2. February 2011 by John Schinnerer.

Hello! My name is John Schinnerer, Ph.D., founder of Guide to Self in Danville, CA.

I teach clients the latest proven tools to turn down the volume on anger. 

A perfect client for me is a man between the ages of 15 and 65 whose anger and irritation is driving his coworkers up a wall.

I use a novel positive psychology approach to anger management which means my clients take away feelings of hope and inspiration rather than guilt and shame. It also means that I teach clients proven tools to increase positive emotions as well as ways to turn down the volume on negative emotions.

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Guide to Self

Turning down the volume on anger with positive psychology!

For a free copy of John’s award-winning self-help book ‘Guide to Self: The Beginner’s Guide to Managing Emotion and Thought’ visit www.GuideToSelf.com and enter your name and email for a free PDF version!

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10. December 2010 by John Schinnerer.

How Anger is the New Sex

Switch off the Housewives they’re making you crazy. How to keep your temper in an angry age.

WebMD Feature from “Marie Claire” MagazineBy Joanne Chen

Whether it’s Wall Street bonuses, the Gulf oil fiasco, or cultural icons (David Letterman! Tiger Woods! Al Gore?!) flagrantly cheating on their wives, Americans have more reason than ever to be pissed off - a sentiment Charles Speilberger, Ph.D., University of South Florida psychologist, says we’re also quicker than ever to express. As coeditor of the recently published International Handbook of Anger - just one of the new releases examining our current age of rage - he should know. Because not only are there more reasons to get angry today, there are more outlets for it as well, from social media to reality TV to books, including Koren Zailckas’ tellingly titled memoir, Fury, out this month. Anger, it seems, is the new sex: It sells. And none of us, especially women, can get enough - just check out the bonanza ratings enjoyed by any reality show in which there’s even the potential for a hissy fit. So how will we ever calm down, and, more importantly, do we even want to? Take a deep breath (or two), and we’ll tell you.
WHAT’S MAKING YOU MAD
(And How to Stop It)

Once upon a time, we told each other off in person. Discussions grew heated, doors were slammed, and we moved on. Now, with so much of our daily communication done via e-mail, texting, or Facebook, many of the impulse controls we’d normally employ in confrontations have gone out the window. “Electronic media disinhibit the expression of anger,” says Michael Potegal, Ph.D., associate professor of pediatrics and neurology at the University of Minnesota. Alone, typing angry thoughts to a friend or a loved one, we don’t have the benefit of seeing a facial reaction, reading body language, or hearing a voice - we’re wearing conversational blinders, so we end up typing things we’d never say in person.

This, in turn, breeds an anger-making dynamic all its own. Scott Wetzler, Ph.D., department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences professor at New York City’s Montefiore Medical Center, calls this sort of one-sided expression of emotion “venting.” When we e-mail or text, which allows us to ignore the other side of the argument, “we feel justified; the more justified we feel, the angrier we get.” What’s more, typing a thoughtful response to your boyfriend in the heat of an argument is particularly tough when shorthand expressions (whatev!) roll so easily off the fingers. Soon, our inbox and Twitter feeds can devolve into rage-filled echo chambers, leaving us feeling vulnerable and guilty over things we wish we could un-type.

And according to University of Minnesota researchers, even cell-phone communication is fraught with risk. Chatting as we run errands may make us feel like great multitaskers, but the reality is that it means we take longer to react. Add poor sound quality and other distractions into the mix, and you have a recipe for misinterpretations and unintended interruptions - all of which, researchers say, lead to “hurt feelings, conflict, and misunderstandings.” What’s more, the fallout from this is often hardest on women: Says Ray Novaco, Ph.D., professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine, women relive angry incidents more, and stay angry longer, than men do.

FINDING PEACE IN AN ANGRY WORLD
 

Turn off the TV. In a University of Maryland study, people who chose reading over watching TV were more likely to describe themselves as “very happy” than those who did the opposite, watching TV more than reading.

Live in 3-D. Save e-mails and cell-phone calls for appointments and reservations, never for heart-to-hearts. And always keep Twitter-talk light and conflict-free.

Breathe. Delay responding to an e-mail or text message that annoys you. Take five breaths; call when you have time to talk calmly. Better yet, take a night to sleep on it. Never, ever send a work e-mail in anger.

Sleep. “Irritability is a symptom of insomnia,” notes Nancy Molitor, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist at Northwestern University. The message: Snooze more and you’ll be in better control of your emotions - and your tongue.

Be grateful. Make a daily list of everything you’re grateful for as a way to dispel anger, which Novaco says is the “absence of appreciation.”

Move. “The chemicals released during anger can feel like muscular tension that needs releasing,” says Rich Pfeiffer, Ph.D., a Sedona, Arizona-based psychologist. Hit the gym to keep your limbs loose and your mind open.

Take action. Anger strikes when we feel powerless. Whether you’re outraged by disease in Africa or the latest eco-disaster, join a volunteer group to do something about it. Your mood will improve, and you may even have an impact on the problem.

For the full article at WebMD, click here.

For more information on how you can turn down the volume on your anger with the latest scientifically-proven anger management tools, visit http://drjohnsblog.wordpress.com for some free online anger management classes!

To life, love and laughter,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.
Founder Guide to Self, Inc.
Emotion Expert

 P.S. For a free PDF copy of the award-winning self-help book, Guide To Self: The Beginner’s Guide to Managing Emotion And Thought, visit http://www.GuidetoSelf.com and enter your name and email. There are dozens of tools included to turn down the volume on anger along with the latest methods for anger management.

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23. November 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From the magnificent ScienceDaily.com…

Your View of Personal Goals Can Affect Your Relationships

ScienceDaily (Nov. 22, 2010) — How you think about your goals — whether it’s to improve yourself or to do better than others — can affect whether you reach those goals. Different kinds of goals can also have distinct effects on your relationships with people around you, according to the authors of a paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science.

People with “mastery goals” want to improve themselves. Maybe they want to get better grades, make more sales, or land that triple toe loop.

On the other hand, people with what psychologists call “performance goals” are trying to outperform others — to get a better grade than a friend or be Employee of the Year. Both kinds of goals can be useful in different contexts. But P. Marijn Poortvliet, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and Céline Darnon, of France’s Clermont University, are interested in the social context of these goals — what they do to your relationships.

For a FREE copy of the award-winning self-improvement book, Guide to Self: The Beginner’s Guide to Managing Emotion and Thought, simply visit http://www.GuideToSelf.com and enter your name and email address for instant access to your very own PDF copy! Change the world by changing your self! 

Poortvliet’s work focuses on information exchange — whether people are open and honest when they are working together. “People with performance goals are more deceitful” and less likely to share information with coworkers, both in the laboratory and in real-world offices he has studied, Poortvliet says. “The reason is fairly obvious — when you want to outperform others, it doesn’t make sense to be honest about information.”

On the other hand, people who are trying to improve themselves are quite open, he says. “If the ultimate goal is to improve yourself, one way to do it is to be very cooperative with other people.” This can help improve the work environment, even though the people with these goals aren’t necessarily thinking about social relations. “They’re not really altruists, per se. They see the social exchange as a means toward the ends of self improvement.” Other research has found that people with these self-improvement goals are more open to hearing different perspectives, while people with a performance goal “would rather just say, ‘I’m just right and you are wrong.’”

It’s not always bad to be competitive, Poortvliet says. “For example, if you want to be the Olympic champion, of course it’s nice to have mastery goals and you should probably have mastery goals, but you definitely need performance goals because you want to be the winner and not the runner-up.”

But it’s important to think about how goals affect the social environment. “If you really want to establish constructive and long-lasting working relationships, then you should really balance the different levels of goals,” Poortvliet says — thinking not only about each person’s achievement, but also about the team as a whole.

Some people are naturally more competitive than others. But it’s also possible for managers to shift the kinds of goals people have by, for example, giving a bonus for the best employee. That might encourage people to set performance goals and compete against each other. On the other hand, it would also be possible to structure a bonus program to give people rewards based on their individual improvement over time.

Original article can be found by clicking here.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Association for Psychological Science.

Journal Reference:
1. P. Marijn Poortvliet and Céline Darnon. Toward a More Social Understanding of Achievement Goals: The Interpersonal Effects of Mastery and Performance Goals. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2010; 19 (5): 324 DOI: 10.1177/0963721410383246

To life, love and laughter,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Founder Guide to Self, Inc.

www.GuideToSelf.com

http://drjohnsblog.wordpress.com  Excellent blog on the latest anger management tools

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13. November 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From Ken Pope’s listserv…

Subject: recommended: *Science*: “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind” by Matthew Killingsworth & Dan Gilbert at Harvard University

Today’s new issue of the American association for the Advancement of Science’s journal *Science* (Vol. 330. no. 6006) includes an article: “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.”

The authors are Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert.

Here are some excerpts:

Many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and practitioners are trained to resist mind wandering and “to be here now.”

These traditions suggest that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

Are they right?

Laboratory experiments have revealed a great deal about the cognitive and neural bases of mind wandering (3-7), but little about its emotional consequences in everyday life.

The most reliable method for investigating real-world emotion is experience sampling, which involves contacting people as they engage in their everyday activities and asking them to report their thoughts, feelings, and actions at that moment.

<snip>

We solved this problem by developing a Web application for the iPhone (Apple Incorporated, Cupertino, California), which we used to create an unusually large database of real-time reports of thoughts, feelings, and actions of a broad range of people as they went about their daily activities.

The application contacts participants through their iPhones at random moments during their waking hours, presents them with questions, and records their answers to a database at www.trackyourhappiness.org.

The database currently contains nearly a quarter of a million samples from about 5000 people from 83 different countries who range in age from 18 to 88 and who collectively represent every one of 86 major occupational categories.

To find out how often people’s minds wander, what topics they wander to, and how those wanderings affect their happiness, we analyzed samples from 2250 adults (58.8% male, 73.9% residing in the United States, mean age of 34 years) who were randomly assigned to answer a happiness question (”How are you feeling right now?”) answered on a continuous sliding scale from very bad (0) to very good (100), an activity question (”What are you doing right

now?”) answered by endorsing one or more of 22 activities adapted from the day reconstruction method (10, 11), and a mind-wandering question (”Are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing?”) answered with one of four options: no; yes, something pleasant; yes, something neutral; or yes, something unpleasant.

Our analyses revealed three facts.

First, people’s minds wandered frequently, regardless of what they were doing.

Mind wandering occurred in 46.9% of the samples and in at least 30% of the samples taken during every activity except making love.

The frequency of mind wandering in our real-world sample was considerably higher than is typically seen in laboratory experiments.

<snip>

Second, multilevel regression revealed that people were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not [slope (b) = -8.79, P < 0.001], and this was true during all activities, including the least enjoyable.

Although people’s minds were more likely to wander to pleasant topics (42.5% of samples) than to unpleasant topics (26.5% of samples) or neutral topics (31% of samples), people were no happier when thinking about pleasant topics than about their current activity (b = -0.52, not

significant) and were considerably unhappier when thinking about neutral topics (b = -7.2, P < 0.001) or unpleasant topics (b = -23.9, P < 0.001) than about their current activity (Fig. 1, bottom).

Although negative moods are known to cause mind wandering (13), time-lag analyses strongly suggested that mind wandering in our sample was generally the cause, and not merely the consequence, of unhappiness (12).

Third, what people were thinking was a better predictor of their happiness than was what they were doing.

The nature of people’s activities explained 4.6% of the within-person variance in happiness and 3.2% of the between-person variance in happiness, but mind wandering explained 10.8% of within-person variance in happiness and 17.7% of between-person variance in happiness.

The variance explained by mind wandering was largely independent of the variance explained by the nature of activities, suggesting that the two were independent influences on happiness.

In conclusion, a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

[end excerpts]

The author note provides the following contact info:

<mkilling@fas.harvard.edu>.

Ken Pope

To life, love and laughter,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Founder of Guide to Self

P.S. For a free PDF copy of John’s award-winning self-help book on ways to focus the mind, turn down negative emotions, and turn up positive emotions simply visit http://www.GuideToSelf.com, click on the yellow book icon on the left side of the page, and enter your email and name. You will be granted instant access to 216 pages of life-improving scientifically-proven tools to focus your mind!

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12. November 2010 by John Schinnerer.

From ScienceDaily…

ScienceDaily (Nov. 10, 2010) — Some scholars estimate that presenteeism, a relatively recent buzzword that applies to people who are less productive at work because of health issues, costs employers as much as three times the dollar amount as absenteeism in terms of lost productivity.

But researchers at University of Michigan believe those numbers may be inaccurate. A new opinion paper suggests that the tools for measuring and quantifying hours of lost productivity and translating those hours to dollars are unreliable and don’t capture the entire presenteeism picture, said Susan Hagen, an analyst from the U-M School of Kinesiology Health Management Research Center (HMRC).

Because of this, the HMRC has suggested a three-year moratorium on its studies of presenteeism that translate hours of productivity loss into financial or dollar equivalents.

The HMRC defines presenteeism as reduced productivity at work due to health conditions such as asthma, back pain, allergies or depression.

“It’s hard to be 100 percent effective every moment you’re at work,” Hagen said. “We’re talking about the lack of productivity that stems from a health condition, or because you’re worried about your health.”

One of the challenges in measuring presenteeism is that all the measurement instruments use self-reported data. This means you’re depending on employees to report they aren’t working as effectively as they could be, due to their health.

“There are all kind of estimates as to how often it happens,” Hagen said. “The estimates can vary so widely. Some studies say that most workers don’t have any presenteeism, while there is other research that suggests most workers experience presenteeism to some degree.”

Another big problem is that there are so many different measuring tools, and each tool may measure presenteeism in a different way. Also, not all health problems affect workers in the same ways. For example, a person may have allergies for two weeks in May and feel horrible, but the measurement instrument could take that two weeks and expand that bad experience to 12 months. This process vastly over-reports the illness and thus, the hours lost and the subsequent financial loss.

“Almost everybody believes in the concept of presenteeism but maybe some of those calculations based on those early measurements aren’t accurate,” Hagen said.

“Our concern is that organizations may be making financial or future decisions based on data that may not support those decisions,” Hagen said.

The paper appears in the November issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

University of Michigan (2010, November 10). Sick at work and surfing the net? You’re not alone — or are you?. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 11, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com¬ /releases/2010/11/101109152943.htm

To life, love, health and laughter,

John Schinnerer, Ph.D.

Founder of Guide to Self, Inc.

For a complimentary copy of the award-winning self-improvement book on latest ways to turn down anger, anxiety, sadness and guilt, visit http://www.GuidetoSelf.com and enter your name and email. This top self-help book (Guide to Self: The Beginner’s Guide to Managing Emotion and Thought) outlines the latest tools to manage your own mind, turn up the volume on love, joy, hope, interest, passion, curiosity, awe, self-compassion and more. Managing  your mind leads to greater physical health, better relationships, more enjoyment in life and healthier relationships. What’s not to like?!

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