Mindfulness: A practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world

by J. Mark G. Williams

For many years it was assumed that we all have an emotional thermostat which determines how happy we are in life. Some people were presumed to have a happy disposition, while others had a miserable one. Although major life events, such as the death of a loved one or winning the lottery, can significantly alter mood, sometimes for many weeks or months on end, it was always assumed that there was a set-point to which we always return. This emotional set-point was presumed to be encoded in our genes or became set in stone during childhood. To put it bluntly, some people were born happy and others were not. Several years ago, however, this assumption was shattered by Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin and Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. They discovered that mindfulness training allowed people to escape the gravitational pull of their emotional set-point. Their work held out the extraordinary possibility that we can permanently alter our underlying level of happiness for the better.