News To You — January 12, 2012

Here’s your justb. cheat sheet to being interesting today:

How to be happy in 2012, you can blame weight gain on your personality, not your body, and sh*t girls say to gay guys (this is so fierce!).

Happiness

Today, two contrasting points of view were shared in The New York Times about what the world is coming to. The first suggests you have little control over what’s going to happen in 2012, and fills me with fear, while the second puts the control over how you choose to react to the first, in your hands.

Journalist Jane Brody writes a wonderful column for The New York Times in which she reviews the book, 30 Lessons For Living. It includes interviews from 1000 older Americans from all walks of life about what they did right and wrong in their lives. Brody is well placed to write this piece as her goal, ever since she was 17 and lost her mother to cancer, is to life live without regrets. She is now 67 years old.

Brody summarizes many of the excellent pieces of advice from the “experts” ranging from careers, to marriage, happiness and parenting.

ON MARRIAGE Although romantic love initially brings most couples together, what keeps them together is an abiding friendship, an ability to communicate, a willingness to give and take, and a commitment to the institution of marriage as well as to each other.

ON CAREERS Not one person in a thousand said that happiness accrued from working as hard as you can to make money to buy whatever you want. “The most important thing is to be involved in a profession that you absolutely love, and that you look forward to going to work to every day.”

ON PARENTING  Spend more time with your children, even if you must sacrifice to do so. Share in their activities, and do things with them that interest them. Time spent together enables parents to detect budding problems and instill important values. Discipline is important when needed, but physical punishment is rarely effective and can result in children who are aggressive and antisocial.

ON AGING “Embrace it. Don’t fight it. Growing older is both an attitude and a process,” an 80-year-old man said.

ON REGRETS “Always be honest” was the elders’ advice to avoid late-in-life remorse. Take advantage of opportunities and embrace new challenges. And travel more when you’re young rather than wait until the children are grown or you are retired.

ON HAPPINESS Almost to a person, the elders viewed happiness as a choice, not the result of how life treats you. “You are not responsible for all the things that happen to you, but you are completely in control of your attitude and your reactions to them.” An 84-year-old said, “Adopt a policy of being joyful.”

Health

The Wall Street Journal reports that your weight gain could be a result of being neurotic and disorganized.

“A growing body of research is finding intriguing connections between personality traits and habits that can lead to obesity. The same parts of the brain that control emotions and stress response also govern appetite, several studies have shown. Early life experiences also set the stage for overeating years later, researchers have found.”

It’s common to over eat as a reaction to emotional distress but according to the list of studies included in The WSJ piece, eating to combat emotions starts from as a young as a toddler.

“Toddlers who had low-quality emotional relationships with their mothers are more than twice as likely to be obese at age 15 as those who have closer bonds, according to a study of 977 children funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and published in the journal Pediatrics this month.”

Funny!

Sh*t Girls Say To Gay Guys!