re: NY Times ... ‘happiest of all’ American wives are ‘religious conservatives.’

also this thread reminds me of this recent article i read: How Complaining Physically Rewires Your Brain To Be Anxious And Depressed

quote:

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Negativity is a downward spiral, meaning that the more you focus on problems instead of solutions, you eventually start to see the negative side of everything in your life.

While bouts of negative thinking happen on and off, it’s important to let yourself vent, but quickly move on to solutions.

And it’s really worth doing : for one, negativity physically destroys your brain. ” …people who routinely experience chronic stress—particularly acute, even traumatic stress—release the hormone cortisol, which literally eats away, almost like an acid bath, at the hippocampus, which is a part of the brain that’s very engaged in visual-spatial memory as well as memory for context and setting,” explains Rick Hanson, Ph.D., a psychologist and Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley (2)

Plus, negative thinking reinforces neuropathways associated with that emotion, eventually making it an automatic reaction (3). The same can be said of any repetitive thought or action.

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it's very short and you can get into much more detail in other areas, but it's true. same as the "you are the 5 people you hang out with most" trope.

the strange part is how leftist-SJWs and super religious people have the same motivations (building a better world) but where those motivations come from and how they see the world being built are polar opposites (in most cases, your doomsday cult "churches" are the exact same)