Getting happier

LifeTwo, a new site about midlife improvement, is getting happy this week with a series of articles and exercises over seven days on how to become happier.    So even if you think you are already happy, if you do the exercises over seven days, you can get even happier quickly.

Wesley Hein is basing his articles and exercises on a new book 

"Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment" (Tal Ben-Shahar)

by a Harvard professor named Tai Ben Sharar who has the most popular class at Harvard.  I wrote about the professor last year in Harvard Teaches Happiness and again in a Happiness Roundup.

What we are seeing is the outgrowth of the positive psychology movement begun by Martin Seligman that I wrote about in The Science of Happiness.

Seligman has found three components of happiness.
1. pleasure- we all know about what feels good.
2. engagement.  - the depth of involvement with one's family, work, romance and hobbies .
3. meaning - using personal strengths to serve some larger end.

Of those three roads to a happy, satisfied life, pleasure is the least consequential, he insists: "This is newsworthy because so many Americans build their lives around pursuing pleasure. It turns out that engagement and meaning are much more important."

I understand the premise of Ben-Shahar's book is you can teach yourself mental habits that will make you happier.  While some  people are genetically disposed to be generally happier than others, everyone can learn to be happier if they adopt simple  habits like being grateful for three things during the day.

Your grandmother  called it "counting your blessings'.   

What's still remarkable to me  new is that so many people never heard or never paid attention to what their parents and grandmothers said. After all, Happiness, It's Not Rocket Science.

So head on over and get happier.  It's not selfish at all.    I think we have a moral obligation to be happy.  If you want to have a happier world, you have to work on yourself first.    After all, as Mahatma Gandhi said, "We have to be what we want to see"

In fact one of the great pleasures of maturity is a growing happiness, a fact that is inexplicable to the young.