1. In recent years there has been an explosion of research on happiness, optimism, positive emotions and healthy character traits. Dr. Martin Seligman is Director of the University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center and founder of Positive Psychology. He was one of the experts featured in Time Magazine’s January 2005 issue devoted entirely to “The Science of Happiness”.
While psychology has traditionally concerned itself with what ails the human mind–such as anxiety, depression, neurosis, obsessions, paranoia, and delusions–, Dr. Seligman proposed a new goal for psychology. He asked the question: “What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish?” That is, his goal was to create a branch of psychology that would study what actively made people feel fulfilled, engaged and meaningfully happy.
Dr. Seligman’s biggest recommendation for lasting happiness is to figure out your strengths and find new ways to deploy them. You can do this at his website, authentichappiness.com.
2. University of Illinois psychologist Edward Diener created one of the most basic and widely used tools for assessing happiness, the Satisfaction with Life Scale. This tool is in the public domain and it asks you to do the following:
Below are five statements that you may agree or disagree with. Using the 1 – 7 scale indicate your agreement with each item by placing the appropriate number on the line preceding that item.
* 7 – Strongly agree
* 6 – Agree
* 5 – Slightly agree
* 4 – Neither agree nor disagree
* 3 – Slightly disagree
* 2 – Disagree
* 1 – Strongly disagree
____ In most ways my life is close to my ideal.
____ The conditions of my life are excellent.
____ I am satisfied with my life.
____ So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.
____ If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.
- 35 – 31 Extremely satisfied
- 26 – 30 Satisfied
- 21 – 25 Slightly satisfied
- 20 Neutral
- 15 – 19 Slightly dissatisfied
- 10 – 14 Dissatisfied
- 5 – 9 Extremely dissatisfied
3. Hungarian-born psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has devoted his life’s work to the study of what makes people truly happy, satisfied and fulfilled, and is best known for exploring the state of mind called flow, the feeling of complete engagement in a creative or playful activity familiar to athletes, musicians, video-game enthusiasts, and almost anyone who loses themselves in a favorite pursuit.
Dr. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.” The flow state is one of the most enjoyable and valuable experiences a person can have, and achieving the flow state on a consistent basis has been found to be one of the best ways to attain happiness.
4. Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University developed another tool for sizing up happiness: the Day-Reconstruction Method. Participants fill out a long diary and questionnaire detailing everything they do on a particular day and whom they were with at the time. The next day, consulting the diary, they relive each activity and, using 12 scales, rate how they felt at the time, whether happy, impatient, depressed, worried, tired, and so on.
5. In 1996 University of Minnesota researcher David Lykken published a paper looking at the role of genes in determining one’s sense of satisfaction in life. Lykken gathered information on 4,000 sets of twins born in Minnesota from 1936 through 1955. After comparing happiness data on identical vs. fraternal twins, he came to the conclusion that about 50% of one’s satisfaction in life comes from genetic programming. That is, genetics establishes a set point level of happiness. He also found that circumstantial factors like income, marital status, religion and education contribute about 8% to one’s overall well-being. The remaining percentage, that is, a little over 40%, is up to the individual.
You can raise your set point level of happiness by working on the following three components of happiness:
A. Getting more pleasure out of life;
B. Becoming more engaged in what you do; and
C. Finding ways of making your life feel more meaningful.
6. At the University of California at Davis, psychologist Robert Emmons found that gratitude exercises improve physical health, raise energy levels, can relieve pain and fatigue, and increase happiness levels. You can read more about this in my article, “How Gratitude Can Change Your Life” over at “The Change Blog”.
7 – 9. Here are three great books on the subject of happiness which you can get on Amazon:
10. Download a free e-book on “How to Be Happy and Have Fun Changing the World” .
(“Life is Short, Have Some Fun”; courtesy of Thaozilla)
11. Research shows that meditation makes you more resilient to negative situations and more likely to derive feelings of pleasure and well-being from every day situations. A very useful meditation tool is The Silva Life System.
12. Visit Gretchen Rubin’s blog, The Happiness Project.
13. Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness
14. If you missed yesterday’s post “How to Be Happy”, now is the time to go read it.
15. On Oprah’s web site there’s an article on “Five Things Happy People Do”. These are:
- They find their most golden self.
- They design their lives to bring in joy.
- They avoid “if only” fantasies.
- They put best friends first.
- They allow themselves to be happy.
16. Read Rick Foster’s article, “9 Ways to Be Happy in a High-Stress World”. Rick Foster is co-author of the book How We Choose to Be Happy: The 9 Choices of Extremely Happy People–Their Secrets, Their Stories
Rick writes: “. . . there appear to be nine choices that self-identified happy people consistently make that give them a feeling of contentment and well being regardless of how stressful their lives may appear to be.”
17. “Happiness depends upon ourselves.” — Aristotle
18. Tal Ben-Shahar teaches a course at Harvard on “Positive Psychology” which began as a six-student seminar and expanded over the subsequent few years to over 1400 students — making it, at its height, the university’s most popular offering. He is author of the book, Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment
- Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning.
- Happiness is mostly dependent on our state of mind, not on our status or the state of our bank account.
- Barring extreme circumstances, our level of well being is determined by what we choose to focus on and by our interpretation of external events.
- Remember the mind-body connection. What we do — or don’t do — with our bodies influences our mind. Regular exercise, adequate sleep, and healthy eating habits lead to both physical and mental health.
- Simplify.
- Express gratitude.
19. Does money buy happiness? Dan Gilbert explains that the difference between making $5,000.00 a year and $50,000.00 a year is dramatic. However, the difference between making $50,000.00 and $500,000.00–a much larger jump–is not nearly as big. Once your basic needs are met, more money stops making you much more happy.
20. In an experiment called “The Nun Study”—which consisted of studying 678 nuns in different convents throughout the United States — Dr. David A. Snowdon, an epidemiologist at the University of Kentucky, and colleagues came up with several theories. Among these was the finding that nuns who expressed more positive emotions in their autobiographies lived significantly longer — in some cases 10 years longer — than those expressing fewer positive emotions.
(“That Girl”; courtesy of Jim Blob Blann)
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