More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
February 8, 2024
my work as a social scientist isn’t research—it’s me-search.
Our mission in this book is to tie together the two strands of our work, to open up the amazing science of happiness to people in all walks of life, who can use it to live better and lift up others.
we seek to help you see that you are not helpless against the tides of life, but that with a greater understanding of how your mind and brain work, you can build the life you want, starting inside with your emotions, and then turning outward to your family, friendships, work, and spiritual life.
One day, when Albina was forty-five, something changed for her. For reasons that were not clear to her friends and family, her outlook on life seemed to shift. It’s not that she was suddenly less lonely, or that she mysteriously came into money, but for some reason, she stopped waiting for the world to change and took control of her life.
her perspective on life wasn’t innate; it was learned and cultivated. She wasn’t just “naturally happy.”
Just maybe, she thought, even if she couldn’t change her circumstances, she could change her own reaction to those circumstances. She couldn’t decide how the world would treat her, but maybe she had some say in how she would feel about it.
She switched from wishing others were different to working on the one person she could control: herself. She felt negative emotions just like anyone else, but she set about making more conscious choices about how to react to them. The decisions she made—not her primal feelings—led her to try to transform less productive emotions into positive ones such as gratitude, hope, compassion, and humor.
One Happiness Is Not the Goal, and Unhappiness Is Not the Enemy
You can’t be happy—though you can be happier. And your circumstances and your source of unhappiness don’t have to stop you.
happiness is not a destination. Happiness is a direction. We won’t find complete happiness on this side of heaven, but no matter where each of us is in life, we can all be happier.
The fact that complete happiness in this life is impossible might seem like disappointing news, but it isn’t. It’s the best news ever, actually. It means we all can finally stop looking for the lost city that doesn’t exist, once and for all.
The macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.
Enjoyment takes an urge for pleasure and adds two important things: communion and consciousness.
Pleasure is easier than enjoyment, but it is a mistake to settle for it, because it is fleeting and solitary. All addictions involve pleasure, not enjoyment.
The second macronutrient of happiness is satisfaction.
Satisfaction is wonderful, but it doesn’t come without work and sacrifice. If you don’t suffer for something—at least a little—it doesn’t satisfy at all.
The third macronutrient is the most important: purpose. We can make do without enjoyment for a while, and even without a lot of satisfaction. Without purpose, however, we are utterly lost, because we can’t deal with life’s inevitable puzzles and dilemmas. When we do have a sense of meaning and purpose, we can face life with hope and inner peace.
The common strategy of trying to eliminate suffering from life to get happier is futile and mistaken; we must instead look for the why of life to make pain an opportunity for growth.
one funny thing about all three: they all have some unhappiness within them. Enjoyment takes work and forgoing pleasures; satisfaction requires sacrifice and doesn’t last; purpose almost always entails suffering. Getting happier, in other words, requires that we accept unhappiness in our lives as well, and understanding it isn’t an obstacle to our happiness.
We all have our own natural mix of happiness and unhappiness, depending on our circumstances and character, and our job is to use the mix we’re given to best effect.
negative feelings can be a helpful response to problems
when we are sad or angry about something, we may be more likely to fix it. And that, of course, leads us to be happier in the long run.
Understanding happiness and unhappiness is necessary, which is why we started with this topic. But it is only the first step in building a better life. The second step is managing our positive and negative emotions, so we get stronger and smarter and spend less time distracting ourselves from the parts of life we don’t enjoy.
two lessons we’ve already learned: First, that it’s about happier—a relative, contextualized, fluid condition, not some perfect fixed ideal of nirvana. And second, that happier is not a state of being, but a state of doing—not a thing you wait around and hope for, but an achievable change you actively work toward.
You feel the feel, then take the wheel. You get to decide how you’ll respond.
I humbly offer you two Oprah-isms to keep in mind: feel the feel, then take the wheel. And happierness.
Two The Power of Metacognition
In Frankl’s words, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Next time you are regretting negative feelings and wishing you didn’t have them, think about this. They aren’t fun, but that’s the point. Getting your attention and making you act is how they protect you.
Three Choose a Better Emotion
Here’s an exercise for increasing gratitude in your life. 1. On Sunday night, take thirty minutes and write down the five things in your life for which you are authentically grateful.
Make sure one or two, though, involve people you love. 2. Each evening during the week, take out your list and study it for five minutes, one minute for each item. Do it also in the morning if you have time. 3. Update your list each Sunday by adding one or two items.
At the end of five weeks, write down the changes you have seen in your attitude and levels of negative affect.
optimism is the belief that things will turn out all right; hope makes no such assumption but is a conviction that one can act to make things better in some way. Hope and optimism can go together, but they don’t have to.
One comprehensive study of compassion defines it as recognizing suffering, understanding it, and feeling empathy for the sufferer—but also tolerating the uncomfortable feelings they and the suffering person are experiencing and, crucially, acting to alleviate the suffering.[39]
Compared with empathy training, compassion training blocked their negative feelings and thus raised their overall mood after they witnessed the pain of others. Compassion also benefits the sufferer; for example, doctors who are more comfortable around patients in pain may be more successful administering painful treatment, such as acupuncture.
Four Focus Less on Yourself
adopting more of an outward focus on life—observing the world and caring for other people without making so much of life about yourself—is one of the best ways to increase your own well-being, and is the third principle of emotional self-management.
When you are the observer, it’s called being the “I-self” (the seer of things around you). When you are observed, or looking and thinking about yourself, that’s called the “me-self” (the one seen).
The trick for well-being is balancing your I-self and your me-self. And that means increasing the former and decreasing the latter, because most people spend too much time being observed and not enough time observing.
For happiness, then, thinking of others’ opinions of us is even worse than obsessing over ourselves directly.
goal here is to focus on others but not on their opinion of you.
Fortunately, if we look at all the best social science research together, just four big happiness pillars stand out far above all others.
The four pillars are family, friendship, work, and faith.
As you read, you’ll begin to appreciate what I think of as the inner-outer paradox—the fact that, as we saw earlier in the book, the surest way to improve your inner world is to focus on the outer world, because happiness inside comes from looking outside.
My point is that our lives are spent in connection—to other people, to our work, to nature and the divine—and the more we do to improve those connections, the better off we are.
In truth, truly “happy” families exist only in the minds of the writers of wholesome family television shows. They don’t exist in the wild. In real life, families are made up of people mashed together.
Even in the best of situations, tension between family members is normal, and crises are par for the course. In one pair of researchers’ words, family bonds are frayed by “the give-and-take between autonomy and dependence and the tension between concern and disappointment.”[3] That’s academic-ese for “Family life can be a huge mess.”
Researchers writing in 2015 found that about 11 percent of mothers ages sixty-five to seventy-five with at least two grown children were totally estranged from at least one of them.[7] They found that a values breach was at the root of many of these estrangements, while a violation of behavioral norms (for instance, not practicing their faith) usually was not. (Take a moment and think about what this says: your family generally cares less about how you live and more about what you say about what they believe.)
Psychologists see extroversion/introversion as one of the Big Five personality dimensions, along with agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.
