Feeling Joy
When is fun not fun any more?
In case you missed Dr. Archibald Hart’s presentation of his latest book, “Thrilled to Death“, here’s a summary of what he said in a recent (6/25/08) Focus on the Family broadcast: Over-stimulation “hijacks the pleasure center of the brain,” first flooding it with cortisol- and adrenalin-stimulated joy, then blocking the ability to feel joy.
When a person is multitasking, for example, his or her body is constantly bombarded with cortisol and adrenalin, leading at first to a sense of pleasure and accomplishment. Then, as the experience is prolonged, there is a reduced capacity to experience pleasure.
Consider the physical experience like holding a small glass of water at arm’s length. For a while one can enjoy the experience of success, but then the weariness sets in.
This is precisely what happens when people are addicted to a “recreational” drug. First the high, then it takes more and more of the substance to feel good. The problem here is that life is a do-it-to-yourself project. We can pursue what is bad for us.
Brain Damage
As the brain is first over-stimulated, then dulled, there is reversible brain damage to that pleasure center of the brain. The constant over-stimulation leads to extreme thrill-seeking in an effort to feel pleasure, since the victim suffers from anhedonia. Anhedonia leads not only to a negative sort of boredom, but to apathy and depression.
This cycle is especially damaging for children.
Too much media stimulation, for example, has been shown to reduce performance on standardized tests, according to a December 24, 2007 article by Caleb Crain in The New Yorker, page 138.
Children are also at high risk since weary, over-stimulated parents park them in front of movies instead to doing Legos, for example, to build the ability to use their own imagination, transfer learning, achieve real self worth, and socialize in the process. Social workers of my acquaintance tell me that today’s youth are poorly socialized.
Not all boredom is the same
Boredom due to under-stimulations leads to the development and use of imagination or creativity. As my mother used to say, “If you can’t find something to be happy doing, I’ll put you to work.” That tactic worked on me. I read books and raised my I.Q. in the process.
What I’ve been saying for years is being explained in a different, well researched way by Dr. Hart. His book is a must read for our own good.
Our American ingenuity (creative ability to solve problems) is endangered by our focus on over-stimulation, since we then pursue pleasure to our detriment. We cause our own depression, boredom and apathy, and the joy of life is gone. We are becoming more and more addicted to the pursuit but less and less satisfied and certainly less happy with the result of our “pleasant” activities. We are being destroyed by our own ignorant desires. Odd, the Bible said that (Phil. 3:19).
Besides being less happy, we are going to be less able to compete on the global marketplace.
Our competitive edge is based in our ability to create. Other countries copy. We invent.
Inattentional Blindness: Personal Jihad
Technorati Tags: Jihad,inattentional blindness,Personal terrorism,child discipline,Walid Shoebat
Moderate Muslims, we are told, consider jihad a personal struggle for spiritual purity.
Americans ignore the facts that over 100 references in the Koran refer to jihad as genocidal slaughter of unbelievers with only one quote referring to an internal struggle[1]. (Source: www.shoebat.com)
Muslim violence (jihad) supersedes peaceful contemplation in every country now ruled by Islam. Americans are too distracted, too comfortable, to pay attention while Islam gains a strategic foothold.
The American approach to Islam is a perfect example of inattentional blindness.[2]
Arien Mack and Irvin Rock, psychologists, first showed that people who were paying attention to something else in their line of sight were “blind” to something that was right before their eyes.
What does this mean for you?
Pay strict attention: your children’s lives depend upon your focused attention to discipline.
Consider your self discipline and their discipline plan.
While you are teaching your children Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, Muslim children learn lullabies and poems about flying body parts and rolling heads.
Here is an example:
“Sharpen my bones into swords, for I am a bomb, I shall eat the flesh of my (Israeli) occupier, O Killers, your blood is ‘Halal” for us, (meaning “kosher” or all right to spill)[3]
Oh, you say, “that’s not me. I’m aware of everything: I’m plugged into news 24/7. I know what is a threat to my family.”
U. Neisser, D. Simons, and C. Chabris, experimented with viewers watching a film. Viewers were focused on counting how many times a basketball was passed from one team member to another, while someone walked through the scene wearing a gorilla suit.
A surprisingly large percentage of subjects did not notice something as obvious as a person in a gorilla suit moving through the scene they were observing, if they are paying attention to something else. (Several examples of these experiments can be viewed on the Visual Cognition Lab page of the University of Illinois.)
Every country in history which has fallen has done so because of failure to perceive a threat.
Let’s look at some brief lessons in military history, you can research further through Wikipedia:
1. Carthage - fell after this city-state’s council failed to recognize the threat Rome posed. They allowed Hannibal’s victory over Rome to slip away simply by not reinforcing Hannibal when he had the upper hand.
2. Rome - many theories here, most show the failure to recognize a threat either from within or outside Rome itself.
3. Greece - the most famous lesson of recognizing a threat was told in the recently fictionalized movie 300. Recognizing the threat where his countrymen did not, Spartan King Leonidas led a personal bodyguard of 300 Spartans to hold a strategic thoroughfare named Thermopylae.
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300 by Frank Miller, Lynn Varley Read more about this book… |
4. Persia - failing to recognize Alexander the Great’s tactics as a threat the entire Persian empire was captured by this young Greek king.
Back to the present
“All four major Islamic schools of thought agree that jihad is not merely a personal struggle, but a call to wage war on the infidels by all means possible: giving money and recruiting and training people are also means of jihad.”[4]
It is not only your Christian faith at risk when you’re not looking. It is your life and the lives of your children.
Discipline is not just for kids. It is for you, the adult, first.
Do you “relax” for hours after work with flickering pictures and telephone chatter? Do you understand that you are being hypnotized into a passive, shallow thought pattern?
Print media requires more logic from you. (See “Twilight of the Books, by Caleb Crain, The new Yorker, December 24 and 31, 2007)
Are you really going to study this, or will you dance past these issues into your chocolate paradise of brain fog?
Do you feel uncomfortable when someone needs to be confronted with facts? Like Pilate when he confronted Jesus, do you wonder, “What is truth?” Have you found ways to learn and grow smarter your whole life, or are you stuck in a high school low effort mentality?
Before you can discipline and teach your children, you must have a plan. Stress Free Discipline provides a tots-to-teens plan for life skill mastery and lifelong family teamwork.
What’s a parent to do?
To begin: I suggest you need to simplify your life and read more, with and for your children. Restrict the phone calls, the ipod, the wireless flood of distractions which pacify but do not satisfy your mind. See the tech junkie quiz at rd.com/tech.
Right now a flood of raw data makes you anxious because you cannot use it all or digest it, but you keep trying. Distractions, as good as they may be, may be a real threat to your thought life.
Inattentional blindness can kill you. Pay attention. Read up. Prioritize.
[1] Why I Left Jihad, Walid Shoebat, Top Executive Media, 2005, ISBN 0-9771021-1-4, p. 36[2] http://www.skepdic.com/inattentionalblindness.html [3] Ibid, p 20[4] Ibid, p.96
Raising a Cheater
It is easy to do. Raise a child to want success without teaching him or her the skills that bring success.
Make everything easy for your son or daughter. Do chores for them rather than teaching them to do for themselves. Serve them without asking them to serve the family. Let them watch four hours of media every night, the American average.
Those hours are lowering their attention span, making them less able to compete in the world marketplace, and reducing their ability to think logically. (Check out Caleb Crain, the New Yorker Critic at Large ,Twilight of the Books.) This is a recipe for failure. Cut off your child’s thinking skills at the knees by plugging them into media for hours each day.
That will take away self confidence so your daughter does not believe she can achieve without cheating.
Feed your son junk food or let him skip breakfast. Let him go to bed any time, even though the Harvard Sleep Study says children through age eighteen need eight or nine hours of sleep per night in order to learn. (Check out Matthew Walker, October 17, 2002 Harvard University Gazette Archives. Also see Beth Potier, December 11, 2003 of the Harvard University Gazette Archives.)
Intimidate your daughter by criticizing her weak first steps so she will not risk running. Take away your son’s responsibility by saying the teacher is picking on him rather than holding him accountable. Let the children have after school jobs and cars even though their grades are suffering.
Cheating in college is on the rise. The pressure to succeed is great. Give your child tips on how to steal essays from friends, frat brothers and the internet.
If you want a child to cheat, make success everything, the learning process nothing.
Teach your child that he or she is just an accident of nature, so moral behavior is no longer a useful choice. (See Crosswalk.com, Chuck Colson’s Breakpoint 2/29/08)
Your Challenge
Be close to your child. Know his or her attitudes and actions. If a teacher says your child has cheated, use the “worried-concerned” approach. Express your doubts and disappointments quietly and privately, not in front of siblings or friends. Remember that to your child, success is everything. Say, “Son, I don’t think you’re being completely honest on that test.”
Punishment for cheating may or may not help your child.
Remember that your goal is to support the right behavior, preventing a character defect from developing into further lies and loss.
If you want to change the cheating behavior, punishment might only make your child determined not to get caught.
Use Adam and Eve as examples. Adam and Eve appear to be sorry for being caught, not for their own responsibility in their fall. Your honesty as you talk with your child will encourage changes. Shallow, knee-jerk punishment may reinforce a failing, cheating cycle. Decide what you want to happen.
Accusing your child bluntly, ignoring the problem, and emotional reactions will reinforce a failing, cheating cycle.
Instead, realize that needs are not being met. Help your child learn the skills and earn success. Help her assert herself or himself and be responsible in every aspect of family and school life.
Walk with your children through their mine field of uncertainties until they can navigate on their own.
Make sure they are eating right and drinking enough and getting enough rest. The Harvard studies prove that learning is a lot more effective when you sleep on it. Chuck Colson’s research shows that a strong moral foundation prevents cheating.
Parents, go for the gold!
Stress-busters 2: Sharing stress
Technorati Tags: stress,consistent discipline,colds,sharing,leadership
When I was Drew’s age, I thought that if I gave 
my cold to someone else I would not have it anymore.
Now I make sure my grandchildren understand they’ll both be miserable if they share a cold.
The passage of stress is much like sharing a cold.
I can accept Drew’s stress that he is not getting what he wants when he wants it. I will feel miserable and he gets spoiled. I can make exceptions to the rules. I can slide around rules the easy way, being inconsistent. I become a bad parent, or in my case, grandparent. Good parenting is too much work!
If your children are constantly testing you, they have been conditioned to obey you only when you are stressed: (1) standing over them, (2) constantly repeating directions and giving them all of your attention, perhaps (3) screaming at them or hitting them.
Only then, they notice, do you really mean it.
When you aren’t looking, they are doing as they please. As they grow, you age. When you want shared goals, they’re “doing their own thing.” Your family is fragmented. You’re a nag. They’re escaping responsibility, piling it on you, or getting even for your on-again, off-again discipline in underhanded ways.
When you accept your child’s stress, you’re burdened and angry.
It’s no favor to them to let them have their way, but you’re too weary (from the stress you have chosen) to do what is right. Poor discipline is too much work!
Make that child obey! Discipline is not punishment most of the time but it is consistent consequences.
Ask yourself: Does my child put stress on me to give him or her what she wants? Have I trained her to be bad by changing the rules? Is this good in the long run? Is this like a cold: we’ll both be miserable? Whose problem is this?
“Meaning it” is stressing the child enough so that he or she chooses to obey rules over getting his/her own way. If you are consistent, poor behavior will self-destruct in a couple of weeks.
Who’s running the ship?
In the Navy, sailors inform the commander and then follow his orders.
Researchers gather data, organize it, submit it upline, filter it through their knowledge, experience, values and sometimes bias. Artificial intelligence is interpreted by human intelligence.
View full resolution, size: 1024×768px, 76 KB, Author: Jon Sullivan
Yet, no matter how intelligent the sailors are, they submit their lives and their skills to the greater good. All good commanders are humbled by their responsibility and the awareness that it was their team which achieved the victory, not their own brilliance.
A 17 year old sailor influences the course of thousands of others on the carrier.
In the same way, feelings inform thinking and should submit to conclusions thoughtfully made in your home.
When feelings are in command, we are tempest tossed, up and down with any tide. Yet without the support and information of our feelings, thinking is weak, unbalanced, and blind.
Feelings are a source of power only when they are under the control of thought.
Feelings can send us into a perfect storm of a life if they are not disciplined by thought. Imagine a commander who has mind-bending irrational fits ten days out of every month or when berthing a ship.
Feelings are manipulated by ad agencies, politicians, media and spouses for their own ends. Our children are taking notes.
Their ability to discipline themselves, control their impulses, enrich their lives, and inform their future all depends on us. We translate the world for them.
It is scary. Will our family values survive? Media myths are confusing everyone. How will children make choices for their future?
The Navy has commanders. Football games have coaches. Cheerleaders have a Head Cheerleader. Families have leaders.
"You can’t have all Chiefs and no Indians" as my Grandma used to say.
But wait! Who is the leader in your family? Do children make the rules because you lack leadership skills? Do husband and wife fight constantly without settling basic leadership issues? Where will you live? How will you live?
Consider your family. Who is the sailor and who is the commander, responsible for the whole ship?
Imagine a commander with responsibility but no power.
Perhaps that is your husband. God has given him responsibility for the whole family.
Wives, have you grabbed command of your ship? Has power been stripped from your marriage because your feelings have sent your family into a whirlpool of emotional choices?
Are you really the one who should be making the basic decisions in your family?
I suggest that God’s plan is the one most likely to succeed. Superhuman power is behind it.
Everyone submits to Christ, the High Commander. Then husbands make the decisions after consulting with counselors and family members. They make a reasoned choice.
Wives, take it from Grandma DeSelm. Stop fighting your man.
Those power grabs will finally exhaust you and they are rough on your body. Your adrenals give out.
They are part of the Genesis 3 curse when Adam and Eve got evicted from the Garden of Eden. Eve was cursed to desire to dominate her husband, but Adam was to rule over her. Women, then, need to get used to that reality.
The godly family functions as a team without bickering over who will submit to whom in the end. 
Every member has valuable skills, personality traits, and insights. Commanders know that.
Husbands know that or find it out in God’s time, not ours, ladies.
God holds men directly accountable for every family member, as the commander is held accountable for the welfare of every sailor.
Family members need to follow all moral orders as sailors follow commands and angels follow God: with joy, in detail. That is how it is done in Heaven. Practice now.
Alaska Stories: Pruning for Greater Growth
Technorati Tags: CFS,EBV,Alaska,Peer Pressure,teaching,chronic fatigue,disabiity,homeless,incurable,grief,suicide,medical expense
It was 65 degrees below zero wind chill as I walked to school in Bristol Bay, Alaska.
Wolf’s fur around my hood could have avoided the frost build up, but I couldn’t bring myself to buy a pelt. They hung around the general store, the “Farthest North Grocery Store” in Alaska. Other teachers, my peers, felt no discomfort about buying wolf pelts. I never quite fit, it seems, into the survival mind set. I wrapped a scratchy wool scarf across my face so it wouldn’t freeze off.
Crystalline air glowed around a few street lights. The still darkness was broken only by the crunch of my boots on ice-crisp snow. A porcupine moved leisurely across my path. I could hardly see what it was until I crept up close. Whew. It was too close for my comfort.
The Dillingham city limits included wildlife and tundra.
During “break-up” the snow melted and refroze in spots. I fell twice despite my care…dislocated my shoulder…couldn’t sleep for 3 months. Students had to do my writing on the whiteboard.
The romance of the northern lights was dimmed by pain.
On top of that I struggled with mysterious illness which made me feel like some alien had sucked out my blood and replaced it with water. Teaching became a nightmare.
Every spare dime was spent on medical expenses: I flew to Anchorage for medical care several times. The principal told me to leave mid-year but I needed the income and fought leaving through the teacher’s union. I slept on the floor of my supply closet as soon as school was over so I could get up again to do schoolwork before collapsing again at home.
I failed my first year of teaching in Alaska. After 19 years my career was over.
I was not a pioneer. In June I left teaching and moved to Anchorage where there was more medical help.
My diagnoses included mercury toxicity, Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysregulation, fibromyalgia, Epstein Barr virus and adrenal exhaustion. Doctors shrugged their shoulders and tried various means to make me functional. None worked.
I slogged through trying to work off my co-pay until my insurance ran out.
I became disabled, homeless, and unable to do anything for more than two or three hours a day. I felt like a broken doll face down in a muddy ditch. I considered and rejected suicide.
I was convinced that God had a plan for my life. Four years passed with no relief and no answers. I sold my car to a couple who defaulted on the payments and disappeared.
A few kind people helped me. I slept six weeks on my doctor’s home office floor.
Most of my peers misunderstood the nature of my illnesses. I didn’t look ill.
They pressured me to be like them, to get over it, to straighten up. They told me to work harder, spend more, move on.
Perhaps they thought I was lazy or mental. I thought that at first. A nurse who had rented me a room in her large home told me to leave when my money ran out. I went to the Anchorage Rescue Mission in tears.
Other posts detail the first 18 months of disability, homelessness and ten months of down time in bed.
Where was God during that time? He was pulling me through, although it was a tough road to travel.
Why? He never explains Himself to people in the Bible. I couldn’t understand if He tried to tell me why bad things happen. God was silent, but He gave me hope on the shoulder of life’s highway.
Insights and Applications
Listening to three or four radio sermons daily focused my mind on "things above" my own misery. It was essential to pain management to put my thoughts somewhere besides on myself.
Ten years later my life focus has completely changed. I am still disabled, but have grieved the loss, then learned more ways to manage and enjoy what I have. I may never have the stamina to teach full time, but I manage 48 apartments instead.
I have learned to pace myself rather than seek the highs and lows of kamikaze living. Previously, I would run full speed in an emotional high, collapse from exhaustion, run full speed again, collapse again.
Now I walk, enjoy the sights in depth, rest, meditate, listen.
I don’t know what is next. I see greater growth through the pruning God has fostered in me.
John 15:1-5 and Jeremiah 29:11 have become so important I read them over to myself again and again.
