Janice Kaplan
speaker
50 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Janice Kaplan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
But you can take the message that your body is sending and reframe that a little bit. When else is your chest pounding and your hands sweaty? When you're excited. So reframe that thought and say, I'm not worried about asking my boss for a raise, I'm excited about it. I'm not worried about giving this toast at the wedding, I'm excited.
And that little change actually works, and it works because your body is sending the same message that you're trying to tell yourself.
The colors are nice, but really it's what they stand for, that it turns out that we're happier in blue spaces near water and in green spaces when we're outside. There's been a lot of research into that. And there's a psychologist out of the UK who did very extensive research and found that two hours a week spent near the water actually improves your wellbeing quite dramatically.
And it doesn't have to be at a roaring ocean. There are lakes and ponds and streams just about everywhere. Lots of cities are reclaiming their waterfronts at great expense, but actually it's such an important thing to do because it really does the calming effect The calmness of the water actually just makes us feel better. The fact that water is constantly changing, that there is a rhythm to it.
There's something about water. Maybe it's that we, going back to our evolutionary biology, we've wanted to live near water because it was safer and it gave us a place where we could find food and possibilities. So just being near water makes us happier. Being outside in any way, being out in the mountains, being outdoors, improves our well-being.
So that's another thing that we can recognize that when we're feeling down, when we're not feeling great, just step outside and it's probably going to improve how you feel.
Of course, and there are many ways that we actually can distract ourselves from pain. There's research that shows that playing music makes you feel better. By touching somebody else, a physical response that way can distract you from pain. So there are lots of different ways to talk about pain and to think about it.
There are huge differences also between chronic pain and between an immediate pain. If you break your leg, that's an immediate pain that needs to be taken care of. So many people suffer from chronic pain, from back pain. from knee pain that just goes on and on for months with no obvious cause.
And it's starting to seem that a lot of that pain can actually be relieved rather than at the site of where it's occurring, but in our brains. You can think of the pain circuit as being like those old electric circuits that you used to set up as a kid, you know, where you'd connect everything and try to make the light bulb go off.
And any place where you disconnected the circuit would make the light bulb, you were trying to make the light bulb go on, excuse me. Any place you disconnected the circuit would make the light bulb go off. And it's the same thing with the pain. Any place in that pain circuit, which of course runs through the brain where we can disrupt the circuit, we might be able to stop the pain.
And more and more of the pain researchers who I spoke to, in fact, all of the researchers, pain researchers I spoke to, are focusing on the brain as the place to stop chronic pain rather than the specific site of where you think the pain is occurring.
I loved learning about food and what makes us think something tastes good. Have you ever gone on a vacation and had maybe a glass of wine while you're sitting in Paris or sitting in the south of France and you go, this is the most amazing wine I've ever tasted. And then you come home and you go to your local store and you manage to find the same wine.
You bring it home and it just doesn't taste the same. And is it true that wine tastes better in Paris? Well, absolutely. And that's because when you're in Paris, you're not just drinking the wine. You're drinking in the atmosphere. You're drinking in the most romantic city in the world. You're drinking in the sense of being in this charming little cafe. We actually taste with all of our senses.
There's been some really interesting research showing that you can influence how people feel about a food or what they're drinking by changing the environment where they are. one researcher gave people glasses of whiskey and he sent them to three different rooms that he had set up with dramatically different environments. And he had them describe the whiskey in each room.
And the one of the rooms, for example, that was set up to be very bucolic with green lighting and with beautiful things that gave a sense of the outdoors, People described the whiskey as having sort of a grassy taste, and then they would go to the next room that was set up very differently with jazz music, and they might describe the whiskey as being a bit edgier.
And he laughed to say that the people were holding the same glass of whiskey in their hands as they moved from room to room. So at the end of it, they realized nobody had been tricking them. They had been tricking themselves. We take in everything in our environment and we attribute it to the food that seems to be on the plate in front of us.
Back when I wrote the Gratitude Diaries, I knew that if I was unhappy about something or if I could catch myself in a moment when I was just being incredibly grumpy, I would actually stop and literally make myself stop and try to reframe the situation and try to think about something positive and try to think about how could I look at this in a more positive way.
And that's pretty wonderful because it gives you a sense of control and a sense that you don't have to just rely on the events that are occurring around you. You can change how you perceive them. Now that I've written this book, What Your Body Knows About Happiness, I'm able to use my body in a similar way.
So if I'm unhappy, sometimes I might stop and make myself stand a little straighter as I'm walking or give a little smile or look up. Or if I'm sitting in my house or apartment and aren't happy, I'll step outside.
So being aware that there are things that you can physically do to change how you feel, to perk up your brain, as we said before, to go someplace new, really gives you that sense that you're in control, you don't have to be reliant on what's happening around you.
Showing 21–40 of 50 · page 2 of 3
← Previous
Next →