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October 13 - November 17, 2016
Try to take yourself by surprise—or, even better, arrange it so that the people you live with or otherwise see frequently surprise each other with “presents” of the pleasures.
the psychological components of gratification
The task is challenging and requires skill We concentrate There are clear goals We get immediate feedback We have deep, effortless involvement There is a sense of control Our sense of self vanishes Time stops
The low-flow teenagers are “mall” kids; they hang out at malls and they watch television a lot. The high-flow kids have hobbies, they engage in sports, and they spend a lot of time on homework. On every measure of psychological well-being (including self-esteem and engagement) save one, the high-flow teenagers did better.
Mounting over the last forty years in every wealthy country on the globe, there has been a startling increase in depression. Depression is now ten times as prevalent as it was in 1960, and it strikes at a much younger age. The mean age of a person’s first episode of depression forty years ago was 29.5, while today it is 14.5 years. This is a paradox, since every objective indicator of well-being—purchasing power, amount of education, availability of music, and nutrition—has been going north, while every indicator of subjective well-being has been going south.
Here, then, is a powerful antidote to the epidemic of depression in youth: strive for more gratifications, while toning down the pursuit of pleasure. The pleasures come easily, and the gratifications (which result from the exercise of personal strengths) are hard-won. A determination to identify and develop these strengths is therefore the great buffer against depression.
Pleasure is a powerful source of motivation, but it does not produce change; it is a conservative force that makes us want to satisfy existing needs, achieve comfort and relaxation….
Aristotle posed two thousand five hundred years ago: “What is the good life?”
My answer is tied up in the identification and the use of your signature strengths.
a bad enough environment will always trump good character.
social science lets us escape from the value-laden, blame-accruing, religiously inspired, class-oppressing notion of character, and get on with the monumental task of building a healthier “nurturing” environment.
Strengths, such as integrity, valor, originality, and kindness, are not the same thing as talents,
strengths are moral traits, while talents are nonmoral.
Psychology as usual is about repairing damage and about moving from minus six up to minus two.
Interventions that effectively make troubled people less so are usually heavy-handed, and the balance between the exercise of will and the push of external forces tilts toward the external.
First, a strength is a trait, a psychological characteristic that can be seen across different situations and over time.
Second, a strength is valued in its own right.
Although strengths and virtues do produce such desirable outcomes, we value a strength for its own sake, even in the absence of obvious beneficial outcomes.
Aristotle argued that actions undertaken for external reasons are not virtuous, precisely because they are coaxed or coerced.
Strengths also can be seen in what parents wish for their newborn (“I want my child to be loving, to be brave, to be prudent”).
The display of a strength by one person does not diminish other people in the vicinity. Indeed, onlookers are often elevated and inspired by observing virtuous action.
introduce themselves—not with the trite “I’m a junior with a double major in finance and psychology,” but by telling us a story about themselves that showed a strength.
Judgment in this sense is synonymous with critical thinking.
I believe that each person possesses several signature strengths. These are strengths of character that a person self-consciously owns, celebrates, and (if he or she can arrange life successfully) exercises every day in work, love, play, and parenting.
Herein is my formulation of the good life: Using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of your life to bring abundant gratification and authentic happiness.
Our economy is rapidly changing from a money economy to a satisfaction economy.
you need to use the signature strengths you found in the last chapter on the job, preferably every day.
Recrafting your job to deploy your strengths and virtues every day not only makes work more enjoyable, but transmogrifies a routine job or a stalled career into a calling.
If you can find a way to use your signature strengths at work often, and you also see your work as contributing to the greater good, you have a calling.
The best understood aspect of happiness during the workday is having flow—feeling completely at home within yourself when you work.
Flow cannot be sustained through an entire eight-hour workday; rather, under the best of circumstances, flow visits you for a few minutes on several occasions. Flow occurs when the challenges you face perfectly mesh with your abilities to meet them.
Flow occurs when the challenges—big ones as well as the daily issues that you face—mesh well with your abilities. My recipe for more flow is as follows: Identify your signature strengths. Choose work that lets you use them every day. Recraft your present work to use your signature strengths more. If you are the employer, choose employees whose signature strengths mesh with the work they will do. If you are a manager, make room to allow employees to recraft the work within the bounds of your goals.
Barry Schwartz distinguishes practices that have their own internal “goods” as a goal from free-market enterprises focused on profits. Amateur athletics, for instance, is a practice that has virtuosity as its good. Teaching is a practice that has learning as its good. Medicine is a practice that has healing as its good. Friendship is a practice that has intimacy as its good. When these practices brush up against the free market, their internal goods become subordinated to the bottom line. Night baseball sells more tickets, even though you cannot really see the ball at night. Teaching gives way
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Perhaps the single most robust fact about marriage across many surveys is that married people are happier than anyone else.
As David Myers says in his wise and scrupulously documented American Paradox, “In fact, there are few stronger predictors of happiness than a close, nurturing, equitable, intimate, lifelong companionship with one’s best friend.”
Cindy Hazan, a Cornell psychologist, tells us that there are three kinds of love. First is love of the people who give us comfort, acceptance, and help, who bolster our confidence and guide us. The prototype is children’s love of their parents. Second, we love the people who depend on us for these provisions; the prototype of this is parents’ love for their children. Finally comes romantic love—the idealization of another, idealizing their strengths and virtues and downplaying their shortcomings.
The children of couples who are married and stay married do better by every known criterion than the children of all other arrangements. For example, children who live with both biological parents repeat grades at only one-third to one-half the rate of children in other parenting arrangements. Children who live with both biological parents are treated for emotional disorders at one-fourth to one-third the rate of the other parenting arrangements. Among the most surprising outcomes (beyond better grades and lack of depression) are the findings that the children of stable marriages mature more
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Part of what makes us irreplaceable in the eyes of those who love us is the profile of our strengths and the unique ways in which we express them.
The securely attached child begins exploring and gaining mastery sooner than an insecurely attached child.
Our third parenting principle is to take the positive emotions of your child just as seriously as the negative emotions, and his or her strengths as seriously as the weaknesses.
amai, the sense of being cherished and the expectation of being loved
We want our children to feel cherished and to enter new situations with the expectation that they will be loved.
Play, by definition, is the prototype gratification. It almost always involves mastery and engenders flow, for a child of any age.
Children need to fail. They need to feel sad, anxious, and angry. When we impulsively protect our children from failure, we deprive them of learning…skills. When they encounter obstacles, if we leap in to bolster self-esteem…to soften the blows, and to distract them with congratulatory ebullience, we make it harder for them to achieve mastery. And if we deprive them of mastery, we weaken self-esteem just as certainly as if we had belittled, humiliated, and physically thwarted them at every turn. So I speculate that the self-esteem movement in particular, and the feel-good ethic in general, had
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When you reward your child with praise regardless of what she does, two dangers loom. First, she may become passive, having learned that praise will come regardless of what she does. Second, she may have trouble appreciating that she has actually succeeded later on when you praise her sincerely.
Love, affection, warmth, and ebullience should all be delivered unconditionally. The more of these, the more positive the atmosphere, and the more secure your child will be. The more secure he is, the more he will explore and find mastery. But praise is an altogether different matter.
Punishment gets in the way of positive emotion because it is painful and fear-evoking, and it gets in the way of mastery because it freezes the actions of your child.
the child often cannot tell what he is being punished for, and the fear and pain leak over to the person who does the punishing and to the entire situation. When this happens, the child becomes generally fearful and constricted, and he may avoid not merely the punished response but the punishing parent as well.
Greg Garamoni and Robert Schwartz, two University of Pittsburgh psychologists, decided to count the number of good thoughts and bad thoughts that different people have and simply look at the ratio.
depressed people had an equal ratio: one bad thought to each good thought. Nondepressed people had roughly twice as many good thoughts as bad ones.
