Hi friends,

Last week, we talked about 5 sim­ple ways to be happy.

As Silva stu­dents, we’re for­tu­nate enough to have tips and tech­niques that can nat­u­rally help us achieve hap­pi­ness. This of course, include med­i­ta­tion, which is the key ingre­di­ent used in all of Silva Method’s exercises.

Med­i­ta­tion helps us to relax our mind and body while giv­ing us phys­i­cal as well as inner peace. It heals stress, anx­i­ety as well as depression.

We already know that engag­ing in activ­i­ties that relieve you from stress, anx­i­ety and depres­sion, such as med­i­ta­tion, can reduce the neg­a­tive ener­gies in our sys­tem lead­ing to hap­pi­ness.

Unfor­tu­nately, there are still so many out there who have yet to expe­ri­ence its won­drous benefits.

So, in their quest to achieve hap­pi­ness, they try var­i­ous meth­ods that may include med­ica­tion, drugs and other adrenaline-rushing activ­i­ties which just aren’t healthy in the long run.

For this rea­son alone, I am very happy to see that med­i­ta­tion is being rec­og­nized more and more in the med­ical world for its nat­ural and per­ma­nent ben­e­fits.

Here’s an arti­cle writ­ten by Janis Whit­lock (MPH, PhD), which talks about the increas­ing num­ber of those addicted to unnat­ural meth­ods in their quest to find hap­pi­ness, but with less than pos­i­tive results.

Accord­ing to Janis, with the quest for hap­pi­ness, as it is socially and cul­tur­ally defined in most west­ern nations, comes height­ened risk for addic­tions of all sorts — par­tic­u­larly for youth.

The arti­cle elab­o­rated on the sci­ence of addic­tion, which reveals that when some­one strug­gles with sub­stance abuse or process addic­tions present in our cul­ture such as food, sex, gam­bling, self-harming behav­iors, or even exces­sive Inter­net usage or worka­holism, the pay-off is the same: increased lev­els of “feel good” chemicals.

All of these behav­iors increase lev­els of “hap­pi­ness” chem­i­cals such as dopamine, sero­tonin, endoge­nous opi­ods, and nor­ep­i­neph­rine — at least for a short while.

Med­i­ta­tion, mean­while, pro­vides the much sought-after pos­i­tive and per­ma­nent qual­i­ties that so many are search­ing for:

• Increased under­stand­ing of the neu­rol­ogy of con­tent­ment sug­gests that prac­tices such as med­i­ta­tion and con­tem­pla­tion may hold the key to real and last­ing happiness
• Stud­ies of long-term med­i­ta­tors by researchers such as Richard David­son from the UW-Madison Lab­o­ra­tory for Affec­tive Neu­ro­science show that med­i­ta­tion is linked to sig­nif­i­cant activ­ity in the left pre­frontal cor­tex — areas of the brain linked to pos­i­tive emotion
• Stud­ies of the effect of med­i­ta­tion on men­tal health typ­i­cally show med­i­ta­tion linked to sig­nif­i­cantly less trait anx­i­ety and neg­a­tive affect, enhanced lev­els of cir­cu­lat­ing anti­bod­ies and the high-frequency gamma waves asso­ci­ated with higher men­tal activity
• Sim­i­larly, as reviewed in Ste­fan Klein’s book, The Sci­ence of Hap­pi­ness, long-term compassion-focused med­i­ta­tion has been linked to the most intense left-sided, happiness-related brain activ­ity ever recorded
• These stud­ies have shown that the effects of med­i­ta­tion are believed to be per­ma­nent

You can read the rest of the arti­cle here, and see for your­self how even the med­ical world is now rec­og­niz­ing the won­der­ful ben­e­fits of meditation.

Bet­ter and Better,

Laura

Why teens addict: The elu­sive search for happiness

by Janis Whit­lock, MPH, PhD

Hap­pi­ness. We all want it. If you were born in Amer­ica you learned early that hap­pi­ness is not only your right but a national obses­sion as well. Indeed, not only do we indi­vid­u­ally spend huge amounts of time, energy, and money becom­ing and stay­ing happy, cor­po­ra­tions spend equal amounts of these con­vinc­ing every­one that they are not happy enough and deserve more. The west­ern rela­tion­ship to hap­pi­ness is indeed an odd one. And, it is into this odd rela­tion­ship that ado­les­cents are inducted as one of the many unspo­ken rites of pas­sage into adulthood.