It’s true we all have regrets. Forsaken dreams. Romantic interests not pursued. Securing a job near home rather than an adventurous position overseas.

But, according to new Cornell University research, our most enduring regrets are the ones that stem from our failure to live up to our “ideal selves”.

A survey undertaken by psychologist Tom Gilovich and former Cornell graduate student Shai Davidai has found people are haunted more by regrets about failing to fulfill their hopes, goals and aspirations than by regrets about failing to fulfill their duties, obligations and responsibilities.

The research, “The Ideal Road Not Taken,” was published in the journal Emotion. It builds on the idea that three elements make up a person’s sense of self: the actual, ideal and the ought selves.

The actual self is made up of the attributes a person believes they possess. The ideal self is the attributes they would ideally like to possess, such as hopes, goals, aspirations or wishes. The ought self is the person they feel they should have been based on duties, obligations and responsibilities.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda

Gilovich and Davidai surveyed hundreds of participants through the course of six studies, describing the differences between the ought and ideal selves, and asking them to list and categorise their regrets based on these descriptions.

The participants said they experienced regrets about their ideal self far more often (72% versus 28%). More than half mentioned more ideal-self regrets than ought-self regrets when asked to list their regrets in life so far. And when asked to name their single biggest regret in life, 76% of participants mentioned a regret about not fulfilling their ideal self.

Why do ideal self failures spark such enduring regret? The expectations of the ought self are usually more concrete and involve specific rules – such as how to behave at a funeral – and so are easier to fulfill. But ideal-related regrets tend to be more general: Be a good parent, be a good mentor. “Well, what does that mean, really?” Gilovich said. “There aren’t clear guideposts. And you can always do more.”

Just do it

The research has practical implications, he said. First, we often assume we first need inspiration before we can strive to achieve our ideals. But a significant amount of psychological research shows that’s not true, Gilovich said.

“As the Nike slogan says: ‘Just do it,'” he said. “Don’t wait around for inspiration, just plunge in. Waiting around for inspiration is an excuse. Inspiration arises from engaging in the activity.”

And people often fail to achieve their ideal goals because they’re worried about how it will look to others. For example, a person might want to learn how to sing but feel they could never let others hear how bad they are.

Again, Gilovich says, just do it.

“People are more charitable than we think and also don’t notice us nearly as much as we think,” he said. “If that’s what holding you back – the fear of what other people will think and notice – then think a little more about just doing it.”

Patients received weekly sessions over three weeks, each lasting, on average, 40 minutes. Exposure situations included tall buildings, highways and overpasses, enclosed places such as elevators, supermarkets, movie theaters, and public transportation such as subways and intercity trains and boats. In addition, levels of cortisol were measured at various times during each exposure session by swabbing inside the mouth for saliva.

Taking advantage of nature

All the patients improved but those who made the biggest gains did so when their sessions started earlier in the day.

The study findings promote taking advantage of two simple and naturally occurring agents – our own cortisol levels and time of day.

Although the study was too small to draw definitive conclusions about how cortisol works, Meuret suggests it may suppress the fear memory established by earlier distressing encounters while at the same time helping a patient better absorb and remember the new corrective information.

“Notably, higher cortisol was related to greater reductions in threat appraisal, perceived control and panic symptom severity at the next session,” Meuret said.

According to a new study, sudden insights are often more accurate at solving problems than thinking them through analytically.

Rather than being a constant, spirituality can vary throughout the day, say University of Connecticut researchers and some things are more likely to knock us off the spiritual path than others.

Speaking at the 110th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA), found that people had the highest levels of spiritual awareness in the morning and while engaged in activities such as praying, worship, and meditation. Spiritual awareness also was high when people listened to music, read, or exercised. It was low, however, while people were doing work-related activities or playing video games.

Although the SoulPulse participants were socially and geographically diverse, the study group is not a nationally representative sample because it was limited to people who owned a smart phone and who volunteered to be in the study. In some ways this makes the variations in participants’ spiritual awareness throughout the day all the more surprising.

“There is a complex interplay between spiritual awareness and the situation. Sometimes the situation you are in affects your spiritual awareness. Other times your spiritual awareness affects the situation you’re in.” said Bradley R.E. Wright, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut and a co-author of the study.

• Interested in spirituality and well-being? Why not browse through our popular Life Lessons series of articles.

Natural Health News – New research has found that a simple one-hour therapy session has helped to cure 73% of people suffering from acute insomnia.

In the first ever study to attempt to treat insomnia in the acute phase – before it becomes chronic – researchers at Northumbria University found that almost three-quarters of participants saw improvements in the quality of their sleep within three months following a 60-minute cognitive behavioural therapy session.

The findings, in the journal SLEEP, are especially important because chronic insomnia can make us more vulnerable to the onset of depression.

A prescription for sleep

For the study 40 adults who were experiencing sleep problems but not taking any medication for the problem, were divided into two groups. None had previously received cognitive behavioural therapy. One group received treatment of a one-hour one-to-one cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) session and a self-help pamphlet to read at home. The control group received no additional support.

The therapy session covered sleep education and individual differences in ‘sleep need’ at different times of life and introduced the principle of sleep restriction, which encourages the individual to spend only the time in bed required for sleep. Using their recorded sleep diaries, the individuals were then ‘prescribed’ a time to go to bed and a time to rise to improve their sleep efficiency.

After treatment there was a significant difference between the group that had received CBT and the control group. Within one month of the therapy session, 60% of participants reported improvements in their sleep quality. Within three months, this had increased to 73%.

Only 15% of those in the control group, who had not received the therapy, reported improved sleep. On seeing the results, 70% of those in the control group requested that they also be given the same treatment.

A quality of life issue

Approximately one third of the adult population reports symptoms of insomnia, with 10% suffering from an insomnia disorder. People with insomnia report consistent issues with the quality, duration or continuity of their sleep patterns. They may find it difficult to fall asleep, struggle to go back to sleep on waking during the night or wake early which can lead to problems with attention, concentration, mood and memory. People with insomnia are also more prone to depression.

Lead researchers Jason Ellis, a Professor of Sleep Science in Northumbria University’s Department of Psychology noted there are numerous advantages to treating insomnia early: “If successful there is potential for significant savings in terms of long-term healthcare, lost productivity and accidents. This becomes more pertinent when the costs associated with other illnesses, such as depression, for which insomnia is known to be a risk factor, are taken into account.”

That’s probably what most people say if you put them on the spot. But, according to a new study, with seasonal overtones,  if you give them time to think about it deeply, other themes emerge that have a lot to do with learning.

And these intellectual dimensions of humility describe the spider as well or better than the pig.

“Wilbur has many of the dimensions of humility in general: regard for others, not thinking too highly of himself — but highly enough,” said Peter Samuelson, the lead study author. “Charlotte shows some of the unique aspects of intellectual humility: curiosity, love of learning, willingness to learn from others.”

Samuelson is a psychologist at Fuller Theological Seminary who embarked on a new voyage for academia: a bottom-up exploration of what it really means to be humble. Samuelson teamed up with Brigham Young University psychologist Sam Hardy.

For his part, Hardy utilized a statistical technique called multi-dimensional scaling that made sense of open-ended responses from the 350 study participants recruited from Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk.”

“This is more of a bottom-up approach, what do real people think about humility, what are the lay conceptions out there in the real world and not just what comes from the ivory tower,” Hardy said. “We’re just using statistics to present it and give people a picture of that.”

Hardy’s analysis found two clusters of traits that people use to explain humility. Traits in the first cluster come from the social realm: Sincere, honest, unselfish, thoughtful, mature, etc. The second and more unique cluster surrounds the concept of learning: curious, bright, logical and aware.

Samuelson says the two clusters of humble traits — the social and intellectual — often come as a package deal for people who are “intellectually humble.” Because they love learning, they spend time learning from other people.

“In many ways, this is the defining feature of intellectual humility and what makes it distinct from general humility,” said Samuelson.

The new study appears in The Journal of Positive Psychology.

It’s because sadness often goes hand in hand with events of greater impact such as death or accidents. You need more time to mull over and cope with what happened to fully comprehend it, say researchers from the University of Leuven in Belgium.

Their research, published in the journal Motivation and Emotion, is the first to provide clear evidence to explain why some emotions last a longer time than others

The Belgian researchers asked 233 high school students to recollect recent emotional episodes and report their duration. The participants also had to answer questions about the strategies they use to appraise and deal with these emotions.

Meaningful differences in duration were indeed found to exist between emotions. Out of a set of 27 emotions, sadness lasted the longest (up to 240 times longer) whereas shame, surprise, fear, disgust, boredom, being touched, irritated or feeling relief were often over in a flash. Interestingly enough, boredom also counts among the shorter emotions experienced.

The researchers suggest that this means that even though time seems to pass slowly when one is bored, an episode of boredom typically doesn’t last that long.

They also discovered that emotions that last a shorter time are typically elicited by events that have relatively low importance attached to them.

On the other hand, long-lasting emotions tend to be caused by events that have strong implications for a person’s major concerns. Some of these implications may only become apparent over time, which then causes the emotion to be maintained or strengthened. The feeling therefore endures while a person rethinks the events and consequences over and over again.

Duration was found to be a dimension that can differentiate between otherwise very similar emotions. For instance, the scientists found that guilt is an emotion that persists much longer than shame, while anxiety lingers longer than fear.

“Rumination is the central determinant of why some emotions last longer than others. Emotions associated with high levels of rumination will last longest,” says co-lead author Philippe Verduyn by way of explaining the role that such constant and repetitive thinking has on the experience of positive and negative emotions.

While everybody has the occasional restless night, for those who suffer from chronic insomnia, that sleep loss carries a high price in terms of your risk for cardiovascular disease, hypertension, weight gain, type-2 diabetes, and can even lead to an earlier death.

The reason for the increased risk of health problems is thought to be an association between insomnia and an increase in inflammation throughout the body that becomes chronic.

Though inflammation can be a good thing – part of a robust immune response that heals injury and fights infection – chronic inflammation can damage and kill healthy cells, leading to disease.

What hasn’t been known is whether treating insomnia could reduce inflammation, thereby lowering the risk for chronic disease in older adults. Nor has it been known what the most effective therapy is to treat insomnia.

Sleep beats chronic inflammation

Now US researchers have answered both these questions. In a new study, the journal Sleep, they demonstrate that reducing insomnia can indeed lead to decreases in inflammation, and second, that a form of psychotherapy called cognitive behavioural therapy proved superior to other forms of treatment.

The results were obtained from a randomized clinical trial of 123 adults older than 55, and showed that treating insomnia led to decreases in a known marker of inflammation called C-reactive protein (CRP).

The protein is found in blood plasma, and its levels rise in response to an acute inflammatory stimulus. The CRP levels were measured at the beginning of the study, again after treatment, and again in a follow-up 16 months later.

“What we found particularly intriguing was that the levels of the CRP inflammatory marker remained low even 16 months after treating the insomnia,” said Michael Irwin, lead author, and a professor of psychiatry and director of the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Drug free options

The researchers also compared three treatments for insomnia:

• Cognitive behavioural treatment (CBT), a form of therapy that helps people learn how to identify and change destructive or disturbing thought patterns that have a negative influence on behavior;
• Tai chi chih (TCC), the westernised version of the Chinese martial art characterized by slow movement and meditation;
• Sleep seminar education, which provided educational information related to the physical, medical, and psychosocial factors of ageing and their contribution to sleep problems.

They found that, “by far” noted Irwin, cognitive behavioural therapy performed better than tai chi chih and sleep seminar education in reducing insomnia, and also showed greater and more sustained improvements in sleep quality, the ability to maintain continuous sleep throughout the night, and study participants’ reports of fatigue, and depressive symptoms.

Benefits comparable to exercise

“This is the first randomised, controlled trial that has evaluated the comparative efficacy of TCC versus CBT, a standardized behavioural intervention for insomnia,” Irwin said. The research team found that those who got cognitive behavioural treatment showed a reduced rate of diagnostic insomnia that was nearly double either of the other two treatments.

The benefit of treating insomnia to reduce inflammation is comparable to the benefit reported with vigorous physical activity or weight loss, he noted. “To advance public health, these findings prominently emphasise the position of sleep among the three pillars of health – diet, exercise and sleep.

“Finally, if insomnia is untreated and sleep disturbance persists, we found that CRP levels progressively increase,” Irwin said. “Together, these findings indicate that it is even more critical to treat insomnia in this population who are already at elevated risk for ageing-related inflammatory disease.”

A study from researchers at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland shows that the details of a transgression are more susceptible to forgetting when that transgression has been forgiven.

The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

“It is well established that learning to forgive others can have positive benefits for an individual’s physical and mental health,” says Saima Noreen, lead author of the study. “The ability to forget upsetting memories may provide an effective coping strategy that enables people to move on with their lives.”

From the perspective of cognitive science, overcoming strong negative emotions toward the person who did us wrong and quashing impulses for retribution or vengeance – processes that are critical to forgiveness – may be seen as a function of executive control.

And research suggests that this executive control is also involved in our ability to forget something when we’re motivated to forget it.

Noreen decided to examine whether this same cognitive mechanism might form a link between forgiveness and forgetting.

The study involved participants reading 40 scenarios that contained hypothetical wrongdoings, including infidelity, slander, and theft. They were asked to evaluate the transgression and say whether, as the victim, they would forgive the misdeed.

About 1 to 2 weeks later, they read a subset of the scenarios again, but this time each scenario was paired with a neutral cue word. After learning the scenario-cue pairings, the participants were presented with some of the cue words, written in either red or green, and were instructed to recall the related scenario when the cue word was green, and to avoid thinking about the scenario when the cue word was red.

This procedure, often used in memory research, essentially trains people to forget specific information or details. The researchers wanted to see whether forgiveness might affect the forgetting process.

For transgressions they had forgiven in the first session, participants showed more forgetting when they had been instructed to forget the scenario in the second session, compared to when they had been given no specific instructions.

In contrast, participants showed no forgetting for scenarios they had not forgiven, even when they had been told to forget them.

Together, these findings suggest that forgiveness may facilitate intentional forgetting by helping individuals to let go of the details about the transgressions perpetrated against them.

So, while true forgiveness may be difficult to accomplish, the findings suggest that once the transgression has been forgiven forgetting may become easier as a result.

“This research is only coming into fruition, and it’s likely that the relationship between forgiveness and forgetting is bi-directional and far more complex over longer periods of time,” Noreen says.

“We hope that, in time, new fields of enquiry may combine forgetting- and forgiveness-based interventions that might, in turn, give rise to powerful therapeutic tools that will enable people to “forgive and forget” more effectively.”