More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 21 - February 9, 2020
While we do more than our bit to increase the well-being of our clients, psychology-as-usual typically does not do much for the well-being of its practitioners. If anything changes in the practitioner, it is a personality shift toward depression
Positive psychology makes people happier. Teaching positive psychology, researching positive psychology, using positive psychology in practice as a coach or therapist, giving positive psychology exercises to tenth graders in a classroom, parenting little kids with positive psychology, teaching drill sergeants how to teach about post-traumatic growth, meeting with other positive psychologists, and just reading about positive psychology all make people happier. The people who work in positive psychology are the people with the highest well-being I have ever known.
the word happiness, which is so overused that it has become almost meaningless. It is an unworkable term for science, or for any practical goal such as education, therapy, public policy, or just changing your personal life. The first step in positive psychology is to dissolve the monism of “happiness” into more workable terms. Much more hangs on doing this well than a mere exercise in semantics.
The theory in Authentic Happiness is that happiness could be analyzed into three different elements that we choose for their own sakes: positive emotion, engagement, and meaning.
The first is positive emotion; what we feel: pleasure, rapture, ecstasy, warmth, comfort, and the like. An entire life led successfully around this element, I call the “pleasant life.” The second element, engagement, is about flow: being one with the music, time stopping, and the loss of self-consciousness during an absorbing activity.
The pursuit of engagement and the pursuit of pleasure are often solitary, solipsistic endeavors. Human beings, ineluctably, want meaning and purpose in life. The Meaningful Life consists in belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self, and humanity creates all the positive institutions to allow this: religion, political party, being green, the Boy Scouts, or the family.
Well-being theory has five elements, and each of the five has these three properties. The five elements are positive emotion, engagement, meaning, positive relationships, and accomplishment.
Positive emotion. The first element in well-being theory is positive emotion (the pleasant life). It is also the first in authentic happiness theory. But it remains a cornerstone of well-being theory, although with two crucial changes. Happiness and life satisfaction, as subjective measures, are now demoted from being the goal of the entire theory to merely being one of the factors included under the element of positive emotion.
Engagement. Engagement remains an element. Like positive emotion, it is assessed only subjectively (“Did time stop for you?” “Were you completely absorbed by the task?” “Did you lose self-consciousness?”). Positive emotion and engagement are the two categories in well-being theory where all the factors are measured only subjectively.
Positive emotion and engagement easily meet the three criteria for being an element of well-being: (1) Positive emotion and engagement contribute to well-being. (2) They are pursued by many people for their own sake, and not necessarily to gain any of the other elements (I want this back rub even if it brings no meaning, no accomplishment, and no relationships). (3) They are measured independently of the rest of the elements.
Meaning. I retain meaning (belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self) as the third element of well-being.
Accomplishment (or achievement) is often pursued for its own sake, even when it brings no positive emotion, no meaning, and nothing in the way of positive relationships.
The addition of the achieving life also emphasizes that the task of positive psychology is to describe, rather than prescribe, what people actually do to get well-being. Adding this element in no way endorses the achieving life or suggests that you should divert your own path to well-being to win more often. Rather I include it to better describe what human beings, when free of coercion, choose to do for its own sake.
Other people are the best antidote to the downs of life and the single most reliable up.
doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.
Gratitude can make your life happier and more satisfying.
Every night for the next week, set aside ten minutes before you go to sleep. Write down three things that went well today and why they went
Next to each positive event, answer the question “Why did this happen?” For example, if you wrote that your husband picked up ice cream, write “because my husband is really thoughtful sometimes” or “because I remembered to call him from work and remind him to stop by the grocery store.” Or if you wrote, “My sister just gave birth to a healthy baby boy,” you might pick as the cause “God was looking out for her” or “She did everything right during her pregnancy.”
Values in Action Signature Strengths test,
We discuss the fact that “satisficers” (“This is good enough”) have better well-being than “maximizers” (“I must find the perfect wife, dishwasher, or vacation spot”). Satisficing is encouraged over maximizing
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), depression is the most costly disease in the world, and the treatments of choice are drugs and psychotherapy. On average, treating a case of depression costs about $5,000 per year, and there are around ten million such cases annually in America. Antidepressant drugs are a multibillion-dollar industry
The first dirty little secret of biological psychiatry and of clinical psychology is that they both have given up the notion of cure. Cure takes too long if it can be done at all, and only brief treatment is reimbursed by insurance companies. So therapy and drugs are now entirely about short-term crisis management and about dispensing cosmetic treatments.
So one thing that clinical psychology needs to develop in light of the heritable stubbornness of human pathologies is a psychology of “dealing with it.” We need to tell our patients, “Look, the truth is that many days—no matter how successful we are in therapy—you will wake up feeling blue and thinking life is hopeless. Your job is not only to fight these feelings but also to live heroically: functioning well even when you are very sad.”
the skills of flourishing—of having positive emotion, meaning, good work, and positive relationships—are something over and above the skills of minimizing suffering.
She then published Creating Your Best Life: The Ultimate Life List Guide, the first book in the self-help section of any bookstore that discusses research-based goal-setting for coaches as well as for the general public.
“Being in touch with what we do well underpins the readiness to change,” David continued. “This is related to the Losada ratio. To enable us to hear criticism nondefensively and to act creatively on it, we need to feel secure.”
marriage allows us three kinds of love: a love where we are cared for, a love where we care for someone else, and romantic love.
Honesty. Loyalty. Perseverance. Creativity. Kindness. Wisdom. Courage. Fairness. These and sixteen other character strengths are valued in every culture in the world. We believe that you can get more satisfaction out of life if you identify which of these character strengths you have in abundance and then use them as much as possible in school, in hobbies, and with friends and family.
Positive education alone is a slow and incremental way of spreading well-being across the globe. It is limited by the number of trained teachers and the number of schools willing to take on positive education. Positive computing might be the rabbit out of the hat.
“I create serious games, games that build the positives in life,” she said. (Go to www.avantgame.com to play one.)
What is all our wealth for, anyway? Surely it is not, as most economists advocate, just to produce more wealth. Gross domestic product (GDP) was, during the industrial revolution, a decent first approximation to how well a nation was doing. Now, however, every time we build a prison, every time there is a divorce, a motor accident, or a suicide, the GDP—just a measure of how many goods and services are used—goes up. The aim of wealth should not be to blindly produce a higher GDP but to produce more well-being. General well-being—positive emotion, engagement at work, positive relationships, and
...more
Self-discipline is the character trait that engenders deliberate practice,
If we want to maximize the achievement of children, we need to promote self-discipline. My favorite social psychologist, Roy Baumeister, believes it is the queen of all the virtues, the strength that enables the rest of the strengths. There is, however, an extreme trait of self-discipline: GRIT. Indeed, Angela went on to explore grittiness, the combination of very high persistence and high passion for an objective
GRIT, the never-yielding form of self-discipline. Very high effort is caused by a personality characteristic of extreme persistence. The more GRIT you have, the more time you spend on the task, and all those hours don’t just add to whatever innate skill you have; they multiply your progress to the goal.
Never to be forgotten, finally, is post-traumatic growth (PTG). A substantial number of people also show intense depression and anxiety after extreme adversity, often to the level of PTSD, but then they grow. In the long run, they arrive at a higher level of psychological functioning than before. “What does not kill me makes me stronger,”
the role that Richard plays in British politics, bridging academic research and the real political scrum. He is also the author of Happiness, a radical view of government in which he argues that government policy should be measured not by increases in gross domestic product but by increases in global well-being
five-step model of assertive communication: 1. Identify and work to understand the situation. 2. Describe the situation objectively and accurately. 3. Express concerns. 4. Ask the other person for his/her perspective and work toward an acceptable change. 5. List the benefits that will follow when the change is implemented.
The healthy option to negative thinking is not positive thinking but critical thinking.” We do not teach mindless positive “thinking.” What we teach is critical thinking: the thinking skills to distinguish between irrational worst-case scenarios that paralyze action and the more likely scenarios. This is a thinking skill that enables planning and action.
It is all too commonplace not to be mentally ill but to be stuck and languishing in life. Positive mental health is a presence: the presence of positive emotion, the presence of engagement, the presence of meaning, the presence of good relationships, and the presence of accomplishment. Being in a state of mental health is not merely being disorder free; rather it is the presence of flourishing.
All studies of optimism and CVD converge on the conclusion that optimism is strongly related to protection from cardiovascular disease. This holds even correcting for all the traditional risk factors such as obesity, smoking, excessive alcohol use, high cholesterol, and hypertension. It even holds correcting for depression, correcting for perceived stress, and correcting for momentary positive emotions. It holds over different ways of measuring optimism. Most important, the effect is bipolar, with high optimism protecting people compared to the average level of optimism and pessimism, and
...more
I conclude that optimism is robustly associated with cardiovascular health, and pessimism with cardiovascular risk. I conclude that positive mood is associated with protection from colds and flu, and negative mood with greater risk for colds and flu. I conclude that highly optimistic people may have a lower risk for developing cancer. I conclude that healthy people who have good psychological well-being are at less risk for death from all causes.
Pessimists give up and suffer more stress, whereas optimists cope better with stress. Repeated episodes of stress, particularly when one is helpless, likely mobilize the stress hormone cortisol and other circulatory responses that induce or exacerbate damage to the walls of blood vessels and promote atherosclerosis. Sheldon Cohen, you will recall, found that sad people secrete more of the inflammatory substance interleukin-6, and that this results in more colds. Repeated episodes of stress and helplessness might set off a cascade of processes involving higher cortisol and lower levels of the
...more
In 2004 Ed Diener and I published an article, “Beyond Money,” which lays out the shortcomings of the gross domestic product and argues that how well a nation is doing is better measured by how enjoyable, engaging, and meaningful the citizens of that nation find their lives—by measuring their well-being. Today the divergence between wealth and the quality of life has become glaring.
Curiosity/Interest in the World
9. Integrity/Genuineness/Honesty
11. Loving and Allowing Oneself to Be Loved
15. Self-Control
transcendence, I mean emotional strengths that reach outside and beyond you to connect you to something larger and more permanent: to other people, to the future, to evolution, to the divine, or to the universe.
19. Gratitude
22. Forgiveness and Mercy
