Stress - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Stress is a killer when it comes to making  m.s. symptoms worse and possibly hastening the progression of the disease.

"Patients with multiple sclerosis who receive stress management training experience less new disease activity, according to a study published in Neurology."

http://www.northwestern.edu/


http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/07/15/stress-management-prevents-brain-lesions-in-multiple-sclerosis/41683.html












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People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.
  
   - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990


People without an internalized symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media.

  - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990


Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness.  Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create a new order in consciousness.
 
  -  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990



Repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed and still kept within the bounds of reason.

- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990



The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one's own powers. This is not to say that we should abandon every goal endorsed by society; rather, it means that, in addition to or instead of the goals others use to bribe us with, we develop a set of our own.

 -  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990


There are two main strategies we can adopt to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better.

 - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990



Those who seek consolation in existing churches often pay for their peace of mind with a tacit agreement to ignore a great deal of what is known about the way the world works.

  -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990