Abstract In the book Applied Psychology in Everyday Life published on 2011 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, included is the 20 page section titled Psychology and Health: Aspects of the Mind That Affect Everyday Health, by the author Michael B. Johnson, who discusses the importance of one’s own perspective and how we ourselves view life, and how all of this contributes to how one feels towards oneself and towards others. The author says that in order for an individual to fully enjoy life, they must learn how to manage their personal experiences since a being is greatly impacted by these involvements to the point in which it can affect their physical health. Therefore one must become self-aware of these experiences, and control them so they do not lead to depression, stress, or attentional hyperactivity (which results from multitasking too many things at once while your mind races to keep up). There are four factors discussed by the author that he believes can be controlled by us in order to maintain a happy state of mind, these include: conation, attention, cognition, and affect. In conation, which involves both volition (aspirations) and intention (completing your goals), these two aspects play a key part in what makes us pleased and fulfilled. On the other hand, conative deficit is when one feels unmotivated, lazy, or uninterested, which can lead to hopelessness. In addition, fueled by one’s obsession to be perfect, conative hyperactivity easily occurs. This can lead to selfishness, depression, and a lot of work in order to achieve perfectionism. In order to solve this, the author proposes the idea of intrapersonal conative balance, in which a person leads themselves towards realistic goals and actually achieves them in a timely matter. This results in more self-awareness towards one’s personal experiences and how to overcome bad ones. However, during attention deficit, a person may try to multitask multiple things at once, but in reality their mind becomes overwhelmed trying to catch up. This can lead to anxiety, diversions, and depression. In order to save a person’s mind from going crazy, a resolution may be to self-regulate your thought process and focus one thing at a time. This helps one be able to commit yourself and fully engage yourself into each assignment at a time, and gain self-awareness of ones abilities. Another way of achieving cognitive balance is through cognition, which is the sum of one’s thoughts. In cognitive balance, a person is more capable of “going with the flow”, and accepts and experiences life in the moment. By contrast, cognitive deficit and cognitive hyperactivity are absent-mindedness and difficulty in deciphering between fantasy and reality, respectively. The final means of reaching this balance is through affect, which consists of your feelings and how you control them. The contrary to this is an act known as effective balance, which is lack of feelings, or affective dysfunction, which is when you react wrong in a situation. In order to resolve these matters you need to self-regulate your emotions which can significantly influence your performance. All these are also discussed on how to can apply these to everyday life and Psychological skills you can form in order to have a fully happy life in your perspective. I feel this article was very appropriate and accurate, especially when it came to the topic of goal setting and the implementation of the four factors. It said in the article, “Studies addressing the relationship between people’s levels
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In the beginning the author assumed that there are four factors that we should follow in order to maintain a peaceful state of mind, and throughout the article he provides evidence for his assumptions and explains how this is indeed, valid reasoning. An example of this would be when Kahneman and Deaton (2010) provide data from 450,000 Americans between 2008 and 2009, showing that individuals that have a higher income than 75,000 per year are not actually happier. He also performed experiments with his patients, for example, while he was with his client that told him he was frustrated and could not remember his important topic three to four days after his psychiatric therapy, he performed these experiments just like he would when he was regularly in session with a patient, so that he could get a truthful
In the beginning the author assumed that there are four factors that we should follow in order to maintain a peaceful state of mind, and throughout the article he provides evidence for his assumptions and explains how this is indeed, valid reasoning. An example of this would be when Kahneman and Deaton (2010) provide data from 450,000 Americans between 2008 and 2009, showing that individuals that have a higher income than 75,000 per year are not actually happier. He also performed experiments with his patients, for example, while he was with his client that told him he was frustrated and could not remember his important topic three to four days after his psychiatric therapy, he performed these experiments just like he would when he was regularly in session with a patient, so that he could get a truthful