts, mop up oil spillages and even help man to fly to Mars. Aerogel, one of the world’s lightest solids, can withstand a direct blast of 1kg of dynamite and protect against heat from a blowtorch at more than 1,300C.

Women's sexism and publishing

Notice how women are always whining about how several of the magazines for men are obsessed with sex, but look at how many tens of women's magazines are! And some of them (including ones for younger girls) include images of naked or half-naked men. So basically these women haven't a leg to stand on in their bitchings against the lads mags.

Also, take a look at this nauseating interview with the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine (about a minute or so in) and tell me that women's magazines aren't misandric.

And there are loads of women's magazines with that kind of attitude. But in reality there are only a handful of mainstream men's mags that are sex-obsessed, the majority of magazines men buy are about hobbies, science and technology.

But women generally don't have hobbies or interests in the world unless it relates to them directly. People with no cultural or intellectual interests in life tend to stave off their boredom through a focus on drama (whether they create it themselves, or vicariously feed off the 'real life' dramas of others) sensations, and sex. And could there be any better description of the contents of women's magazines. No subject is covered by the women's magazines unless it can be related to how it might 'spice up' a woman's sex life.

Although the hairy feminist types who complain against the men's magazines are actually complaining mainly about the covers. They dislike having to see scantily clad young women on them. Well, you have to wonder whether these women actually have their eyes open when they walk around the streets, shops, workplaces, bars, restaurants etc. Everywhere you go there are women dressed in provocative and sexually alluring ways. And men have to deal constantly with these little pulls on their attention every day. Fair enough, we rarely get actively offended by it, but it is constant, and it adds up in some sense. Particularly when women dress provocatively yet then act all snotty if any man dares stare at them, or ask them out.

And its not just their magazines, its books too.

Browsing through the books on display in the airport the other day I saw one called 'How to kill your husband' (a 'dark' comic novel), and another called 'Girl with a one track mind' (this is the spin-off book of the blog by the feminist slut who writes about her constant sexual conquests).



Drivel that degrades men is given prime-shelf space, yet if one innocent and educational book is aimed at boys, female journalists get their panties in a twist.

Low self-esteem

If you read up on the original literature on self-esteem, it says that what creates high self-esteem is when you act in way that you would find admirable if another person acted that way. Now, notice how these days many women are always complaining they have low self esteem, as though it were the fault of others. But its actually their own fault; its their own behaviour.

Whenever you hear some woman say "I'm suffering from low self esteem", what it actually means is "I don't genuinely feel proud of myself and my actions".

Might something even be playing on their conscience?

The thing is that even if you behave in a bad way when no-one is watching, or when you think no-one will find out, YOU still know that you behaved that way, and deep down it will affect how you feel about yourself.

Gender Guesser

In 2003, a team of researchers from the Illinois Institute of Technology and Bar-Ilan University in Israel (Shlomo Argamon, Moshe Koppel, Jonathan Fine, and Anat Rachel Shimoni) developed a method to estimate gender from word usage. Their paper described a Bayesian network where weighted word frequencies and parts of speech could be used to estimate the gender of an author. Their approach made a distinction between fiction and non-fiction writing styles.

Thanks to 'yga' for bringing this to my attention.

Trash journalism

You know, it really is extraordinary how much licence the press are given to spread around incorrect ideas. Any other profession would be held far more tightly to account if they were found spreading misleading information on the scale and frequency of the national newspapers.

Throughout the 1990s, as a teenager, I used to read the Sunday papers with anger as I encountered one misandric opinion piece after another by bitchy female journalists. Of course, as a teenager you give more weight than is probably due to such societal institutions as the national papers. Upon getting older, wiser and now having a website to vent my anger and incredulity, its easier to deal with this stuff. But I imagine it does have a real effect on the male youth to see how much hate is poured out against them by the national newspapers. Even supposedly intelligent ones.

Of course, the papers thrive on 'winding people up' in order to grab attention. So they probably love those kind of articles. This will probably become even more so as the newspaper business moves online more, and they are able to track better exactly which articles are read the most, and most commented on. Although thanks to the thriving men's movement online, it could end up being articles which are man-friendly which end up dominating the papers (wishful thinking perhaps, but they ARE desperate to chase the advertising revenue from companies eager to find a way to market to men).

It is baring this all in mind that I present this piece of crap:

Pow! Take that lowly man!

As far as articles go, its not half as hateful as many I've read, but its so riven with holes that if it were a piece of furniture it would collapse in 2 seconds.

Just to take one example: near the beginning of the article she claims that women are better at DIY than men. Why? Because 38% of children learn their DIY skills from their mothers compared to 34% from their fathers. Given that, for various reasons - including women divorcing the father, or the child never having the opportunity to meet their father - you would expect more children to have to learn those skills from the mother, simply because they spend more time with them. This could be the case even if mother's DIY skills were practically non-existent. It telling you NOTHING about the levels of skills that fathers or mothers possess in this area. Yet its given as evidence for women, as the headline claims: "Outperforming men" in the area of DIY.

Anyone who has even the slightest amount of logical ability can tear articles like this to shreds. Why do the national newspapers print them? because they don't give a sh*t about attacking men and boys.

Probably the most sickening bit in the article was the way that at the end, one of the key bits of evidence that women are outperforming men was that the suicide rate for men is almost 4 times as high as for women. Including this within a 'go get em girls', triumphant article is nothing short of sick and hateful. Its compounded by the fact that whenever there is the slightest evidence that women are 'suffering' in any aspect of their lives, its taken as evidence that men are sexist against them, and is used as a rallying cry of 'something must be done!'. Yet whenever men are suffering in any area its taken as evidence that they are weaker than women.

I cannot express strongly enough my disgust and contempt at these hateful, trash journalists.

Feminists don't give you the full truth on porn

Some feminists are pro-porn, some are violently anti-porn. About the only thing that tells you is that feminism is incoherent and basically stands for nothing except a woman's right to do whatever she wants and to condemn or praise things randomly and expecting the taxpayer to ask "how high?" whenever she shouts "Jump!"

The thing that annoys me with the anti-porn fembots is the way that they use such violent and hateful language to attack men who look at porn images of women, yet they stay silent on the subject of photos of men and teenage boys in gay porn, or on the subject of femdom porn.

I wanted to find some way to get an over-view measurement of what is popular in the world of online porn. I found a site called 'Clips4Sale', which claims to be "The number one downloadable clip site on the net", featuring over 100,000 downloadable clips. This is where the real consumption of porn is going on these days, not some little seedy shop selling DVDs, which made such a soft-target for the harassment feminists in my previous post. Looking through the site there are a bewildering array of different genres and fetishes. Including some as strange as just videos of women's feet on car pedals. Not even naked feet, feet with shoes on.

If we take Clips4Sale's claim of popularity to be true, then it gives a very interesting picture of what genres of porn are most popular online. They maintain a list of their 50 top stores - and it seems that by this they mean their most popular stores. Around 40 of these top 50 are some variation of female domination, including sites where the man is being hurt, worshipping the woman's feet, being tied up and controlled by a woman (sometimes with the guy being naked while the woman is clothed), naked men having their genetalia kicked or trampled, and so on.

Only 1 of these sites featured the domination running in the other way. It was a site featuring women tied up by men. And was actually pretty tame.

If this site is any measure of porn popularity online then around 80% of the video porn consumed online is some form of femdom or features the man in the weaker position sexually, either being forced to worship the woman or being sexually degraded/humiliated.

Isn't this radically different from the picture that feminists paint of porn?

Men more intelligent than women

This came out last month:

A recent study proves it is "very likely" that the reason women have difficulty rising to the top in their careers is because they are less intelligent than men, according to controversial University of Western Ontario psychologist J. Philippe Rushton.

This is something that few people ever seem to realise: the fact that the male IQ stats are unfairly biased in a downward direction by the inclusion of effectively brain damaged individuals within the data.

If you were giving a list of the maximum speed of different models of cars, would you include those cars which were not functioning within your stats?

If you were giving a list of the average walking speed of different nationalities would you include those who didn't have legs as = 0mph? If, for example, you had a country in which a large number of people had had their legs blown off by landmines, you can see how such a ridiculous inclusion would bias the stats downward and make it appear that people were actually walking slower in that country.

Similarly, baby boys are more likely to be born with brain damage of various kinds than baby girls are. This biases the average male IQ downwards.

Additionally (and unfortunately I don't have a link for this, so you'll have to trust me) a number of times I've read psychologists who say that the IQ tests are deliberately structured in order to ensure that both males and females average at 100. We also recently caught out the website of 'Psychology Today' for sneekily deducting several points off any IQ test result that was filled in by a man. The effect of such artificial tinkering with the scoring masks the possibility that men are more intelligent on average.

What we are saying here is not just that the male population has a wider distribution of scores, but that the male mean average IQ itself is higher than that of women.

To those who might ask what is the significance of 4 IQ points higher: this has a huge significance across populations. Not least because it alone could account for the greater number of men in positions of intellectual eminence.

Psychologist: Men more intelligent than women

It is research that is guaranteed to delight men - and infuriate the women in their lives. A controversial new study has claimed that men really are more intelligent than women.

Now, I don't mind paying my taxes to support psychologists like that! You may remember that recently the magazine 'Psychology Today' was caught sneekily disadvantaging men who took their online IQ test: any man who took the test automatically had several points deducted off his score. Of course, the idea that men might have a statistically higher IQ than women is absolute politically incorrect dynamite. Which is basically why I love it!

Debate on sex differences

Why do men and women behave in different ways? Is it because there are physical differences between the male and female brain? The author of a new book on gender differences thinks so. What do you think? Is it nature or nurture that sets us apart?

Submit your responses at that link!

A cool tool for your brain

I've long been an advocate of the idea of using computer games as educational or mind-enhancement tools. There are three main reasons for this: (1) computer games can give personalised training, adapting to each person's needs, (2) they can give you very quick feedback on your performance, and tell you where you need to improve, hence accelerating the learning process, (3) they can foster a fun sense of competition, hence improving motivation to learn.

For the past couple of weeks I've been using a great game on my Nintendo DS called 'Brain Age'. Designed in Japan, and incorporating the insights of a Japanese neuroscientist (who appears as a 3-D cartoon head in the game), Brain Age is a suite of brain training exercises that you can use for training your brain-power (and graphing your improvements over time) or just playing. A good example of the latter is the game Sudoku which is included. Its a highly addictive number/logic game which you can also play in a paper format, but it works much better as a computer game as it automatically times you and tells you when you've got an answer wrong.

The other good thing about Brain Age is it really makes good use of the Nintendo DS's abilities, such as the touch-screen that you can write and draw on, and the microphone (some tests require you to speak out loud your answers).

I highly recommend Brain Age as a fun way to sharpen your mind. If only schools used things like this.

The evolution of consciousness

Humans biologically the same as ourselves have been around for around 200,000 years, but its only in the last 5,000 to 10,000 years that we have made sustained progress. Certain arts of the male mind - like construction, seafaring, astronomy and mathematics - seem to stretch back a fair bit further than that, but its only recently that we've really created civilisations.

Anyway, all that is mere background to my theory that through time man has become more CONSCIOUS. That is to say more self-aware and more in control of his thoughts and destiny. We are still almost totally dominated by unconscious thought-processes, but I feel pretty sure that, say 50 or 60 thousand years ago people were barely conscious at all, and probably drifted through life in a kind of trance. I say this partially because even today most people, most of the time are barely conscious. Unless you make constant efforts to stay focused, you will join most people in letting your mind drift aimlessly from one thing to another. Like a windmill being spun round by the external force of the weather around you. Just spinning, spinning. One thoughts pops up, which leads you to start imagining something, which brings up a memory, then you hear a song, which cycles around and around for a while, then something about it evokes an emotion which leads to another thought....

and so on. Like a cow endlessly chewing on the cud of trivia.

I believe a man should try to train his mind to rise above this kind of trance state and become as conscious as he can be. Conscious of where you are. Conscious of where you are going. Conscious of the effect of your actions and words. This is not always pleasant, or comforting. But over time, this kind of realism will pay off in your life.

Remember, effective action can only occur when you have an accurate as possible model of REALITY in your mind. And you have to become as conscious as possible to get it.

The Solutions Focus

I've been reading a very good book called 'The Soutions Focus' by Paul Z Jackson and Mark McKergow. Its basically a business book, but based around ideas from a form of therapy called solution-focused brief therapy.

The basic idea is that of not trying to analyse a problem but instead analyse glimpses of the solution and expand on them. For example, in an interview Mark McKergow describes a person who suffered from an anxiety disorder. The therapist asked them to recall times when they NEVER felt anxious. They realised that on a certain day of the week they were never anxious, and further analysis of this day revealed a range of things that they did which helped to eliminate their anxiety. Thus solutions were uncovered.

I think that this approach is really superb. I've long been of the opinion that most problems are unsolvable, in the sense that we look to batter them into submission or eliminate them. But focusing on problems usually makes them worse. You don't get yourself out of debt by thinking about DEBT 24/7. You get out of debt by concentrating on making and saving more money.As Einstein once said: most problems cannot be solved at the level of thinking which created them. Most therapists and business consultants seem to get their clients to fix all their attention onto the problem and analyse it in great detail, turning it over and over in their minds. Oftentimes, in my opinion, this is not very healthy or helpful.

Here is how you can use this technique in your life. Think of a problem you have. Now, imagine you wake up tomorrow morning and a miracle has happened during the night and the problem has magically been solved all by itself and an ideal state is now in existance.

How would you first realise this had happened? What would be the signs?

What would be the next sign? And the next?

What would be the first sign that your family, or your co-workers would notice?

List as many of these as possible.

Now, imagine a 1-to-10 scale, where 10 equals this perfect state where the problem has been totally solved, and 1 equals the problem at its very worst.

Where are you currently on the scale?

Lets imagine, for example, that you are at '3' (a common answer).

Now, this is interesting, because how come you are already as high as 3? You are not at 1. Therefore something has been happening to lift you a little way towards the solution. Write down every little thing that has lifted you as high as a 3. How far up the scale have you gone in the past? Maybe you've had a day when you went up to 6 or 7? What was happening then which created that?

As you list these things you will start to see that you've already got little peices of the solution to your problem at hand. All that remains is to work out how you can expand on these little peices. Do more of them. Do them more energetically and more often. Or use them as a starting point for thinking of other solutions.

The trick is not to get too hung up on trying to solve the problem in one big move. Most of the time its more practical to inch towards solving it. For instance, if you are at a '3' then work out what you could do to get yourself to a 3.5 or a 4.