18 Oct The Lazy Way To An Awesome Life: 4 Secrets Backed By Research
What if living your best life wasn’t as hard as you thought?
What if happiness and success were easier than you’d imagined?
Well, I’m the last person to say any of these things are “easy” or don’t take any work, but sometimes there are somethings some of us could do that would enhance the quality of our lives, the positivity of our emotions, and they might not be as strenuous as we sometimes think …
via Eric Barker
A lot of men were dying and nobody knew why.
In the late 70’s, the CDC realized that a shocking number of Hmong immigrants, ages 25-45, were dying in their sleep. They would gasp for breath but before help could arrive, they were gone. Autopsies revealed nothing. Perplexed, epidemiologists started calling it “Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome.” SUNDS was killing more Hmong men than the top five causes of death combined.
But someone had an idea. Oddly enough, she wasn’t a doctor; she was an anthropologist. Shelley Adler knew that in Hmong folklore it was believed that the “dab tsog” – an evil demon – could paralyze and smother victims at night. In their home country of Laos, shamans would perform magic to fight off the spirit. But here in the US, shamans were few and far between. And most Hmong no longer practiced the religion they had been raised with.
Enter “Sleep Paralysis.” A very real but usually innocuous medical condition that 8% of people experience. For most of your sleep cycle, your body “switches off” movement. In Sleep Paralysis, your body delays switching it back on. Briefly, you’re conscious — but unable to move. Very scary though harmless. But Shelley thought the men were interpreting this as the dab tsog attacking them. They’d panic and some would have a heart attack. And as word spread about the deaths, more and more Hmong men became afraid, and thereby susceptible.
Shelley turned out to be right. However, Western medicine wasn’t very effective in getting the Hmong to give up the ideas they’d been raised with. And the deaths continued…
So the local hospital brought in Hmong shamans. When men would see a doctor, they wouldn’t just get Western medicine, they’d also get traditional “magic.” (One shaman placed a sword above the ward door to defend against demons.) The men believed they were now protected. They felt if the spirits came, they were now imbued with magic and could fend them off.
The deaths stopped. And it happened because the men’s beliefs – their expectations – changed.
Some might think that the Hmong had silly ideas and that those of us fully immersed in the modern world are immune to all this hooey. Uh, not really…
A while back in the US and UK there were a flood of stories about the negative side effects of statins. The drugs could cause severe muscle pain. But this didn’t get much coverage in Japan and Sweden. The rate of side effects in the English-speaking countries was 10-12%. Guess how often the side effects occurred in the non-English speaking countries? Two percent – which is about what the research showed was normal in placebo-controlled studies. In the US and UK, they believed it — so it happened.
No, this isn’t an issue of beliefs magically affecting the world. But our expectations can drastically affect what we perceive. Psychosomatic pain, limiting beliefs, the placebo effect, optical illusions… Expectations are powerful. They aren’t going to warp reality, but they can influence your responses to what happens to you. Denial and mere positive thinking aren’t the answer, but often our responses to difficult situations are due to our expectations — and we can change those. We can use this fact to live better lives, if we’re clever.
It’s time to pop the epistemic bubble on some bad beliefs and acquire more useful ones. We’ll get help from the latest science. (The only science that is okay with outdated information is Astronomy.) David Robson’s book is “The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Change Your World.”
Let’s get to it…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE