Mind, Body, Soul — Proven Rules for Betterment [Pos. Psy.]

Three Empirical Strategies for Self-Improvement

Martin Seligman is both the founder and leading pioneer of Positive Psychology, a subfield that offers a sort of guidance absent from most other schools. While Seligman began his research examining pessimism and learned helplessness, he grew increasingly curious about the opposite: What makes people endure challenges with optimism? What makes people truly flourish?

Thus began Positive Psychology, a subfield aiming to help us better achieve happiness and fulfillment. As one anthologist put it:

“Seligman is blunt in his assertion that our level of happiness cannot be lastingly increased, however, what is possible is to live in the upper reach of our natural range.” [i]

Incidentally, this outlines the entirety of Positive Psychology: Living in the upper reach of our natural range. While almost all traditional schools of psychology analyzed what is wrong with us, Positive Psychology asks what is right with us and works towards bringing those traits to the forefront of our lives. As one researcher puts it:

“Positive psychology is concerned not with how to transform, for example, -8 to -2 but with +2 to +8.” [ii]

This isn’t just about being happy, but rather our Subjective Well-Being (SWB), a term referring to our overall quality of life, coined in the 1980s by American Positive Psychologist Ed Diener (1946 — Present), who, ironically, still earned the nickname ‘Dr. Happiness’. (‘Dr. Subjective Well-Being’ doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.)

There are many great Positive Psychology books that focus on our subjective well-being, most notably:

• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (1946)
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990)
• The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want by Sonja Lyubomirsky (2007)
• Positive Psychology In A Nutshell: The Science Of Happiness by Ilona Boniwell (2008) [what a perfect last name for a positive psychologist!]
• Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being by Martin Seligman (2012)
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson (2016)

Combining my research of these works with my own experience, I’ve decided to offer my own advice on improving our subjective well-being, organized by mind, body, and soul.

Let’s get to it!

Mind — Establish a Consistent, Controlled Challenge

What meaningfully stimulates you? What intellectually challenges you? What is something that gives your brain a reason to keep brain-ing?

During my 30-minute morning commute to and from work, for example, I try to solve the daily Wordle, then Quordle, and only then am I allowed to read. Right now, I’m reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (having just finished Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma). I’m currently shopping around for a poetry book (always open to suggestions!) and a fiction book (likely Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children).

For me, reading is an exercise in empathy and compassion (you’re essentially listening to someone’s insights and perspectives for hours). Psychology and literature are my passions — so that’s what I read the most — and poetry (if you know how to read it) is just as much a puzzle as the daily Quordle. For me, these are desirable labors of the mind.

Some may lament that between their various responsibilities — work, school, family, bills, taxes, etc. — that their brains are already overburdened. The beauty, though, is that these are controlled challenges. These are tasks that you can actually look forward to. A puzzle you love solving and a deadline for work that you’re dreading, though both cognitively stimulating, are worlds apart.

A challenge to the mind is not only important for strengthening our mental abilities — like memory and reasoning [iii] — but also because it provides us with a sense of accomplishment, something Seligman defines as a pillar of subjective well-being. [iv]

So give yourself a consistent, controlled (or self-decided) cognitive challenge to look forward to.

Body — Activate So You Can Remain Active

When speaking about the necessity of exercise nearly 2,500 years ago, Socrates declared to his out-of-shape student, Epigenes, that “it is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.” [v] Of course, it feels good to work out — which is no small matter — but it also betters our sleep habits and decreases our risk for chronic disease [vi] including cancers, [vii] strengthens our bone density [viii] and helps combat against bone and joint-related disorders like arthritis. [ix]

Since December 2019, I’ve been following a six-day-a-week workout routine, which consists of three weight-lifting days divided by days exclusively for cardio. The three weightlifting blocks look like the following:

Last summer, my goal was to shed my winter weight of 207 lbs. and reach 189 lbs. Though, begrudgingly, I couldn’t make it below 190.2 lbs., the activation — the challenge, the fight, the enemy, the battle — was something that activated more than my body. It was a moving target to look forward to, something that kept me responsible in terms of partying, dieting, sleeping, allowing time for recovery, and my overall health.

My next goal: See how fast I can run a mile. Last week, I ran one mile (with a 6% incline for the first five minutes) in 15:45. Three days ago, with the same conditions, 11:23. Yesterday morning, it was 10:46. Will I be able to run a (regular) seven minute mile by Christmas? Maybe! But even if I fail, I know I’ll make improvements, and that journey of self-improvement is really what counts!

Whether it’s walking or running, yoga or Pilates, weight-lifting or cardio, Zumba classes or a classless fight club (which, of course, we don’t talk about!), remember that physical activity has a variety of benefits. It’s not only important because of the associated dopamine release — making us feel good (or, to be more neurochemically precise, rewarded) — but also, again, because of the broad health benefits and the long-term benefits of having accomplished something.

Activate your body so that you can remain active.

Soul— Strive Towards A Purpose Beyond Yourself

When we say ‘soul’ we are referring to that essence beyond the physical and mental. Perhaps the closest synonym we can use without departing from Earthly, grounded, and empirical terminology would be meaning.

To best understand this, we can explore the insights of Austrian neurologist and Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl (1905–1997). In his 1946 best-seller Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl spends half his pages recounting his experience in concentration camps and the other half introducing his theory of Logotherapy, which he defines as a focus on “the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future.” [x]

Perhaps the most telling excerpt defining how to practically apply Logotherapy can be found in his most quoted phrase:

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each [hu]man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

There is a reason why religious people tend to cope better during social hardships than non-religious people [xi] and there’s a reason why injured athletes (who can no longer participate in their career-hobby) are disproportionately vulnerable to depression. [xii] Meaning, purpose, and a sense of greater significance is not only helpful for building your own positive momentum, but also essential for coping with life’s inevitable pitfalls.

So, ask yourself, what gives you meaning? What makes you want to wake up in the morning and start your day? What is something you strive for that is bigger than yourself?

For me, I derive meaning from:

• Calling my mother every day to try and make her laugh
• My obligation to support and empower Armenia and the Armenian diaspora (while combatting the corruption and tyranny perpetuated by dictatorships like Azerbaijan and Turkey)
• Writing what I believe will become a ground-breaking, best-selling, one-of-a-kind, multidisciplinary self-help book for millennials, young adults, and teens
• Reading and writing poetry that makes me feel inextricably connected to others despite gaps in time, space, and their intersection — what we call experience
• Praying (almost) every night to discuss with God how I see the world and what I wish for it
• Teaching and mentoring the future generation — whether it’s high schooler in Brooklyn, teenagers across rural Armenia, collegians who I train to become tomorrow’s teachers, or Armenian undergraduates who want to master story-telling.

And, of course, writing in this Psychology, Education, and Literature blog with the purpose of edifying, uplifting, and entertaining whoever is reading. With these combined tasks, I strive towards a purpose beyond myself.

Samuel Armen is an author, educator and activist. Orphaned after Armenia’s Gyumri-Spitak Earthquake in 1988 and adopted by Armenian-Americans based in New York, he makes it his life goal to give back. Currently, he divides his time between psychology research for his book (Acceptance), teaching ELA & AP English Language and Composition in the top public high school in Brooklyn, creative writing guest lectures at The Russian Armenian University in Yerevan, teaching and managing an English Creative Writing program (Project Bloom) through the Children of Armenia Fund, uplifting members of his community through digital advocacy, and publishing articles and poetry. His writing has appeared in HetQ (June — September 2011), CivilNet (2018), The Showbear Family Circus (Aug. 2020), Dreamers Creative Writing (Nov. 2020), The Raw Art Review (Winter 2020), Prometheus Dreaming (October 2021), Hey, I’m Alive Magazine (November 2021), Beyond Words Magazine (February 2022), Wingless Dreamer (February 2022), Allegory Ridge (Spring 2022), and Griffel (Spring 2022).

Works Cited

[i] Butler-Bowdon, T. (2017). Martin Seligman. In 50 psychology classics: Your shortcut to the most important ideas on the mind, personality, and human nature (Second ed., pp. 290–295). London, UK: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
[ii] Boniwell, I. (2012). What is Positive Psychology. In Positive psychology in a nutshell the science of happiness (Third ed., pp. 1–8). Berkshire, England: McGraw Hill Open University Press.
[iii] Mahncke, H. W., Connor, B. B., Appelman, J., Ahsanuddin, O. N., Hardy, J. L., Wood, R. A., … & Merzenich, M. M. (2006). Memory enhancement in healthy older adults using a brain plasticity-based training program: a randomized, controlled study. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103(33), 12523–12528.
[iv] Seligman, Martin (2011). Flourish. New York: Free Press. pp. 16–20. ISBN 9781439190760.
[v] Xenophon. (1848). Xenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates : with English notes, critical and explanatory, the Prolegomena of Kühner, Wiggers’ Life of Socrates, etc. New York :Harper & brothers,
[vi] Piercy, K. L., Troiano, R. P., Ballard, R. M., Carlson, S. A., Fulton, J. E., Galuska, D. A., … & Olson, R. D. (2018). The physical activity guidelines for Americans. Jama, 320(19), 2020–2028.
[vii] Ballard-Barbash, R., Friedenreich, C. M., Courneya, K. S., Siddiqi, S. M., McTiernan, A., & Alfano, C. M. (2012). Physical activity, biomarkers, and disease outcomes in cancer survivors: a systematic review. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 104(11), 815–840.
[viii] Boreham, C. A., & McKay, H. A. (2011). Physical activity in childhood and bone health. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 45(11), 877–879.
[ix] Cooney, J. K., Law, R. J., Matschke, V., Lemmey, A. B., Moore, J. P., Ahmad, Y., Jones, J. G., Maddison, P., & Thom, J. M. (2011). Benefits of exercise in rheumatoid arthritis. Journal of aging research, 2011, 681640. https://doi.org/10.4061/2011/681640
[x] Frankl, V. E. (2006). Logotherapy in a Nutshell. In Man’s search for meaning (pp.97–136). Boston: Beacon Press.
[xi] Chan, T., Michalak, N. M., & Ybarra, O. (2019). When God is your only friend: Religious beliefs compensate for purpose in life in the socially disconnected. Journal of Personality, 87(3), 455–471.
[xii] Roiger, T., Weidauer, L., & Kern, B. (2015). A longitudinal pilot study of depressive symptoms in concussed and injured/nonconcussed National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I student-athletes. Journal of athletic training, 50(3), 256–261. https://doi.org/10.4085/1062-6050-49.3.83