Your Guided Journey to a Happier Life

By Jay Danto

The major goal of 'Your Guided Journey to a Happier Life' is to simplify your path to a happier life. Generally, most people feel that, even if they consider themselves happy they could be happier. The activities within provide the reader daily tasks to streamline their journey. An important part of that journey is the journaling experience. Alternatively, you could share your thoughts about the activities you try with someone else or, even better, you could do both.
We spend our entire lives in pursuit of goals. Those goals may be related to health, happiness, athletic achievement, financial success, academic success, career advancement and many others. Many of the concepts utilized in this journaling experience will smooth that journey and empower you to enjoy it a bit more. And, when it comes to happiness, a bit more can go a long way.
How often does your day end with you reviewing what went wrong and then losing sleep ruminating on those issues? By applying the concepts of gratitude, tolerance, forgiveness, coping and others you will develop some of the tools to address these issues and many more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jay Danto
• Release date: Jan 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9780988883208

Jay Danto

I have proudly attained and re-certified my board certifications in both Osteopathic Neuromusculoskeletal Medicine and Family Medicine. In the late 80's and early 90's I earned both my B.S. degree in psychology and my D.O. degree from Michigan State University. In the mid-90s, I was fortunate enough to attain my Family Practice residency training from a combined program by MSU-COM (Michigan State University- College of Osteopathic Medicine) and St. John-Oakland Hospital. Throughout my training I recognized I was called to serve as both a clinician and an educator. Currently, I am fortunate to be an associate professor at the founding college of osteopathy, A.T. Still University - Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine (ATSU-KCOM). As a lifelong learner I completed two teaching fellowships at MSU-COM. Most recently, I completed the year-long academic training program developed by the Costin Institute for Osteopathic Medical Educators. At ATSU, my position enables me to educate physicians and physicians-in-training at all levels of medical education. My interests in research had inspired me to participate in a research fellowship at ATSU-KCOM in the late 1990s. Currently, I'm participating in several research projects, grants and professional articles at ATSU.. Finally, I've had the opportunity to author and publish a variety of articles on osteopathic philosophy and education. My early experiences in practice, my students and patients inspired me to write a textbook on the 'Normalization of Muscle Pain' and two books for patients: 'Healing & Anti-aging for Your Back & Neck Pain' and 'Your Guided Journey to a Happier Life'. The later two are available through links found at www.samjill.com .

Book preview

Your Guided Journey to a Happier Life

By Jay B. Danto, D.O.

To my loving wife, Debbie, & children, Samantha & Jillian, without whom this work would not have been possible

Copyright 2013 Samjill Publishing Company, LLC

First Edition: September 2011

First Edition ISBN: 0977673731

Smashwords Edition: January 2013

ISBN-10: 0988883201

ISBN-13: 978-0-9888832-0-8

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Warnings & Disclaimer

The author has strived for accuracy & simplicity in the information provided. This book does not profess to diagnose or treat any psychological or physical disorder. This book is intended for informational and personal exploration. This book is not the authoritative textbook in the field of Positive Psychology. The use of the information contained within this book remains the sole responsibility of the reader. The examples given in the book, while based on real-life, have been modified for educational purposes. Every character referred to in an example should be considered fictional and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is essentially coincidental.

www.smashwords.com/profile/view/samjill

www.samjill.com

Preface to the e-book edition

Originally, I never considered this guided journal to be something for publishing electronically, but technology caught up with me. Despite some of my patients asking me to write an e-version of this book. I had thought that most people journal using a pen and paper. However, as part of my new position practicing as a specialist in osteopathic manipulative medicine at the Gutensohn Clinic in Kirksville, Missouri they equipped me with an iPad. Soon after receiving my iPad I realized that it would be an easy device to journal upon, especially with the addition of voice-to-text.

Wouldn’t you know that there are several apps for journaling. The journaling app that I downloaded is called My Wonderful Days Lite. The ‘lite’ version is the free one and the pay one has some extra features. Both versions backup what you’ve written to iCloud. So, you can use several different devices to access your four-number, password-protected journal. I have no financial connection to any of the companies marketing these journaling apps.

I’ve used both the typewriter function and the text-to-speech functions on my iPad and have found them both pretty cool. The big advantage to having the text-to-speech function is that some people are better at vocalizing their thoughts rather than writing them. In essence, the technology has surpassed my expectations, which, as a sci-fi enthusiast, I had thought it would be difficult to have achieved.

Some people have read this book cover-to-cover upon receiving it. I advocate reading it one chapter at a time or even one day at a time. It was written as a journaling guide and can be a very neat experience when utilized in this manner. The e-version is particularly amenable to this type of application.

CHAPTER 1: Introduction

"Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."

-Abraham Lincoln

My journey into happiness...

‘I stand on the shoulders of giants...’ as I write this book, deeply hoping that with this contribution I will be a shoulder upon which to stand, as well. The first giants that come to my mind are my mentors when I was an osteopathic medical student. They have been part of the way that I have interpreted the world since the early 1990’s. Two of my favorite mentors were Dr. Allen Jacobs and Dr. Robert Ward. Dr.s Jacobs and Ward were fascinated with the developing field of Psychoneuroimmunology. They introduced my classmates and I to this field as scientific evidence for the importance of the mind in health and wellbeing. This was radical new research to include in a medical school curriculum, but osteopathic medicine has a tradition of being very leading edge when it comes to new frontiers.

Twenty years ago was the coming out party for Psychoneuroimmunology as a formal science and it was announced to the public via a series of books authored by Norman Cousins, former editor-in-chief of the Saturday Review. Cousins had survived a battle with cancer attributing his success to the expertise of his physicians and the care he received, as well as to the conscious choice he made to laugh every day by watching recordings of the Three Stooges. Upon reading Cousin’s story about his battle with illness in the Saturday Review one of the editors form the New England Journal of Medicine, a prestigious medical journal, urged him to write a story for the journal.

Researchers in Psychoneuroimmunology from the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine read about his experience and recognized that he could serve as an ambassador for this burgeoning science into the mainstream and recruited him to join them in California as part of the university faculty. Cousins did that and more. He served as a mentor for medical students to understand the role of the mind in healing and, in many ways, as a counselor for patients. He also wrote a series of elegant books that were bestsellers and he was an ambassador for bringing Psychoneuroimmunology to the masses.

In ‘Head First,’ Cousin’s wrote, Nothing I have learned in the past decade at the medical school seems to be more striking than the need of patients for reassurance... They are reaching out not just for medical help but for ways of thinking about catastrophic illness. They are reaching out for help. People tell me not to offer hope unless I know hope to be real, but I don’t have the power not to respond to an outstretched hand. I don’t know enough to say hope can’t be real. I’m not sure anyone knows enough to deny hope...

My mentors saw in Cousin’s writings about Psychoneuroimmunology a reflection of some of the fundamental concepts of osteopathic medicine that had been lacking scientific research. Afterall, the first of the four basic tenets of Osteopathy is The body, mind & spirit are a unit. Yet, osteopathic medical education at that time focused mostly on only the body. In osteopathic medical school we learned many of the same basics as regular medical students...anatomy, physiology, histology, pathology...radiology, and since we were Osteopathic students we had a lot more training in the physical aspects of the body. We even had a philosophical difference that urged osteopathic physicians to ‘find health because anyone can find disease.’ Health, as it was conceived in the contemporary osteopathic writings of that time, was not just the absence of disease, but the maximization of human potential that could be felt and observed on physical examination.

Andrew Taylor Still, MD, founder of Osteopathy, had found a way through the use of hands-on manipulation to help people heal themselves. He taught this to his students to the best of his abilities by teaching them as much about anatomy and physiology that he could. Yet, it was so difficult to translate what he was doing with his hands he decided that if you understood the mechanics of the problem to the depth that he did, then the solution would simply be as obvious to others as it was to him. Consequently, it took a century for osteopathic physicians to ‘rediscover’ many of the techniques that Dr. Still used in treating people.

On the Psychological front, Dr. Still actually presented and lectured on the significant role that the mind plays in health and disease. He would often talk or write about mind, matter, & motion and some have conjectured that this was a further reference to the spiritual aspects of Osteopathy and that it harkened back to Dr. Still’s early life as the son of a Methodist minister. The problem was that being the son of a preacher, Dr. Still had a natural gift of engaging with people, meeting them where they were at and lifting them up to another spiritual/psychological plane. This was not commonly taught in medical schools and was mostly a role played by the church and other religions. And, just as we have had a separation of church and state we have had a similar separation between religion and medicine.

The entry of the role of the mind in medicine has been through the back door of psychiatry, which over the past 40 years had been dominated by manipulation of the neurochemical makeup of the brain through medications. Most of the early work by Sigmund Freud, MD and many of his disciples became the practice and territory of Psychology, which became a field unto itself ...and in many ways it became a distant cousin to medical practice. The exciting thing about the research produced by the field of Psychoneuroimmunology was the finding that experience and environment could change the neurochemical balance in our brains as effectively or even more effectively than medication. So, this newly found understanding was extremely exciting to my mentors because they knew that somewhere in this burgeoning science there loomed an understanding of finding ‘psychological health’ that was more congruent with Osteopathic Medicine’s search for health and diminished focus on disease.

Flash forward to the early 1990’s and Martin Seligman, Ph.D.’s rise to the position of President of the American Psychological Association: Dr. Seligman’s passion in research had early in his career been on learned hopelessness and later to the opposite of this diseased state to focus on learned optimism, a frame of mind that favored psychological wellbeing. With his election and recognition by his colleagues for his significant contribution to the field of Psychology, he was able to use these achievements as a springboard to develop and legitimize the field of Positive Psychology. Prior to this, and since the time of Freud, the emphasis in Psychology had been on the definition, recognition and treatment of psychological illnesses.

This brings us to the latter part of the first decade of this new century and now we have a flurry of researchers publishing books on Positive Psychology and Happiness. This is a good thing. As a physician who has been practicing since the mid-1990s I can tell you that I’ve never been as happy as I am now since I’ve been studying and incorporating many of the principles and techniques of Positive Psychology into my life and life’s work.

The problem with applying Positive Psychology in a medical practice is that I didn’t have a sufficient tool or guide in for its application. Positive Psychology builds upon itself and requires significant lifestyle changes. As an experienced physician, I can tell you that nothing in medicine is more difficult than helping people make and achieve a lasting lifestyle change. Our society is more geared for quick fixes and ‘a pill for every ill.’ However, as most of us have learned anything worth anything in life usually takes a significant amount of work.

The power to make the lifestyle changes in this book are really, really easy if you just see them through. In this book I will do my best to introduce you to the field of Positive Psychology, guide you through many activities that enhance mood and the result will empower you to live a more fulfilled life.

If this is your introduction to Positive Psychology, then I commend you for starting on this journey and encourage you and to continue to explore. I admittedly take ideas from all over the field of Positive Psychology and the many authors that have published on it. I can’t help but put this through my filter of having worked with people in helping them along healing paths over the past 20 years of practice as an osteopathic physician. And, I hope that this is a growth experience for you and that it will help to fuel your fire for learning more about Positive Psychology.

As you will read and experience, growth and learning are fundament to the Good Life. The Good Life is a life filled with Happiness and Meaning. Happy learning to you!

About Positive Psychology

Dr. Viola Frymann was in her 70s when she came to Michigan State University-College of Osteopathic Medicine (MSU-COM) to teach an intermediate course on Osteopathy in the