What type of happiness do you want?

When we think and talk about happiness what exactly do we mean? The presentation above by Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman draws an interesting distinction: there may be two very different types of happiness. 

The first is being happy in your life. It is happiness that we experience immediately and in the moment.

The second is being happy about your life. It is the happiness that exists in memory when we talk about the past and the big picture.

We can enjoy nine-tenths of something blissfully in the moment, yet a lousy ending can bias us and ruin the memory forever.

We often plan holidays around the memories they will later give us ("Mexico!"), rather than doing something we'd enjoy far more in the moment ("catching up on sleep and spending more time with friends.") 

Kahenman suggests we ask ourselves ahead of time what kind of happiness we are seeking.

If you want the rich memories of happiness we should deliberately select for that: go on that exotic holiday, definitely have children and strive to make as much money as possible. These are all things shown to make us happy about our lives.

If you want to be happy in the moment don't travel to fancy places, keep it simple. Don't have children because moment for moment they will dramatically reduce your happiness with crying, complaining, chores and worry. And certainly don't toil to earn more than 30K a year because beyond that, experiential happiness flat lines.

It's a question we all face: Is living in the moment, as encouraged by every Hollywood movie, the right way to live or is it the path of impulsive hedonism?

Is living to create great memories the goal of the mature individual or does it make us a miserable weaver of a fiction that never was?

I leave the answer to you.

But there is advice about being happier in both senses in The Real Secret, which is available in paperback and kindle format on www.amazon.com and www.amazon.co.uk .

Posted by Annabel

Stay Happy, Live Longer

The idea that feeling good may be good for your health is not new. Three decades ago, Lazarus et al (1980), suggested that under intensely stressful conditions positive emotions might be protective. Whilst helping to sustain coping efforts, positive emotions also appeared to replenish vital resources that had been depleted by stress.

In a more recent review of the literature, Anthony Ong* of Cornell University looked at how positive emotions can influence health outcomes in later adulthood.

"We all age. It is how we age, however, that determines the quality of our lives," he says. The data he reviewed suggests that positive emotions may be a powerful antidote to stress, pain, and illness. Studies found that people with stronger positive emotions have lower levels of chemicals associated with inflammation related to stress.

Ong became interested in the study of positive emotion when he learned about what researchers call the paradox of ageing: despite the notable loss of physical function throughout the body, a person's emotional capacity seemed to stay consistent with age. Ong speculated that if positive emotions are indeed good for our health then, "one direct, measurable consequence of this should be the extended years of quality living." And that is what he found.

So there you have it - stay happy, live longer.

*Anthony D. Ong (2010). Pathways Linking Positive Emotion and Health in Later Life. Current Directions in Psychological Science, December 2010; vol. 19, 6: pp. 358-362.

Annabel

Martin Seligman Talks about the Science of Happiness

It's A Wonderful Life! Want a Quick Fix to Feeling Happy?

Research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology* tested the hypothesis that thinking about the absence of a positive event from one's life would improve feelings of happiness more than thinking about the presence of a positive event.

What they found was that respondents who wrote about how they might never have met their romantic partner were more satisfied with their relationship than were those who wrote about how they did meet their partner.

So whenever you want a quick fix then just think how you'd feel if you didn't have the things you do have. See? Simple.

Gratitude - always a powerful happy pill - turned up side down and it still works. For more information and ways to develop the Habit of gratitude, read Step 12, "Smell the Roses" of The Real Secret

* "It's a Wonderful Life: Mentally subtracting positive events improves people's affective states, contrary to their affective forecasts" Minkyung Kooet et al (2008) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95(5)

WISHING YOU'D DONE THINGS DIFFERENTLY

Looking back and wishing I’d done things differently is a tendency I have when I get a ‘blue’ day. Most of us will experience ‘blue’ days from time to time as we get older but they really are a waste of time and energy. They help no-one, least of all me.

For example, did I do all I could have done for my kids? I don’t know. I can beat myself up for hours on this one, especially at 3.00 am in the morning. What I do know is that I did the very best I could do at the time I was doing it, making decisions, coping with the situation then – not now, then. If I had my time over again would I do things differently? Yes, in some instances I would. But I didn’t. It’s in the past. Let it go.

Martin Seligman, author of ‘Learned Optimism’, advocates, as I do, that we take responsibility for our own happiness. But that doesn’t mean that we have to take responsibility for absolutely everything that happens to us. The point of owning up to temporary failure is that we can change. We don’t see the failure as permanent – I am stupid. It’s all my fault. It won’t be – ever. If your son or daughter drops out of university, it’s easy to see that as a parental failure. I didn’t instill enough self-discipline in him or her. That’s nonsense. The reality will be that your student offspring was bored with the course and made his or her own decision to leave.

Be happy that whatever has happened in your life has brought you to where you are now, older, wiser, and more secure. If you made mistakes in the past, learn from them and move on.

Thank-you to Penny Young of Magnificent Ageing for this post : You can visit Penny's site at http://www.magnificentageing.com/index.aspx