Looking after ourselves has got a bad press: it’s seen as selfish, narcissistic, new age, you name it. But when we are taken through the safety procedures on a plane, we always hear that should pressure in the cabin decrease and air masks drop down, we should always place our own over our faces first before putting them on our children…
If we neglect our needs, whether they are for playing sports, or musical instruments, for love, social contact, making things, whatever they may be, the longer we leave them the harder it becomes to break some internal barrier that our organism erects and start fulfilling them again.
“Decades of studies show that people who say their health is poor are likely to die sooner than those who rate their health excellent, even after controlling for how sick people actually are.” What can this mean? It seems we are our own best sources of information…
Something about this article rubs me up the wrong way — maybe it’s the title itself, “Master your emotions”. The cheerful, practical, common sense tone reinforces the idea that we are messy souls who need keeping in line, and who need to enforce a certain wholesome discipline for our own good. It sounds as if an adult is taking charge of a child.
Rather die than go to the dentist? Contemplating our own death is a lot more pleasant than contemplating dental pain, according to research which shows that reminders of death seem to provoke a kind of tuning into positive emotional information, a way of coping which is immediate, unconscious and clearly counterintuitive.
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