"To the extent
to which one makes happiness the objective of his
motivation, he necessarily makes it the object of his
attention. But precisely by so doing he loses sight of
the reason for happiness, and happiness itself must
fade away."
"Success and
happiness must happen, the less one cares for them,
the more they can." Viktor E. Frankl, The Will of Meaning
"All that is
best for us comes of itself into our hands--but if we
strive to overtake it, it perpetually eludes
us." Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Shiva
Born
to be happy?
The circumstances in
life have precious little to do with the satisfaction
we experience. Married churchgoers tend to outscore
single nonbelievers in happiness surveys, but health,
wealth, good looks and status have astonishingly
little effect on what the researchers call "subjective
well-being."
Psychologists
have amassed a heap of data on what people who deem
themselves happy have in common. Mood and temperament
have a
large genetic
component. In a now famous 1996 study, University of
Minnesota psychologists David Lykken and Auke Tellegen
surveyed 732 pairs of identical twins and found them
closely matched for adult happiness, regardless of
whether they'd grown up together or apart. Such
findings suggest that while we all experience ups and
downs, our moods revolve around the emotional
baselines or "set points" we're born with.
In his book,
"Authentic Happiness" (Free Press), University of
Pennsylvania psychologist Martin E.P. Seligman tells
us that happiness is not about maximizing utility or
managing our moods. It's about outgrowing our
obsessive concern with how we feel. He says, "The time
has arrived for a science that seeks to understand
positive emotion, build strength and virtue, and
provide guideposts for finding what Aristotle called
the 'good life'."
Beyond pleasure
lies what he terms "gratification," the enduring
fulfillment that comes from developing one's strengths
and putting them to positive use. Half of us may lack
the genes for bubbly good cheer, he reasons, but no
one lacks nascent strengths or the capacity to nurture
them.
Source: The
Science of Happiness by Geoffrey Cowley (with Anne
Underwood) in Newsweek, September 16, 2002
There is an
ancient tale of happiness that appears in many
cultures, and it goes something like this: Once there
was a prince who was terribly unhappy. The king
dispatched messengers to find the shirt of a happy
man, as his advisers told him that was the only cure.
They finally encountered a poor farmer who was
supremely content.
Alas, the
happy man owned no shirt.
"Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in
length."
Robert
Frost
The Road to Happiness
by
John Reich and Ed Diener, Psychology Today, July
1994
Happiness, venture
William James, the noted 19th century
philosopher/psychologist, is reflected in the ratio of
one's accomplishments to one's aspirations. This
suggests, of course, that when it comes to feeling
happy in our lives, we can choose one of two paths:
continually add to our list of accomplishments--or
lower our expectations.
Since then,
researchers have suggested new definitions of
happiness and how we should go about getting there. In
their attempt to
understand and
quantify the state of "subjective well-being"
(lab-speak for happiness), a new ratio/question has
emerged: How many positive vs. negative experiences
must people have before they can call themselves
genuinely "happy"?
The general
consensus of current research is that happiness is
greatest when we combine frequent numbers of good
experiences with a few very intense ones. To feel
happy, our focus needs to be on the frequency, not the
intensity, of positive events in our lives. Learning
how to take pleasure in the littler victories,
recognizing their importance in our lives, and working
hard to minimize the negatives will accomplish more
than waiting around for a burst of intense pleasure.
Happiness is
being aware not only of the positive events that occur
in your life but also that you yourself are the cause
of these events--that you can create them, that you
control their occurrence, and that you play a major
role in the good things that happen to you. The sense
of mastery over both the good and bad events in your
life contributes to an overall sense of
well-being.
"Success is maintaining your enthusiasm between
failures"
Winston
Churchill
Pursuing happiness
by
David G. Meyers in Psychology Today, July
1993
If I wanted to
predict whether you feel happy and find life
satisfying, there are some things that, surprisingly,
it would not help me to know. For example:
Tell me your
age, and you've given me no clue. we can forget tales
of "mid-life crisis," "empty-nest syndrome," and
despondent old age. Actually, happiness is equally
available to people at every age. Moreover, rates of
depression, suicide, and divorce show no increase
during the mythical mid-life crisis years.
Tell me your
sex, and you're given me no clue. The sexes are prone
to different sorts of misery. When troubled, men more
often become alcoholic, while women more often
ruminate and get depressed. Yet men and women are
equally likely to declare themselves "very happy" and
"satisfied" with life.
Tell me your
race, and you've given me no clue. African-Americans,
for example, are only slightly less likely than
European-Americans to feel very happy. Yet how could
this be, given what everyone knows-that disadvantaged
groups suffer impoverished self-esteem and resulting
depression? It's because what "everyone knows" is
wrong.
Tell me your
income, and-assuming you can afford life's
necessities-I'm still in the dark as to whether you're
a happy person. Most people suppose otherwise. They
are not crass enough to say that money buys happiness.
But they do think that 20 percent more money would
make them a little happier. And three in four
students-nearly double the proportion in 1970-now
begin college agreeing that its "very important" that
they become "very well off financially."
Again, the
findings astonish us: People in rich countries are not
consistently happier than people in not-so-rich
countries. And rich people-even those surveyed among
Forbes' 100 wealthiest Americans-are only slightly
happier than working-class folk.
So, what would
give us a clue about someone's level of happiness and
how can we use this information to improve our inner
well-being?
Although there is no surefire "How to Be Happy"
formula, here are a few
suggestions:
REALIZE THAT ENDURING HAPPINESS DOESN'T, COME FROM
"MAKING IT."
What do you long for? Fame? Fortune? Unlimited
leisure? Imagine that I could snap my fingers and give
it to you. Would you now be happy? Indeed, you'd be
euphoric, in the short run. But gradually you would
adapt to your new circumstance and life would return
to its normal mix of emotions. To recover the joy, you
would now need an even higher high.
SAVOR THE MOMENT.
Happiness, said Benjamin Franklin, "is produced not so
much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom
happen as by the little advantages that occur every
day."
As a
future-oriented person, I periodically remind myself
of Pascal's remark that we too often live as if the
present were merely our means to the future. "So, we
never live, but we hope to live-and as we are always
preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should
never be so."
To live in the
present means, for me, taking delight in the day's
magic moments, from morning tea and cereal, hunched
over a manuscript, to the day's last moments,
snuggling and talking with my wife. Happiness isn't
somewhere off in the future, but in this mornings
phone conversation with someone seeking advice, in
this noon's meal with a friend, in this evening's
bedtime story with a child, in tonight's curling up
with a good book.
TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR TIME.
There is
nevertheless a place for setting goals and managing
time. Compared to those who've learned a sense of
helplessness, those with an "internal locus of
control" do better in school, cope better with stress,
and live with greater well-being. Deprived of control
over one's life-an experience studied in prisoners,
nursing home patients, and people living under
totalitarian regimes-people suffer lower morale and
poorer health.
One way to feel
more empowered is to master our use of time. For happy
people, time is "filled and planned," says Oxford
University psychologist Michael Argyle. "For unhappy
people time is unfilled, open and uncommitted; they
postpone things and are inefficient."
ACT HAPPY.
Study after study reveals three traits (in addition to
the above-mentioned personal control) that mark happy
people's lives. First, they like themselves. They
exhibit self-esteem by agreeing with such statements
as "I'm a lot of fun to be with" and "I have good
ideas." Second, they are positive thinkers. Writing
from a place called Hope [College], it is
fitting that I concede the power of hope-filled
optimism. Third, they are outgoing. We could imagine
opposite findings-that introverts would be happiest,
living in peaceful solitude, or that pessimists would
live with greater gladness as things keep turning out
better than expected. But its the sociable extroverts
and the venturesome optimists who report more
happiness.
SEEK WORK AND LEISURE THAT ENGAGE YOUR SKILLS.
Sometimes
the challenges
of work or
home are too great, and we feel stressed. At other
times, we're under challenged and bored. In between
these two states is a zone where we feel challenged,
but not overmatched. We get absorbed. We lose
consciousness of time. We are in a state that
University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow."
In his studies
of writers, dancers, surgeons, chess players, mountain
climbers, and the like, Csikszentmihalyi discovered
that people find the flow experience satisfying. Even
if we make a lower but livable wage, it pays to seek
work that we find interesting and challenging. The
well-being that accompanies flow extends to
leisure.
JOIN THE MOVEMENT
MOVEMENT. A
slew of studies reveal that aerobic exercise is an
antidote for mild depression and anxiety. Repeated
surveys show that people are more self-confident,
unstressed, and in better spirits, if physically fit.
The exercise
research is producing such consistent and encouraging
results and with such minimal cost and desirable side
effects-that most people seeking to boost their energy
and well-being can benefit from at least a moderate
regimen. Chuck, my 76-year-old friend, plays
basketball daily with people half his age and younger.
"If I don't exercise five times a week," he explains,
"I begin to get the blahs. The stamina I get from
exercising helps keep me optimistic about living."
Mens sana in corpore sano. Sound mind in a sound body.
GET REST. Happy
people live active, vigorous lives, yet they reserve
time for renewing sleep and solitude. Today, however,
many people suffer from shortened sleep, leaving them
groggy and unable to get into flow. William Dement,
director of Stanford University's Sleep Disorders
Center, laments the "national sleep debt." Among the
college students I have spent my adult life with, few
behaviors strike me as more self-destructive than the
typical late nights, with resulting fatigue,
diminished alertness, and, not infrequently, failure
and depression.
GIVE PRIORITY TO CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS.
There are
few better antidotes for unhappiness than an intimate
friendship with someone who cares deeply about you.
People who can name several close, supportive
friends-friends with whom they freely share their ups
and downs-live with greater health and happiness. in
experiments, people relax as they confide painful
experiences. Like confession, confiding is good for
the soul.
TAKE CARE OF THE SOUL.
"Joy is the
serious business of heaven," said C. S. Lewis. One
surmises as much from reading the new research on
faith and well-being. Actively religious people are
much less likely to become delinquent, to abuse drugs
and alcohol, to divorce, or to commit suicide. They're
even physically healthier, due perhaps to less smoking
and drinking.
Source: Digested
from The Pursuit of Happiness (Avon Books; 1993) by
David G. Myers, Ph.D. Copyright 1993 by the David and
Carol Myers Foundation.
Happiness
is....
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