How to Keep your 2018 New Year Resolutions

Many of us made New Year resolutions, and many of us have probably broken them already. In fact, about 80% of people fail to stick to their resolutions for longer than six weeks. Although we don’t need research to tell us that, but research helps us to understand more about what is going on, why we make resolutions, why they fail, and how we might do it better. Consultant Psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud and former Consultant Psychiatrist and author Dr Peter Bruggen have recently provided a helpful summary of some of the recent research.

Read How to Keep your2018 New Year Resolutions in full.

Why Should Christians Do Good?

Most people (Christians and otherwise) think that Christians should do good in the world, and I agree with them. But I think it makes a lot of difference why they should do that. For some time I have noticed that some of the reasons Christians give for doing good inspire me, while others leave me cold. I have been thinking over why that should be.

I grew up in Coventry, and those who know me well know how excited I was by the opening of the new Cathedral when I was 16, an excitement that has never left me. The new cathedral arose from the ashes of the old one, bombed by Germany in WWII. From the outset the new Cathedral ommitted itself to building a more reconciled world, at first working for improved Anglo-German relations but increasingly working with partners across the globe for a more reconciled world everywhere. That inspired me.

Read the article in full on my website.

Why Feeling Good About Ourselves is Good for Those Around Us

How do your feelings about yourself affect how you treat others? I think there are two very different views about this, and people can feel quite strongly about it.

Some people assume that feeling good about yourself makes you self-centred and arrogant, and leads to treating other people badly. Others assume that feeling good about yourself makes you less defensive and threatened and leads to treating other people better.

This is an empirical matter, and one that can be settled by psychological research, and I think the answer is very clear: feeling good about yourself leads to treating other people well.

There are many studies showing a positive correlation between self-esteem and helping behaviour (and positive attitudes to other people). But there is now experimental evidence to back this up, in a recent British research summarised in Psychology Today.

Some participants (teenagers) gave themselves mini self-affirmations. They were asked whether they had forgiven someone else, or been concerned about their happiness, etc. If they said ‘Yes’, they were asked to give examples. They were compared with people who were asked neutral questions about the weather, etc.

A month later, the people who had recalled acts of kindness to other people were more likely to have engaged in more such acts. The researchers thought that was because the questions had led to self-affirmations, which in turn had made the teenagers less defensive and more outgoing. That interpretation fits a large body of other research.

I think this has broad social implications. Society seems to be getting more cynical and less inclined to treat each other well.  This is evidenced a lot on social media and especially true of those who feel under threat. For example, it is those who feel most insecure about their own employment or personal circumstances who are most concerned to stop immigrants ‘taking their jobs’. That can lead on to all sorts of hostility.

If society is not to fall apart we need to find ways in which people feel affirmed and supported and supportive rather than threatened. Only then will we be able to feel good about ourselves and treat each other well. 

This article was originally posted on www.frasernwatts.com 

Why Christmas music in shops is bad for you

I’ve always dreaded the constant replay of Christmas music in shops. From Carols to popular music and the classic Christmas tunes that are trotted out every festive season. There are no doubt various reasons for feeling this way about them, and I know I’m not alone in it. Some people really don’t like carols, others aren’t fans of the classics and while some new ones become hits there are others that miss.

I think my dread of hearing songs in shops comes from the fact that I actually rather like carols, particularly the real old carols that are basically ancient folk music for Christmas. What the shops play are mainly Victorian Christmas hymns, which I and others like less.

You also tend to find that shops tend to play souped-up arrangements of carols. There may be something significant in what those arrangements do to the rhythm.

Read the full article on my website.

My New Book on Living ‘Deeply’

I have recently handed in ms. of my latest book to Lutterworth Press. It is called “Living Deeply”. It is linked to a set of film clips that will shortly be available on YouTube for free download. This book absorbs the text of the film clips, but expands it considerably. The book is about how to live, and draws on both psychology and spirituality in an integrated way.

We had lengthy discussions about the title for this material. A previous version was called the “beta course”, but that is fairly uninformative and has already been used by others. For a while we thought of calling it ‘metanoia’, but we decided that was too obscure. We then got as far as thinking we wanted a two word title with ‘living’ as one of the words but what should be other work be? Eventually we went for ‘deeply’.

Read the article in full on my blog.

Spirituality and Life Satisfaction

Daniel José Camacho wrote in the Guardian recently about research from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) on people who are ‘spiritual but not religious’.

PRRI and Florida State University jointly conducted a national survey in the US, measuring spirituality by self-reported experiences of being connected to something bigger than oneself, and religion by frequency of religious attendance and the personal importance of religion.

Read the article in full on my blog.

Living Deeply – the inner personal journey

For the last two months I have been very focused on completing my latest book, ‘Living Deeply’. It is always exciting, and a relief, to complete a book, and I will be celebrating.

Some years ago my colleagues in the University of Cambridge Psychology and Religion Research Group produced the ‘Beta Course’. It was a psychologically oriented introduction to Christianity, with a focus on ‘Being Christian, Becoming Whole and Building Community’. We tried to bring psychology and Christianity together to help people with personal growth and pastoral care.

Read the article in full on my website.