By Martin E. P. Seligman. 2002.
Chapter 4: Can You Make Yourself Lastingly Happier?
Good things and high accomplishments, studies have shown, have astonishingly little power to raise happiness more than transiently: In less than three months, major events (such as being fired or promoted) lose their impact on happiness levels.
In our study of very happy people, Ed Diener and I found that every person (save one) in the top 10 percent of happiness was involved in a romantic relationship. You will recall that very happy people differ markedly from both average and unhappy people in that they all lead a rich and fulfilling social life. The very happy people spend the least time alone and the most time socializing, and they are rated highest on good relationships by themselves and also by their friends.
Chapter 5: Satisfaction About the Past
Remarkably, the evidence shows that when positive and negative events happen, there is a temporary burst of mood in the right direction. But usually over a short time, mood settles back into its set range. This tells us that emotions, left to themselves, will dissipate.
Insufficient appreciation and savoring of the good events in your past and overemphasis of the bad ones are the two culprits that undermine serenity, contentment and satisfaction.
Chapter 6: Optimism About the Future
Positive emotions about the future include faith, trust, confidence, hope, and optimism. Optimism and hope are quite well-understood, they have been the objects of thousands of empirical studies, and best of all, they can be built.
Chapter 7: Happiness in the Present
This has direct implications for enhancing the pleasures in your life: how you spread them out over time is crucial. The first rule of thumb is Cavafy’s (“as many sensual perfumes as you can”). Inject into your life as many events that produce pleasure as you can, but spread them out, letting more time elapse between them than you normally do.
Surprise, as well as spacing, keeps pleasures from habituating. Try to take yourself by surprise–or even better, arrange it so the people you live with or otherwise see frequently surprise each other with “presents” of the pleasures. It does not need to be on the scale of a dozen roses from the florist. An unexpected cup of coffee will do, but it is worth five minutes a day to create a pleasing little surprise for your spouse, your children, or a coworker: his favorite music on when he arrives home, rubbing her back while she is recording receipts on the computer, a vase full of flowers on your officemate’s desk, a simple note of affection. Such acts are reciprocally contagious.
Five techniques that promote savoring:
1. Sharing with others. You can seek out others to share the experience and tell others how much you value the moment. This is the single strongest predictor of pleasure.
2. Memory-building. Take mental photographs or even a physical souvenir of the event, and reminisce about it later with others.
3. Self-congratulation. Don’t be afraid of pride. Tell yourself how impressed you are, and remember how long you’ve waited for this to happen.
4. Absorption. Let yourself get totally immersed and try not to think, just sense. Do not remind yourself of other things you should be doing, wonder what comes next, or consider the ways in which the event could be improved upon.
Here are the components [of flow]:
• 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
In fact, it is the absence of emotion, of any kind of consciousness, that is at the heart of flow. Consciousness and emotion are there to correct your trajectory; when what you are doing is seamlessly perfect, you don’t need them.
When we engage in pleasures, we are perhaps just consuming. The smell of perfume, the taste of raspberries, and the sensuality of a scalp rub are all high momentary delights, but they do not build anything for the future. They are not investments, nothing is accumulated.
My breakfast (unlike my writing) is all shortcuts, requiring no skill and almost no effort. What would happen if my entire life were made up of such easy pleasures, never calling on my strengths, never presenting challenges? Such a life sets one up for depression. The strengths and virtues may wither during a life of taking shortcuts rather than choosing a life made full through the pursuit of gratification.
To start the process of eschewing easy pleasures and engaging in more gratifications is hard. The gratifications produce flow, but they require skill and effort; even more deterring is the fact that because they meet challenges, they offer the possibility of failing. Playing three sets of tennis, or participating in a clever conversation, or reading Richard Russo takes work—at least to start. The pleasures do not: watching a sitcom, masturbating, and inhaling perfume are not challenging. Eating a buttered bagel or viewing televised football on Monday night requires no effort and there is no possibility of failure.
Pleasure is 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. … Enjoyment [gratification] on the other hand is not always pleasant, and it can be utterly stressful at times. A mountain climber may be close to freezing, utterly exhausted, in danger of falling into a bottomless crevasse, yet he wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Sipping a cocktail under a palm tree at the edge of a turquoise ocean is nice, but it just doesn’t compare to the exhilaration he feels on that freezing ridge.
The question of enhancing the gratifications is nothing more and nothing less than the venerable question, “What is the good life?”
Chapter 8: Renewing Strength and Virtue
We read Aristotle and Plato, Aquinas and Augustine, the Old Testament and the Talmud, Confucius, Buddha, Lao-Tzu, Bushido (the samurai code), the Koran, Benjamin Franklin, and the Upanishads—some two hundred virtue catalogs in all. To our surprise, almost every one of these traditions flung across three thousand years and the entire face of the earth endorsed six virtues:
• Wisdom and knowledge
• Courage
• Love and humanity
• Justice
• Temperance
• Spirituality and transcendence
Chapter 9: Your Signature Strengths
You cannot squander a strength. A strength involves choice about when to use it and whether to keep building it, but also whether to acquire it in the first place.
Building strengths and virtues and using them in daily life are very much a matter of making choices.
To be a virtuous person is to display, by acts of will, all or at least most of the six ubiquitous virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.
The display of a strength by one person does not diminish other people in the vicinity. Indeed, onlookers are often inspired and elevated by observing virtuous actions. Envy, but not jealousy may fill the onlooker’s breast. Engaging in a strength usually produces authentic positive emotion in the doer: pride, satisfaction, joy, fulfillment, or harmony. For this reason, strengths and virtues are often enacted in win-win situations. We can all be winners when acting in accordance with strengths and virtues.
1. Curiosity/Interest in the World
2. Love of Learning
3. Judgment/Critical Thinking/Open-Mindedness
4. Ingenuity/Originality/Practical Intelligence/Street Smarts
5. Social Intelligence/Personal Intelligence/Emotional Intelligence
6. Perspective
7. Valor and Bravery
8. Perseverance/Industry/Diligence
9. Integrity/Genuineness/Honesty
Humanity and Love
10. Kindness and Generosity
11. Loving and Allowing Oneself to be Loved
12. Citizenship/Duty/Teamwork/Loyalty
13. Fairness and Equity
14. Leadership
Temperance
15. Self-Control
16. Prudence/Discretion/Caution
17. Humility and Modesty
Transcendence
18. Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence
19. Gratitude
20. Hope/Optimism/Future-Mindedness
21. Spirituality/Sense of Purpose/Faith/Religiousness
22. Forgiveness and Mercy
23. Playfulness and Humor
24. Zest/Passion/Enthusiasm
1. Curiosity/Interest in the World
Curiosity about the world entails openness to experience and flexibility about matters that do not fit one’s preconceptions.
2. Social Intelligence / Personal Intelligence / Emotional Intelligence
Social intelligence is the ability to notice differences among others, especially with respect to their moods, temperament, motivations, and intentions—and then to act upon those distinctions. This strength is not to be confused with merely being introspective, psychologically minded, or ruminative; it shows up in socially skilled action.
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. Take your list of top strengths, and for each one ask if any of these criteria apply:
• A sense of ownership and authenticity (“This is the real me”)
• A feeling of excitement while displaying it, particularly at first
• A rapid learning curve as the strength is first practiced
• Continuous learning of new ways to enact the strength
• A sense of yearning to find ways to use it
• A feeling of inevitability in using the strength (“Try and stop me”)
• Invigoration rather than exhaustion while using the strength
• The creation and pursuit of personal projects that revolve around it
• Joy, zest, enthusiasm, even ecstasy while using it
Herein is my formulation of the good life: Using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of your life to bring about abundant gratification and authentic happiness.
Chapter 10: Work and Personal Satisfaction
Work can be prime time for flow because, unlike leisure, it builds many of the conditions of flow into itself. There are usually clear goals and rules of performance. There is frequent feedback about how well or poorly we are doing. Work usually encourages concentration and minimizes distractions and in many cases it matches the difficulties to your talents and even your strengths. As a result, people often feel more engaged at work than they do at home.
Chapter 11: Love
Perhaps the single most robust fact about marriage across many surveys is that married people are happier than anyone else. Of married adults, 40 percent call themselves “very happy,” while only 23 percent of never-married adults do. This is true of every ethnic group studied, and it is true across the seventeen nations that psychologists have surveyed. Marriage is a more potent happiness factor than satisfaction with job, or finances, or community. 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.”
Chapter 13: Reprise and Summary
There are three importantly different kinds of positive emotion (past, future, and present), and it is entirely possible to cultivate any of these separately from the others. Positive emotion about the past (contentment, for example), can be increased by gratitude, forgiveness, and freeing yourself of imprisoning deterministic ideology. Positive emotion about the future (optimism, for example) can be increased by learning to recognize and dispute pessimistic thoughts.
Positive emotion about the present divides into two very different things—pleasures and gratifications—and this is the best example of radically different routes to happiness. The pleasures are momentary, and they are defined by felt emotion. They can be increased by defeating the numbing effect of habituation, by savoring, and by mindfulness. The pleasant life successfully pursues positive emotions about the present, past, and future.
The gratifications are more abiding. They are characterized by absorption, engagement, and flow. Importantly, the absence—not the presence—of any felt positive emotion (or any self-consciousness at all) defines the gratifications. The gratifications come about through the exercise of your strengths and virtues…
This led to my formulation of the good life, which, in my view, consists in using your signature strengths as frequently as possible in [the three great arenas of life: work, love, and parenting] to obtain authentic happiness and abundant gratification.
The pleasant life, I suggested, is wrapped up in the successful pursuit of the positive feelings, supplemented by the skills of amplifying those emotions. The good life, in contrast, is not about maximizing positive emotion, but is a life wrapped up in successfully using your signature strengths to obtain abundant and authentic gratification. The meaningful life has one additional feature: using your signature strengths in the service of something larger than you are. To live all three lives is to live a full life.