Sunshine Coast of Queensland Australia, Hypnotherapy Clinic, Hypnosis
Michael Grassel
Successfully guiding weight-loss clients since 1981.
Bachelor of Science, Business U.W.P., Post-graduate studies in Psychology, Social Psychology U.T.S.A., N.I.I.P.
Certified Hypnotherapy Practitioner; HH.Dip(P.H.)
A Harvard psychiatrist says 3 things are the secret to real happiness
Happiness is one of the most important things in life, yet it’s also one of the hardest to study.
Psychiatrist Robert Waldinger is the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development,
one of the longest and most complete studies of adult life ever
conducted. Waldinger described some of the secrets to happiness revealed
by the study in a recent TED talk.
The study followed two cohorts of white men for 75 years, starting in 1938:
268 Harvard sophomores as part of the “Grant Study” led by Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant
456 12- to 16-year-old boys who grew up in inner-city Boston as part of the “Glueck Study” led by Harvard Law School professor Sheldon Glueck
The researchers surveyed the men about their lives (including the
quality of their marriages, job satisfaction, and social activities)
every two years and monitored their physical health (including chest
X-rays, blood tests, urine tests, and echocardiograms) every five years.
They came away with one major finding: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier.
In his TED Talk, Waldinger pointed out three key lessons about happiness:
1. Close relationships
The men in both groups of the Harvard study who reported being closer
to their family, friends, or community tended to be happier and
healthier than their less social counterparts. They also tended to live
longer. By comparison, people who said they were lonelier reported
feeling less happy. They also had worse physical and mental health, as
defined above. A 2014 review
of dozens of studies published in the journal Social and Personality
Psychology Compass suggests that loneliness can get in the way of mental
functioning, sleep, and well-being, which in turn increases the risk of
illness and death.
2. Quality (not quanity) of relationships
It’s not just being in a relationship that matters. Married couples
who said they argued constantly and had low affection for one another
(which study authors defined as “high-conflict marriages”) were actually
less happy than people who weren’t married at all, the Harvard study
found.
However, the effect of relationship quality seems to depend somewhat on age. A 2015 study published in the journal Psychology and Ageing that followed people for 30 years found that the number of relationships people had was, in fact, more important for people in their 20s, but the quality of relationships had a bigger effect on social and psychological well being when people were in their 30s.
3. Stable, supportive marriages
Being socially connected to others isn’t just good for our physical
health. It also helps stave off mental decline. People who were married
without having divorced, separating, or having “serious problems” until
age 50 performed better on memory tests later in life than those who
weren’t, the Harvard study found.
And other research backs this up. A 2013 study
in the journal PLOS ONE found that marriage, among other factors, was
linked to a lower risk of mild cognitive impairment and dementia.
All of this suggests that strong relationships are critical to our health.
Society places a lot of emphasis on wealth and “leaning in” to our
work, Waldinger said. “But over and over, over these 75 years, our study
has shown that the people who fared the best were the people who leaned
in to relationships, with family, with friends, with community.”
Source: FlickrDefinitions and Diagnosis
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – fifth edition (DSM-5; APA, 2013)
identifies obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) as being characterized
by obsessions and/or compulsions. Obsessions are defined as:
1. Recurrent and persistent thoughts,
urges, or impulses that are experienced, at some time during the
disturbance, as intrusive and unwanted, and that in most individuals
cause marked anxiety or distress.
2. The individual attempts to ignore or
suppress such thoughts, urges, or images, or to neutralize them with
some other thought or action (i.e., by performing a compulsion).
Compulsions are defined as:
1. Repetitive behaviors or mental acts
that the individual feels driven to perform in response to an obsession
or according to rules that must be applied rigidly.
2. The behaviors or mental acts are aimed
at preventing or reducing anxiety or distress, or preventing some
dreaded event or situation; however, these behaviors or mental acts are
not connected in a realistic way with what they are designed to
neutralize or prevent, or are clearly excessive.
DSM-5 also specifies that in order for an individual to be diagnosed
with OCD, these obsessions or compulsions must be time-consuming (e.g.,
take more than 1 h per day) or cause clinically significant distress or
impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of
functioning; cannot be attributable to the physiological effects of a
substance or another medical condition; and cannot be better explained
by the symptoms of another mental disorder. Traditionally, OCD has been
classified as an anxiety disorder; however, in the most recent version
of the DSM, OCD was moved to a newly created category of
obsessive–compulsive and related disorders (OCRD) (APA, 2013). Understanding Obsessions and Compulsions
Currently, OCD can be diagnosed if the individual experiences either obsessions or compulsions (APA, 2013),
however, it is rare for patients to only experience obsessions in the
absence of compulsions, or compulsions in the absence of obsessions (Williams et al., 2011).
The obsessions and compulsions characteristic of OCD are heterogeneous,
meaning that individuals with OCD can present with many different kinds
of symptom presentations. Recent research suggests that there are five
main symptom subtypes (Williams et al., 2011)
and one of these subtypes, comprised of compulsive acquiring and
difficulty discarding, is now subsumed under an independent disorder
(Hoarding Disorder) in DSM-5 (APA, 2013). Below, we will describe the four remaining symptom subtypes of OCD.
Harming
The harming cluster includes obsessions that focus on harm coming to
the patient or to others, generally resulting in subsequent checking
compulsions. Common obsessions include concerns about fire from leaving
appliances on, burglary/theft from leaving doors unlocked, being
responsible for hit and run accidents, harm coming to loved ones and
pets, etc. Checking compulsions (including checking of appliances,
doors, faucets, emergency brake, the route the patient has driven, etc.)
are generally performed to prevent harm coming to themselves or others. Contamination
The contamination cluster includes obsessions with themes of dirt,
germs, and contamination; with subsequent washing and cleaning
compulsions. Patients often present with emotional distress relating to
contamination from dirt/germs, bodily waste/secretions (such as urine,
feces, sweat, semen, and blood), environmental contaminants (mold,
asbestos, and lead) or chemicals, solvents, and cleaners. This distress
may manifest as either fear or disgust (Olatunji et al., 2007)
and washing/cleaning compulsions (for example, excessive hand
washing/sanitizing, showering, or excessive cleaning of household items)
are often performed to reduce distress caused by the contamination
obsessions. Unacceptable thoughts
The unacceptable thoughts cluster includes individuals with unwanted
and unacceptable aggressive, sexual or religious intrusive thoughts and
mental and repeating compulsions. Individuals with these obsessions
often perform mental or covert compulsions (mental acts that serve to
neutralize anxiety caused by obsessions, e.g., reciting a silent prayer,
mentally reviewing past actions or conversations, replacing ‘bad’
thoughts or images with ‘good’ thoughts or images, counting, etc.).
Repeating behaviors can also be used as a way to reduce anxiety by
patients with unacceptable thoughts and may include repeating routine
tasks such as dressing, walking up stairs or through doorways, or
repeating chores in response to the unwanted thought. Symmetry
This cluster tends to include individuals with obsessions relating to
symmetry and subsequent ordering compulsions. Obsessions in this domain
tend to be associated with the need to know or remember, the need for
exactness in behavior, and the need for symmetry in the environment.
Emotional distress accompanying these obsessions may be more likely to
manifest as feelings of ‘incompleteness’ or things being ‘not just
right,’ rather than fear (Summerfeldt, 2004).
The compulsions seen in this subtype can include physically ordering
and arranging items such as books, CDs or DVDs, or clothing.
Demographics of Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder
Symptoms of OCD have been documented for at least 500 years (Burton, 1989) and the disorder can be seen across all ethnic groups (World Health Organization, 2002). OCD is a relatively common condition, with a prevalence rate of approximately 1.2% (Ruscio et al., 2010). Symptom onset tends to occur during adolescence to early adulthood (Ruscioet al., 2010); however, it is not uncommon to see a much younger childhood onset (Gelleret al., 2001). Most individuals with OCD develop symptoms by the age of 20 (Angst et al., 2004), and symptom onset rarely occurs in late adulthood (Fireman et al., 2001), unless caused by neurological trauma (Carmin et al., 2002).
This excerpt was taken from the article Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder by B.M. Wootton and D.F. Tolin. Read the rest of the article to learn about treatment and measurement of OCD here!
