Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

by Martin E.P. Seligman

The second element, engagement, is about flow: being one with the music, time stopping, and the loss of self-consciousness during an absorbing activity. I refer to a life lived with these aims as the “engaged life.” Engagement is different, even opposite, from positive emotion; for if you ask people who are in flow what they are thinking and feeling, they usually say, “nothing.” In flow we merge with the object. I believe that the concentrated attention that flow requires uses up all the cognitive and emotional resources that make up thought and feeling. There are no shortcuts to flow. On the contrary, you need to deploy your highest strengths and talents to meet the world in flow. There are effortless shortcuts to feeling positive emotion, which is another difference between engagement and positive emotion. You can masturbate, go shopping, take drugs, or watch television. Hence, the importance of identifying your highest strengths and learning to use them more often in order to go into flow (www.authentichappiness.org). There is yet a third element of happiness, which is meaning. I go into flow playing bridge, but after a long tournament, when I look in the mirror, I worry that I am merely fidgeting until I die. 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 sel...

I used to think that the topic of positive psychology was happiness, that the gold standard for measuring happiness was life satisfaction, and that the goal of positive psychology was to increase life satisfaction. I now think that the topic of positive psychology is well-being, that the gold standard for measuring well-being is flourishing, and that the goal of positive psychology is to increase flourishing. This theory, which I call well-being theory, is very different from authentic happiness theory, and the difference requires explanation.

Happiness in authentic happiness theory is operationalized by the gold standard of life satisfaction, a widely researched self-report measure that asks on a 1-to-10 scale how satisfied you are with your life, from terrible (a score of 1) to ideal (10). The goal of positive psychology follows from the gold standard—to increase the amount of life satisfaction on the planet. It turns out, however, that how much life satisfaction people report is itself determined by how good we feel at the very moment we are asked the question. Averaged over many people, the mood you are in determines more than 70 percent of how much life satisfaction you report and how well you judge your life to be going at that moment determines less than 30 percent.

A mood view of happiness consigns the 50 percent of the world’s population who are “low-positive affectives” to the hell of unhappiness. Even though they lack cheerfulness, this low-mood half may have more engagement and meaning in life than merry people. Introverts are much less cheery than extroverts, but if public policy is based (as we shall inquire in the final chapter) on maximizing happiness in the mood sense, extroverts get a much greater vote than introverts.

Life satisfaction essentially measures cheerful mood, so it is not entitled to a central place in any theory that aims to be more than a happiology.

And each element of well-being must itself have three properties to count as an element: 1. It contributes to well-being. 2. Many people pursue it for its own sake, not merely to get any of the other elements. 3. It is defined and measured independently of the other elements (exclusivity). 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. A handy mnemonic is PERMA.

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. Here is what ultimately convinced me: I play a lot of serious duplicate bridge. I have played with and against many of the greatest players. Some expert bridge players play to improve, to learn, to solve problems, and to be in flow. When they win, it’s great. They call it “winning pretty.” But when they lose—as long as they played well—it’s almost as great. These experts play in the pursuit of engagement or positive emotion, even outright joy. Other experts play only to win. For them, if they lose, it’s devastating no matter how well they played; if they win, however, it’s great, even if they “win ugly.”

Positive Relationships. When asked what, in two words or fewer, positive psychology is about, Christopher Peterson, one of its founders, replied, “Other people.” Very little that is positive is solitary. When was the last time you laughed uproariously? The last time you felt indescribable joy? The last time you sensed profound meaning and purpose? The last time you felt enormously proud of an accomplishment? Even without knowing the particulars of these high points of your life, I know their form: all of them took place around other people. Other people are the best antidote to the downs of life and the single most reliable up.

When he was a young boy, and his mother saw that he was in a bad mood, she would say, “Stephen, you are looking piqued. Why don’t you go out and help someone?” Empirically, Ma Post’s maxim has been put to rigorous test, and we scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.

“Another one-penny stamp increase!” I fumed as I stood in an enormous, meandering line for forty-five minutes to get a sheet of one hundred one-cent stamps. The line moved glacially, with tempers rising all around me. Finally I made it to the front and asked for ten sheets of one hundred. All of ten dollars. “Who needs one-penny stamps?” I shouted. “They’re free!” People burst into applause and clustered around me as I gave away this treasure. Within two minutes, everyone was gone, along with most of my stamps. It was one of the most satisfying moments of my life. Here is the exercise: find one wholly unexpected kind thing to do tomorrow and just do it. Notice what happens to your mood.

Is there someone in your life whom you would feel comfortable phoning at four in the morning to tell your troubles to? If your answer is yes, you will likely live longer than someone whose answer is no. For George Vaillant, the Harvard psychiatrist who discovered this fact, the master strength is the capacity to be loved. Conversely, as the social neuroscientist John Cacioppo has argued, loneliness is such a disabling condition that it compels the belief that the pursuit of relationships is a rock-bottom fundamental to human well-being.

The final chapter of this book is about the politics and economics of well-being, but for now I want to give just one example of why happiness theory fails abysmally as the sole explanation of how we choose. It is well established that couples with children have on average lower happiness and life satisfaction than childless couples. If evolution had to rely on maximizing happiness, the human race would have died out long ago. So clearly either humans are massively deluded about how much life satisfaction children will bring or else we use some additional metric for choosing to reproduce. Similarly, if personal future happiness were our sole aim, we would leave our aging parents out on ice floes to die. So the happiness monism not only conflicts with the facts, but it is a poor moral guide as well: from happiness theory as a guide to life choice, some couples might choose to remain childless. When we broaden our view of well-being to include meaning and relationships, it becomes obvious why we choose to have children and why we choose to care for our aging parents.

Here’s a brief exercise that will raise your well-being and lower your depression: The Gratitude Visit Close your eyes. Call up the face of someone still alive who years ago did something or said something that changed your life for the better. Someone who you never properly thanked; someone you could meet face-to-face next week. Got a face? Gratitude can make your life happier and more satisfying. When we feel gratitude, we benefit from the pleasant memory of a positive event in our life. Also, when we express our gratitude to others, we strengthen our relationship with them. But sometimes our thank-you is said so casually or quickly that it is nearly meaningless. In this exercise, called the “Gratitude Visit,” you will have the opportunity to experience what it is like to express your gratitude in a thoughtful, purposeful manner. Your task is to write a letter of gratitude to this individual and deliver it in person. The letter should be concrete and about three hundred words: be specific about what she did for you and how it affected your life. Let her know what you are doing now, and mention how you often remember what she did. Make it sing! Once you have written the testimonial, call the person and tell her you’d like to visit her, but be vague about the purpose of the meeting; this exercise is much more fun when it is a surprise. When you meet her, take your time reading your letter. Notice her reactions as well as yours. If she interrupts you as you read, say that y...

The hope that better externalities could make people lastingly happier was discouraged by a study of lottery winners, who were happier for a few months after their windfall but soon fell back to their habitual level of grouchiness or cheerfulness. We adapt rapidly to windfall, job promotion, or marriage, so theorists argue, and we soon want to trade up to yet more goodies to raise our plummeting happiness. If we trade up successfully, we stay on the hedonic treadmill, but we will always need yet another shot.

What-Went-Well Exercise (Also Called “Three Blessings”) We think too much about what goes wrong and not enough about what goes right in our lives. Of course, sometimes it makes sense to analyze bad events so that we can learn from them and avoid them in the future. However, people tend to spend more time thinking about what is bad in life than is helpful. Worse, this focus on negative events sets us up for anxiety and depression. One way to keep this from happening is to get better at thinking about and savoring what went well. For sound evolutionary reasons, most of us are not nearly as good at dwelling on good events as we are at analyzing bad events. Those of our ancestors who spent a lot of time basking in the sunshine of good events, when they should have been preparing for disaster, did not survive the Ice Age. So to overcome our brains’ natural catastrophic bent, we need to work on and practice this skill of thinking about what went well. 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 well. You may use a journal or your computer to write about the events, but it is important that you have a physical record of what you wrote. The three things need not be earthshaking in importance (“My husband picked up my favorite ice cream for dessert on the way home from work today”), but they can be important (“My sister just gave birth to a healthy baby boy”). Next to each positive event...

Two of the exercises—what-went-well and the signature strengths exercise below—markedly lowered depression three months and six months later. These two exercises also substantially increased happiness through six months. The gratitude visit produced large decreases in depression and large increases in happiness one month later, but the effect faded three months later. Not surprisingly, we found that the degree to which participants actively continue their assigned exercise beyond the prescribed one-week period predicted how long the changes in happiness last.

A signature strength has the following hallmarks: • A sense of ownership and authenticity (“This is the real me”) • A feeling of excitement while displaying it, particularly at first • A rapid learning curve as the strength is first practiced • A sense of yearning to find new ways to use it • A feeling of inevitability in using the strength (“Try to stop me”) • Invigoration rather than exhaustion while using the strength • The creation and pursuit of personal projects that revolve around it • Joy, zest, enthusiasm, even ecstasy while using it

After you have completed the test, perform the following exercise: this week I want you to create a designated time in your schedule when you will exercise one or more of your signature strengths in a new way either at work or at home or in leisure—just make sure that you create a clearly defined opportunity to use it. For example: • If your signature strength is creativity, you may choose to set aside two hours one evening to begin working on a screenplay. • If you identify hope/optimism as a strength, you might write a column for the local newspaper in which you express hope about the future of the space program. • If you claim self-control as a strength, you might choose to work out at the gym rather than watch TV one evening. • If your strength is an appreciation of beauty and excellence, you might take a longer, more beautiful route to and from work, even though it adds twenty minutes more to your commute. The best thing to do is to create the new way of using your strength yourself. Write about your experience. How did you feel before, during, and after engaging in the activity? Was the activity challenging? Easy? Did time pass quickly? Did you lose your sense of self-consciousness? Do you plan to repeat the exercise?

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. Homework: The client reviews ways to increase satisficing and devises a personal satisficing plan.

Shelly Gable, professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has demonstrated that how you celebrate is more predictive of strong relations than how you fight. People we care about often tell us about a victory, a triumph, and less momentous good things that happen to them. How we respond can either build the relationship or undermine it. There are four basic ways of responding, only one of which builds relationships:

Negative emotions and the negative personality traits have very strong biological limits, and the best a clinician can ever do with the cosmetic approach is to get patients to live in the best part of their set range of depression or anxiety or anger. Think about Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, two severe depressives. They were both enormously well-functioning human beings who dealt with their “black dog” and their suicidal thoughts. (Lincoln came close to killing himself in January 1841.) Both learned to function extremely well even when they were massively depressed. 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.”

Just as important as Wittgenstein’s ideas was the fact that he was a spellbinding teacher. Crowds of the brightest Cambridge students turned up to watch him pace his bare room, mouthing his epigrams, striving for moral purity, overpowering his students’ queries, and all the while demeaning himself for being so inarticulate. The combination of his brilliance, his striking good looks, his magnetic and unusual sexuality, and his exotic otherworldliness (he renounced a huge family fortune) was seductive, and his students fell in love with the man and with his thought. (It is commonplace for students to learn best when they fall in love with their teacher.)

“There is a sharp dividing line,” Barb continued. “Companies with better than a 2.9:1 ratio for positive to negative statements are flourishing. Below that ratio, companies are not doing well economically. We call this the ‘Losada ratio,’ named after my Brazilian colleague Marcel Losada, who discovered this fact. “But don’t go overboard with positivity. Life is a ship with sails and rudder. Above 13:1, without a negative rudder, the positive sails flap aimlessly, and you lose your credibility.”

On average, we are at our most alert in late morning and midevening. We are at the bottom of our cycle—tired, grumpy, inattentive, and pessimistic—at midafternoon and in the wee hours of the morning.

At least half of positive psychology occurs below the neck, however, and it is important that several of the MAPPsters every year are neck-down people: yoga instructors, dance therapists, sports coaches, marathoners, and triathletes. At three o’clock each day, a neck-down cadre leads us in dance, vigorous exercise, meditation, or a brisk walk. At first the high-forehead people ducked out, blushing, but as we witnessed the annihilation of fatigue and the instant return of intellectual energy, we all became avid participants.

Each month, I hold an optional movie night with popcorn, wine, pizza, and pillows on the floor. I show movies that convey positive psychology better than lectures full of words, but devoid of musical sounds and cinematic sights, can. I have always opened with Groundhog Day, and even after having seen it for the fifth time, I am still stunned by how much it presses us, yearning, toward positive personal transformation. I have shown The Devil Wears Prada, a movie about integrity—that of Meryl Streep, the boss from hell, and not of Anne Hathaway, the “fat” one; The Shawshank Redemption, and it is not Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) the falsely accused banker, who is redeemed, but the narrator, Red (Morgan Freeman); Chariots of Fire, with the embodiment of three motives to win: Eric Liddell running for God; Lord Andrew Linley, for beauty; and Harold Abrahams, for self and tribe; and Sunday in the Park with George, which even on its twenty-fifth viewing still moves me to tears during the transcendent last scene of the first act in which art, children, Paris, and what abides and what is ephemeral in life are suffused. Last year I ended the series with Field of Dreams, a work of genius, even better than W. P. Kinsella’s haunting novel Shoeless Joe, on which it is based.

“What is the Geelong Grammar School?” I inquired. “First, it’s pronounced Geee-long, not G’long, Marty. It’s one of the oldest boarding schools in Australia, founded more than one hundred fifty years ago. It has four campuses, including Timbertop—up in the mountains where all the year-nine students go for the entire year. If they want a hot shower at Timbertop, they cut their own firewood.

Like all Geelong Grammar six-year-olds, Kevin starts his day in a semicircle with his uniformed first-grade classmates. Facing his teacher, Kevin shoots his hand up when the class is asked, “Children, what went well last night?” Eager to answer, several first graders share brief anecdotes such as “We had my favorite last night: spaghetti” and “I played checkers with my older brother, and I won.” Kevin says, “My sister and I cleaned the patio after dinner, and Mum hugged us after we finished.” The teacher follows up with Kevin. “Why is it important to share what went well?” He doesn’t hesitate: “It makes me feel good.” “Anything more, Kevin?” “Oh, yes, my mum asks me what went well when I get home every day, and it makes her happy when I tell her. And when Mum’s happy, everybody’s happy.”

It turns out that speed and IQ have a surprisingly strong relationship. In the experimental procedure called “choice-reaction time,” subjects are seated in front of a panel with a light and two buttons. They are told to press the left button when the light is green and to press the right button when the light is red, and to do this as fast as they can. IQ correlates almost as high as +.50 with how fast people can do this.

How does IQ compare with self-discipline in predicting grades? IQ and self-discipline do not correlate with each other significantly; in other words, there are just about as many low-IQ kids who are highly self-disciplined as there are high-IQ kids who are highly self-disciplined, and conversely. Self-discipline outpredicts IQ for academic success by a factor of about 2.

Pete called on Rhonda for her philosophy of life: “Prioritize. “A. “B. “C. “Discard C.”

Negative emotions warn us about a specific threat: when we feel fear, it is almost always preceded by a thought of danger. When we feel sad, there is almost always a thought of loss. When we feel angry, there is almost always a thought of trespass. This leaves us room to pause and identify what is going on when our negative emotional reaction is out of proportion to the reality of the danger, loss, or trespass out there. Then we can modulate our emotional reaction into proportion. This is the essence of cognitive therapy, but in a preventive mode.

Building a robust Losada ratio (more positive thoughts than negative) by having positive emotions more frequently builds psychological and social capital.

The key to taking advantage of positive emotions is to regard them as “resource builders” Please think of a really clear example of a time when you felt one of the positive emotions—pride, gratitude, pleasure, satisfaction, interest, hope—whether it happened today or last week. After you recall some of the details of that event, give it a name (for example, “thinking about the future”), and specify which emotion it was. Now that you have an example to keep in mind, let’s go back to what we know about emotions: the feeling (the emotion) works for us in two ways, by (1) drawing attention and (2) coordinating a response. Positive emotions shine a light on things that are going particularly well for us or that have the potential to do so—that is, situations that are congruent with our goals. These can be thought of as opportunities for resources to be built; for example, if you are interested or inspired, or if you feel that someone has been particularly kind.

Let’s take some examples. • If you feel admiration toward someone, it means you think they did something to display great skill or talent. As a paragon of success (at least in that domain), if you pay attention this individual, you may pick up on how he or she performs that skill. It would certainly save you a lot of trial-and-error time to do so. Your admiration alerts you to the chance to rapidly learn a culturally valued skill. • If you feel great joy, it means that you have gotten (or are getting) what you desire. Perhaps you received a promotion, had your first child, or are simply enjoying the company of good friends at dinner. Joy represents a satisfied state, which provides the opportunity for growth. In that moment, you are not worried about other things, you are feeling safe and open. Your joy alerts you to opportunities for new experiences. • If you feel pride, it means that you believe you have personally demonstrated some culturally valued skill or talent. Pride gets a bad reputation because, like too much of anything, people can get carried away with their pride, and it becomes self-aggrandizing hubris. However, in appropriate doses, pride alerts you to your own skills and talents, allows you to take credit for them, and sets you up for future successes. • Finally, if you feel gratitude, it means you think that someone has just demonstrated that he or she cares about you as a person and will be there for you in the future. Gratitude marks opportunities to sol...

The module begins with the ancient wisdom that personal transformation is characterized by renewed appreciation of being alive, enhanced personal strength, acting on new possibilities, improved relationships, and spiritual deepening, all of which often follow tragedy. Data support this: in just one example, 61.1 percent of imprisoned airmen tortured for years by the North Vietnamese said that they had benefited psychologically from their ordeal. What’s more, the more severe their treatment, the greater the post-traumatic growth. This is not remotely to suggest that we celebrate trauma itself; rather we should make the most of the fact that trauma often sets the stage for growth, and we must teach our soldiers about the conditions under which such growth is most likely to happen.

There are three strategies for challenging the catastrophic beliefs in real time: gathering evidence, using optimism, and putting it in perspective.

So we teach the four styles of responding: active constructive (authentic, enthusiastic support), passive constructive (understated support), passive destructive (ignoring the event), and active destructive (pointing out negative aspects of the event).

We teach the sergeants to praise the specific skills as opposed to a vague “Way to go!” or “Good job!” Praising the details demonstrates to their soldier (a) that the leader was really watching, (b) that the leader took the time to see exactly what the soldier did, and (c) that the praise is authentic, as opposed to a perfunctory “Good job.”

Finally, we teach assertive communication, describing the differences among passive, aggressive, and assertive styles. What is the language, voice tone, body language, and pace of each style? What messages does each style convey? For example, the passive style sends the message “I don’t believe you’ll listen to me anyway.” We found in our positive education work that a critical aspect is to explore the icebergs that lead to one style of communicating over another. Someone who has the belief “People will take advantage of any sign of weakness” tends toward an aggressive style. A person who believes “It’s wrong to complain” will have a passive style, and the belief “People can be trusted” brings about an assertive style. So we teach a 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.