Deep conversations made people happier than small talk, one study found. Not stop-the-presses news, but a good reminder.
Talk Deeply, Be Happy?
Would you be happier if you spent more time discussing the state of the world and the meaning of life — and less time talking about the weather?
It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject.
-
But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people.
5 Things that will make you happier as reported in the Journal of Clinical Psychology.
1. Be grateful - Some study participants were asked to write letters of gratitude to people who had helped them in some way. The study found that these people reported a lasting increase in happiness - over weeks and even months - after implementing the habit. What's even more surprising: Sending the letter is not necessary. Even when people wrote letters but never delivered them to the addressee, they still reported feeling better afterwards.
2. Be optimistic - Another practice that seems to help is optimistic thinking. Study participants were asked to visualize an ideal future - for example, living with a loving and supportive partner, or finding a job that was fulfilling - and describe the image in a journal entry. After doing this for a few weeks, these people too reported increased feelings of well-being.
3. Count your blessings - People who practice writing down three good things that have happened to them every week
show significant boosts in happiness, studies have found. It seems the act of focusing on the positive helps people remember reasons to be glad.
4. Use your strengths - Another study asked people to identify their greatest strengths, and then to try to use these strengths in new ways. For example, someone who says they have a good sense of humor could try telling jokes to lighten up business meetings or cheer up sad friends. This habit, too, seems to heighten happiness.
5. Commit acts of kindness - It turns out helping others also helps ourselves. People who donate time or money to charity, or who altruistically assist people in need, report improvements in their own happiness.
Shumuley Boteach travels to Zimbabwe with Dennis Prager and about seven Christian volunteers.
No Holds Barred
Indeed, of the hundreds who came to our feast, only a few were young mothers and fathers; the vast majority had already been lost to AIDS. We saw scores of young children strapped to their grandmothers' backs in the African way. An entire generation has been wiped out by this killer disease, which is still met by denial in Africa. Most of the people we spoke to who lost relatives to AIDS told us that "they got sicker and thinner." They knew exactly what caused the ailment but would never pronounce it. Strict moral codes govern life in southern Africa, so a sexually-transmitted disease is rarely acknowledged.
BUT AMID these serious challenges, the people exhibit unbelievable warmth. Are they happier than we in the West? I can't say. I have never believed in the supposedly ennobling effect of poverty, and I will not glamorize a life with so little. But what is undeniable is that they seemed far more satisfied, grateful and content than us. We in the West who are fortunate to be able to translate so much of our potential into something professionally and personally fulfilling are more often than not plagued by insatiable material hunger, rarely finding the inner peace which they seemed to possess.
--
Most memorable were the children, who were wondrous in every way. Gorgeous, extremely polite and exceptionally well-behaved. They exhibited none of wildness that is becoming common among Western kids. Hundreds of them sat in perfect rows on the floor, grateful to have a hot meal. They too sang and danced for us, and we danced with them.
The most moving part of the day was when we distributed the corn seed. The chief called out the names and as the families came forward, they were glowing. Many of them kissed the bags as they collected them. A few bags broke open and their recipients searched for, and found, every last seed as if it were a diamond.
It should be mandatory to take Western kids to Africa for at least one humanitarian mission. It would help wean them from the corrosive materialism that is suffocating us all, and it would lead them to appreciate their blessings and share more with others.
One woman volunteer particularly impressed him.
...she is not a household name and she will never be as famous as Britney Spears. But to me she was a small reminder that the suffocating selfishness of Western material culture can indeed be transcended.
The Framingham Heart Study which started in 1948 to discover the underlying causes of heart disease is the longest on-going study in the country.
Two years ago, James Fowler and Nicolas Christakis, both social scientists, used the information gathered to discover the "contagious" nature of social behavior.
By analyzing the Framingham data, Christakis and Fowler say, they have for the first time found some solid basis for a potentially powerful theory in epidemiology: that good behaviors — like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy — pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses. The Framingham participants, the data suggested, influenced one another’s health just by socializing. And the same was true of bad behaviors — clusters of friends appeared to “infect” each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking. Staying healthy isn’t just a matter of your genes and your diet, it seems. Good health is also a product, in part, of your sheer proximity to other healthy people.
From the New York Times magazine Is Happiness Catching?
The subconscious nature of emotional mirroring might explain one of the more curious findings in their research: If you want to be happy, what’s most important is to have lots of friends.
--
Christakis and Fowler say their findings show that the gamble of increased sociability pays off, for a surprising reason: Happiness is more contagious than unhappiness.
He's a philosophy professor who asks whether the traditional philosophical idea of happiness as an experience of contemplation is really so ridiculous.
Simon Critchley in Happy Like God.
For the philosophers of Antiquity, notably Aristotle, it was assumed that the goal of the philosophical life — the good life, moreover — was happiness and that the latter could be defined as the bios theoretikos, the solitary life of contemplation. Today, few people would seem to subscribe to this view.
--
Happiness is not quantitative or measurable and it is not the object of any science, old or new. It cannot be gleaned from empirical surveys or programmed into individuals through a combination of behavioral therapy and anti-depressants. If it consists in anything, then I think that happiness is this feeling of existence, this sentiment of momentary self-sufficiency that is bound up with the experience of time
--
As Wittgenstein writes in what must be the most intriguing remark in the “Tractatus,” “the eternal life is given to those who live in the present.” Or ,as Whitman writes in “Leaves of Grass”: “Happiness is not in another place, but in this place…not for another hour…but this hour.”
But think about it: If anyone is happy, then one imagines that God is pretty happy, and to be happy is to be like God. But consider what this means, for it might not be as ludicrous, hubristic or heretical as one might imagine. To be like God is to be without time, or rather in time with no concern for time, free of the passions and troubles of the soul, experiencing something like calm in the face of things and of oneself.
Why Israel is the world's happiest country, David Goldman in First Things who formerly wrote as the anonymous Spengler.
If any of you are depressed, morose, despondent, pessimistic, and glum, I have a cost-effective solution. For the price of a dozen sessions with a medicore therapist, you can get on a plane and go to Israel. That will cheer you up. Trust me. Insecurity doesn’t make you unhappy. This life isn’t secure. Shut yourself up in a cave ten miles under the earth with all the distilled water and freeze-dried food you can hoard, equip it with an intensive care unit and a dozen physicians… you still are going to die. Being alive is a very insecure condition as the probability of becoming dead at some future point is — let me check the chart — 100%. Care will slip in through the keyhole, no matter how secure you try to be. But the Israelis have something better than security. They have faith. That’s true even of secular Israelis, for to be an Israeli is a statement of faith.
And that is why Israel is the happiest country in the world. Last year I made this argument in a Spengler essay:
“In a world given over to morbidity, the state of Israel still teaches the world love of life, not in the trivial sense of joie de vivre, but rather as a solemn celebration of life. In another location, I argued, “It’s easy for the Jews to talk about delighting in life. They are quite sure that they are eternal, while other peoples tremble at the prospect impending extinction. It is not their individual lives that the Jews find so pleasant, but rather the notion of a covenantal life that proceeds uninterrupted through the generations.” Still, it is remarkable to observe by what wide a margin the Israelis win the global happiness sweepstakes.
Close friendships often have a greater effect on health than a spouse or a family member. They will shape your life, sustain it and make it better.
What Are Friends For? A Longer Life
Researchers are only now starting to pay attention to the importance of friendship and social networks in overall health. A 10-year Australian study found that older people with a large circle of friends were 22 percent less likely to die during the study period than those with fewer friends. A large 2007 study showed an increase of nearly 60 percent in the risk for obesity among people whose friends gained weight. And last year, Harvard researchers reported that strong social ties could promote brain health as we age.
“In general, the role of friendship in our lives isn’t terribly well appreciated,” said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. “There is just scads of stuff on families and marriage, but very little on friendship. It baffles me. Friendship has a bigger impact on our psychological well-being than family relationships.”
The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.
- Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784) British lexiographer.
My friends are my estate.
- Emily Dickinson
This is wonderful. Happiness is contagious.
The survey is not recent (2003) but still surprising.
Nigeria has the highest percentage of happy people followed by Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador and Puerto Rico, while Russia, Armenia and Romania have the fewest.
--
"New Zealand ranked 15 for overall satisfaction, the US 16th, Australia 20th and Britain 24th - although Australia beats the other three for day-to-day happiness," New Scientist says.
The survey is a worldwide investigation of socio-cultural and political change conducted about every four years by an international network of social scientists.
--
The survey appears to confirm the old adage that money cannot buy happiness.
--
The researchers for World Values Survey described the desire for material goods as "a happiness suppressant".
The backlash against feminism continues as more women come to grips with their decisions to forego children for a career.
Madonna syndrome: I should have ditched feminism for love, children and baking.
A playwright who embraced the feminism espoused by her mother and flaunted by Madonna now feels betrayed.
My mother was a hippy who kept a pile of (dusty) books by Germaine Greer and Erica Jong by her bed (like every good feminist, she didn't see why she should do all the cleaning). She imbued me with the great values of choice, equality and sexual liberation. I fought with my older brother and won; at university I beat the rugby lads at drinking games. I was not to be messed with.
Now, nearly 37, those same values leave me feeling cold. I want love and children but they are nowhere to be seen.
--
I wish a more balanced view of womanhood had been available to me. I wish that being a housewife or a mother wasn't such a toxic idea to middle-class liberals of yesteryear.
Increasing numbers of my feminist friends are giving up their careers for love and children and baking. I wish I'd had kids ten years ago, when time was on my side, but the problem is not so much time as mentality. I made a conscious decision not to have serious relationships because I thought I had all the time in the world. Many of my friends did the same. It's about understanding what is important in life, and from what I see and feel, loving relationships and children bring more happiness than work ever can.
Children happy with spirituality
The spiritual lives of children has come under close scrutiny by two different sets of researchers who reached the same conclusion. Spirituality is a good thing for youngsters, a positive influence.
It makes them happier - and healthier.
"Children who were more spiritual were happier," said a University of British Columbia study released Friday, which methodically quantified the typical ups and downs in a young life.
The study, which questioned 320 children from four public schools and two religious schools about their spiritual practices, revealed that happiness was boosted by 26 percent among those children in touch with an "inner belief system."
To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.
Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal on What the New Atheists Don't See
A few years back, the National Gallery held an exhibition of Spanish still-life paintings. One of these paintings had a physical effect on the people who sauntered in, stopping them in their tracks; some even gasped. I have never seen an image have such an impact on people. The painting, by Juan Sánchez Cotán, now hangs in the San Diego Museum of Art. It showed four fruits and vegetables, two suspended by string, forming a parabola in a gray stone window.
Even if you did not know that Sánchez Cotán was a seventeenth-century Spanish priest, you could know that the painter was religious: for this picture is a visual testimony of gratitude for the beauty of those things that sustain us. Once you have seen it, and concentrated your attention on it, you will never take the existence of the humble cabbage—or of anything else—quite so much for granted, but will see its beauty and be thankful for it. The painting is a permanent call to contemplation of the meaning of human life, and as such it arrested people who ordinarily were not, I suspect, much given to quiet contemplation.
Happiness Can Spread Among People Like a Contagion reports the Washington Post
Happiness is contagious, spreading among friends, neighbors, siblings and spouses like the flu, according to a large study that for the first time shows how emotion can ripple through clusters of people who may not even know each other.
--
"You would think that your emotional state would depend on your own choices and actions and experience," said Nicholas A. Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard University who helped conduct the study published online today by BMJ, a British medical journal. "But it also depends on the choices and actions and experiences of other people, including people to whom you are not directly connected. Happiness is contagious."
One person's happiness can affect another's for as much as a year, the researchers found, and while unhappiness can also spread from person to person, the "infectiousness" of that emotion appears to be far weaker.
--
Other experts praised the study as a landmark in the growing body of evidence documenting the influence of personal connections and the importance of positive emotions.
"It's a pathfinding article," said Martin E.P. Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist. "It's totally original, and the findings are striking."
Stanley Wasserman, who studies social networks at Indiana University, said: "We've known that one's network ties are important, but we've never looked at anything on this scale. The implications are you can't look at individuals as little entities devoid of their social context."
The New York Times adds the following quotation of Christakis
. “There’s kind of an emotional quiet riot that occurs and takes on a life of its own, that people themselves may be unaware of. Emotions have a collective existence — they are not just an individual phenomenon.”
--
The subtle transmission of emotion may explain other findings, too. In the obesity and smoking cessation studies, friends were influential even if they lived far away. But the effect on happiness was much greater from friends, siblings or neighbors who lived nearby.
--
Another surprising finding was that a joyful coworker did not lift the spirits of colleagues, unless they were friends. Professor Fowler believes inherent competition at work might cancel out a happy colleague’s positive vibes.
A Mongolian photographer From the Cream of the Crop at Flickr
The modern world, according to Christopher Lasch, is most of all in futile rebellion against “the ancient religious insight that the only way to achieve happiness is to accept limitations in the spirit of gratitude and contrition.” It is, Lasch goes on, in rebellion against “the central paradox of religious faith: the secret of happiness lies in renouncing the right to be happy.”
--
For most human beings — most social animals — happiness is something like the opposite of loneliness. There are some people who want to be left alone. But for the most part, studies show that married people are happier than single people, people from large families are happier than people from small families, and people with lots of close friends are happier than people with just a few. Happiness also correlates strongly with faithful involvement in religious communities, active participation in political life, and worthwhile work with others. Happiness usually depends on really developing the attachments — a non-Darwinian would say the personal love — that come from doing what social animals do. No study confirms the individualistic thoughts that love is for suckers or hell is other people.
--
According to Alexis de Tocqueville (writing in the 1830s), the Americans have characteristically never made the error of believing either Locke or Darwin teaches the whole truth. The Americans’ religion, most of all, causes them not to understand themselves as merely self-interested individuals or playthings of some impersonal process. The Americans, semi-consciously, reconcile individual liberty and personal happiness by understanding themselves in different ways at different times. They understand themselves as free individuals insofar as they restlessly work in pursuit of the material conditions of happiness, but they find happiness by using what they’ve acquired as parents, children, friends, citizens, creatures, and as men and women (as opposed to abstracted or sexless individuals). It’s as religious, familial, and political beings, Tocqueville explains, that the Americans are happy.
Being at Home with Our Homelessness by Peter Augustine Lawler
How easy it is to forget that we live in a world of wonders.
By focusing only on symptoms and not on causes, has psychiatry incorrectly diagnosed too many cases of ordinary sadness - what Thomas `å Kempis called "the proper sorrows of the soul" - as depression?
Ronald Pies, a professor of psychiatry at Tufts, outlines some of the conceptual and scientific problems in Redefining Depression as Mere Sadness.
Arthur Brooks seems to be all over the place these days decoding what social science research has found out about happiness.
In the City Journal, he writes that Free People Are Happy People.
Freedom and happiness are highly correlated, then; even more significant, several studies have shown that freedom causes happiness.
--
Pundits and politicians on the left often tell us that a free economy makes for an unhappy population:... But for most people, it turns out, that isn’t true.
To begin with, those who favor less government intervention in our economic affairs are happier than those who favor more.
Religious freedom—known to the Founding Fathers as the “first liberty”—probably brings happiness, too.
--
Many of the happiest people in America achieve their happiness through faith. When asked in the 2000 GSS about the experiences that made them feel the most free, about 11 percent of adults put religious and spiritual experiences at the top of the list.
Brooks reports that religious people who practice their faith are twice as likely to say they are happy than secular people. The psychological well-being that religion can promote is also linked to better physical health.
Brooks, the author of the new published Gross National Happiness writes
According to hundreds of reliable surveys of thousands of people across the land, happy people increase our prosperity and strengthen our communities. They make better citizens--and better citizens are vital to making our nation healthy and strong. Happiness, in other words, is important for America. So when I chanced upon data a couple of years ago saying that certain Americans were living in a manner that facilitated happiness--while others were not--I jumped on it.
--
I had always thought that marching to the beat of my own drummer and making up my own values as I went along were the right things to do, and that traditional values, to put it bluntly, were for suckers.
Turns out that I was in for some surprises.
In Why We're Happy, he lays out the top five happiness predictors
1. Faith
2. Work
3. Marriage and Family
4. Charity
5. Freedom
The wonder is how this most ancient of nations has survived and thrived as a tiny sliver in the Middle East in the face of continuous danger.
Spengler writes they are also the happiest country in the world
In a world given over to morbidity, the state of Israel still teaches the world love of life, not in the trivial sense of joie de vivre, but rather as a solemn celebration of life. In another location, I argued, "It's easy for the Jews to talk about delighting in life. They are quite sure that they are eternal, while other peoples tremble at the prospect impending extinction. It is not their individual lives that the Jews find so pleasant, but rather the notion of a covenantal life that proceeds uninterrupted through the generations." Still, it is remarkable to observe by what wide a margin the Israelis win the global happiness sweepstakes.
Nations go extinct, I have argued in the past, because the individuals who comprise these nations choose collectively to die out. Once freedom replaces the fixed habits of traditional society, people who do not like their own lives do not trouble to have children. Not the sword of conquerors, but the indigestible sourdough of everyday life threatens the life of the nations, now dying out at a rate without precedent in recorded history.
--
The faith of Israelis is unique. Jews sailed to Palestine as an act of faith, to build a state against enormous odds and in the face of hostile encirclement, joking, "You don't have to be crazy to be a Zionist, but it helps." In 1903 Theodor Herzl, the Zionist movement's secular founder, secured British support for a Jewish state in Uganda, but his movement shouted him down, for nothing short of the return to Zion of Biblical prophecy would requite it. In place of a modern language the Jewish settlers revived Hebrew, a liturgical language only since the 4th century BC, in a feat of linguistic volition without precedent. It may be that faith burns brighter in Israel because Israel was founded by a leap of faith.
A love of life and leap of faith, think of that.
Anna Pasternak is astonished to learn and experience for herself that the skills of happiness can be taught.
Happy now? The course claiming to replace the blues with true happiness
Some selections from her diary of her encounter with American professor Richard Davidson
"You will never be happy as long as you are afraid of your sadness. You don't have to learn to like your unhappiness - but you do have to learn not to be afraid of it.
--
His key message is that it is not self improvement that will make us happy, but self-acceptance.
"Classically, people believe that if they improve themselves enough, they will be happy. But we can never improve enough.
--
Holden explains the difference between who we really are and who we think we are: our "essential self" as opposed to our "self-concepts".
He warns that self-image can be extremely detrimental to happiness. Often, we allow our "story" about who we think we are to become our identity.
"You can try to change your thoughts, but they are driven by your identity. If you want to change your thinking, change your identity."
--
When Robert Holden said: "You must let go of your hope for a better past" something released inside. I felt unbelievably drained but buoyant. As if I've re-ignited hope.
How we spend our time has a great deal to do with how happy we are.
Down the Tube: Sad Stats on Happiness, Money and TV
Sure our natural disposition and our circumstances matter, but what we have most control over is how we spend our leisure time.
The standout cluster was what the authors label "engaging leisure and spiritual activities," things like visiting friends, exercising, attending church, listening to music, fishing, reading a book, sitting in a cafe or going to a party. When we spend time on our favorite of these activities, we're typically happy, engrossed and not especially stressed.
"These are things you choose to do, rather than have to do," notes one of the study's co-authors, Prof. Schkade of the University of California, San Diego. we spend too much time watching television rather than time on "engaging leisure and spiritual activities" .
But too many people - women, divorced or separated, the less educated and lower income earners - are likely to spend a bigger chunk of their time in an unpleasant state.
there's been a significant increase in the hours devoted to what the authors call "neutral downtime," which is mostly watching television. Women now spend 15% of their waking hours staring at the tube, while men devote 17%.
Watching TV may be low-stress and moderately enjoyable. But people aren't mentally engaged the way they are when they're, say, exercising or socializing.
Making art, whether it be singing, writing, painting or crafts seems to be the key in the art of growing older happily, still contributing, still creating.
Studies Suggest There's An Art to Getting Older
In 2006, the preliminary findings from the federally funded Creativity and Aging Study suggest that
making art, or even listening to music or viewing paintings, supports physical, mental and emotional well-being and eases some symptoms of illness, including dementia.
----
Sometimes arts participation can be powerful therapy. Susan Perlstein, the founder of the National Center for Creative Aging and New York's nonprofit Elders Share the Arts, recalls a Holocaust survivor who sat watching her peers perform theater for a year before she told them how she escaped death more than 60 years earlier. The group turned her story into a play and made her the star.
"She said to the group . . . she felt for the first time she could feel at home," Perlstein said. "This process of being able to share your stories and transform them into art is actually a deeply healing process. She went from a depressed, sick older person to a lively young person. It was phenomenal to watch this change."
Taken as a whole, the benefits to the well-being of the old who participate in creative arts are quite extraordinary:
• new growth of brain cells stimulated
• better overall physical health
• less depression and loneliness
• medication use down
• a heightened sense of control and social engagement
• increased sense of independence
Dan Zac on why a sense of entitlement can wreak havoc on happiness in me, me, it's all about ME.
Broad pronouncement of the week: We are entitled brats.
In real life, we want what we want and we want it now. No delay. No aggravation. No hassle, pain-free, our way, right away.
--
Narcissism and entitlement among college students have increased steadily since 1979, according to a study to be published this year in the Journal of Personality.
--
The data are clear: The ascent of narcissism and entitlement is dramatic.
--
To complement her research, Twenge offers evidence from the field: "I have a 14-month-old daughter, and the clothing available to her has 'little princess,' or 'I'm the boss,' or 'spoiled rotten' written on it. This is what we're dressing our babies in."
--
Feeling entitled to something you aren't getting leads to frustration, which leads to bratty behavior and confrontation. Nearly 80 percent of Americans say rudeness -- particularly behind the wheel, on cellphones and in customer service -- should be regarded as a serious national problem, according to a study by the opinion research firm Public Agenda.
Zac then explores some tried and true ways of getting over your inner brat by going to, in tried and true fashion, to a stress expert who recommends practicing relaxation techniques to turn the frustration of waiting for someone into an opportunity to relax.
Cultivating the habit of being grateful, the attitude of gratitude, will lead to a happier life and much lower levels of entitlement.
Other habits I learned in Sunday School were "offering it up" and blessing those who were frustrating me, which in the end is simply loving your enemy. Not a bad way of getting through a three hour flight delay.
From the Washington Post by Eric Weiner Why Republicans Are So Darn Happy
No single morsel of happiness data, though, is more intriguing than this: Republicans are happier than Democrats.
A 2006 Pew Research poll found that 45 percent of Republicans describe themselves as "very happy," compared with only 30 percent of Democrats (and 29 percent of independents). This is a sizable gap and a remarkably consistent one, too. Republicans have been happier than Democrats every year since the General Social Survey, conducted biannually by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, began asking about happiness in 1972.
Is it money? Power? Ignorance?
Basically, Republicans have in spades all the things that combine to make us happy. Church attendance is particularly crucial. People who attend religious services regularly are more likely to report being "very happy" than those who don't -- 43 percent vs. 26 percent (a happiness boost, by the way, that cuts across all the major religious denominations). In addition, Republicans are more likely to be married than Democrats, and married people are happier than singles.
Weiner says that some of the Democrats' pet policies, income equality and diversity, have little effect on our contentment.
The View of Alexandria looks at the Post article and writes
Republicans stress freedom and individual responsibility, which lead people to feel in control and take action that changes their lives for the better, while Democrats assign blame to institutions, which makes people feel powerless and discourages them from undertaking ameliorative courses of action.
The comments to his post are particularly interesting.
No one mentioned gratitude which to me is the single greatest predictor of happiness. People who are grateful for what they have and have been given are by far the happiest people. Republicans generally are more sincerely grateful for the great blessing of being born American than are Democrats.
What's so interesting about the current race is the sense of hope that Senator Obama brings to the Democrats. There's no denying that the palpable sense of joy Democrats feel when they contemplate the November election contrasts sharply with the gloom Republicans feel. Whether that will change any of the underlying dynamics of happiness remains to be seen.
There is a trough in middle age that is truly depressing as everyone who has lived it can tell you but reports a study in England.
Middle-age is truly depressing, study finds
In a remarkably regular way throughout the world people slide down a U-shaped level of happiness and mental health throughout their lives," Andrew Oswald at Britain's Warwick University, who co-led the study, said on Tuesday.
The researchers analyzed data on depression, anxiety levels and general mental health and well-being taken from some 2 million people in 80 countries.
--
"It happens to men and women, to single and married people, to rich and poor, and to those with and without children," Oswald said. "Nobody knows why we see this consistency."
I think it's because they are unhappy with all that they had to do because those were the rules, that's what their parents said to do, it's what they had to do for their children or their career. Somewhere around 50, with all the intimations of mortality that brings, they begin to think for themselves, about the unlived parts of themselves and about their legacy.
In their fifties they begin to climb out of the trough and start to become themselves, the people they were meant to be and as they do so, they become happier each year.
The good news is that if people make it to aged 70 and are still physically fit, they are on average as happy and mentally healthy as a 20-year old.
There's no place to go but up . In great relief, you begin to experience the pleasures of maturity.
As life goes on it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself every day. This is sometimes disconcerting for those around you, but a great relief to the person concerned. - Agatha Christie
Don Aucoin in the Boston Globe explores why Analyzing happiness is a growth industry.
In that piece he quotes author and TV host John Izzo who asked 235 elderly people how and where they found happiness.
"I've always been interested in the question of why some people live well and die happy, and some people die as if they missed the party," explains Izzo. So he asked his interviewees, who ranged in age from 60 to 106, such questions as "What brought happiness to your life?", "What do you wish you'd learned sooner?", and "What do you regret?"
"Almost no one regretted something they tried in their life that didn't work out, yet almost everyone said they wished they had risked more," Izzo says. "They said the greatest fear at the end of life is not death or failure. It's that you didn't even try." The men in particular regretted not showing their wives or children how much they loved them. "What I've discovered is my BMW doesn't visit me in the nursing home," one retired businessman told Izzo.
So what were some of the secrets of happiness? In addition to living in the moment and being true to yourself, the consensus of the interviewees, Izzo says, was: "If you want to be a person who's happy, be a giver." In other words, focus not on yourself but on the needs of others. "They said when you're young you think your greatest happiness will come from what you get from life, but looking back they realized the only things that gave meaning was the fact that they gave," says Izzo.
America is a very happy place, Investor's Business Daily points out.
"Most Americans say they are generally happy, with a slim majority saying they are 'very happy,' " according to the Gallup Poll released on the final day of 2007. "More than 8 in 10 Americans say they are satisfied with their personal lives at this time, including a solid majority who say they are 'very satisfied.' "
Another extensive survey conducted in 2007 by the Pew Research Center found that 65% of Americans termed themselves "satisfied" with their lives. That compares with the four economic powerhouses of Britain, France, Germany and Italy, which averaged about 53%.
--
As economist Irwin Stelzer recently noted, "teenage drug use, pregnancies, smoking and drinking are all on the decline; welfare reform is working, bringing down child poverty, and the divorce rate is falling."
Oh, and we're having more babies than at any time since the 1970s — not something that a gloomy, depressed society does.
If Americans are happier than ever, the Brits are not. Over the New Year, the London Ambulance Service received an emergency call every 8 seconds, the great majority related to binge drinking.
50 years ago, 50% of Brits said they were very happy. Today, only about a third say that.
The Harvard Professor of Happiness Tal Ben Shahar gave them some advice in the Guardian on Cheering Up
1. Give yourself permission to be human and to feel the full range of human emotion including the painful ones.
2. Simplify your life. Do less, enjoy more.
3. Exercise regularly.
Michael Babyak and his colleagues at Duke University medical school, for example, showed that exercising three times a week for 30 minutes each time was as helpful for patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder as taking an antidepressant.
4. Focus on the positive.
The question we need to ask ourselves is: must things get worse before we recognise how wonderful life was? Do we need something negative to happen to us, a tragedy, to appreciate life? The answer is "no" if we make gratitude a way of life - because to be grateful for something is the opposite of taking it for granted
