August 2021 Newsletter
Dear Clients,
Michael: "Sweetheart, I invited a friend over for dinner tonight."
Amy: "You did? The house is a mess, the fridge is almost empty, the kids' toys and clothes are all over the house and my car is stalled in the driveway. Did you have to invite him today?"
Michael: "Yes, because he’s thinking about getting married."
Friends,
Thank you for opening my newsletter. I hope you are enjoying your summer. We’re going to Vermont, New Hampshire and Saratoga Race Course this month and it feels real good to be back outdoors on vacation.
I hope you have a chance to do the same.
Kind Regards.
Michael Antonini
What’s New
Is Dental, Vision and Hearing going to be added to Original Medicare?
There is a new push in Congress to add dental, vision and hearing benefits to Original Medicare. There is a bill tied in to the 3.5 Trillion mega reconciliation bill that Congress is currently considering. In 2018 this also came up and did not pass.
Click here for a link to some news on the subject from the Washington Post. There is also some talk about reducing the eligibility age for Medicare, but A) you already are on Medicare, B) I doubt it will ever happen and C) if anything, they should raise the age to 67 just like Social Security is for people born in 1960 or later, in my opinion.
Ask An Expert: Why Gratitude is Good
Robert A. Emmons, Ph.D., is the world’s leading scientific expert on gratitude. He is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, and the founding editor-in-chief of The Journal of Positive Psychology.
What good is gratitude?
So what’s really behind our research results—why might gratitude have these transformative effects on people’s lives? I think there are several important reasons, but I want to highlight four in particular.
1. Gratitude allows us to celebrate the present. It magnifies positive emotions.
Research on emotion shows that positive emotions wear off quickly. Our emotional systems like newness. They like novelty. They like change. We adapt to positive life circumstances so that before too long, the new car, the new spouse, the new house—they don’t feel so new and exciting anymore. But gratitude makes us appreciate the value of something, and when we appreciate the value of something, we extract more benefits from it; we’re less likely to take it for granted. n effect, I think gratitude allows us to participate more in life. We notice the positives more, and that magnifies the pleasures you get from life. Instead of adapting to goodness, we celebrate goodness. We spend so much time watching things—movies, computer screens, sports—but with gratitude we become greater participants in our lives as opposed to spectators.
2. Gratitude blocks toxic, negative emotions, such as envy, resentment, regret—emotions that can destroy our happiness. There’s even recent evidence, including a 2008 study by psychologist Alex Wood in the Journal of Research in Personality, showing that gratitude can reduce the frequency and duration of episodes of depression.
This makes sense: You cannot feel envious and grateful at the same time. They’re incompatible feelings. If you’re grateful, you can’t resent someone for having something that you don’t. Those are very different ways of relating to the world, and sure enough, research I’ve done with colleagues Michael McCullough and Jo-Ann Tsang has suggested that people who have high levels of gratitude have low levels of resentment and envy.
3. Grateful people are more stress resistant. There’s a number of studies showing that in the face of serious trauma, adversity, and suffering, if people have a grateful disposition, they’ll recover more quickly. I believe gratitude gives people a perspective from which they can interpret negative life events and help them guard against post-traumatic stress and lasting anxiety.
4. Grateful people have a higher sense of self-worth. I think that’s because when you’re grateful, you have the sense that someone else is looking out for you—someone else has provided for your well-being, or you notice a network of relationships, past and present, of people who are responsible for helping you get to where you are right now.
Once you start to recognize the contributions that other people have made to your life—once you realize that other people have seen the value in you—you can transform the way you see yourself.
Dr. Robert A Emmons, Ph. D.
Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis
Founding Editor-in-Chief, The Journal of Positive Psychology
Important Dates
Here's a throwback from Sports Illustrated August 12, 1985. Who's that handsome guy in the top left?