Perhaps if it were otherwise, it’d be easier to take more seriously the words of Paul Gilding, an independent writer, activist and adviser on a sustainable economy. Gilding is talking here about the end of civilisation as we know it, due to our having used up all of earth’s resources.

Sure, you might be thinking, things are bad but are they really that bad? Yes, Gilding says, they are although thankfully his presentation isn’t all doom and gloom. Yes, he warns, there will be great disruption on a global scale, but – and here his main message is one of hope – whether this proves catastrophic or ultimately, paradigm shifting in the most positive sense, is ultimately up to us.

Gilding begins by saying “the earth is full”, that “we’re living beyond our means” and that “we need about 1.5 earths to sustain this economy.” In other words, “our economy is unsustainable.” Why? “Because it is based on a crazy idea – the crazy idea being that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet.”

Certainly the ongoing priority for many countries is to accelerate their economic growth. For example, China’s government aims to grow its economy by 400 percent in the next 20 years, the rationale being that plundering the earth to produce endless amounts of stuff solves poverty and helps maintain social stability. And so it does unless of course, in the process, “food and water, soil and climate, the basic practical and economic foundations of our lives” are jeopardised.

According to Gilding, this is already the case. To ignore this fact and moreover, still insist that “nine billion people can live in 2050 a life of abundance and digital downloads is a delusion … is just wrong, and it’s dangerously wrong because it means we’re not getting ready for what’s really going to happen.

“What happens when you operate a system past its limits and then keep on going at an ever-accelerating rate is that the system stops working and breaks down. And that’s what will happen to us,” he says. And no, he doubts very much we’ll get our act together in time to prevent this. Not because we can’t but because we haven’t even tried, despite decades of warning signs.

Gilding attributes our collective failure to appreciate the seriousness of our predicament on how “we tend to look at the world, not as the integrated system it is, but as a series of individual issues … as individual problems to be solved. In fact, it’s the system in the painful process of breaking down – our system of debt-fuelled economic growth, of ineffective democracy, of overloading planet earth, is eating itself alive.”

Which brings Gilding to the more optimistic part of his talk. Having painted a fairly dismal picture of how living conditions for many of us will markedly deteriorate in the next few decades, he then asks us to consider the great possibilities inherent in this future scenario. Granted, the new world he describes is scary. But then he says, “We should feel a bit of fear. We are in danger, all of us.”

But the upside is that “we’ve evolved to respond to danger with fear to motivate a powerful response, to help us bravely face a threat.”

Some environmentalists debate the value of using scare tactics to shake people out of their apathy, believing it just makes us feel even more hopeless and disempowered. Gilding, on the other hand, wants us to be scared “because if we wait until the crisis takes hold, we may panic and hide. If we feel it now and think it through, we will realise we have nothing to fear bur fear itself.”

Gilding is confident that we humans have what it takes to survive and even thrive despite the immense challenges that are coming, if only because we have shown ourselves to be extremely resourceful in previous times of crisis. “When we feel fear and we fear loss, we are capable of quite extraordinary things.

“Sure, if we get it wrong, we could face the end of this civilisation. But if we get it right, it could be the beginning of civilisation instead.”

Luckily, this state of affairs was short lived. By the time I was out in the world and working, my eating habits had normalised. Moreover, it’s never occurred to me since to deprive myself in this way. But to this day I do remain intrigued by eating disorders and hence was very interested in Chris Thornton’s presentation at last year’s Mind & Its Potential conference.

A clinical psychologist with 20 years experience in the area, Thornton begins by pointing out that there are a number of myths about eating disorders, one being that they’re rare. On the contrary, 15 percent of Australian woman are afflicted. Not only that, the great majority don’t conform to the media stereotype of a young, painfully emaciated female.

“In fact, there are people (even men) of all shapes and sizes. There’s someone who’s underweight who may have anorexia nervosa; there’s a large number of normal weight people who may have bulimia nervosa, and there’s some overweight people who may have what we call binge eating disorder,” says Thornton.

The second myth is that eating disorders aren’t very serious. Wrong again. Thornton says that eating disorders and anorexia nervosa specifically have the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric illness. Not only can sufferers die from the physical complications associated with chronic purging or being severely underweight, many commit suicide. In fact, the suicide rate for people with anorexia is higher than it is for those with depression.

Then there’s the myth that someone with anorexia probably hails from an upper socio economic group, is an avid watcher of fashion TV, reads lots women’s magazines and idolises super models. “But largely what [people] think is this is a narcissistic, self-obsessed person who is caught up in the social cultural drive for thinness, and really, she’s selfishly starving herself to death in the pursuit of thinness at the expense of everything else,” says Thornton.

The good news is that discoveries in neuroscience are helping to shatter these myths, “helping us understand the hardwired worldview of somebody with an eating disorder.” Consider the inability of, say, someone with anorexia, to see the bigger picture. Thornton says their tendency to narrow the world “down to ‘pixels’ of weight control” and not see the terrible effects their behaviour has on their health and their family can be blamed on changed brain chemistry. Likewise their warped body image. When patients with eating disorders look in the mirror, or even at food, not only don’t they see what everyone else sees, the fear centres in their brain are activated.

Thornton says this new knowledge is important because it proves “eating disorders aren’t the wilful choices of the individual” but rather brain aberrations that needs to be taken seriously. Already this understanding is translating into better treatment strategies. For example, affected family members are now involved where once they were excluded, and more clinicians than ever are using mindfulness based therapies.

Chances are not too many which is why this interview with upcoming Young Minds presenter Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Young Queenslander of the Year 2010 and both founder and president of Youth Without Borders, is so compelling. Compelling because Yassmin talks candidly about everything from her upbringing and what initially whet her interest in a career in engineering to YWB’s mandate and what it’s like to be a woman wearing a hijab in the virtually all male environment of an oil and gas rig.

Yassmin says the fact that her dad was an engineer very definitely rubbed off on her. That and a movie she saw when she was about 13. The film featured a child on cart and she remembers thinking how much fun it looked. Eventually, this and her passion for motor sports (she contributes to the Formula 1 blog) led her to choose engineering as a career path, since this combined her love of “design and working with cars” with her budding “interest in development and in helping people.” She recalls thinking that, “engineering would be such a tangible way” of ticking both boxes.

Incredibly, Yassmin’s parents who originally hail from Sudan were very supportive of their daughter’s decision first, to study engineering and then more crucially, to accept a job working fly-in, fly-out for an oil and gas rig company. A job that Yassmin says attracted her for a number of reasons. The money was good, there was the prospect of overseas travel and adventure plus it was a huge challenge. “It is in some sense a personal test to see if I can handle it, and I’m proud of the fact that I can.”

Her parents share their daughter’s pride, a testament to what Yassmin describes as their “focus on education and achieving the best that you can.” Indeed, her parents decided to emigrate to Australia “because they wanted a better life for their children.” Not surprisingly, neither has any trouble reconciling her current line of work with her commitment to Islam.

Yassmin explains that, “there’s quite a big difference between Islam and culture. Culturally this isn’t something that’s really all that acceptable.” Yet what matters most to her mum and dad is how faithfully she embodies the tenets of Islam, that is “as long as I’m praying and I keep my hijab on and I do all these things because I want to and [my parents] can see that obviously I’m holding on to my religion, then they’re okay with it.”

Life on a rig has its challenges: the unbelievably long hours (Yassmin sometimes works 16 hour days), the isolation, the lack of entertainment and material comforts and the fact that Yassmin is “usually the only girl there”. Indeed, her gender is a far bigger challenge than her religion.

Much to Yassmin’s surprise, most of her co-workers think her hijab “is just a fashion item” until she explains its significance, a spiel that elicits one of two responses, “It either doesn’t really bother them because they don’t understand what it means, or they have to reconcile the fact that there’s this person they know who’s cool and they’re friends with versus the stereotype they have of Muslim people.”

But it’s her unique womanliness in a sea of men that has provided Yassmin with her main opportunity for personal growth. Believing that her religion would somehow stop men from viewing her predominantly as a sex object, she’s continually surprised that it doesn’t. This reveals itself in numerous ways, including how her male colleagues communicate with each other in her presence, which can have a disturbing effect.

She says, “the sexual banter sometimes gets to the point where they get so comfortable around you that they start pushing the boundaries and you no longer know if that’s an acceptable boundary and if what they’re saying is actually a bad reflection of you because you’re accepting it.”

Although Yassmin loves her job as drilling engineer despite the difficulties, she can see “it has a limited lifespan.” Still, whatever happens, she wants “to continue doing work that’s valuable,” perhaps more in line with her role at Youth Without Borders, an organisation that galvanises “young people to work together on projects that implement positive change in their community.

“Whatever I do, I won’t be able to do just one thing, and I won’t be able to do something that doesn’t help my community. I don’t know what that means just yet. A big part of being an adult is figuring this out.”

Which brings me to this video a friend shared with me earlier in the week of an incredible performance of Sanddornbalance, said to be the king of all balancing acts. It demonstrates brilliantly the great extent to which some people can focus their mind and as a result accomplish extraordinary physical feats.

People such as performance artist Miyoko Shida Rigolo who with mind boggling poise and single pointedness balances a single white feather atop a succession of stripped palm branches, each one placed on top of the other, before transferring the weight of the entire structure first on to her head and then on to the remaining tallest and straightest branch. The grand finale is when she removes the feather causing the entire edifice to collapse gloriously.

The transfixed facial expressions of those in the audience as they watch Miyoko is testament to the magic unfolding. I’d be very surprised if you didn’t fall under her spell too.

In the 50s and 60s, it took physical work to do most things. Winding a window in a car took strength. There was no power steering so you struggled to turn the wheel around corners and grind a stick shift. Typewriters, if you had one, had keys that needed a firm bang. Chairs made you sit up straight as they were hard and small and not for relaxing in. Slumping was rude. Parents, teachers and bosses told you to sit up straight, pull your shoulders back and your head in.

Somewhere along the way technology stopped us using our bodies. Everything became light and easy. We press buttons to do jobs that once took hours of physical labour. We use lifts instead of stairs, drive cars with one hand, slump in bucket seats and do most of our work sitting down, our fingers tapping lightly on keyboards or touch screens. Life has made our bodies weak. We spend more time on our bottoms than our feet and our bottoms are spreading to cope with the load.

We also spend a lot of time in our minds. Thinking, processing and ruminating. Rates of depression and anxiety have risen almost as fast as our bottoms have dropped. Now research is suggesting that some of the issues with our minds are linked to these changes in our bodies.

Sitting too much affects our metabolisms, our lungs, our sleep and our moods. Moving more can have an amazing effect on all these things. You don’t need to join gyms, run marathons or go to boot camp. You just need to start changing some everyday habits to make you move more, all day every day.

My grandmother slept like a log, ate like a horse and liked to say in her Italian accent, “I just kept a-going”. The time has come for us to think differently about our bodies and how to get them moving again. Once we do, we will find that our minds also feel calmer, happier and lighter.

Anna-Louise Bouvier is a nationally renowned physiotherapist, author and regular on the Today Show. She’s presenting a session and leading a post-conference workshop at Happiness & Its Causes in June.

One such person is Dr Jane Goodall DBE, an internationally acclaimed primatologist, environmentalist and UN Messenger of Peace, who begins her presentation at Happiness & Its Causes 2011, by sharing what ‘hello’ sounds like in chimp language. She then proceeds to discuss what she’s learnt from her own life and work about happiness, not just the contentment experienced by homo sapiens but by other species as well.

Goodall concedes that proving animals feel happy just like we do is difficult, if not impossible. Yet having worked for so long and so closely with chimpanzees, “a wonderful species in which to learn a little bit more about these things because biologically they’re so like us,” she doesn’t doubt for a moment their capacity for joy as well as “sadness, fear, anger, despair, rage, guilt and so forth … I think anybody who’s spent a meaningful time with animals understands that we’re not alone in having emotions,” she says.

Chimps in particular, from the time they’re infants right up until adulthood, behave in a remarkably similar fashion to humans. “For example, go and watch a ballgame and see how the fans behave when their side scores a goal. It’s very much like chimps that have suddenly seen good food – they’re very exuberant, hugging and slapping one another on the back,” she says.

Not surprisingly, Goodall surmises from her observations that chimps and most probably all other animals too, just like us, don’t merely feel but also desire happiness. Yet as she points out, chimps along with many other species on the planet are now suffering due to the selfish actions of humans. Indeed, loss of chimp habitat through logging means their numbers have plummeted from nearly two million 100 years ago to 30,000 today.

“I think one of the big tragedies is that so many people feel that with money, they can buy happiness but it doesn’t work that way,” says Goodall. On the contrary, our materialism is “destroying our only home. This is about the destruction of rain forests, the spreading of the desert, the shrinking of freshwater supplies, the terrible pollution, climate change, the loss of species, loss of biodiversity, along with all the human suffering, the social problems that go with that.”

Goodall blames the mess we’re in on our collective lack of wisdom, one manifestation of this being our unwillingness to think too far ahead. Unlike decision making in traditional cultures, which considers the effects of choices on future generations, contemporary societies tend to focus more on the immediate benefits while ignoring any potential negative long-term consequences.

But despite all this, Goodall remains hopeful about the future, not least because she has, like many individuals, discovered that the secret to happiness is to give. “It’s giving that seems to make people feel really good, feel happy.” Which is why she has established her global environmental and humanitarian youth network Roots & Shoots, the perfect antidote to those feelings of depression, anger and despair experienced by so many young folk today.

Roots & Shoots now has groups in 127 countries, each one concentrating on three different projects to help “make the world better for people, for the other animals … and for the environment that we all share.” Goodall says the effect this has on the young participants’ lives is transformative.

As for her own state of wellbeing, Goodall says she’s realized after all these years that “happiness is not really something we can seek; it’s something that comes to us depending on how we live our lives and how we interact with others.”

A reminder: Natalie Haughton, Chief Executive Officer of the Jane Goodall Institute Australia, will be presenting a session and leading a post-conference workshop at Young Minds in June.

How often do we find ourselves running from our challenges and turning our backs on our difficulties? Ancient wisdom teachings such as mindfulness encourage us to gently and courageously open the gates of our hearts, to face our fears and befriend our troubles as welcome visitors. Modern Science also beautifully validates the benefits of such time-tested methods on health and wellbeing, and points all of us in the direction of fearlessness and gently approaching our difficulties using techniques such as mindfulness.

This way of leading ourselves and others requires committed and compassionate action from an inner sense of stillness and calm. Thank you to this kindly gentle-man for showing us the way of the kindness warrior, in dreaming and building a culture of peace, safety and flourishing for all in his land.

This is the way of the kindness warrior; one who treats all beings, fellow humans, animals or even uninvited emotions at the doorstep of our ‘inner home’, with dignity and care. This way of skilfully caring for all parts of our inner lives and looking after others is an essential foundation for the long lasting happiness and peace of mind for the next generation … our future leaders and guardians of all that is precious on this planet.

Rachael Fisher is a teacher and founder of the KindKids Project, a pilot program at Waverly Primary School, Sydney. She is presenting the session Kind kids at this year’s Young Minds conference.

But it doesn’t always. On the contrary, in this dash cam video montage, the very BEST of humanity is showcased: our kindness, selflessness, warmth and generosity.

The friend who sent it to me dared me to not tear up within the first minute. I reckon I lasted all of 30 seconds; it’s that moving. What about you?

And if you like the backing music, check this out too. Such a beautiful song!

There are three types of workers:

Engaged workers have a strong connection to their job and the company. They’re enthusiastic, constantly looking to improve their performance and want to help move the organisation forward.

Not engaged workers have ‘checked out’. They do the job but don’t have any enthusiasm, energy or passion for their work. You could say they’ve quit without actually resigning.

Actively disengaged workers aren’t just unhappy at work; they’re ‘busy’ sharing that unhappiness with their colleagues. They undermine the company and those workers who are engaged.

Currently in Australia, only 18 percent of workers are engaged. A whopping 62 percent of workers are not engaged and 20 percent are actively disengaged (Gallup). This costs our economy 32 billion dollars in lost productivity alone.

Focusing on the wrong thing!
If you look at all the literature around engagement, it always talks about how the company suffers if employees are disengaged.

For example, a company that has four engaged employees for every actively disengaged employee, grows 2.6 times faster than an organisation where half the employees are engaged and the other half aren’t. In addition, companies in the top quarter of engagement out perform companies in the bottom quarter by 18 percent. You can’t argue with those numbers. It’s obvious that a company needs to have engaged workers.

What about the individual?
Rather than only focus on the company, let’s look at the impact of disengagement on the individual. Among actively disengaged employees, 54 percent of them say that work stress causes them to behave poorly with family or friends. For example, they’re more verbally abusive. On the other hand, only 17 percent of engaged employees report this being a problem.

An English study followed a group of healthy men over a 10 year period. What they found is that men who are engaged at work were 30 percent less likely to suffer from coronary heart disease than men who weren’t. The findings remained consistent even when the researchers controlled for age, ethnicity, marital status, educational attainment, socio-economic position, cholesterol level, obesity, hypertension, smoking, alcohol consumption, and physical activity. What this means is that work attitude was the defining variable.

Engagement is also beneficial for your mental health. When you’re engaged, all you are thinking about is the present moment. You are paying attention to each detail and thinking, “Can I do this better, faster more efficiently?”

Research by prominent psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, found that people with chronic depression and eating disorders experience a predominance of negative emotions and negative self-talk. However, when given a task to do that they’re engaged in, their emotions and thoughts are indistinguishable from those of people free of these conditions.

In addition, they found that the worst thing for people with depression and eating disorders is to be disengaged as this results in them thinking depressing thoughts and losing concentration and focus.

This is true for all of us. Disengaged people in the work place often say that they are bored and disinterested. Pause for a moment to think what happens when you put two children in the back of a car and go for a long drive. After 15 minutes, what do you hear? “She hit me!” “He’s on my side of the car!” “He teased me!”

A disengaged worker is not much different. When not engaged, their thoughts drift and they start looking for trouble. Office gossip, turf battles and in fighting are just some of the consequences of a lack of engagement.

Can we start to choose to be more engaged in the work place? For most people, engagement is conditional: “If my team members are in a good mood, I’ll engage.” “My boss didn’t thank me for doing a good job so I won’t be engage.” Obviously having a supportive and fun work environment makes it easier to be engaged. However research shows us that highly engaged people don’t necessarily work in the best work places.

Ask yourself, what is your lack of engagement costing you?

Dr Adam Fraser is a leading educator and researcher on human performance, and the author of The Third Space: Using Life’s Little Transitions to Find Balance and Happiness. He is presenting a session and leading a post-conference workshop at Happiness & Its Causes in June.

Daniel Smith, professor of English at the College of New Rochelle in New York, and author of the recently published Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety, is someone who’s lived with an anxiety disorder his whole life. As one of two guests invited to discuss the subject on this radio program (the other speaker is Dr Paul Morgan from Sane Australia), he describes his experience this way:

“It feels, when anxiety is really acute, as if anything around you is a terrible threat to you, a catastrophe about to befall you. Anxiety is a state of nervous vigilance; you look around for the source of it and it could be anything. It could be the sandwich you’re eating for lunch, it could be the person that you’re living with, it could be the job that you’re in the middle of trying to do. So everything falls into doubt, you sort of burrow into the self so that all you can see are those anxious thoughts and those anxious feelings, and the feelings are particularly hellish.”

He’s not alone. Every year, around 14 percent of all adult Australians are affected by an anxiety disorder, making it the most common mental health problem. It’s also one that can manifest in a range of forms including Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, agoraphobia, social anxiety and panic attacks.

Although its causes still aren’t completely understood, full blown and sustained anxiety is generally thought to be “an interaction between a genetic predisposition plus regular personality traits; some people just tend to be a bit more carefree than others, some tend to be a little bit more worried than others. And thirdly, there are environmental stressors, just the pushes and shoves and pressures of daily life,” says Morgan.

According to Reed, one stressor that’s particularly pernicious is the overwhelming amount of choice we now have in our lives. In fact, I wrote about this in a previous blog post. Smith concurs, “I do think that being faced with a choice is often very anxiety-provoking.”

He also laments the terrible toll anxiety often takes on our closest relationships. “The absolute hell of anxiety is that inability to love, that sense of being locked into yourself,” he says.

“Because when you’re anxious, you’re always looking for a source of the anxiety [and] the thing that you sometimes light upon is the person in front of you – your spouse, your partner, whomever – and you start to blame that person.”

Anyone reading this who happens to be that spouse or partner should also heed what Reed says next, namely that it’s important not to take any of this personally because “you are not the source of anxiety.” But nor should you put up with a “level of abuse where a person is pushing and pulling you away constantly back and forth.”

On a positive note, anxiety can be quite funny. Indeed, it’s the only mental disorder that lends itself to humour, says Reed, citing early Woody Allen Films to prove his point. “And I think that’s because the process behind anxiety is not only a kind of absurd process, but while you’re going through it, if you have any wherewithal whatsoever you know that it’s absurd … So it’s a good way of kind of punching anxiety in the jaw,” he says.

But in Reed’s case, the best anxiety management strategy of all has been the practice of cognitive behaviour therapy. He says, “It’s like diffusing these mental bombs. When you’re anxious, you’ve carved out these mental pathways. After practicing them so well, becoming so good at them, they are more or less permanent. So what you have to do is find a way to change that pathway, learn a new method of thinking. The first step in this process is just mindfulness. Pay attention to your thoughts, be aware of them, pick them up, look at them, let go of them. Recognise that they are not permanent and not the gospel truth.”