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Effect of language differences on:

1. Attitude to savings:

   While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

2. Navigation:

   About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in […] absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.”

3. Blame attribution:

   Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.

4. Colour perception:

   Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them […]  A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.

5. Gender:

   A study done in the 1980s found that […] thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew [which is strong on gender markers] knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish [which lacks gender markers]. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

As noted earlier, a specific subgroup reports the greatest satisfaction: People who don’t feel rushed, but also report little or more “excess time.” Their high levels of happiness held steady even after a long list of demographic factors was taken into account, including marriage, age, education, race and gender.

Clearly, there’s much to be said for living a productive life at a comfortable pace.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques come in many shapes and sizes, offering a wide variety to choose from to suit your preferences.

You and your therapist can mix and match techniques depending on what you’re most interested in trying and what works for you. You can also try the following Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques as self-help.

Behavioral Experiments

In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, behavioral experiments are designed to test thoughts. […] This would give you objective feedback about whether self-criticism or self-kindness was more effective […]

(CBT Behavioral experiment example)

Thought Records

Like behavioral experiments, thought records are also designed to test the validity of thoughts. […] Once you’ve looked at the objective evidence for and against a thought side by side, the idea is to come up with several more balanced thoughts. […]

Thought records tend to help change beliefs on a logical level, whereas behavioral experiments may be more helpful in also changing beliefs on a gut or felt level i.e., what you emotionally feel is true, regardless of the objective evidence. (CBT Thought record example)

Pleasant Activity Scheduling

Pleasant activity scheduling is a surprisingly effective Cognitive Behavioral Therapy technique. It’s particularly helpful for depression. […]

Doing activities that produce higher levels of positive emotions in your daily life will help make your thinking less negative, narrow, rigid, and self-focused.

Situation Exposure Hierarchies

Situation exposure hierarchies involve putting things you would normally avoid on a list. […] For each item on your list, rate how distressed you think you’d be if you did it. […]

Try to have several items at each distress number so there are no big jumps. The idea is to work your way through the list from lowest to highest. You would likely experiment with each item several times over a period of a few days until the distress you feel about being in that situation is about half of what it was the first time you tried it […] Then move to the next item up the list.

Imagery Based Exposure

One version of imagery exposure involves bringing to mind a recent memory that provoked strong negative emotions. […] In imagery exposure, the person would bring the situation of being given the feedback to mind and remember it in lots of sensory detail […] They would also attempt to accurately label the emotions and thoughts they experienced during the interaction, and what their behavioral urges were […]

Imagery based exposure can help counteract rumination because it helps make intrusive painful memories less likely to trigger rumination. Because of this, it also tends to help reduce avoidance coping. When a person is less distressed by intrusive memories they’re able to choose healthier coping actions.

Summary

This list of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques is far from exhaustive but will give you a good idea of the variety of techniques that are used in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. If you’re working with a therapist and you’ve been doing your own reading about CBT, you can let your therapist know what techniques you’re excited to try.

“Every time you recall a memory, it becomes sensitive to disruption. Often that is used to incorporate new information into it.” That’s the blunt assessment from one of the world’s leading experts on memory, Dr. Eric Kandel from Columbia University.

And that means our memories are not abstract snapshots stored forever in a bulging file in our mind, but rather, they’re a collection of brain cells — neurons that undergo chemical changes every time they’re engaged.

So when we think about something from the past, the memory is called up like a computer file, reviewed and revised in subtle ways, and then sent back to the brain’s archives, now modified slightly, updated, and changed.

As scientists increasingly understand the biological process of memory, they are also learning how to interrupt it, and that means they might one day be able to ease the pain of past trauma, or alter destructive habits and addictions, as though shaking an Etch A Sketch, erasing the scribbles on the mind, and starting fresh.

“The old view of memory processing was that our memories got stored in the brain and once they’re stored, you can’t touch them,” Nader said. But scientists now realize that memories are evolving all the time. “Every time someone recalls a memory, it’s a chance to change it,” Nader added.

That’s because the memory has to be restored using a biochemical pathway that is very similar to the original storage. And there are ways to interfere with this memory “reconsolidation” using a drug. “You have to change the strength of the connection between neurons. It’s almost like you’ve unwired the memory,” Nader said.

Understanding the neurochemical process of memory opens up possibilities for therapy in situations where memory is causing pain.

Early research on post traumatic stress disorder has been encouraging, Nader said. In studies, subjects have been asked to remember the trauma, and then take a drug that has been shown to block memory reconsolidation, and that seems to reduce the strength of the traumatic memory to non-PTSD levels.

Other research has suggested that it might even be possible to block the memory reconsolidation without drugs, by asking a person to remember something and then, in those moments of remembering, replace the old memory with new information.

Over 135 libraries across the country are lifting the nations spirits with mood-boosting books and all the titles have been specially chosen by reading groups - we hope you will find one that will improve your mood!

The Beach Café by Lucy Diamond
Being Human by Neil Astley
The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde
Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani
Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
Couch Fiction by Philippa Perry
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
Hector and the Search for Happiness by Francois Lelord
Life According to Lubka by Laurie Graham
Life with the Lid Off by Nicola Hodgkinson
A Little History of the World by E. H. Gombrich
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
Men at Work by Mike Gayle
Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman
A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon
Tackling Life by Charlie Oatway
That Awkward Age by Roger McGough
To the Moon and Back by Jill Mansell
Trouble on the Heath by Terry Jones
A Winter Book by Tove Jansson

You might also like to try …
Stop What You’re Doing and Read This - Various contributors
Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
Waterlog by Roger Deakin
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

I’ve enjoyed many books by Jasper Fforde and Bill Bryson. Another suggestion: anything by Douglas Adams.

“It shows that brain regions important for decision-making remain active even while our brains may be simultaneously engaged in unrelated tasks, such as thinking about a math problem. What’s most intriguing about this finding is that participants did not have any awareness that their brains were still working on the decision problem while they were engaged in an unrelated task.”

The results included three main findings. First, the team confirmed previous research demonstrating that a brief period of distraction—in this case two minutes—produced higher quality decisions about the cars and other items.

But did this effect occur because the distraction period provided an opportunity for the brain to take a break from decision-making and then return to the problem with a fresh look? Or alternatively, does the brain continue to unconsciously process decision information during this distraction period? This research supports the latter unconscious processing explanation.

When the participants were initially learning information about the cars and other items, the neuroimaging results showed activation in the visual and prefrontal cortices, regions that are known to be responsible for learning and decision-making.

Additionally, during the distractor task, both the visual and prefrontal cortices continued to be active—or reactivated—even though the brain was consciously focused on number memorization.

Third, the results showed that the amount of reactivation within the visual and prefrontal cortices during the distractor task predicted the degree to which participants made better decisions, such as picking the best car in the set.

Scientists believe that mindfulness practitioners gain enhanced control over sensory cortical alpha rhythms that help regulate how the brain processes and filters sensations, including pain, and memories such as depressive thoughts.

In a paper found in_ Frontiers in Human Neuroscience_, researchers said that by learning to control their focus on the present somatic moment, mindfulness meditators develop a more sensitive “volume knob” for controlling spatially specific, localized sensory cortical alpha rhythms.

Efficient modulation of cortical alpha rhythms in turn enables optimal filtering of sensory information. Meditators learn not only to control what specific body sensations they pay attention to, but also how to regulate attention so that it does not become biased toward negative physical sensations such as chronic pain.

The localized attentional control of somatosensory alpha rhythms becomes generalized to better regulate bias toward internally focused negative thoughts, as in depression.