Richard Davidson has come to view “happiness not as a trait but as a skill, like tennis.… If you want to be a good tennis player, you can’t just pick up a racket—you have to practice,” he said. “We can actually practice to enhance our well-being. Every strand of scientific evidence points in that direction. It’s no different than learning to play the violin or play golf. When you practice, you get better at it.” And trust me, it’s much easier than mastering the violin or becoming a golf pro. Davidson found “remarkable results with practitioners who did fifty thousand rounds of meditation, but
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