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Spontaneous Happiness

I actually finished this book (Spontaneous Happiness by Dr. Andrew Weil) awhile ago.

I’m not much for self-help books.  I generally find the boring and not terribly helpful.  To be vague about it, I think self-help books deal with symptoms and not the root cause.  But anyway, I picked up the book because I like reading the odd column I find written by Dr. Weil on the various news sites I visit and I was curious as to what he had to say about happiness and what he did about his depression (he suffered from dysthymia).

Dr. Weil promotes the idea of emotional well-being in his book as opposed to the very general term, “happiness.”  Happiness is hard to measure.  I mean, how happy are you supposed to be at any time to be considered healthy?  Also, being happy means different things to different people.  Thus, Dr. Weil does not consider “being happy” the neutral point of emotional well-being.

Dr. Weil puts forth the idea that we should reconsider happiness, which he associates as a response to outward things, as our emotional neutral zone to contentment, which he defines as something that is more enduring and something outside of satisfying needs and desires.  To this end, he speaks of his medical model of integrative medicine, in which you do not treat a person as a biological machine, in which some input gives you an output just through chemical means, but that emotional health and biological health are intricately tied together.  Thus, the book provides advice on biological means on which to help stabilize mood and also strategies from psychology, all toward the means of supporting emotional wellness.  Toward the end of the book, there is an 8-week program that can be tailored to the reader’s needs.

I like his effort in refreshing the medical model and what he says in this book about how integrative medicine is needed in treating what seems to be an epidemic of depression (as well as everything else).  If nothing else, this book gives some perspective on your well-being as a whole person.  Emotional health is just as important as biological health if YOU are going to be healthy.  I would recommend this book if you’d like some tips in maintaining your emotional wellness, or at least look at emotional health in a different way.

By the way, this book isn’t treatment for major depressive disorder.  You need to see your doctor about that.

Tempermental ATMs

Recently, I stopped by my local bank to make a deposit.  I went on a Sunday afternoon, which meant the branch was actually closed, but they are so kind and generous that they allow access to the ATMs twenty-four hours a day.  Thus, I was at one of the ATMs trying to make a deposit.

These ATMs were of the “new and improved” sort, in that they no longer require envelopes to make deposits because the ATM will count your cash or checks right as you make your deposit.  This was my first experience using the ATM to make a cash deposit.  I rarely have so much cash on me that I would need to deposit it into the bank.  In fact, I rarely have any cash on me at all.  It makes one’s wallet large and fat and bulky.  That’s annoying.

Anyway, I was making my deposit and the check portion of the deposit was summarily rejected.  I have never had a check deposit rejected before.  The ATM just told me that it was unable to take check deposits at this time.  Um…why not?  I put the check away and I was going to try it in the neighboring ATM.  I didn’t get a chance to though, because a whole family of people came in to use that ATM.  Using the ATM apparently is a family affair for some.

Then I tried depositing all the cash. It was a bunch of loose and annoying low denomination bills. That was partly why I was depositing the cash. Who wants a wad of ones clogging up your wallet?  Well, after I stuck the wad of cash in the collection window (after dutifully unwadding it first), the ATM started making clicking noises happily to itself counting up said unwad, but then it suddenly started dinging at me in a most alarming manner.

Ok, so it wasn’t alarming at all.  It was vaguely annoying and somewhat confusing at first because the ATM failed to give me the corresponding error message that went all that dinging.  Finally it told me that it didn’t like some of the bills.  I don’t know why.  All the bills were carefully unwadded and even all facing in the same direction.  I figured it might have been a few of the more raggedly bills I put in, or maybe one of the higher denomination bills looked suspicious to the ATM.  But when it finally spit out the offending currency, it was a fairly crisp one dollar bill.  And only one.  And it never told me why it was unacceptable.

This was one of the less successful deposits I’ve ever attempted.