Emotional Well-Being:: From Science to Practice

By Miriam Stanford-Cusack, Corey Stanford and George Stanford Ph.D

Emotional Well-Being: From Science to Practice is based in current research in psychology and neuroscience on maintaining emotional stability, cultivating loving human connections and pursuing high-benefit purposes in life. It provides detailed practical applications in daily life derived from a new comprehensive model of emotional well-being. The book serves as a basis for experiential workshops and professional continuing education developed and offered by the authors.

This book, Emotional Well-Being: From Science to Practice, is soundly based in science and extremely practical. The authors give you three golden keys to experiencing a meaningful and satisfying life, with specific steps on how to make simple but significant changes for the better. If you applied even half of what is offered here, you could easily be living the life you always dreamed of.
— Judi Neal, Ph.D., Chairman and CEO of Edgewalkers, International

This book skillfully integrates scientific research and practical skills to achieve well-being. The authors present a comprehensive and innovative model of thriving. It summarizes complex scientific research in a way that is understandable for the general public. Anyone looking for a way to enhance/ maintain physical and psychological well-being will find this book of great value. It could also be used by clinicians to help clients enrich their lives.
— Karen Wilson, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, St. Francis College-Brooklyn

Emotional Well-Being from Science to Practice provides an in-depth guide to emotional wellness. As a researcher and community-based practitioner, I was excited to find a practical text grounded in the best available science and accessible to community audiences. This book stands as the preeminent guide to emotional wellness for researchers and community practitioners.
— Pearl Anna McElfish, PhD, MBA Director of Community Health and Research, University of Arkansas For Medical Sciences

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Sep 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504359399

Miriam Stanford-Cusack

George Stanford, Ph.D. is a psychologist in private practice and a retired university research scientist and adjunct professor. Miriam and Corey are two of his children. Miriam Stanford-Cusack is a long time science educator and a Doctor of Natural Healing. Corey Stanford holds a MBA and is an internationally certified personal and professional development coach.

Book preview

Emotional Well-Being:

From Science to Practice

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George Stanford, Ph.D.

Miriam Stanford-Cusack, Ph.D.N.H

Corey Stanford, MBA

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Copyright © 2016 Corey L Stanford.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

A Division of Hay House

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.balboapress.com

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

ISBN: 978-1-5043-5938-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-5940-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-5939-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016909216

Balboa Press rev. date: 09/14/2016

Table of Contents

Preface

Part I: Creating Positive Personal Experiences

Chapter 1:   The Origins and Nature of Emotional Well-Being

Chapter 2:   The Cycle of Personal Experiences

Chapter 3:   Creating Transformative Personal Experiences

Part II: Maintaining Emotional Stability

Chapter 4:   Balancing Your Reactive and Reflective Minds

Chapter 5:   Calming Distress and Impulsivity

Chapter 6:   Seeking Emotional Resolution

Chapter 7:   Problem-Solving Distressing Circumstances

Part III: Cultivating Loving Human Connections

Chapter 8:   Understanding Basic Human Attachment

Chapter 9:   The Upward Spiral into Loving Kindness

Chapter 10:   Living in Gratitude

Chapter 11:   Responding with Compassion

Chapter 12:   Choosing Forgiveness

Chapter 13:   Cultivating Loving Human Connections

Part IV: Pursuing Meaningful Purposes in Life

Chapter 14:   Aligning Your Self with High-Benefit Core Values

Chapter 15:   Understanding Personality Resources

Chapter 16:   Conscious and Unconscious Self-Evaluation

Chapter 17:   Practicing Self-Examination

Chapter 18:   Pursuing Challenging Goals

Chapter 19:   Adopting Beneficial Lifestyle Practices

Conclusion

Preface

Writing this book was a natural family collaboration. Our interests and expertise converged on the topic of emotional well-being. George is a psychologist in private practice and a retired university research scientist and adjunct professor. Miriam and Corey are two of his children. Miriam Stanford-Cusack is a long time science educator and a Doctor of Natural Health. Corey Stanford holds a MBA and is an internationally certified personal and professional development coach.

We wrote this book for you if you choose to actively pursue well-being. We intended for it to be a valuable resource for that purpose. You will benefit most from this book by pondering and practicing the principles and skills described in it. It took us years to synthesize them, and will likely take you a lifetime to fully incorporate them into your daily life.

For years we reviewed every major line of research pertaining to emotional well-being that we could find. Our goal was to develop one approach to emotional well-being that represents the big picture and share it with you. We wanted to discover and describe the single best model to account for the common elements in all of the theories and practices we could find that have been confirmed by solid research.

We tried to restrict the model to the smallest number of powerful concepts we could select to take into account the majority of scientific variables related to emotional well-being. It is not necessary to have a complete understanding of these basic concepts the first time you read about them. As we use them throughout the book, they will make more sense and become more useful.

We have taken a number of steps to make the book accessible to most readers. Many key concepts are found in bold for your easy review of their meaning. Our description of our model is supplemented by lines of research and science inserts. Lines of research are stories about the collective efforts of many scientists to clarify a particular piece of the puzzle. Science inserts are more technical descriptions, for those that are interested, of the psychological and biological issues that underlie the science of emotional well-being.

Admittedly, this endeavor did not produce a book that is designed to be read straight through. Rather it is material to be pondered and used. It is written in a concise manner that is packed with information, much of which is new to most readers. The resulting model is even new in some places to most researchers and mental health professionals.

To make the book as useful as possible, we make references available to you in their most current and complete form on the companion website. This allows us to stay current with related research. If you have an extensive interest in research on emotional well-being, most of the references on the book website are links to PDFs of the full peer-reviewed research articles upon which much of the book is based. In many cases, the reviews of previous relevant research in the articles are as important to the topics in the book as the specific research findings reported.

PART I

Creating Positive Personal Experiences

Some individuals find the majority of their personal experiences to be beneficial and fulfilling. They are basically happy, successful and satisfied with life. The rest of us want to know how they do it. This book describes how they do it and why it works. The short answer is the basis for much of our book. They create positive personal experiences and build personality resources for emotional well-being by how they choose to respond in thoughts and actions to challenging circumstances and situations in their lives. It is their ability to choose good responses to challenges that allow them to set the directions of their lives and influence their own growth.

Emotional well-being is largely an outcome of such constructive self-directed choices. Many people think that emotional well-being is a matter of having good circumstances in life and they focus their pursuit of well-being on improving their circumstances. Research has shown that emotional well-being seems to be much more related to how you interpret and respond to circumstances to meet your basic needs for safety, belonging and purpose in life. This makes you the main cause of your personal experiences and your life the main effect of the personal experiences you create. The more clearly you see this, the more intentionally you choose your interpretations and responses to challenges.

There is no question that some circumstances and situations in life are more advantageous for positive personal experiences than others. However, researchers have found that circumstances in life account for less than 10% of sustainable emotional well-being. Temporary improvements in emotional well-being that can be attributed to positive changes in circumstances are mostly lost as we become adjusted to the new circumstances.

Each personal experience evokes emotional reactions, even before you have a chance to think or act. Thoughts and actions generally follow during and after emotional reactions as a part of personal experiences. We feel that it is helpful to distinguish between emotional reactions and the responses that follow, and will do so throughout the book. This makes it easier to focus on the thoughts and actions that you can choose for yourself to create your experiences. In each part of the book we present various constructive thoughts and actions you can choose to create and sustain emotional well-being.

As a major point of distinction, emotional reactions occur automatically while the thoughts and actions that compose responses to situations can be intentionally chosen to direct your life. Whether automatic or intentional, responses to challenges are developed and changed over time to represent response patterns. Research has shown that response patterns to stressful events are more related to emotional well-being than the frequency of stressful events a person experiences.

Learning to create positive response patterns is a lot like learning to play an instrument; talent is helpful, but practicing is the essential ingredient to be as good at it as you can be. What this book is most concerned with is practicing specific thoughts and actions that support emotional stability, loving human connections and richly experienced purposes in life. The thoughts and actions that support these three aspects of emotional well-being are described in detail in the last three sections of the book.

Your personal experiences are the material out of which you develop a sense of Self. We capitalize the term Self to indicate that specific part of you that your mind creates through your responses to your challenges in life. The two main aspects of your Self that we ask you to examine throughout the book are your identity and your personality. Your identity is who you think you are and is intimately tied to your core values and self-evaluation. Your personality is the habitual ways that you respond in thoughts and actions to the opportunities and adversities in your life.

For many years emphasis was placed on those aspects of your Self that reflect the impressions of you that are held and expressed by other persons. In contrast, the Theory of Self-Perception proposed a half century ago painted a different and more optimistic picture. Just as your impressions of others are highly influenced by their actions, your perceptions of your Self are highly influenced by your actions. Slowly but consistently research has validated this theory. You can choose to be the person that others tell you that you are or you can be the person who thinks and acts like you want to be.

This means that you can take charge of your personality. Your personality is simply tendencies or dispositions to respond to opportunities and adversities in habitual ways. Just as those dispositions reflect the ways you think and act, the ways you think and act shape those dispositions. You can choose the ways you think and act. The more you apply this principle, the more you direct your own life, create positive personal experiences and experience emotional well-being

CHAPTER 1

The Origins and Nature of Emotional Well-Being

In the British Journal of Medicine, Machteld Huber and a large panel of health experts recently proposed changing the definition of health towards the ability to adapt and self-manage in the face of social, physical, and emotional challenges. We follow this concept in exploring the nature of emotional well-being. There is a growing realization among researchers that the main source of general health is emotional well-being, and adapting through challenges and self-management are two important keys to emotional well-being.

Certainly physical health is important, but emotional well-being is the main determinant of physical health among individuals that have their needs for nutrition and safety met. While the contribution of current medical practices to general health is estimated to be about 10%, the contribution of emotional well-being has been shown to be much higher. While at the National Institute of Health, Candice Pert demonstrated that the various chemical reactions that occur in our bodies during positive emotions also regulate most body functions like heart beat and respiration. Conversely, negative emotions dysregulate the same functions.

Research consistently confirms the importance of spiritual perspectives and practices as well. Virtually all of the studies that attempt to link emotional, physical and spiritual well-being are successful in doing so. All of these aspects of well-being serve as the causes and effects of each other. We decided to follow the trail of emotional well-being while acknowledging the separate and combined contributions of physical and spiritual well-being. Throughout the book we make reference to some of those areas of overlap.

We wanted to know if emotional well-being could be largely accounted for by a small number of essential components. Carol Ryfe at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has studied the relationship between the optimal functioning of our minds and bodies as much as anyone. Her well-supported conclusion is that, It is what occurs in the body when the mind is fully engaged in living and loving that most fully captures the essential meaning of positive health. We adopted this premise as a major tenant of our model.

From our review of the relevant research we identified three main components other than life circumstances that combine to create and sustain emotional well-being. Each operates largely on the creation and use of specific personality resources.

Components of Emotional Well-Being

Emotional stability is your ability to sustain positive moods and calm and resolve negative moods and impulsivity. Emotional stability serves as the foundation of the other components and without this foundation, development of the other aspects of emotional well-being are restricted. Emotional stability is created and maintained largely through the personality resource of emotional coping skills.

Loving-kindness is the main path to developing loving connections and sustaining positive moods. It is developed through the personality resources of secure attachment to others and the development of such dispositions of love as gratitude, compassion and forgiveness.

Realized Purpose in life is the main way to create lasting general satisfaction in life that spans greater time periods than moods. Realizing rich purposes such as personal growth and contributions to others gives great meaning to life. Such successes build the personality resource of self-efficacy, the belief that you can be who you want to be, learn what you want to learn and accomplish what you want to accomplish.

These three components are highly related in the sense that they each promote positive personal experiences and calm distress that results from adversities. This common feature explains to some degree how each component contributes to the others and how they combine to promote emotional well-being.

Carol Ryfe concluded that the positive emotions associated with loving human connections and richly experienced purposes in life form the major bridge between physical and mental health. Research has consistently supported that loving human connections and richly experienced purposes in life are main ingredients in thriving in life. As you see, they are two of the components in our model outlined above.

The other component of emotional well-being seemed to be the positive effects of emotional stability. A rich history in psychological research has shown that experiencing satisfying relationships and meaningful purposes rest on the foundation of emotional stability.

In one large study in which individuals were administered tests of emotional well-being and emotional stability, statistical analysis showed that about half of emotional well-being is related to emotional stability.

However, the measures of emotional stability used in past research are based