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By Mark Lundegren

I would like to introduce you to a simple and potentially quite useful model of human personality called The Four Temperatures. Notably, this model is not to be confused with either traditional or contemporary ideas about our naturally having four temperaments, though there is some overlap (see Temperament and Keirsey).

The Four Temperatures model focuses mainly on a single psychological dimension – our overall level or degree of activation, animation, engagement, or arousal. Here, this psychological state is approached in a broad and encompassing sense, but importantly is taken as largely extending from our naturally interrelated degrees of motivation and emotion in a given setting.

In this way, our perceptions, thoughts, and actions are taken as naturally interwoven or circular with our motivations and emotions, and as often significantly influenced and even driven by them in practice. At the same time, the model incorporates the critical and at times remaking idea that we commonly have the potential for conscious self-control, and thus contravening thought, to override and optimize our attributes and associated general temperature. Overall, this is to the extent that we can become aware of our current or common activating temperatures, their surrounding qualities, and their natural effects.

As you can see in my summary graphic above, human and larger animal activation is framed in the Four Temperatures model as a continuous quality in total, but also one that can be helpfully, and often healthfully, approached or organized as occurring in four broad temperature zones, states, or stages:

> Hot – states of high arousal or activation overall, and thus ones often marked by narrowed thoughts and perceptions, and strong emotions and judgments. This form of personality or identity is taken in the model as generally or predominantly reactive, and associated with lower states of both effectiveness and happiness.

> Warm – states of moderately high arousal or activation in total, and thereby ones often marked by relatively broad thoughts and perceptions, and ranging emotions and judgments. This form of personality or identity is approached as often generally or principally interested, and associated with higher states of effectiveness and happiness.

> Cool – states of moderately low arousal or activation overall, and therefore ones often marked by relatively broad thoughts and perceptions, and more tentative emotions and judgments. This form of personality or identity is taken as often generally or predominantly responsive, and associated with higher states of effectiveness and happiness.

> Cold – states of low arousal or activation in total, and thus ones often marked by narrowed thoughts and perceptions, and weak emotions and judgments. This form of personality or identity is approached as often mainly or predominantly indifferent, and associated with lower states of both effectiveness and happiness.

Importantly, the intentionally simplifying Four Temperatures model is not derived directly from a particular empirical study, but rather looking at and seeking to distill a range of modern psychological studies and theories. As such, we readily can find support for the approach across a number of contemporary research areas, and this includes its general prescription of seeking and fostering temperate or cool-to-warm activation in most settings (in addition to the above links, see Personality, Arousal, Motivation, Emotion, Moderation, Sociality, Social Behavior, Empathy, Self-Regulation, Self-Reflection, Metacognition, Intelligence, Learning, Positive Psychology, Flow, Well-Being, and Happiness).

I would encourage you to explore this at once intuitive, testable, leverageable, and universalizing model of human personality – for yourself, and as you naturally live, work, and interact with others. As I have in my own life and work, you may find that consistently and skillfully moving ourselves, and helping others to move, into the temperate or tempered regions of the model can make us, and the world around us, far more effective and happier overall.

As always, I am happy to respond to your comments and questions.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

In our lives and endeavors, we naturally have the opportunity to speak, and to speak powerfully, influentially, and beneficially.

This speaking may be in the work of health education or development with individuals and groups of various sizes, or in these settings with other aims in mind.

In any case, to underscore and help you master this crucial opportunity that we all have – across nearly all the moments of our lives and interactions with others – I would like to spend a moment exploring and contrasting the important phenomena or practices of private speaking and public speaking.

Overall, and as summarized in my Private Versus Public Speaking graphic, both private speaking and public speaking involve speech or communication that is careful, attentive, idea-rich, and again potentially quite powerful. In each case, elevated skill and foresight are brought to life and our interactions, and in processes that always must be learned and practiced. This of course is even as some of us may have an easier time with private speaking, public speaking, or both.

Private speaking, in a few words, can be defined as close or confidential conversation with others, and also as conversation that frequently seeks to uncover, disclose, elicit, or enable insight or learning. Private speaking is the intimate natural communication of counselors and confidants, whether this is deliberately so or not, and whether one’s audience is a single person, a group, or a large auditorium or media platform. Compared to public speaking, private speaking often is less acknowledged or celebrated today, even as it can be as potent, important, and aiding to us all. Notably, private speaking is different from private speech, a term psychologists use to describe personal, and potentially communal, self-talk.

Public speaking, in turn, regularly is the better recognized and more widely recommended member of these twin and naturally complementary modes of skilled, careful, and often creative communication. In public speaking, we seek to communicate broadly or generally, pointedly so compared with private speaking, and thus often in ways that are more declarative or conclusive. Given this, public speaking commonly is bolder or more projected, relatedly more tailored to people in general than people in particular, and thus a common communication tool of social leaders and advocates. Importantly, people who focus on public speaking may neglect private speaking, just has skilled private speakers may do the reverse, and in all prove less effective as communicators and in their endeavors as a result. Crucially, this is even as both forms of skilled communication may be mastered by us, and fluidly intermixed.

As highlighted in the graphic, skilled private speaking and public speaking each can be contrasted with what we might think of as private and public stating, expressing, or verbalization. With this doubtless less familiar term, I simply mean communication that is less skilled and careful, typically more reactive or autonomic, and as such often more conventional and transactional too. Private and public stating, or statement-making, of course are natural and useful modes of communication, but equally are subject to natural limitations or barriers in their potential for power, influence, and impact in our lives and groups.

As a study in these four archetypical modes of communication, and the continuous two-dimensional model they form in total, consider explaining my graphical summary and its key ideas to others, first individually and then with a group. You likely can sense immediately that this effort might be more hurried and superficial, and thus perhaps less insightful and aiding, or instead more careful, creative, and lasting. Similarly, you perhaps can see that various skilled and impactful presentations of the graphic might be more individualized and private in approach, more generalized and public, or a combination or interweaving of the two. Again, and often less intuitively, this is in both personal and communal settings.

Let me end this brief discussion by encouraging you to explore this important set of ideas, and by suggesting the now likely intuitive conclusion that we each can and typically should practice and cultivate our abilities at private and public speaking. Whatever your personal circumstances and particular endeavors, these twin and entirely natural communication skills are likely to serve you and others. Notably, this always is amid the inevitable, but also superficial or less potent, stating or statement-making that makes up much of daily life – and perhaps more than we may realize at first, and find optimal in time.

As always, I am happy to respond to your comments and questions.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

I would like to discuss the concept of health vectors with you. Health vectors are an important natural process, and a practical tool we all can use to better understand and improve modern health – notably at a group or community level, but also at a personal one too.

If you haven’t heard of health vectors before, you can be forgiven. It is actually a new term I have intentionally created to contrast with the more common idea of disease vectors. As you may know, the concept of disease vectors is an important model and tool from the fields of epidemiology and public health.

Broadly, all vectors are paths or routes. When we walk to a destination or an aircraft proceeds to a new city, we and it are following or tracing a vector. In principle, vectors can be straight or curved. And as my photo below suggests, in reality, vector pathways are often quite complex, and they even may be convoluted or circular and thus potentially self-reinforcing.

Vector Pathways – Simple In Theory, Complex And Often Interconnected In Reality

In epidemiology and public health, disease vectors are defined more narrowly as the actual paths, mechanisms, or agents that transmit diseases and other health threats or risks. For example, if a community faces health risks from malaria, food-borne pathogens, or drug abuse, the specific vectors or mechanisms of transmission might include mosquitos from a nearby wetland, area restaurants, or under-policed areas near a local highway.

By contrast, the term health vector is intended as a parallel but wider concept. It still involves specific paths, mechanisms, or agents, but as I indicated, it encompasses not only risks and threats, but also positive health promoters and opportunities as well. For example, positive health vectors might include particular sources of information, role models, and other community institutions.

Overall, and as we will explore next, health vectors are a somewhat complex but also enormously powerful tool for moving from general health awareness to specific resources or actions for increased health. For me, the concept and tool of health vectors is essential for anyone engaged in community health promotion, and it can be useful in our personal health promotion efforts as well, especially at an advanced level.

In this broadening of the idea of vectors from merely describing the transmitters of disease or health risks, as important as this may be, my goal is to equip people, communities, and societal institutions to better understand and act on the health dynamics operating around and within them, whether positive (health enablers) or negative (health limiters). Let me briefly provide a more precise and rigorous definition of health vectors, and then discuss several examples of health vectors that will demonstrate the use and power of the concept.

Continue reading “Working With Health Vectors”

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By Mark Lundegren

There is a good chance that you know where your recent ancestors are from. Perhaps they lived where you are now, or maybe they were from another part of the world. If you are in doubt, low-cost genetic tests today can shed light on your immediate ancestral history.

But do you know where, and how, your ancestors lived in the more distant past – say, 5 million years ago? Through the archeological record, we understand that all modern people share a common set of ancestors – humans and pre-humans who lived exclusively in Africa until roughly 100,000 years ago.

This bit of science answers the where part of our ancient natural history (though in simple terms, since it omits later interbreeding with Asiatic Homo erectus people by some of our Homo sapiens ancestors as we left Africa).

Similarly, the how part of the lives of our distant ancestors is nearly as settled science. But there is an interesting controversy about our earlier life patterns that is instructive about scientific understanding and everyday knowing more generally.

In practice, examining this and other controversies, or questions about the quality of our understanding, can help us to better navigate a variety of modern challenges and uncertainties, and ultimately to think and act more optimally amid contemporary life.

As you may know, today’s scientific consensus is that, 5 million years ago, pre-humans of this time had descended from trees and begun to move out from forest cover in small foraging or hunter-gatherer bands, ones who would gradually come to dominate the increasingly dry and deforested savannas of Africa.

However there is an alternative view or hypothesis, touched on in the Our Past section of HumanaNatura’s Personal Health Program. This hypothesis proposes that we were aquatic apes for a time in this larger evolutionary transition. Though our distant ancestors clearly began as tree-dwellers and ended as land-dwellers, the aquatic ape hypothesis asserts that this transition might have been marked or interrupted for a time by an aquatic mode of pre-human life – with our ancestors spending many hours each day swimming and fishing in coastal waters.

The graphic above summarizes key features of the aquatic ape hypothesis, which in its essence emphasizes that a number of our distinctly human physical characteristics might be explained by an extended period of semi-aquatic life during our evolution (including our tight skin and ability to swim proficiently).

Continue reading “Lessons of the Aquatic Ape”

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If you follow HumanaNatura, you know that we make regular recommendations about planning, action, and celebration throughout the year, or rather throughout the natural year.

When HumanaNatura talks about the natural year, we mean the annual solar cycle that begins and ends with the winter solstice, or day with the least amount of sunlight each year. The word solstice means “sun-stopping” and the winter solstice – along with its complement, the summer solstice or day with most sunlight – has been marked and celebrated by people at least since the beginning of recorded history.

Progressive Health Promotion Throughout the Natural Year     full-size

As you likely know, the amount of sunlight grows and recedes during the natural year since the Earth is tilted in its orbit around the sun, as are many or most planets. Because of this, the Earth’s two poles periodically lean toward and then away from the sun as we travel around it, changing the amount of light each day, and in an opposite or reciprocal way in the northern and southern hemispheres. Halfway in this recurring process are the two equinoxes, a word meaning days of equal light and night. And the endpoints of each increasing and decreasing half-year of light are the two solstices.

In this ancient, sun-oriented or heliocentric approach to time-keeping, the natural year technically begins at opposite times of the year in the northern and southern hemispheres. Depending on the year, the natural new year occurs about December 21st in the north and June 21st in the south of our planet. Since most of us live in the north, and owing to frequent origins of annual time-keeping from the winter solstice, many of the world’s modern and pre-modern calendar systems begin (or once began) at the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere. Notable exceptions are lunar calendars.

With this background, we would highlight that a crucial opportunity within modern health-centered life involves creating progressive cycles of health-increasing planning, action, and learning in our lives – in essence, intentionally mirroring and potentially accelerating the process of naturally evolving and thus health-minded life. 

In practice, our own cycles of planning, action, and learning often occur quite rapidly when we first pursue health-centered life. But this progressive cycling often slows over time. In part, this is natural and reflects the fact that, as our progressive plans become more established and tested in time, there is often less need for frequent re-evaluation of our plans and actions. However, our cycling also can slow excessively and undesirably, especially when we do not create milestones or reminders to ensure that we using our learnings to seek and begin new progressive cycles on a regular basis.

In our experience, fairly intensive personal planning twice-yearly strikes a good balance between too little and too much planning in our lives, especially as our pursuit of health-centered life becomes more skilled and surefooted. Always, we want to have enough experience and learning from our previous plans as a foundation for each new plan. But we also do not want to plan so infrequently that we miss important opportunities for the compounding learning and health-increasing action that regular progressive planning reliably provides. Again, we have found that dedicated planning on a twice-yearly cycle is ideal for many of us (which can be increased as needed and supplemented by plan adjustments between in-depth planning sessions).

To foster this biannual rhythm of progressive planning, action, and learning in our lives, we recommend using the milestones of the natural year as a waiting aid to our efforts. As highlighted in our Mastering The Natural Year graphic, HumanaNatura’s recommended use of the natural year in this way has three core aspects, which you will see us encourage on Facebook and Twitter throughout the year:

> Equinox Planning – we encourage personal planning sessions at each equinox, both to encourage in-depth biannual planning and because the greater environmental balance of these times often aids reflection and deliberation. In the HumanaNatura approach, this work typically results in our creation a new Natural Life Plan, outlining our evolving personal vision for progressively healthier life and the steps we will take to realize this vision.

> Cross Quarter Action & Learning – in the four cross-quarter periods between the equinoxes and the solstices each year, we encourage extra focus on implementing, and thus learning from, our Natural Life Plans. As the name implies, and as you may know, a cross quarter is the halfway point between each equinox and solstice.

> Solstice Celebration – importantly, since this focus on planning and goal-oriented action can make us more future-oriented – often beneficially but also potentially making us undesirably less appreciative of momentary life – we encourage health-seekers to step away from their plans and actions at each solstice. In these times, we recommend gathering with others in celebration of our lives and accomplishments, enjoyment and immersion in momentary life, and marking the passage of time – as people have done for millennia, and perhaps far longer.

We hope this overview of the crucial health practice that is progressive or cycling planning, action, and learning, and our recommendation to use the natural year as an aid to this important natural health practice, will prove helpful, healthful, and enriching to you and those you influence.

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