La Vita è Bella Life is Beautiful. La Vita es Bonita. 美麗人生　

242愛的鼓勵 7訂閱站台

人雖然是理性的動物，但卻極易受到環境的影響，像是天氣就深深的影響著我們的情緒，甚至是決定。即使是知名的心理學家，也往往無法避免受陰鬱天氣的影響；甚至明知陰鬱的天氣會影響心情，但卻無計可施。當陷入情緒低潮時，人似乎無法擺脫；存在意義的虛渺，也總容易使人沮喪。

令人沮喪的是：即使知道擺脫莫名的低潮的方法，通常你在低潮時也不見得想得到要運用那些技巧或方法。雖然身體所感覺到可能只是有點餓了，我們的大腦不一定會正確解讀身體的感覺；感覺內心空虛的力量十分強大，一旦稍有這種念頭閃過，很容易陷入情緒的漩渦。

 This column will change your life: 
Sudden exposure       
From sunshine to oversleeping, transient, external factors can trigger all manner of reactions.       

Oliver Burkeman       
The Guardian, Saturday 31 October 2009   


烏雲密布的淡水河與基隆河匯流處。　　　by Frank, 2009.6.13, 台北社子島   

A gloomy outlook: The arrival of dark clouds can affect our mood in more ways than one.       

The British Psychological Society recently asked some of the world's leading psychologists a rather personal question: having spent so much time trying to understand people, what was the one nagging thing they still didn't understand about themselves? One respondent was Norbert Schwarz, whose many contributions to the field include the finding that gloomy weather can make your whole life look bad. The incidental feeling that it induces colours your entire outlook, at least until you become aware that this is what's happening, whereupon the effect vanishes. "You'd think I'd learned that lesson, and now know how to deal with gloomy skies," Schwarz told the BPS ruefully. "I don't. They still get me... Why does insight into how such influences work not help us notice them when they occur?"       


We can surely all empathise. I think of myself as generally happy, but every so often I'm struck by a fleeting mood of unhappiness or anxiety that quickly escalates. On a really bad day, I may spend hours stuck in angst-ridden maunderings, wondering if I need to make major changes in my life. It's usually then that I realise I've forgotten to eat lunch. One tuna sandwich later, the mood is gone. And yet, "Am I hungry?" is never my first response to feeling bad: my brain, apparently, would prefer to distress itself with reflections on the ultimate meaninglessness of human existence than to direct my body to a nearby branch of Pret A Manger.       


There are two frustrating aspects to this. The first, as Schwarz points out, is the forgetting: knowing there's a simple fix doesn't mean you'll remember it when you need to. The other is the extraordinary power of these transient states: though in truth they might signify nothing more than moderate hunger, or the fact that it's overcast, they condition how you feel about everything. In a study entitled After The Movies, some crafty Australian researchers grilled people leaving the cinema about their views on politics and morality; they discovered that those leaving happy films were optimistic and lenient, while those leaving aggressive or sad ones were far more pessimistic and strict.        


(They tried to control for the fact that different kinds of people might choose different kinds of movies in the first place.) Dutch psychologists recently found that when people are handed a questionnaire on a clipboard, they'll take the task more seriously – giving longer and weightier answers – when the clipboard is physically heavier. Alcoholics Anonymous, meanwhile, urges its adherents to memorise the acronym "halt", for "never too hungry, never too angry, never too lonely, never too tired", as a caution against the minor, everyday factors that can lead to dark moods, and thence to full-blown relapse.


"Life is a train of moods like a string of beads," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "and as we pass through them they prove to be many coloured lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus." The implications of all this, if you think too hard about it, grow dizzying: how many wars have been started, rather than averted at the last minute, because someone was underslept? How many marriage proposals accepted because it was sunny, or because the view from the observation deck was so dramatic? How many momentous decisions taken, how many life-courses altered, for want of a tuna sandwich?       


oliver.burkeman@guardian.co.uk     
 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/oct/31/change-your-life-sudden-exposure

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The story was taken from the website of the Guardian.  The copyright remains with the Guardian.  The author of this story and the Guardian are not involved with, nor endorse the production of this blog.