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October 13 - November 17, 2016
Relieving the states that make life miserable, it seems, has made building the states that make life worth living less of a priority.
you probably ponder, as I have, how to go from plus two to plus seven in your life, not just how to go from minus five to minus three and feel a little less miserable day by day.
there is not a shred of evidence that strength and virtue are derived from negative motivation.
Authentic happiness comes from identifying and cultivating your most fundamental strengths and using them every day in work, love, play, and parenting.
The best therapists do not merely heal damage; they help people identify and build their strengths and their virtues.
In your own life, you should take particular care with endings, for their color will forever tinge your memory of the entire relationship and your willingness to reenter it.
Positive emotion alienated from the exercise of character leads to emptiness, to inauthenticity, to depression, and, as we age, to the gnawing realization that we are fidgeting until we die.
The positive feeling that arises from the exercise of strengths and virtues, rather than from the shortcuts, is authentic.
The exercise of kindness is a gratification, in contrast to a pleasure. As a gratification, it calls on your strengths to rise to an occasion and meet a challenge.
When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity.
Choosing which traits to investigate is a serious question for a distinguished group of psychologists and psychiatrists who are creating a system that is intended to be the opposite of the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association, which serves as a classification scheme of mental illness).
Three criteria for strengths are as follows: They are valued in almost every culture They are valued in their own right, not just as a means to other ends They are malleable
These strengths and virtues serve us in times of ill fortune as well as better moments.
I do not believe that you should devote overly much effort to correcting your weaknesses. Rather, I believe that the highest success in living and the deepest emotional satisfaction comes from building and using your signature strengths.
Just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life.
happiness is not a competition. Authentic happiness derives from raising the bar for yourself, not rating yourself against others.
Pessimists, I had found over the last two decades, are up to eight times more likely to become depressed when bad events happen; they do worse at school; sports, and most jobs than their talents augur; they have worse physical health and shorter lives; they have rockier interpersonal relations, and they lose American Presidential elections to their more optimistic opponents.
I found that teaching ten-year-old children the skills of optimistic thinking and action cuts their rate of depression in half when they go through puberty
What progress there is been in the prevention of mental illness comes from recognizing and nurturing a set of strengths, competencies, and virtues in young people—such as future-mindedness, hope, interpersonal skills, courage, the capacity for flow, faith, and work ethic.
An inner-city young man, at risk for substance abuse because of all the drug traffic in his neighborhood, is much less vulnerable if he is future-minded, gets flow out of sports, and has a powerful work ethic.
Such a strength, fully grown, would be a buffer against her weaknesses and against the storms of life that would inevitably come her way.
Raising children, I knew now, was far more than just fixing what was wrong with them. It was about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues, and helping them find the niche where they can live these positive traits to the fullest.
Learned helplessness convinced me that the behaviorist program was dead wrong.
Two groups of four-year-olds were asked to spend thirty seconds remembering “something that happened that made you feel so happy you just wanted to jump up and down,” or “so happy that you just wanted to sit and smile.” (The two conditions controlled for high-energy versus low-energy happiness.) Then all the children were given a learning task about different shapes, and both did better than four-year-olds who got neutral instructions.
Securely attached children grow up to outperform their peers in almost every way that has been tested, including persistence, problem solving, independence, exploration, and enthusiasm.
When we are happy, we are less self-focused, we like others more, and we want to share our good fortune even with strangers. When we are down, though, we become distrustful, turn inward, and focus defensively on our own needs. Looking out for number one is more characteristic of sadness than of well-being.
H = S + C + V where H is your enduring level of happiness, S is your set range, C is the circumstances of your life, and V represents factors under your voluntary control.
roughly 50 percent of almost every personality trait turns out to be attributable to genetic inheritance.
psychologists to wonder if each of us has our own personal set range for happiness, a fixed and largely inherited level to which we invariably revert.
A systematic study of 22 people who won major lotteries found that they reverted to their baseline level of happiness over time, winding up no happier than 22 matched controls.
“hedonic treadmill,” which causes you to rapidly and inevitably adapt to good things by taking them for granted.
Wealth, which surely brings more possessions in its wake, has a surprisingly low correlation with happiness level. Rich people are, on average, only slightly happier than poor people.
Together, the S variables (your genetic steersman, the hedonic treadmill, and your set range) tend to keep your level of happiness from increasing. But there are two other powerful forces, C and V, that do raise the level of happiness.
The overall lesson is that most Americans, regardless of objective circumstances, say they are happy, and at the same time they markedly underestimate the happiness of other Americans.
In wealthier nations, however, where almost everyone has a basic safety net, increases in wealth have negligible effects on personal happiness.
if you want to lastingly raise your level of happiness by changing the external circumstances of your life, you should do the following: Live in a wealthy democracy, not in an impoverished dictatorship (a strong effect) Get married (a robust effect, but perhaps not causal) Avoid negative events and negative emotion (only a moderate effect) Acquire a rich social network (a robust effect, but perhaps not causal) Get religion (a moderate effect) As far as happiness and life satisfaction are concerned, however, you needn’t bother to do the following: 6. Make more money (money has little or no
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The thoughts of depressed individuals are dominated by negative interpretations of the past, of the future, and of their abilities, and learning to argue against these pessimistic interpretations relieves depression to just about the same extent as antidepressant drugs (with less relapse and recurrence).
These two opposite views have never been reconciled. The imperialistic Freudian view claims that emotion always drives thought, while the imperialistic cognitive view claims that thought always drives emotion. The evidence, however, is that each drives the other at times.
So the question for twenty-first century psychology is this: under what conditions does emotion drive thinking, and under what conditions does thinking drive emotion?
an interpretation, a memory, or a thought intervenes and governs what emotion ensues. This innocent-looking and obvious truth is the key to understanding how you feel about the past. More importantly, it is the key to escaping the dogmas that have made so many people prisoners of their past.
I think that the events of childhood are overrated; in fact, I think past history in general is overrated.
The major traumas of childhood may have some influence on adult personality, but only a barely detectable one.
studies find large effects of genes on adult personality, and only negligible effects of any childhood events.
Identical twins reared apart are much more similar as adults than fraternal twins reared together with regard to authoritarianism, religiosity, job satisfaction, conservatism, anger, depression, intelligence, alcoholism, well-being, and neuroticism, to name only a few traits.
adopted children are much more similar as adults to their biological parents than they are...
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the promissory note that Freud and his followers wrote about childhood events determining the course of adult lives is worthless.
The reason gratitude works to increase life satisfaction is that it amplifies good memories about the past: their intensity, their frequency, and the tag lines the memories have.
The human brain has evolved to ensure that our firefighting negative emotions will trump the broadening, building, and abiding—but more fragile—positive emotions.
If you think about bad things in terms of “always” and “never” and abiding traits, you have a permanent, pessimistic style.
Inject into your life as many events that produce pleasure as you can, but spread them out,
