Yoni Schwartzman is also a veteran photographer who mainly focuses on scenery and nature. This book encompasses his passion for creativity, love of photography, and veneration for the power of language. This book teaches that happiness is natural and that learning to be happy can lead to better relationships, better health, more success and a longer life. It describes seven practices that incorporate both ancient and new wisdom to help you learn how to find this happiness within yourself.
The truth is, happiness can be had with little effort. Nothing in your life has to change. This book teaches that, no matter what your circumstances are in life, you can be happy. Happiness is nothing you have to buy or work for, since it is your birthright. You do not have to do anything to get it. You just need to learn what happiness is, where it is, and how to open yourself up to it. This book challenges the populist idea that loneliness is a bad and sad thing.
Loneliness is rather a very facilitative mechanism of body-mind for wellness and personal excellence. It is an innate call of instincts for self-actualization of potentials within, to attain excellence.
The book looks into many novel ideas of good living. Download these books for free, enjoy them all and be happy! Hardesty Self-Improvement Rating: This book teaches that happiness is natural and that learning to be happy can lead to better relationships, better health, more success and a longer life.
Best of Gary Whitmore! Best Books: Q2 Update! Must-Read Detective Novels! Bibliotherapy: Anxiety and Depression! If I have to conform to psychiatric fashions, couch my work in the latest fashion of DSM-III categories, and have official diagnoses hung onto my research subjects, these are mere inconveniences, not hypocrisy.
For patients, the payoff of the NIMH approach has been awesome. In , no mental illness was treatable. For not a single disorder did any treatment work better than no treatment at all. It was all smoke and mirrors: working through the traumas of childhood did not help schizophrenia the movie David and Lisa notwithstanding , and cutting out pieces of the frontal lobes did not relieve psychotic depression the Nobel Prize to Portuguese psychiatrist Antonio Moniz notwithstanding.
Fifty years later, in contrast, medications or specific forms of psychotherapy can markedly relieve at least fourteen of the mental illnesses.
Two of them, in my view, can be cured: panic disorder, and blood and injury phobia. Not only that, but a science of mental illness had been forged. We can diagnose and measure fuzzy concepts like schizophrenia, depression, and alcoholism with rigor; we can track their development across a lifetime; we can isolate causal factors through experiments; and, best of all, we can discover the beneficial effects of drugs and therapy to relieve suffering.
The payoff for me has been pretty good, too. Working within a disease model, I have been the beneficiary of more than thirty unbroken years of grants to explore helplessness in animals and then in people. Learned helplessness and depression have similar underlying brain chemistry deficits, and the same medications that relieve unipolar depression in humans also relieve helplessness in animals. At the back of my mind is real unease, however, about this exclusive emphasis on discovering deficits and repairing damage.
As a therapist, I see patients for whom the disease model works, but I also see patients who change markedly for the better under a set of circumstances that fit poorly into the disease model. I witness growth and transformation in these patients when they realize just how strong they are. When a patient who has been raped gains insight into the fact that while the past was unchangeable, the future is in her hands.
When a patient has the flash of insight that while he might not be such a good accountant, his clients always cherish him for being so painstakingly considerate. When a patient brings order into her thinking by merely constructing a coherent narrative of her life from the apparent chaos of reacting to one trouble after the next.
I see a variety of human strengths, labeled and then amplified in therapy, that serve as buffers against the various disorders whose names I dutifully inscribe on the forms that go to insurance companies. This idea of building buffering strengths as a curative move in therapy simply does not fit into a framework that believes each patient has a specific disorder, with a specific underlying pathology that will then be relieved by a specific healing technique that remedies deficits.
Ten years into our work on learned helplessness, I change my mind about what was going on in our experiments. It all stems from some embarrassing findings that I keep hoping will go away. Not all of the rats and dogs become helpless after inescapable shock, nor do all of the people after being presented with insolvable problems or inescapable noise. One out of three never gives up, no matter what we do. Moreover, one out of eight is helpless to begin with—it does not take any experience with uncontrollability at all to make them give up.
At first, I try to sweep this under the rug, but after a decade of consistent variability, the time arrives for taking it seriously. What is it about other people that makes them collapse at the first inkling of trouble? I park the mud-splattered Suburban and hurry into the lodge. They both had spent much of the last twenty years at APA conclaves in Washington and elsewhere. I was an outsider who was not invited to these gatherings. I have held none. Pat and Dick had each been president of a dozen groups.
The last presidency I can remember, as I dial again, is of my ninth-grade class. Frustrated and immobilized, I stare blankly at the phone. I stop, take a deep breath, and scan my own reactions. I am a hideous example of my own theory. Pessimists have a particularly pernicious way of construing their setbacks and frustrations.
Optimists, in contrast, have a strength that allows them to interpret their setbacks as surmountable, particular to a single problem, and resulting from temporary circumstances or other people. Pessimists, I had found over the last two decades, are up to eight times more likely to become depressed when bad events happen; they do worse at school; sports, and most jobs than their talents augur; they have worse physical health and shorter lives; they have rockier interpersonal relations, and they lose American Presidential elections to their more optimistic opponents.
Were I an optimist, I would have assumed that the busy signal meant Dorothy was still trying to reach me to tell me I won. Even if I lost, it was because clinical practice now happens to have a larger voting bloc than academic science. I was, after all, the scientific consultant to the Consumer Reports article that reported how remarkably well psychotherapy works.
So I am well positioned to bring practice and science together, and I will probably win if I run again next year. But I am not a default optimist. I am a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist; I believe that only pessimists can write sober and sensible books about optimism, and I use the techniques that I wrote about in Learned Optimism every day.
I take my own medicine, and it works for me. I am using one of my techniques right now—the disputing of catastrophic thoughts—as I stare at the phone that dangles off the hook. The disputing works, and as I perk up, another route occurs to me.
Fowler, Dr. As I wait for Ray to come on, I drift back twelve months to a hotel suite in Washington. In his mid-sixties, Ray is handsome, wiry, and goateed, reminding me of Robert E. Lee and Marcus Aurelius rolled into one. A decade before, he had been elected president, moving up to Washington, D. Through no fault of his, however, within months the American Psychological Association fell apart.
Meanwhile, an organized group of disgruntled academics of which I was one were threatening to march out of the organization, believing its politically astute practitioner majority had led the APA to become an organ that supported private psychotherapy and neglected science.
Moving from the presidency to the real seat of power as CEO, within a decade Ray had wrought a truce in the practice- science wars, moved the APA astonishingly into the black, and increased the membership to ,, bringing it into a tie with the American Chemical Society as the largest organization of scientists in the world.
Can I possibly win? And if I do, can I accomplish anything worth three years of my life? Ray is used to considering quietly; he is an island of contemplation in the stormy ocean of psychological politics. Or that I want to see psychology challenge this pernicious system of managed care by getting behind therapy effectiveness research.
Or that I want to see research funding for mental health doubled. Do you remember the image at the end of A Space Odyssey? The enormous fetus floating above the earth, not knowing what was to come? In this case, I happen to mean it. Would it be worth three years of your life? Not only did you win, you had three times as many votes as the next candidate. Twice as many people as usual voted. You won by the largest vote in history! But what was my mission? I needed to come up with my central theme in short order and begin gathering sympathetic people to carry it out.
It is my view that therapy is usually too late, and that by acting when the individual was still doing well, preventive interventions would save an ocean of tears. This is the main lesson of the last century of public health measures: Cure is uncertain, but prevention is massively effective—witness how getting midwives to wash their hands ended childbed fever, and how immunizations ended polio.
Can there be psychological interventions in youth that will prevent depression, schizophrenia, and substance abuse in adults? My own research for the previous decade had been an investigation of this question. I found that teaching ten-year-old children the skills of optimistic thinking and action cuts their rate of depression in half when they go through puberty my previous book, The Optimistic Child, detailed these findings.
So I thought that the virtues of prevention and the importance of promoting science and practice around it might be my theme. Six months later in Chicago, I assembled a prevention task force for a day of planning.
Each of the twelve members, some of the most distinguished investigators in the field, presented ideas about where the frontiers of prevention lay for mental illness. Unfortunately, I was bored stiff. It was just the disease model warmed over and done up proactively, taking the treatments that worked and enacting them earlier for young people at risk. It all sounded reasonable, but I had two reservations that made it hard to listen with more than half an ear.
First, I believe that what we know about treating disordered brains and minds tells us little about how to prevent those disorders in the first place. What progress there is been in the prevention of mental illness comes from recognizing and nurturing a set of strengths, competencies, and virtues in young people—such as future-mindedness, hope, interpersonal skills, courage, the capacity for flow, faith, and work ethic.
The exercise of these strengths then buffers against the tribulations that put people at risk for mental illness. Depression can be prevented in a young person at genetic risk by nurturing her skills of optimism and hope. An inner-city young man, at risk for substance abuse because of all the drug traffic in his neighborhood, is much less vulnerable if he is future-minded, gets flow out of sports, and has a powerful work ethic.
But building these strengths as a buffer is alien to the disease model, which is only about remedying deficits. Second, beyond the likelihood that injecting kids at risk for schizophrenia or depression with Haldol or Prozac will not work, such a scientific program would attract only yeomen. A renovated science of prevention needs the young, bright and original scientists who historically have made the real progress in any field.
As I shuffled out toward the revolving doors, the most iconoclastic of the professors caught up with me. You have to put some intellectual backbone into this. Nikki, however, was throwing weeds into the air and dancing and singing. Since she was distracting me, I yelled at her, and she walked away.
From when I was three until when I was five, I was a whiner. I whined every day. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.
In terms of my own life, Nikki hit the nail right on the head. I was a grouch. I had spent fifty years enduring mostly wet weather in my soul, and the last ten years as a walking nimbus cloud in a household radiant with sunshine.
Any good fortune I had was probably not due to being grumpy, but in spite of it. In that moment, I resolved to change. More importantly, I realized that raising Nikki was not about correcting her shortcomings. She could do that herself. Rather, my purpose in raising her was to nurture this precocious strength she had displayed—I call it seeing into the soul, but the jargon is social intelligence—and help her to mold her life around it.
Such a strength, fully grown, would be a buffer against her weaknesses and against the storms of life that would inevitably come her way. Raising children, I knew now, was far more than just fixing what was wrong with them. It was about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues, and helping them find the niche where they can live these positive traits to the fullest.
But if social benefits come through putting people in places where they can best use their strengths, there are huge implications for psychology. Can there be a psychological science that is about the best things in life? Can there be a classification of the strengths and virtues that make life worth living? Can parents and teachers use this science to raise strong, resilient children ready to take their place in a world in which more opportunities for fulfillment are available?
Can adults teach themselves better ways to happiness and fulfillment? The vast psychological literature on suffering is not very applicable to Nikki. A better psychology for her and children everywhere will view positive motivations—loving kindness, competence, choice, and respect for life—as being just as authentic as the darker motives. It will ask how children can acquire the strengths and virtues whose exercise leads to these positive feelings.
It will ask about the positive institutions strong families, democracy, a broad moral circle that promote these strengths and virtues. It will guide us all along better paths to the good life. Nikki had found me my mission, and this book is my attempt to tell it. WHY do we feel happy? Why do we feel anything at all? Why has evolution endowed us with emotional states that are so insistent, so consuming, and so…well, so present…that we run our very lives around them?
Evolution and Positive Feeling In the world that psychologists are most comfortable with, positive feelings about a person or an object get us to approach it, while negative feelings get us to avoid it.
The delicious odor of brownies being baked pulls us toward the oven, and the repulsive smell of vomit pushes us to the other side of the sidewalk. But amoebae and worms also presumably approach the stuff they need and avoid pitfalls, using their basic sensory and motor faculties without any feeling. Somewhere during evolution, though, more complicated animals acquired the wet overlay of an emotional life. The first huge clue to unraveling this knotty issue comes from comparing negative emotion to positive emotion.
Negative emotions—fear, sadness, and anger—are our first line of defense against external threats, calling us to battle stations. Fear is a signal that danger is lurking, sadness is a signal that loss is impending, and anger signals someone trespassing against us. In evolution, danger, loss, and trespass are all threats to survival itself.
More than that, these external threats are all win-loss or zero-sum games, where whatever one person wins is exactly balanced by a loss for the other person. The net result is zero. Negative emotions play a dominant role in win-loss games, and the more serious the outcome, the more intense and desperate are these emotions. A fight to the death is the quintessential win-loss game in evolution, and as such it arouses the panoply of negative emotions in their most extreme forms.
Natural selection has likely favored the growth of negative emotions for this reason. Those of our ancestors who felt negative emotions strongly when life and limb were the issue likely fought and fled the best, and they passed on the relevant genes. All emotions have a feeling component, a sensory component, a thinking component, and an action component. The feeling component of all the negative emotions is aversion—disgust, fear, repulsion, hatred, and the like.
These feelings, like sights, sounds, and smells, intrude on consciousness and override whatever else is going on. The type of thinking such emotions ineluctably engender is focused and intolerant, narrowing our attention to the weapon and not the hairstyle of our assailant.
All of this culminates in quick and decisive action: fight, flight, or conserve. This is so uncontroversial except perhaps for the sensory part as to be boring, and it has formed the backbone of evolutionary thinking about negative emotions since Darwin. It is strange, therefore, that there has been no accepted thinking about why we have positive emotion. Scientists distinguish between phenomena and epiphenomena.
Pushing the accelerator in your car is a phenomenon because it starts a chain of events that cause your car to speed up. Behaviorists like B. Skinner argued for half a century that all of mental life was mere epiphenomena, the milky froth on the cappuccino of behavior.
When you flee from a bear, this argument goes, your fear merely reflects the fact that you are running away, with the subjective state frequently occurring after the behavior. In short, fear is not the engine of running away; it is just the speedometer. I was an anti-behaviorist from the very beginning, even though I worked in a behavioral laboratory. Learned helplessness convinced me that the behaviorist program was dead wrong.
Appreciating complex contingencies is the process of judgment, and extrapolating them to the future is the process of expectation.
If one takes learned helplessness seriously, such processes cannot be explained away as epiphenomena, because they cause the behavior of giving up.
The work on learned helplessness was one of the blasts that blew down the straw house of behaviorism and led in the s to the enthroning of cognitive psychology in the fiefdoms of academic psychology. I was thoroughly convinced that negative emotions the so-called dysphorias were not epiphenomena. The evolutionary account was compelling: Sadness and depression not only signaled loss, they brought about the behaviors of disengagement, giving up, and in extreme cases suicide. Anxiety and fear signaled the presence of danger, leading to preparations to flee, defend, or conserve.
Anger signaled trespass, and it caused preparation to attack the trespasser and to redress injustice. Strangely, though, I did not apply this logic to positive emotions, either in my theory or in my own life. The feelings of happiness, good cheer, ebullience, self-esteem, and joy all remained frothy for me.
In my theory, I doubted that these emotions ever caused anything, or that they could ever be increased if you were not lucky enough to be born with an abundance of them. I wrote in The Optimistic Child that feelings of self-esteem in particular, and happiness in general, develop as only side effects of doing well in the world. However wonderful feelings of high self-esteem might be, trying to achieve them before achieving good commerce with the world would be to confuse profoundly the means and the end.
Or so I thought. In my personal life, it had always discouraged me that these delightful emotions rarely visited me, and failed to stay for a long visit when they did. I had kept this to myself, feeling like a freak, until I read the literature on positive and negative affect.
Whether one identical twin is a giggler or a grouch, it is highly likely that her sister, with exactly the same genes, will be one as well; but if the twins are fraternal, sharing only half their genes, the odds that they will have the same affectivity are not much greater than chance. How do you think you score on positive and negative affectivity?
You can take the test here or on the website www. Read each item and then mark the appropriate answer in the space next to the word. Indicate to what extent you feel this way right now that is, at the present moment. Use the following scale to record your answers. To score your test, merely add your ten positive affect PA scores and your ten negative affect NA scores separately.
You will arrive at two scores ranging from 10 to Some people have a lot of positive affect and this stays quite fixed over a lifetime. High positive-affect people feel great a lot of the time; good things bring them pleasure and joy in abundance.
Just as many people, however, have very little of it. Most of the rest of us lie somewhere in between. I suppose psychology should have expected this all along. Constitutional differences in anger and depression have long been established.
Why not in positive emotion? The upshot of this is the theory that we appear to have a genetic steersman who charts the course of our emotional life. If the course does not run through sunny seas, this theory tells us that there is not much you can do to feel happier. I have a friend, Len, who is much lower on positive affect than even I am. He made millions as the CEO of a securities trading company and, even more spectacularly, became a national champion bridge player several times over—all in his twenties!
Handsome, articulate, bright, and a very eligible bachelor, however, he was surprised that in love he was a total flop. As I said, Len is reserved, and virtually devoid of positive affect. I saw him at the very moment of victory in a major bridge championship; he flashed a fleeting half-smile and escaped upstairs to watch Monday night football alone.
This is not to say Len is insensitive. He is not warm. He is not joyous. He is not a barrel of laughs. In fact, there is probably nothing much wrong with Len. He is just constitutionally at the low end of the spectrum of positive affectivity. Evolution has ensured that there will be many people down there, because natural selection has plenty of uses for the lack of emotion as well as for its presence.
To be a champion bridge player, to be a successful options trader, and to be a CEO all require lots of deep cool when under fire from all sides. But Len also dated modern American women, who find ebullience very attractive. A decade ago he asked my advice about what to do, and I suggested that he move to Europe, where bubbliness and extroverted warmth are not so highly prized.
He is today happily married to a European. And this is the moral of the story: that a person can be happy even if he or she does not have much in the way of positive emotion. That afternoon in the garden with Nikki convinced my heart that my theory was wrong, but it took Barbara Fredrickson, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, to convince my head that positive emotion has a profound purpose far beyond the delightful way it makes us feel.
The Templeton Positive Psychology Prize is given for the best work in Positive Psychology done by a scientist under forty years of age. In , the inaugural year of the prize, Barbara Fredrickson won it for her theory of the function of positive emotions. Fredrickson claims that positive emotions have a grand purpose in evolution.
They broaden our abiding intellectual, physical, and social resources, building up reserves we can draw upon when a threat or opportunity presents itself.
When we are in a positive mood, people like us better, and friendship, love, and coalitions are more likely to cement. We are open to new ideas and new experience. For instance, suppose you have in front of you a box of tacks, a candle, and a book of matches. Your job is to attach the candle to the wall in such a way that wax does not drip on the floor. The task requires a creative solution—emptying the box and tacking it to the wall, then using it as a candleholder.
The experimenter beforehand makes you feel a positive emotion: giving you a small bag of candy, letting you read amusing cartoons, or having you read a series of positive words aloud with expression. Each of these techniques reliably creates a small blip of good feeling, and the positive emotion induced makes you more likely to be creative in fulfulling the task.
Another experiment: Your job is to say as quickly as you can whether a word falls into a specific category. But if the experimenter first induces positive emotion as above, you are faster. The same intellectual boost occurs with both little children and experienced physicians. Then all the children were given a learning task about different shapes, and both did better than four-year-olds who got neutral instructions.
At the other end of the spectrum of experience, 44 internists were randomly placed in one of three groups: a group that got a small package of candy, a group that read aloud humanistic statements about medicine, and a control group.
All the physicians were then presented with a hard-to-diagnose case of liver disease and asked to think out loud as they made their diagnosis. The candied group did best, considering liver disease earliest and most efficiently. Happy But Dumb? In spite of evidence like this, it is tempting to view happy people as air- heads. The happy-but-dumb view has very respectable provenance. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, wrote in that the function of thought is to allay doubt: We do not think, we are barely conscious, until something goes wrong.
When presented with no obstacles, we simply glide along the highway of life, and only when there is a pebble in the shoe is conscious analysis triggered. They gave undergraduate students differing degrees of control over turning on a green light.
For other students, however, the light went on regardless of whether they pressed the button. Afterward, each student was asked to judge how much control he or she had. Depressed students were very accurate, both when they had control and when they did not. The nondepressed people astonished us. They were accurate when they had control, but even when they were helpless they still judged that they had about 35 percent control.
The depressed people were sadder but wiser, in short, than the nondepressed people. More supporting evidence for depressive realism soon followed. Depressed people are accurate judges of how much skill they have, whereas happy people think they are much more skillful than others judge them to be. Eighty percent of American men think they are in the top half of social skills; the majority of workers rate their job performance as above average; and the majority of motorists even those who have been involved in accidents rate their driving as safer than average.
Happy people remember more good events than actually happened, and they forget more of the bad events. Depressed people, in contrast, are accurate about both. Depressed people, in contrast, are evenhanded in assessing success and failure.
This does indeed make happy people look empty-headed. Moreover, Lisa Aspinwall a professor at the University of Utah who won the second-prize Templeton award in gathered compelling evidence that in making important real-life decisions, happier people may be smarter than unhappy people. She presents her subjects with scary, pertinent health-risk information: articles about the relationship of caffeine to breast cancer for coffee drinkers, or about links between tanning and melanoma for sun worshippers.
Happy people remember more of the negative information and rate it as more convincing, it turns out, than do the unhappy people. The resolution of the dispute about which type of people are smarter may be the following: In the normal course of events, happy people rely on their tried and true positive past experiences, whereas less happy people are more skeptical.
Even if a light has seemed uncontrollable for the last ten minutes, happy people assume from their past experience that things will eventually work out, and at some point they will have some control. Hence the 35 percent response discussed earlier, even when the green light was actually uncontrollable.
There is an exciting possibility with rich implications that integrates all these findings: A positive mood jolts us into an entirely different way of thinking from a negative mood. This seems to make us critics of a high order. When we gather to debate which one of several superb job candidates we should hire as a professor, we often end up hiring no one, instead picking out everything that each candidate has done wrong.
So a chilly, negative mood activates a battle-stations mode of thinking: the order of the day is to focus on what is wrong and then eliminate it. A positive mood, in contrast, buoys people into a way of thinking that is creative, tolerant, constructive, generous, undefensive and lateral. This way of thinking aims to detect not what is wrong, but what is right.
It does not go out of its way to detect sins of omission, but hones in on the virtues of commission. It probably even occurs in a different part of the brain and has a different neurochemistry from thinking under negative mood. Choose your venue and design your mood to fit the task at hand. Here are examples of tasks that usually require critical thinking: taking the graduate record exams, doing income tax, deciding whom to fire, dealing with repeated romantic rejections, preparing for an audit, copy-editing, making crucial decisions in competitive sports, and figuring out where to go to college.
Carry these out on rainy days, in straight-backed chairs, and in silent, institutionally painted rooms. Being uptight, sad, or out of sorts will not impede you; it may even make your decisions more acute. In contrast, any number of life tasks call for creative, generous, and tolerant thinking: planning a sales campaign, finding ways to increase the amount of love in your life, pondering a new career field, deciding whether to marry someone, thinking about hobbies and noncompetitive sports, and creative writing.
Carry these out in a setting that will buoy your mood for example, in a comfortable chair, with suitable music, sun, and fresh air. If possible, surround yourself with people you trust to be unselfish and of good will. Play among juvenile ground squirrels involves running at top speed, jumping straight up into the air, changing directions in midair, then landing and streaking off in the new direction.
Young Patas monkeys at play will run headlong into saplings that are flexible enough to catapult them off into another direction. Both of these maneuvers are used by adults of the respective species to escape predators. It is almost irresistible to view play in general as a builder of muscle and cardiovascular fitness and as the practice that perfects avoiding predators, as well as perfecting fighting, hunting, and courting.
Health and longevity are good indicators of physical reserve, and there is direct evidence that positive emotion predicts health and longevity. In the largest study to date, 2, Mexican-Americans from the southwest United States aged sixty-five or older were given a battery of demographic and emotional tests, then tracked for two years.
Positive emotion strongly predicted who lived and who died, as well as disability. After controlling for age, income, education, weight, smoking, drinking, and disease, the researchers found that happy people were half as likely to die, and half as likely to become disabled. Positive emotion also protects people against the ravages of aging.
You will recall that beginning nuns who wrote happy autobiographies when in their twenties lived longer and healthier lives than novices whose autobiographies were devoid of positive emotion, and also that optimists in the Mayo Clinic study lived significantly longer than pessimists.
Happy people, furthermore, have better health habits, lower blood pressure, and feistier immune systems than less happy people. Research suggests, however, that more happiness actually causes more productivity and higher income. One study measured the amount of positive emotion of employees, then followed their job performance over the next eighteen months. Happier people went on to get better evaluations from their supervisors and higher pay.
In a large-scale study of Australian youths across fifteen years, happiness made gainful employment and higher income more likely. In attempts to define whether happiness or productivity comes first by inducing happiness experimentally and then looking at later performance , it turns out that adults and children who are put into a good mood select higher goals, perform better, and persist longer on a variety of laboratory tasks, such as solving anagrams.
When Bad Things Happen to Happy People The final edge that happy people have for building physical resources is how well they deal with untoward events. How long can you hold your hand in a bucket of ice water? The average duration before the pain gets to be too much is between sixty and ninety seconds. Rick Snyder, a professor at Kansas and one of the fathers of Positive Psychology, used this test on Good Morning America to demonstrate the effects of positive emotion on coping with adversity.
He first gave a test of positive emotion to the regular cast. By quite a margin, Charles Gibson outscored everybody. Then, before live cameras, each member of the cast put his or her hand in ice water.
Everyone, except Gibson, yanked their hands out before ninety seconds had elapsed. Gibson, though, just sat there grinning not grimacing , and still had his hand in the bucket when a commercial break was finally called. Not only do happy people endure pain better and take more health and safety precautions when threatened, but positive emotions undo negative emotions.
The idea was rooted in nothing more fateful than a bus ride. It was a typical day and a typical commute when Gretchen caught sight out the bus window of a woman juggling an umbrella, a cell phone, and a child. Not a very extraordinary woman, but someone that Gretchen could see herself in.
She was that woman - ordinary, harried, and while not depressed, maybe not the happiest, either. That's when it hit Gretchen - she was happy, but was she happy enough? Was this, an ordinary bus ride with ordinary feelings on an ordinary day really all there was for her in life? She knew she had life good, but could she have it even better? Gretchen decided to find out. A perfectionist and planner, Gretchen got started on her "Happiness Project" by doing some research. She read all the greats - from Plato to Schopenhauer in philosophy; Seligman to Lyubomirsky in religion; Tolstoy to McEwan to even Oprah in literature and pop-culture.
She spoke with friends and family and colleagues, all of them a mix of critical and encouraging. One Sunday afternoon, as she unloaded the dishwasher, Gretchen Rubin felt hit by a wave of homesickness.
She was standing right in her own kitchen. She felt homesick, she realized, with love for home itself. And what did she want from her home? A place that calmed her, and energized her. A place that, by making her feel safe, would free her to take risks. Also, while Rubin wanted to be happier at home, she wanted to appreciate how much happiness was there already.
So, starting in September the new January , Rubin dedicated a school year—September through May—to making her home a place of greater simplicity, comfort, and love. In The Happiness Project, she worked out general theories of happiness. Here she goes deeper on factors that matter for home, such as possessions, marriage, time, and parenthood.
How can she control the cubicle in her pocket? And it really was time to replace that dud toaster. Each month, Rubin tackles a different theme as she experiments with concrete, manageable resolutions—and this time, she coaxes her family to try some resolutions, as well.
0コメント