Chapters 4-6: Leisure, Well-Being, and Flow

• The following are study notes for Chapters 4, 5, and 6.

Chapter 4: Leisure and Well-Being

• More leisure time does not automatically increase well-being.
• Mental and spiritual attitude matters.
• The most important reasons for activity turning into leisure are fulfilling autonomy needs, enjoying family life, relaxation, and escaping routine.
• Leisure fosters well-being through detachment from stress, autonomy, mastery, meaning, and affiliation with others.
• Time affluence, having time in abundance, is a strong predictor of well-being.

Flow and Optimal Experience

• Studied creative processes
• Observed states of engagement

Defining Flow

• Intense concentration
• Suspended awareness of self
• Intrinsically rewarding task
• Altered perception of time (speeds up or slows down).

Components of Flow

• Intense focused concentration
• Merging of action and awareness
• Loss of self-consciousness
• Sense of control
• Distortion of temporal experience
• Intrinsically rewarding

Conditions for Facilitating Flow

• Balance between challenge and skill
• Clear, achievable goals and immediate feedback

Contexts of Flow and Experience

• Crucial for job satisfaction, helpful in psychotherapeutic and rehabilitation processes
• Various degrees of intensity
• Unique qualities include coactivation of sympathetic and parasympathetic branches, balancing arousal for focus with relaxation to avoid stress.

Stages of Flow

• Paying attention
• Interested attention
• Absorbed attention
• Merging

Measuring Flow

• Flow State Scale - 2
• Dispositional Flow Scale - 2
• Experience Sampling Method

Autotelic Personality

• Personality variables related to ability to achieve flow
• Includes extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, and a preference for high-action-opportunity, high-skills situations
• Tendency to experience less stress when in flow.
• Natural inclination to seek challenges and experience flow.

Hyperegoic States

• Low states: Self-awareness is low, and attention focuses on concrete rather than abstract material.

The Dark Side of Flow

• Includes gambling and Internet use (video games), which can be addictive.
• True flow is constructive, healthy, or beneficial.

Mindfulness

• Represents a cognitive style that focuses on awareness and quality of attention in everyday experiences.
• Involves actively searching for novelty; mindlessness is passively zoning out.
• Fresh eyes and ears

Core Qualities of Mindfulness

• Create new categories of experiences
• Be open to new information
• See more than one point of view

Use of Mindfulness

• Awareness of experience, new information, and new categories of knowledge
• Build new perspectives and foster creativity.

Defining Mindfulness

• Relaxed state of awareness (both inner thoughts and outer world of changing phenomena) without trying to control anything
• Styles include Intention, Attention, and Attitude.

Measuring Mindfulness

• Mindfulness attention and awareness scale
• The five facet mindfulness questionnaire
• Langer mindfulness scale
• Philadelphia mindfulness scale

Formal Practice of Mindfulness

• Time dedicated to daily meditation and/or intentional mindful movement (yoga).

Informal Practice of Mindfulness

• Mindfully attending to something, such as mindful eating or attending to surroundings.

Core Components of Mindfulness Practice

• Self-regulation attention
• Sustain attention to immediate experience
• Inhibit secondary elaborative processing
• Switch attention to desired focus

Openness to Experience

• Curiosity and acceptance

COAL Approach

• Curiosity, Openness, Acceptance, Love

Mindfulness and Decreased Symptoms

• Negative affect, depression, anxiety and worry, experience of stress
• Symptoms of cancer, insomnia, multiple sclerosis
• Perfectionistic cognition and negative effects of social comparison, impulsivity and habitual behaviors associated with addictions, eating disorders, and borderline personality disorder

Mindfulness and Improvement

• Classroom learning, working memory functions, ability to focus/concentrate
• Musician performance, immune system functioning, physical health outcomes, pain management, hardiness
• Subjective well-being, regulation of heart rate, self-regulation skills, self-awareness and positive emotions, marital satisfaction, empathy, and self-compassion

How Mindfulness Increases Well-Being

• Increases metacognitive perspective, allows for decentering, reduces intense reactivity to highly arousing and emotional stimuli, processes of emotional material, and a greater capacity and self-concordance

Savoring

• Awareness and focus on pleasure

4 Types of Savoring

• Basking : Receiving praise.
• Marveling : Getting lost in the wonder of the moment.
• Luxuriating : Indulging in sensation.
• Thanksgiving : Expressing gratitude.

Peak Performance

• Performing in flow does not always equal better performance
• Peak performance = actual behavior

Privette's Four Parameters of Peak Performance

• Clear focus on self, object, and relationship
• Intense involvement in the experience
• A strong intention to complete a task
• A spontaneous expression of power

Applications in Athletes

• Garfield and Bennet found 8 conditions when performance was best: mental relaxation, physical relaxation, confident attitude, present-focus, high energy, extraordinary awareness, sense of being in control, and focus on sport

Training for Peak Performance

• Restricted environment stimulation therapy and Langerian type of mindfulness
• Includes psychological interventions.

Romantic Love and Positive Families

• Oxytocin promotes bonding, safety, reduces stress, and increases motivation for social contact.
• Endogenous opioids suppress pain, promote social affiliation, and reduce stress.

Baumeister and Leary's Belongingness Hypothesis

• We have a need for belonging, forming relationships.

Ostracism

• Rejection can have serious effects on self-esteem and is linked to feelings of pain.

Benefits of Marriage

• Married people tend to be happier and more satisfied across demographics.
• Men benefit more in heterosexual marriages with traditional gender roles.
• The quality of the marriage is a significant predictor of SWB; greater role sharing leads to higher SWB.
• Better physical health: lower blood pressure and positive health indicators for LGBTQ + couples too

Two-Factor Theory of Love

• Passionate: intense longing, emotional union/sexual fulfillment, or despair of rejection
• Companionate: affection, companionship, friendship, long-term commitment

Sternberg's Triangular Model of Love

• Consummate love (passion, intimacy/liking, and commitment) is the goal.
• Progresses across the lifespan, with passion high at the start, increasing intimacy, and steady commitment.

Attraction

• Proximity: repeated exposure causes you to like something more.
• More likely to make friends with immediate neighbors and at the bottom of staircases.

Attachment Models of Love

• Relationship with early caregivers influences attachment style later on.
• Secure attachment style leads to satisfying relationships and comfort.
• Preoccupied attachment style involves relying highly on other people for emotional validation.
• Dismissing attachment style involves independence.
• Fearful attachment style involves low self-confidence and fear of intimacy.

Contributors to Relationship Satisfaction

• Most couples want more communication
• Topics discussed may be important to relationship and can foster increased satisfaction and happiness and more connection

Gottman's Research

• More satisfied couples turn toward each other for bids of attention.
• Bids can be small interactions (not grand expressions).

Capitalization Model

• Sharing positive events with others leads to a capitalisation model
• Helpful to both the person sharing and the person listening
• Includes being constructive, destructive, active, and passive.

Types of Responses

• Active constructive involves enthusiastic support
• Passive constructive involves understated support.
• Active Destructive support involves enthusiastic and demeaning support
• Passive destructive involves ignoring event and inward turning

Self Disclosure

• Transparency allows others to see whole self (when used correctly)

Disclosure Reciprocity

• Tendency for one's intimacy to encourage self-disclosure from partner

Components of Minding Relationships Model

• Reciprocal, knowing process involving interrelated thoughts/feelings of each other in a relationship
• Five-component model includes knowing and being known, love maps/schemas, attribution, acceptance and respect, self-expansion, reciprocity, balance of benefits, and continuity with paying attention to relationships over time

Positive Families and Family Life Cycle

• Children have little impact, a dip, on couple satisfaction.
• Marital satisfaction decreases after the arrival of children and then increases.
• Being on a team (collaborative effort) and staying attuned to each other

Hurting Relationships

• Gottman 5:1 positive to negative interactions
• Conflict as the main cause of divorce.
• Problem : demand-withdraw pattern

"Four Horsemen" Pattern

• Demand-withdraw pattern is most destructive pattern in relationships and likely to predict divorce if down that path in relationships

Gottman's 7 Principles

• Enhance love maps (everything you know about partner)
• Nurture fondness and admiration, turn toward one another
• Let partner influence you (willing to share power - let them take the lead to)
• Solve solvable problems (conflict resolution) and overcome gridlock.
• Create shared meaning - valuing life together
• Magic 5 hours - enough to build and intentionally change a relationship toward the positive

Chapter 6: Positive Health

• Health = state of complete physical, mental and subjective well-being.
• Physical health = absence of illness.

Wellness

• Maximizing potential
• Meaning/purpose and social responsibility
• Includes adapting to changing environment

Vitality

• Meeting self-determination needs
• Excellence in biological markers, subjective experiences, and functional abilities

Bio-Psycho-Social Approach

• Includes biological and physical health, behavior and personality, and education/ social support

Physiological Factor

• Exercise
• Heart Rate Variability measures self-regulatory strength

Creating Coherence

• To create a state of coherence involves, generating Confidence, Courage, Appreciation and Kindness.
• It further involves emotions such as: Care, Compassion, Patience, and Enthusiasm

Positive emotionality

• Happy people stress less promoting overall health
• Negative emotions influence autonomic nervous system - parasympathetic (immune function).

Social Support

• Positive social support is associated with Measurable changes in the immune system. As loneliness as negative efects. Positive social support also helps people to be more compliant with their medical treatments and reduced need for medications

Receiving Social Support

• Positively impacts us via direct receipt of guidance and empathy
• Also helps to shield us from the negative impacts of stress.

Types of Friendships

• Friendships Include: Pleasure, Utility, and virtue
• Greater psychological resilience and less vulnerability to depression, better overall health

Love, marriage, and health

• Positive relationship with marriage-health is evident as there are many such health benenfits.
• It also reduces lowered risk for heart disease, ulcers, hypertension, alcohol abuse

Communication

• Communication is increased with compassion and care which inturn helps one heal and feel safe
• It also helps reduce mental disorders that people may face

The Stress Response

• Hans Selye found three stages of the stress response as: Alarm, Resistance, and exhaustion
• Stage of exhaustion:Body resources depleted, capacity to deal with stressor rapids decreases, can't maintain adaptation, immune function compromised

Coping Styles

• Emotion-focused to calm down; produce and have positive ways to feel ok