Ramblings of an Anonymous Coward

Happiness Is...

i was going to put this into the previous post, but it felt too much like an add-on when i was done... though it too does deal with psychology, but more directly. i wanted to point to an article in the UK's sunday times entitled So what do you have to do to find happiness? which in between a lot of stuff that nearly bored me to tears were a few things i thought were interesting.

below are some clips from the article that caught my eye and are likely out of context, so please... read the article linked above.

As a psychology graduate working in animal- behaviour labs, Seligman discovered "learned helplessness" and became a big name. Dogs who experience electric shocks that they cannot avoid by their actions simply give up trying. They will passively endure later shocks that they could easily escape. Seligman went on to apply this to humans, with "learned helplessness" as a model for depression. People who feel battered by unsolvable problems learn to be helpless; they become passive, slower to learn, anxious and sad. This idea revolutionised behavioural psychology and therapy by suggesting the need to challenge depressed people's beliefs and thought patterns, not just their behaviour.

i can identify with that. there have been plenty of times i've just thought it just doesn't matter what i do and simply float along.

Professor Alice Isen of Cornell University and colleagues have demonstrated how positive emotions make people think faster and more creatively.

interesting. i've found myself being more "creative", at least in an artistic sense, when i'm on a down rather than an up. when happy (excited) i do believe i think faster and get more things done.

Although most people rate themselves as happy, there is a wealth of evidence to show that negative thinking is deeply ingrained in the human psyche. Experiments show that we remember failures more vividly than successes. We dwell on what went badly, not what went well. When life runs smoothly, we're on autopilot — we're only in a state of true consciousness when we notice the stone in our shoe.

most definitely. it is rare for me to be able to point to more positives than negatives things. my son can proudly say he swept the floor, and while i notice and appreciate it, my attention is most quickly drawn to the spot he missed or the fact that the job was so-so rather than the fact he put forth the effort. show me a picture and i'll tend to point to the things i don't like about it rather than the things i do.

Of the six universal emotions, four — anger, fear, disgust and sadness — are negative and only one, joy, is positive. (The sixth, surprise, is neutral.)

six universal emotions? was i sleeping in pysch class that day or is my memory simply failing me? ahhhh, who cares. :-)

Modern humans, stuck with an ancient brain, are like rats on a wheel. We can't stop running, because we're always looking over our shoulders and comparing our achievements with our neighbours'. At 20, we think we'd be happy with a house and a car. But if we get them, we start dreaming of a second home in Italy and a turbo-charged four-wheel-drive.

This is called the "hedonic treadmill" by happiness scholars. It causes us to rapidly and inevitably adapt to good things by taking them for granted. The more possessions and accomplishments we have, the more we need to boost our level of happiness.

sad, but true. worse is recognizing it and feeling helpless to change it. maybe there is a good drug to take... :-)

Happiness is neither desire nor pleasure alone. It involves a third chemical pathway. Serotonin constantly shifts the balance between negative and positive emotions. It can reduce worry, fear, panic and sleeplessness and increase sociability, co-operation, and happy feelings. Drugs based on serotonin, such as ecstasy, produce a relaxed sense of wellbeing rather than the dopamine pattern of euphoria and craving.

In essence, what the biology lesson tells us is that negative emotions are fundamental to the human condition, and it's no wonder they are difficult to eradicate. At the same time, by a trick of nature, our brains are designed to crave but never really achieve lasting happiness.

ecstasy? sounds like they picked an apropo name. whodathunkit? maybe there is a legal version of such a thing?

The tragic legacy of Freud is that many are "unduly embittered about their past, and unduly passive about their future", says Seligman. His colleague Aaron Beck developed cognitive therapy after becoming disillusioned with his Freudian training in the 1950s. Beck found that as depressed patients talked "cathartically" about past wounds and losses, some people began to unravel. Occasionally this led to suicide attempts, some of which were fatal. There was very little evidence that psychoanalysis worked.

this is quoted here... just because. the bolding was done by me and is not in the article. hehe. oh, and since i've quoted so much, i really should link to the website they mentioned too... http://www.reflectivehappiness.com/ that has programs to supposedly make you happier.

In one internet study, two interventions increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms for at least six months. One exercise involves writing down three things that went well and why, every day for a week.

read the full article for the other exercises, but i cherry picked this one out to say... hmmm, if done properly is blogging theraputically good (for real)?

t's difficult to resist the logic of the happiness doctors. Stay in your Eeyore-ish bubble of existentialist angst and have a life that's short, sickly, friendless and self-obsessed. Or find a way to get happy, and long life, good health, job satisfaction and social success will be yours.

well.... i dunno pooh.

Posted by ac at October 5, 2005 03:26 PM