Americans feel less sense of well being, according to a recent Gallup poll. You can see the poll results.
The report notes that the Life Evaluation sub-index fell 14.3 points from a high of 47.4 in February to a low of 33.1 in November. The Life Evaluation Index categorizes respondents as either “thriving”, “struggling”, or “suffering”, in accordance with how they rate their current lives as well as their expectation of where they will be in five years using a “ladder” scale with steps numbered from 0 to 10, where “0″ indicates the worst possible life and “10″ the best possible life. Beginning in April, the number of struggling Americans outnumbered those who are thriving. A key finding from the poll is that regardless of age, gender, income, or marital status, every group experienced a drop in their Well-Being Index score from January to December of 2008.
Millions more people today are in deep psychological pain, and this has profound consequences for the country. Based on good science, we know how this pain is likely to cause…
• People will choose to eat more foods that result in weight gain. This is not a sign of moral weakness, but the result of deep evolutionary triggers that impel humans to consume more calories when under perceived threats and distress. This of course makes sense, and can be replicated in experimental studies for not just humans. If millions of Americans start to eat more foods that satisfy this evolutionary urge, we will have reverberations in rising health-care costs—just at a time we cannot afford those rising costs.
• People will act more depressed at home and work, which is born out in multiple studies. Psychological depression means productivity and innovation in the workplace will decline, and psychological depression at home means that more marriages will fail and more children will grow up with behavioral and health problems. All of these likely results are well documented scientifically.
What might turn around the declining sense of well being? Nurturance from other human beings.
We, as humans, are fundamentally wired to be sensitive to expressed warmth, help and assistance from others in our immediate environment. Why is that so? Because our survival over eons depended on it. Historically, if a parent did not nurture a child, that child was less likely to survive. If a mate or our extended human community did not cooperate, the family or whole group suffered.
The economic crisis that has resulted in the declining sense of well being has fundamentally upset the daily acts of nurturance among millions of people. While the loss of billions of dollars will not be turned around immediately, the sense of human nurturance can be with major benefits for all of us. A few examples illustrate.
In the early 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control funded my propose to increase nurturance in 8 high-risk schools, set in neighborhoods with long histories of violence, drugs, and poverty. In this effort, we taught staff and students to begin writing positive notes to each other for helpfulness and kindness. These were featured six times a day on the TV news, as well. Within a few months, students and staff were writing, sharing and posting such nurturing notes every day. Since this was a randomized control study, we were measuring the effects of this increased nurturance. Children were less ill, children were less aggressive and violent, and children developed many more competencies that predict lifetime success. Not bad for something no more than old-fashioned nurturing of children and adults. You can read the studies here.
Similar studies exist for home and the work place. These findings ought not to be surprising, as humans are the only species that we are aware of that can use language to nurture others in our group. Yet, when we feel distress, we tend to reduce our verbal nurturing of others. Fortunately, prevention science has clearly shown that we can increase these types of nurturing, which in turn improve human well being.
Tags: Nurturing Environments
How wonderfully well put. Science demonstrating that kindness and good manners trump adversity most of the time and give even the unmanageable times a leg up on improvement.
A couple years ago, you taught me about kernels–those easy to learn, mostly one-step things to do that help us get other people to be more fun to be around.
Being a city bus driver, I was anxious to see if planting a lot of kernels of smiles and thank yous would grow a crop of pleasant journeys for me and my passengers. Now bus drivers just know from experience that a bus is stony ground for growing something pleasant, but I wanted you to be proud of me.
So every day (and especially at the stop where the “toughest” passengers got on) I looked every passenger in the eye, smiled from my heart and said, “thank you” as they paid the fare.
The result? I felt better, kinder (even prettier) no matter what the passengers did. AND they smiled back more, stopped clowning and swearing and occasionally said something pleasant to me. It sounds small but it gave me a great sense of joy and accomplishment every day I drove a bus after that. Thank you, Dennis!
Nicely put Dennis!