Happiness For Dummies E-Book

W. Doyle Gentry

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Seitenzahl: 556

Beschreibung

Now, you can find the happiness you want and live "the good life" you deserve by applying the helpful information in Happiness For Dummies, the ultimate guide to achieving bliss! You'll discover proven techniques for living a meaningful, healthy, and productive life no matter what your life circumstances happen to be. Positive concepts and techniques will help you change key behaviors, foster good habits, and be in sync with your surroundings. This helpful guide will give you the chance to assess your happiness and understand what it means to be happy at each stage of self-actualization. You'll learn why having positive emotions can improve your health and well-being. And, you will find out what happiness isn't and how to avoid confusing happiness with culturally valued outcomes like wealth, power, and success. Pursue what you want, seize the day, find benefits in life's challenges, and live a coherent lifestyle. Find out how to: * Assess your current capacity for happiness * Live the life that you want * Overcome common obstacles to happiness * Identify your strengths and virtues * Improve your emotional and spiritual life * Create meaningful social ties and learn to be alone * Find the silver lining Complete with lists of ten ways to raise a happy child, ten common roadblocks to happiness, and ten personal habits to foster happiness, Happiness For Dummies is your one-stop, easy-to-follow guide to being happy and living your best life.

Leseprobe

Happiness For Dummies®

Happiness For Dummies®

by W. Doyle Gentry, PhD

Happiness For Dummies®

Published byWiley Publishing, Inc.111 River St.Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2008 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

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ISBN: 9780470507674

Manufactured in the United States of America

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About the Author

W. Doyle Gentry, PhD, is a clinical psychologist living in Lynchburg, Virginia. He is a Fellow in the American Psychological Association and was the founding editor of the Journal of Behavioral Medicine. In Dr. Gentry’s 40-year career as a scientist-practitioner, he has authored over 100 publications in the fields of health psychology and behavioral medicine, which he helped pioneer. He has previously served on the faculty of Duke University Medical Center and the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston. Gentry has conducted training seminars for lay and professional audiences throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. He has also served as a consultant to major industry, where he specializes in conflict management, team building, and health promotion. Articles referring to Dr. Gentry’s work regularly appear in a variety of contemporary magazines, and he is frequently interviewed on radio and television. He is the author of three earlier self-help books: Anger-Free: Ten Basic Steps to Managing Your Anger (William Morrow), When Someone You Love Is Angry (Berkley), and Anger Management For Dummies (Wiley).

Dr. Gentry is available for speaking engagements and workshops. Interested readers may contact him via e-mail at [email protected].

Dedication

I dedicate this book to the countless numbers of people who, in one way or another, have brought happiness into my life.

Author’s Acknowledgments

I want to thank a number of fellow collaborators without whose efforts writing this book would not have been possible or nearly as enjoyable. As always, I want to express my appreciation to my agent, Maura Kye, of the Denise Marcil Literary Agency. Once again, she has served my interests well!

The team at John Wiley & Sons, Inc. — in particular, Mike Baker, Elizabeth Kuball, Lindsey Lefevere, and Diane Steele — was a pleasure to work with at all phases of the project. I greatly appreciate their encouragement and professionalism, as well as their thoughtfulness and patience throughout. Their collective enthusiasm for the For Dummies brand is definitely contagious.

Lastly, I want to thank my loving family — Catherine, Chris, and Rebecca — for their unending support for my life’s work and, more important, for bringing so much happiness into my life each and every day.

I believe that happiness is the only really important goal, and yet we are all dummies when it comes to pursuing it in our everyday lives. If this book brings even one additional moment of happiness to the life of a single reader, then my time spent on this project will have been well worth it.

Publisher’s Acknowledgments

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Introduction

Happiness is an important part of life — no less than anger, sadness, and fear. It begins with life itself: What mother doesn’t recognize the look of happiness on the face of her newborn? Human beings are wired with an innate, neurological potential for happiness, but whether this potential eventually becomes a reality depends on how we choose to live our lives. In other words, happiness isn’t an accident, and it isn’t a gift from the gods — it’s the gift you give yourself!

Unlike Shangri-La, a mythical paradise on Earth, happiness is not confined to a particular place, nor is it the result of any one specific activity or life circumstance. Happiness is a personal state of physical, spiritual, and emotional well-being that you can experience anywhere at any time. This morning, for example, before I began to work on this book, I spent a few happy moments sitting in my driveway quietly watching my two basset hounds, Max and Dixie, experiencing another day through the many divergent smells on a crisp fall morning in Virginia.

If you’re like me, you’re far too passive when it comes to experiencing happiness. You wait for it to find you instead of exercising your right to pursue it. It’s because most people are passive when it comes to happiness that happiness seems so elusive! Face it: We live in proactive times. People around the world don’t wait for freedom — they fight for it. Wealth is no longer something you have to inherit (despite what Paris Hilton may think) — you can create it. People are living longer these days. Why? Because we’re learning that we can improve quality of life through the everyday choices we make. Happiness For Dummies tells you how to fight for, create, and live a long and happy life. It makes you the master of your own happy destiny!

About This Book

How do you know when you’re happy? Are you as happy as most people? If you have lots of money or a fancy title at work, shouldn’t that be enough to make you happy? What does happiness have to do with health? Is there such a thing as eternal happiness? Can you really make yourself happy by putting a smile on your face? Type B personalities tend to enjoy less material success than Type A’s, so why are Type B’s so much happier? These are just a few of the important questions that Happiness For Dummies answers.

In writing Happiness For Dummies, I had five basic goals in mind:

I wanted to show you that happiness is not a simple emotion — it’s an extremely complex experience that results from feeling safe, satisfied, and grateful. By understanding all the key ingredients that are involved, you can make up your own recipe for happiness.

I wanted to tell you what happiness isn’t — it isn’t power, money, success, or excitement. Happiness is something much more than that!

I wanted to show you how to develop those personality attributes that maximize your potential for happiness — optimism, hardiness, and conscientiousness. These are not qualities that you inherit at birth through some genetic “good fortune” — they’re learned traits, and if you haven’t learned them yet, this book can help.

I wanted to offer you actionable strategies for pursuing happiness. In other words, I wanted to show you how to get into the flow of everyday life, how to find the silver lining in what you otherwise might view as an all-bad situation, how to develop an abiding sense of self-confidence, and how to smile for the right reasons. Think of this book as your happiness toolbox!

I wanted to emphasize the importance of striking the right balance between the essential opposing forces that constitute human life, like that between work and play or between selfishness and generosity. Happiness is never found at the extremes of life — it’s in the middle. That’s why they call it the “happy medium”!

Happiness For Dummies is not one of those 12-step books where you have to read and follow the advice of Step 1 before you can proceed to Step 2, and so on. It’s a resource book that contains everything I know about how to achieve happiness after four decades of professional experience, both as a scientist and as a clinician — and after more than 60 years of personal experience living my own life!

I did not want Happiness For Dummies to be another one of those pie-in-the-sky books containing more fluff than substance. This book is intended to show ordinary people how to pursue and achieve happiness. Simply put, it’s a road map that guides you to the most sought-after destination in life — happiness. Buying this book means you want to get there — Happiness For Dummies shows you how.

Conventions Used in This Book

Happiness For Dummies is not a book about the science of happiness. Even though the principles contained in the book are based in part on science, I’ve eliminated all the professional jargon and instead used terms and concepts that the average person without a degree in psychology can understand. Instead of looking at tables and charts, you read about happy people — composites of real people like yourself who represent friends, relatives, and clients I’ve had the good fortune to learn from over the years. The quotations and two-person dialogs that I include in these stories are based solely on my recollections of conversations I had. And, yes, you find a few reflections on my own most memorable moments of happiness sprinkled throughout —one of the perks of being an author is sharing my experiences!

You don’t have to know psychology to understand Happiness For Dummies. But I do use a couple of conventions that you should be aware of:

When I introduce a new term, I put the word in italics and define it shortly thereafter (usually in parentheses).

When I give you a list of steps to perform, I put the action part of the step in bold, so you can easily follow along.

When I list an e-mail address or Web address, I use a special font called monofontso you know exactly what to type.

When this book was printed, some Web addresses may have needed to break across two lines of text. If that happened, rest assured that we haven’t put in any extra characters (such as hyphens) to indicate the break. So, when using one of these Web addresses, just type in exactly what you see in this book, pretending as though the line break doesn’t exist.

What You’re Not to Read

Look on the bright side: I won’t be giving you a test after you’ve had a chance to read Happiness For Dummies. So, you don’t have to read every single word, sentence, chapter, and/or part of the book to get your money’s worth. And don’t feel compelled to remember everything. If it strikes a nerve, believe me, you’ll remember it!

Throughout the book, I include lots of sidebars — text in gray boxes. Sidebars make me happy! Although they aren’t an essential part of the overall message conveyed in this book, they are things I thought you might find interesting. You can think of them as side dishes to the main course. If you’re hungry for every morsel of information there is on how to pursue happiness, then by all means gobble them up; otherwise, you can skip them altogether and still satisfy your appetite.

You can also safely skip any paragraphs marked with Technical Stuff icons (see “Icons Used in This Book,” later in this Introduction, for more information).

Foolish Assumptions

I made a few assumptions about you when I was writing Happiness For Dummies:

You want to be happy — but so far happiness has been elusive. You bought this book, not because you want or need someone to convince you that happiness is a good thing, but because you haven’t been able to achieve it on your own. You know it’s out there; you just don’t know how to find it.

You’re open-minded about discovering more-efficient ways to achieve happiness. People don’t typically buy books simply to reinforce their own fixed ideas about life or to have someone else tell them about experiences they’ve already had. They’re looking for something new, something different, something that will both guide and inspire them — something that will help them not only survive but, more important, thrive on life.

You see yourself as part of the “let’s do it” generation and you want to be a player, not a spectator, when it comes to achieving true happiness. This attitude portends one of the key personality traits underlying happiness — hardiness — which I cover in this book. You may be farther along in your pursuit of happiness than you realized!

How This Book Is Organized

I organized Happiness For Dummies into 6 parts and 23 chapters. Here’s what you can find in each part.

Part I: Defining Happiness

In these first four chapters, I acquaint you with some basic ideas about happiness as a universal emotion, the benefits that positive emotions have for health, the key ingredients that make up happiness, and what happiness isn’t. (Knowing what happiness isn’t is important because many people spend most of their lives searching for happiness in all the wrong places.) I show you how to calculate your HQ — happiness quotient — and help you compare yourself to others so that you know whether you’re ahead of or behind the curve. I also explain how happiness is simply your nervous system’s feedback about whether you’re living the right kind of life — and fill you in on what right means in the context of achieving happiness.

Part II: Personality Attributes That Lead to Happiness

In this part, I introduce concepts — in this case, personality attributes — from the emerging field of positive psychology that greatly influence the extent to which you experience happiness. Not everyone learns early in life (if at all) to be optimistic, hardy, and conscientious, so in these three chapters I show you how to be that type of person and get a leg up in your quest for happiness. It’s not hard — trust me.

Part III: Behaving Your Way toward Happiness

Chapters 8 through 12 show you specific ways to behave — always look for the silver lining, have a heart-to-heart with a higher power, make a daily confession of the positives in your life — that increase your potential for achieving happiness. Chapter 12 talks in depth about the power of a smile and gives you a heads-up about which smiles will not bring you happiness. The idea here is that happiness is no mere accident — it’s something that you have to work for!

Part IV: Striking the Right Balance

If you’re like me, your everyday life is mostly out of balance. Sad to say, you approach life from one extreme or another — you work too much and play too little, you have too many hassles and not enough of life’s little pleasures, and you’re either too selfish or too selfless. Am I right? This part of the book helps you find a happy medium along some of the more important dimensions of life.

Part V: Achieving Happiness in Key Relationships

People tend to compartmentalize their day-to-day lives into three main areas of interaction — at work, at home, and in intimate relationships. The three chapters in this part offer situation-specific strategies designed to increase happiness. Interpersonal happiness is all about reciprocity — or, as the saying goes, “What goes around comes around.” Here I show you how to calculate your workplace positivity ratio, which determines whether employees flounder or flourish at work; tell you which parenting style leads to a happy home life; and illustrate how marital happiness is really a three-legged stool.

Part VI: The Part of Tens

If you’re looking for quick ideas about how to raise a happy child or the ten most common roadblocks to becoming a happy person, or you just want an easy-to-remember checklist of personal habits or thoughts that foster happiness, this is the part for you.

Icons Used in This Book

Icons are those little pictures in the margins throughout this book that are there to draw your attention to certain types of information.

This icon suggests practical how-to strategies for achieving happiness.

This icon alerts you to important ideas and concepts that you’ll want to remember and that you can use when you don’t have Happiness For Dummies in hand.

Every once in a while, the scientist in me gets a little chatty, and when I do, I mark the paragraph with this icon. You can read these paragraphs if you want, but the information they contain isn’t essential to your understanding of the topic at hand.

This icon appears when I think a cautionary note is in order or when you need to seek professional help.

Where to Go from Here

You don’t have to begin by reading Chapter 1 and continue straight through to the end of the book. Each part and chapter of this bookis meant to stand alone in its discussion of how to achieve true happiness. When I was writing, I skipped around, writing chapters in no particular order — when I finished one chapter, I looked at the table of contents to see what interested me next and went with that. It made the writing more fun. Feel free to do the same — choose a topic that interests you and dive in!

A word of caution

If after reading Happiness For Dummies and trying the behavioral strategies set forth in this book, you still find yourself struggling to find happiness, talk to a professional — a licensed clinical psychologist or mental-health counselor, for example. Tell your counselor that you’ve already read Happiness For Dummies and, if she hasn’t already, suggest that she do so as well — that way, you can ensure that you’re both on the same page and she’ll know that you’ve already done your homework in trying to become a happier person.

I don’t recommend looking for a medical remedy for unhappiness — one that focuses on prescribed medication. There is no known pill that will create a sense of enduring happiness, only ones that treat some of the obstacles to happiness, such as depression.

Finally, if you’ve been diagnosed with clinical depression, you owe it to yourself to get help. For more information on depression, check out Depression For Dummies, by Laura L. Smith, PhD, and Charles H. Elliott, PhD (Wiley).

You may want to head straight for those chapters that focus on how to achieve happiness in your key relationships — at work, at home, and with your loved ones (Part V). Or you may want to take a quick look at the ten most common obstacles to happiness (Chapter 22). The choice is yours. In the end, it really doesn’t matter where you start — what matters most is where you end up, I hope a much happier person!

Part I

Defining Happiness

In this part . . .

I talk about why happiness is a universal emotion and help you begin to appreciate just how complex an experience true happiness is. I explain why there is no such thing as eternal, everlasting happiness and why it’s important to enjoy those precious moments. I show you how to quantify happiness and break down happiness into its various components — pleasure, gratitude, contentment — so that you know how close you are to achieving your goal of being a happy person. I also tell you where not to look for happiness — power, status, wealth, and success. If that’s all you pursue in life, you can only end up being unhappy! Finally, I explain what your nervous system is telling you when you find happiness — the answers to four crucial questions that determine your overall quality of life.

Chapter 1

Anyone Can Be Happy

In This Chapter

Experiencing happiness anywhere

Meeting some happy people

Calculating you happiness quotient

Benefiting from positive emotions

What do children in an Israeli kibbutz, students at the College of William and Mary, and preliterate tribesmen in the wilds of Borneo share in common? Not their language or customs. It’s their innate ability to experience happiness. Nowhere on this planet is there a group of human beings who lack the capacity for joy, satisfaction, peace of mind, and well-being.

Unlike its counterparts — anger, sadness, and fear — happiness is a positive emotion. Happiness is the glue that binds us all together and underlies all forms of civilized behavior. Happy employees are more productive. Happy couples have more enjoyable sex. Happy children make good students. Just as anger repulses people, happiness attracts. Happy people enjoy more support from those around them and are more sought after in social situations. Happiness offsets the burdens of everyday life and can be a healing force for the injured and infirm.

In this chapter, I fill you in on the many benefits that come from positive emotions and show you how to assess how happy you are at any point in life. I show you that it’s possible to be happy no matter what your social and economic circumstances. And I introduce you to four people whose stories illustrate some key ingredients to how you can go about achieving happiness.

Happiness: The Universal Emotion

Happiness is everywhere — in every country, culture, big city, jungle, canyon, and apartment building in the world, anywhere that human beings reside. Thus, happiness — along with anger, curiosity, fear, disgust, and sadness — is considered a universal emotion.

Psychologist Paul Ekman, professor emeritus at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco, spent his entire 40-year career circumnavigating the globe, and everywhere he went he found the same smiling faces. His research pointed the way to our understanding that emotions are not learned behaviors — we’re born with them. What you can learn, however, are ways of accessing happiness.

Find a quiet spot somewhere — your favorite coffee shop, the YMCA, your local shopping mall, a park bench — and, like Dr. Ekman, observe the faces of people around you. Count how many smiling faces you see in a period of 30 minutes. You’ll probably find that there’s a lot more happiness in the world than you imagined.

Happiness from the Individual Perspective

Other people are the best teachers, no matter what you’re trying to learn. So, if you want to know how to be happy, what better way to start than by asking people who show happiness more than most people?

I interviewed four people whose stories are not only interesting but instructive. Here’s what they had to say:

Diane is a 64-year old grandmother of eight. She’s what’s known as a “mover-shaker” in the real-estate business, a very successful woman, who has an infectious laugh and looks much younger than her age. Diane has had, in her words, “a blessed life,” and her only major current stress is caring for an aging parent. She attends church regularly and has for most of her life. On a happiness scale from 1 to 10, Diane rates herself “at least 9” and she believes that people who know her would give her that same score. I asked Diane what the secret to her happiness is, and she said:

That’s easy. I had happy parents. We didn’t have a lot of money, but they managed to make me feel special and a very important part of their lives. They were very positive about whatever I wanted to do when I was growing up. And, most important, they showed me I had a choice about how to see life — if you look for the positive, you’ll find it. And the same goes if you’re always looking for the negative.

That positive outlook Diane learned from her parents has served her well in her business. As she put it, “In real estate, looking for the positive helps when you have to deal with difficult people and I think it makes it easier for me to find solutions to problems.”

Lanny is 74 and widowed. He has one grown daughter and two grandkids, who are the joy of his life. Lanny retired after a long and very successful career as a stock broker, and now he spends a lot of his time doing volunteer work for various community agencies. He believes it’s important to give back some of the good fortune he’s accumulated throughout his life. Lanny also attends church regularly.

At the time I interviewed Lanny, there were no significant stresses in his life, but there had been in the past — the deaths of four siblings, his parents, and his wife, all as a result of severe and lingering illness. Still, on that 1-to-10 happiness scale, Lanny rates himself a 10. He believes it’s important to look for opportunities to be happy and to work hard to achieve that end. His motto: “Only you can make it happen!”

Like Diane, Lanny doesn’t look his age — he says, “I don’t frown and have wrinkles, so most people think I’m younger than I am!” He also believes that happiness has had a lot to do with the fact that he’s rarely been ill throughout his life. Lanny says he owes much of his ability to be happy to his mother, who from the outset taught him to “go to bed every night thinking about something positive you did today.” He begins the day the same way, thinking about “someone I want to see today who means a lot to me” — this sets the emotional tone for his day. Lanny also makes a point of repeating to himself, both silently and aloud, “Life is good!”, which keeps him focused on the positives in the world around him. Finally, he thanks people he encounters for “sharing their smile” with him, which they’re glad to do.

Janine is 56, has two grown sons, and is happily married. She spends much of her time lately doing volunteer work, which she describes as both a joy and a hassle, depending on which day you ask her. She attends religious services regularly. And you’d never guess it from her happy demeanor, but Janine has long suffered from chronic depression. Interestingly, part of her success in managing her depression comes as a result of her attempts to “keep others happy” — their happiness then bounces back on her and “helps me get through difficult times.”

What’s her recipe for happiness? She says, “My mother taught me that ‘pretty is as pretty does’ — in other words, a smile is more becoming than a snarl.” Her mother also taught her to “not say anything about someone if you can’t be nice,” which remains a guiding principle in Janine’s life. Her mother was a strong role model, a self-made woman with a generous spirit. Janine feels that happiness is a gift from her mother — a talent — that she, in turn, must share with the world. On the happiness scale, she rates herself a definite 9!

Cecil is 60 and still actively employed in the insurance business, a profession he has succeeded at since high school when he began shadowing his father, who was also an insurance agent. He’s married to the same sweet woman he met decades ago, whom he credits with being a major influence in his ability to be perpetually happy — “She pulls me up in life and always has.” She’s also taught Cecil to “loosen up” and enjoy life — and, be the type of person who always sees the glass half-full.

Cecil had a childhood illness that left him disabled, and he learned early on that humor defuses the awkwardness that often arises when you have a handicap. He attends church regularly and also looks much younger than his age. Cecil believes that happiness is crucial to good health — “At my age, I think it’s remarkable that I don’t take any prescription drugs.” Laughter is Cecil’s medication to be sure. He is legendary when it comes to telling jokes; as a close friend once said, “It’s impossible to tell a joke that Cecil hasn’t already told.” He believes that happiness is contagious and he’s apparently doing his best to infect the world around him.

Each of these people is unique in his or her own way, but there are some commonalities to their happy stories:

They all attribute much of their happiness to the influences of significant others in their lives (parents, life partners).

They all profess a belief that happiness is something you have to work for — you have to find it, it doesn’t come looking for you.

They all believe it’s possible to be happy even when life doesn’t always go the way you want it to (for example, when dealing with aging parents, coping with depression, or grieving the loss of loved ones to debilitating illnesses).

They all believe in a higher power and practice their religion, and they think that helps them have a positive outlook on life.

They all believe in beginning and ending the day with positive thoughts that lend themselves to happiness.

They all believe that happiness insures good health and keeps you looking young.

They all believe that happiness is something that increases with age (see the following section).

Talk to a happy person you know and see if you can find out what his secret to happiness is. If you’re like me, you’ll be surprised at how willing he is to talk about why he’s happy, who in his life enabled him to feel this way, and what he sees as the benefits that come from always being positive.

The Demographics of Happiness

Happiness is a very democratic emotion — it isn’t an emotion that’s available to only a certain group of individuals and not others. But there are some demographic characteristics that increase your chances of being happy. I cover these in the following sections.

The happiest country in the world

Finland is purportedly the happiest country in the world. Their secret, so say the Finns, is that they’re a culture of modest expectations. As a people, they want less out of life and are satisfied with what they have. Finland has a shortage of workaholics and there is little disparity as far as wealth goes. They don’t suffer from all the social pressures and violence that typify most industrialized countries. They find a certain comfort in their collective humility — when it comes to materialism, they’re content being the underdog.

Age

Age seems to increase a person’s overall likelihood of being happy. If you think that young people have the advantage here, you’re wrong. Most young people are happy to be sure, but research shows that you’re much more likely to experience happiness the older you get. In one survey, 38 percent of respondents aged 68 to 77 reported feeling “very happy” as compared to only 28 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 27. This same survey showed a sharp increase in happiness scores beginning at age 45 and continuing into the mid-70s. (There was a similar decline in negative emotions with age.)

So, why do people tend to get happier as they get older?

Older people have reached a point of satiation in life. They’ve had a sufficient amount of success and positive experiences to feel both grateful and content. Younger people are on the way, but they’re not there yet.

Age alters a person’s expectations. Somewhere along the way, you realize that you don’t get everything you want out of life and that life never was meant to be perfect. I tell people all the time, “If you want to be happy, you don’t have to like the way life is — you just have to accept that it is that way.”

With age comes wisdom — a perspective that results from a combination of accumulated worldly experience and knowledge — not often seen as people muddle through the first half of life.

It’s no coincidence that the people I interviewed (see the preceding section) were all between the ages 56 and 74.

Marital status

Marriage also seems to make a difference in people’s happiness. Married people, generally speaking, are happier than those who are unmarried. This is true for both men and women. Marriage is one of the meaningful social ties I talk about in Chapter 16. Marriage brings coherence to people’s lives (Chapter 10), gives them an opportunity to be less selfish (Chapter 17), and allows them to tend and befriend those they love (Chapter 20).

Although most of the research looks at happiness in married people, I think it’s fair to say that these same benefits would accrue from other types of committed, long-term relationships as well.

Not all partnerships are happy. In Chapter 20, I point out the aspects of an intimate relationship that make for a happy couple. These include

Understanding that being in an intimate relationship means being your partner’s companion

Creating a sense of equity and parity in the relationship

Sharing interests, passion, and intimacy

Avoiding contempt even when angry

Practicing empathy

Saying the magic words: “I am sorry.”

Education level

The more education you have, the happier you’re likely to be. This may be an indirect effect of the positive relationship that education has on a person’s earning power, health, ability to cope with the stresses and strains of everyday life, and longevity. In short, education doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be happy, but it sure does increase your odds.

Sign up for a class or two at your local community college. Trust me, you’ll be happy you did.

Happiness at Each Stage of Self-Actualization

According to psychologist Abraham Maslow, a forerunner of the positive psychology movement, if you’re self-confident (as opposed to self-centered), enjoy solitude, have a need to serve the greater good, have a keen sense of humor, and aren’t afraid to be creative and unique in how you approach life, you’re a self-actualized person. Maslow said that happiness comes from satisfying a hierarchy of needs in an orderly manner. He argued that you experience happiness at each of five levels of self-actualization:

Level I: The first level of self-actualization has to do with meeting your basic survival needs — air, water, food, and sleep. At this level, happiness is more about having something to eat than it is about tender, loving care.

Level II: The second level of self-actualization has to do with safety and can include everything from a safe neighborhood to a financial safety net that comes from having a supportive family or by working hard to put aside money for your retirement years.

Level III: The next level involves a sense of belonging — that is, feeling loved and needed by others.

Level IV: The fourth level has to do with self-esteem. Do you feel like you’re respected and appreciated by others? Do you like and respect yourself?

Level V: The final level Maslow calls self-actualization. In essence, you’re there, you’ve arrived, you’ve reached your full potential, and you are your happiest, most unique, most creative self. Classic examples of self-actualized people include Thomas Jefferson, Florence Nightingale, Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mother Teresa.

Having satisfied each level of need/motivation, you then move on to the next all the way to the “peak” of what life has to offer.

So, ask yourself: How satisfied am I as far as biological needs, safety, love, self-esteem, and creativity goes? You may be more self-actualized than you know.

Looking at the Benefit of Positive Emotions

Only in recent years have psychologists begun to appreciate the benefits of positive emotion — benefits that include everything from enhanced creativity to improved immune-system function. Dr. Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina, a leader in the field of positive psychology, posed the question, “What good are positive emotions?” and came up with the following possibilities.

Broadening your focus and expanding your thinking

Positive emotions — curiosity, love, joy, contentment, wonder, excitement — expand your focus of attention. When you’re angry, your focus narrows to the source of your frustration and the object of your wrath. Your mind is like a heat-seeking missile, bent on destruction.

Contrast this with what happens when you get excited about something — your mind opens up and there’s a free flow of ideas and intellectual possibility. Curiosity abounds. This is precisely why passion is so essential to artistic endeavors. This is also why you need a high positivity ratio in the workplace (see Chapter 18) if you want a high rate of productivity and a healthy bottom line. In short, your brain works best when it’s high on happiness.

Dr. Fredrickson likens the cognitive changes that accompany positive emotion to a state of mania (great excitement), only in this case not the kind of mania that requires medical treatment.

All four of the happy people I introduce in “Happiness from the Individual Perspective,” earlier in this chapter, also enjoyed success in their respective careers. When I talked to them, I could hear the excitement and passion in their voices, whether we were discussing the challenges of dealing with difficult clients in the real-estate business or how to thrive in the insurance industry. And that passion had obviously not diminished despite their age.

Psychologist Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School teaches his patients the art of mindfulness meditation — a Buddhist meditation exercise — as a means of expanding their awareness of those things they fear most, for example, chronic pain and depression. He has patients relax their bodies while at the same time opening up their minds. The irony here is that the more clearly you think about your pain, the less it distresses you. (If you’d like to try meditation, but you’re not sure where to start, check out Meditation For Dummies, 2nd Edition, by Stephan Bodian [Wiley]. It includes a CD of guided meditation exercises.)

When Kabat-Zinn and others studied the brain activity that accompanies this type of meditation, they found that it was the left frontal lobe of the brain that was literally turned on — the part that scientists refer to as the “happy brain.”

Endorphins: The link between happiness and pain relief

The same chemicals that facilitate pain relief — often referred to as the body’s own painkillers — also underlie feelings of pleasure, joy, and contentment. Those chemicals are called endorphins, and they have an opiate-like effect on a person’s mental and emotional states. The so-called “runner’s high” is an example of endorphins at work, suppressing the pain that would naturally come from long-distance running. In addition to exercise, activities that turn the brain on to endorphins include all forms of creative activity, competitive pursuits (as long as you don’t get angry), fellowship with others, prayer, healthy sexual encounters, and being surrounded by things of beauty.

Improving your ability to problem-solve

Psychiatrist Avery Weisman, in his wonderful book The Coping Capacity (Human Sciences Press), lists 15 commonly used coping strategies, including “Laugh it off — change the emotional tone.” That’s right, when you’re frustrated and you’re having trouble solving some problem that confronts you, what you need is a good laugh. Laughter unfreezes a “stuck” brain. Think of humor as a lubricant that allows the wheels — your thought processes — to once again move toward a solution. The mechanism that underlies effective problem-solving is creativity, which is your brain’s ability to come up with novel, unique answers to life’s many challenges.

In the ten years that I ran an outpatient rehabilitation program for chronic-pain sufferers, one of the things that made our program more effective than most medically oriented programs was the fact that we went out of our way to create a positive environment for our clients. The four-hour-a-day, five-week experience we offered our clients was about much more than shots and pills. Getting people who experience pain 24/7 to lighten up and laugh is no easy task, I can assure you. But, in the end, I’m convinced that laughter is the best painkiller on the market. Typically, within only a couple of days, strangers whose only common link was their ongoing pain began to smile, giggle, tease one another, and, for the first time in years, exhibit a sense of hope and optimism. Suddenly, those who had steadfastly resisted engaging in any type of physical reconditioning were willing to tackle the treadmill, floor exercises, and exercise bike. In group discussions, patients were able to come up with creative solutions of how to live with pain — whereas before they could only envision a lifetime of misery and disability. They began to move about more freely — walking faster, limping less, and showing more signs of stamina. Pain management was now a possibility that they embraced rather than ran from.

Building physical, intellectual, and social resources

Positive emotions build the following resources:

Physical resources: People are more playful when they’re happy — they’re interested in golf, tennis, marathon running, pick-up basketball games, adult softball leagues, scuba-diving, and water-skiing. Happy people are more likely to exercise on a regular basis. Part of this comes from the higher self-esteem seen in happy people. In short, happiness translates into physical fitness — stronger muscles, improved heart-lung function, and increased flexibility.

This relationship between happiness and physical resources explains, in large part, why the Baby Boomer generation is expected to live longer and healthier than preceding generations — as a group, they’ve been happier and more physically active throughout their lives and they have no intention of changing any of that even after retirement.

The next time you feel really happy, think about signing up at a local gym. That’s where all the other happy people are!

Intellectual resources: People learn better when they’re in a positive frame of mind.

I once attended a workshop conducted by Patch Adams, the controversial physician who believes that positive emotions have the power to heal. What was unusual about this workshop was having my nose painted red by one of his assistants — who was dressed as a clown — at the beginning of the afternoon seminar. He didn’t ask my permission — he just did it! And, you know what? The workshop was one of the best learning experiences of my entire professional life — I looked silly as hell, but I sure learned a lot. There’s something about humility that opens the mind, relaxes the body, and makes the brain more receptive to incoming information.

The most effective schoolteachers are the ones who find ways to make education enjoyable — laughter makes kids pay attention and attention is the key to learning. The same is true when you go to a continuing education experience; you want a speaker who is not only knowledgeable about his subject matter, but who can be entertaining.

I tell my students at the community college to do something for fun before they sit down to study for a test and they’ll get a better grade. If you engage in a fun activity first, your brain will be like a happy sponge and absorb all that material.

Social resources: Human beings gravitate toward positive people and away from negative ones.

Think about the biblical prescription, “Do onto others as you would have them do unto you,” and decide how you want to be treated. If you want to be treated badly, then by all means act badly toward others. However, if you want people to smile at you, you need to greet them with cheer and influence their lives in some positive way. More often than not, this is what you’ll get in return.

Counteracting negative emotions

Happiness is one antidote to rage. Optimism can be an antidote to fear and cynicism. Joy is the opposite of misery. Humor defuses a desire for vengeance. Positive and negatives emotions can’t exist at the same moment in time. Embracing one negates the other.

Once when I was being treated for depression, I was fussing about things I thought my family had done to agitate me, when my therapist interrupted to ask, “Do you love your wife?” Without hesitation, I said, “Of course, I do.” He then told me to continue ranting and raving about my family, but I couldn’t. My head wanted to, but my heart was no longer in it — it happened just that fast. Whenever I find myself getting angry at the people closest to me, I ask myself that same question, “Do I love this person?” and the anger disappears.

The next time you find yourself feeling negative — upset, angry, sad — try replacing that with a positive feeling and see what happens. Think about someone who makes you laugh, something that excites you, some activity that pleases you — it may provide just the escape you need from those negative emotions.

Protecting your health

You probably already know that getting upset or angry can raise your blood pressure and, in the worst-case scenario, precipitate a heart attack or stroke. But did you know that positive emotions can lower your blood pressure and risk for cardiovascular disease? Well, they can.

The pioneering work of Dr. Barbara Fredrickson illustrated that when stressed people watched a film that left them feeling amused and content, that led to quicker recovery of heart function. She also noted that stressed subjects who smiled while watching a sad movie had a more rapid heart rate recovery than those who didn’t smile. Her thesis is that positive emotions undo the effects of stress and, therefore, protect a person’s health over the long run.

The wrong time to be happy

There is one situation in which happiness doesn’t pay — it’s when you’re trying to negotiate a resolution to some type of conflict or bargain with someone. If the opposing party sees that you’re in a good mood, he’s more likely to have a longer list of demands.

Research shows that parties concede more to an angry opponent than a happy one. So, if you want to strike a good deal, wipe that smile off your face and replace it with a frown — even if you don’t feel all that negative. It’s just good business!

Happiness detracts from the impression that you’re a tough negotiator. It also implies that, no matter what you say, you’ll be satisfied with whatever the last offer was. It encourages others to hold the line on what they’re willing to give you. So, the next time you go to buy a car or a new house — where negotiation is expected — put on your serious face. You can smile after the deal is done.

Other studies have shown that something as simple as getting a light touch on your hand from a compassionate friend or the act of petting your favorite animal can also lower your blood pressure — and, neither requires a prescription, gets you into a hassle with your insurance carrier, or has negative side-effects.

Achieving Happiness Isn’t Always Easy

You’d think it would be easy to be happy, but that’s not always the case. You have to be aware. You can’t be in a hurry. And you have to welcome the experience. In the following sections, I show you how.

Being mindful

Mindfulness is about paying attention. Being mindful requires that you stay in the present moment — the here and now — which isn’t easy for folks whose minds are always dwelling on the past or skipping ahead to the future. If you’re paying attention to the world around you, then you’re said to be “mindful of your surroundings.” In the case of emotions like happiness, mindfulness has to do with being acutely aware of your inner feelings — something most people don’t do enough of.

Being mindful requires that you be able to focusyour thoughts on one thing — how you feel — and nothing else. For some people, this is more difficult than it sounds. Often, for example, when I ask male clients how they feel about something, they answer by telling me what they think or what they did. They’re simply not used to thinking in emotional terms. In the more extreme case, I end up saying, “Look, I don’t care what you thought or what you did. I just want to know how you felt at the time — you know, like mad, sad, or glad. Which were you?”

Being mindful requires that you not critique, sensor, or judge whatever it is that you’re focusing your attention on. There is no right or wrong to how you feel. If you feel happy, that’s okay — if not, that’s okay, too.