Recipe for “Little Happiness”
Special treat today. Here’s a guest post from Terrell Meek. Terrell, a student of happiness, was one of the astute commenters during last week’s “Happiness Project” thread. Welcome, Terrell!
I am a left-brained introvert, a self-described realist, and a glass-half-empty type of gal. I’m also extremely happy. At least, I am right now. Ask me in a few hours and my answer might be different.
In all this talk of happiness, let us not forget that it is an emotion, which according to Wikipedia is a “complex evaluative (postive or negative) reaction of the nervous system in response to external or internal stimuli.” In addition to happiness, other emotions we feel include fear, sadness, anger, surprise, and ambivalence. Why is it that we seek balance in other areas of our lives, but when it comes to the way we feel, we only want to be happy, 100% of the time?
Not only is the notion of being in a constant state of happiness unrealistic, it’s also unhealthy. Fear can keep us safe; sadness lets us heal; anger can be a catalyst for change.
Having said all that, I do believe the pursuit of happiness is important. I use the word pursuit because one of the key points I’ve learned from reading scientific happiness research is that the majority of humans are not wired for it, it takes work. Blame it on the brain!
Here is my recipe for feeling happy more often:
- Recognize what makes me feel good. I take the time to register my emotions so that I don’t pass by a moment of happiness unnoticed. This sounds absurd, but we’ve all ruined a perfectly good moment by worrying about future events. The classic example is the feeling of dread you may get on Sunday evenings as you start to think about work the next day. This practice also helps me identify what it is that actually makes me happy, which keeps me from repeatedly doing things only because I think they should make me happy.
- Record what made me feel good. Because the human brain is really bad at remembering past events and feelings correctly, I like to make a record of happy times, either through writing or photographs.
- Repeat. The entire premise of the book Stumbling on Happiness is that we are really bad at predicting what will make us happy. If we have a record of what has made us feel good in the past, we can more accurately predict what will make us happy in the future.
One of my favorite quotes on happiness comes from French psychiatrist Christophe Andre: “Striving toward absolute, huge, oceanic happiness, le bonheur fou, can be discouraging and distract you from little happiness.”
Little happiness. I can deal with that.
Now if that doesn’t make you happy, nothing will. If you’d like to read more, here’s a suggested reading list from Terrell:
- Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert
- The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, by Jonathan Haidt
- Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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Don’t let little moments of happiness pass unnoticed. That is the best piece of advice I have heard all week. Thank you. That was a great post.
I’m a generally happy person. Your “being happy 100% of the time” sentence struck a chord. It’s impossible to be happy 100% of the time – take it from a generally happy person. It irks me that when I may be having a neutral day, people ask “What’s wrong? Are you okay? You seem down.” As if I’m expected to supply the office happy quotient, and I’m letting down the team. Nuh-uh, people! I enjoyed the post, Terrell.
Great post and nice comments. Indeed happiness can be hard to recognize when it happens. For instance, when I am in the middle of a group of friends, eating, drinking, laughing and having a good time, I often don’t realize how special it is then and there. It’s only when I’m alone, and see it from the outside – that big group of people, eating, drinking, and laughing – that I am reminded how wonderful it is be a part of that group instead of observing that group.
There is a Sopranos scene in which Tony is talking to a Russian woman with a prosthetic leg. He asks her, I’m paraphrasing, “Why aren’t you more upset about your situation?” Her response was, again paraphrasing, “In America, everyone expects to be happy. And when they aren’t, they think the world has wronged them. Where I come from we expect to be miserable. When we experience strife, it’s no big deal because it was expected. When something good comes along, we find true joy.”
I know I totally demolished that quote – it has been quite awhile since I saw that particular episode. The nuts and bolts are the same, though. I agree that happiness is all about perspective. If we can gear ourselves to pick out the positives of a situation instead of the negatives, we allow happiness to become a reality. I let folks that don’t use their turn signals, sporting events, and innocent comments negatively effect me, yet I don’t allow compliments, success, and day-to-day pleasures bring me happiness. What an awful way to go through life.
Thanks for a great post, and a change in my perspective!
Everybody has ups and downs, it is totally normal and not to be feared or avoided. I think it is everyone’s message here, and really should be emphasized to those who expect too much of life. Unless you want to live on “soma” or its modern day equivalents, be thankful we live in a world where reasonable happiness is available to a lot of people.
You might want to add “Happier,” by Tal-Ben Shahar to your reading list. It is the best book I have read on the subject.
“Little Happiness” is a perspective that, for me, is easy to idealize my way out of. Reading this was the perfect reset button.
This post hit the spot. Thanks for writing it.
It’s the recording happiness that I have so much trouble with. Thanks for the reminder.
My favorite read on the topic: Robert Nozick’s “The Examined Life.”
Having become interested in the topic of human happiness a number of years ago, I have read most of the popular books on happiness to come out in recent years. There have been a number of excellent books on the subject, particularly those arising from the Positive Psychology movement, a science-based approach to achieving happiness. Your article mentioned three of the best, as did one of your readers, who mentioned Tal Ben-Shahar’s wonderful book.
The most recent addition to the growing body of literature on Positive Psychology is Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky’s The How of Happiness. For those seeking an approach to cultivating greater happiness based on solid empirical evidence and scientific data, I feel that this is an outstanding book, written by one of the leading researchers in the study of human happiness, a world-renowned expert in the field. In reviewing all of the books on the subject of happiness over the past decade, however, there is one book that stands out as the forerunner of all these popular books on human happiness — In speaking of this book, Dr, Lyubomirsky has said, “If you go to the bookstore, you will find many, many books on happiness. And I’m often asked what is the best book about happiness out there. I truthfully always say it is The Art of Happiness. I believe that.”
For those who may be unfamiliar with the book, The Art of Happiness: A Handbook of Living, is a collaboration between H.H. the Dalai Lama, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and Howard C. Cutler, M.D., an American psychiatrist. Dr. Cutler is an expert on human happiness, one of the pioneers in the field of Positive Psychology, who helps individuals achieve greater happiness using a unique program based on The Art of Happiness, supplemented with the latest cutting-edge scientific research on the subject. While sometimes overlooked in many blogs and media discussions about happiness,, as a result of the glut of newer books on the subject, this groundbreaking work was published in 1998, just prior to the explosion of interest in happiness among both the scientific community and the general public, but one could argue that it is still the “gold standard” of books on happiness–as even today, after all of the more recent bestsellers, it is still undoubtedly the most successful book on the subject, with two years on The New York Times bestseller list, and worldwide acclaim–and I feel rightfully so.
The Art of Happiness is quite an amazing book–offering the very best of East and West, blending the Dalai Lama’s profound wisdom and insight about how to achieve greater happiness with Dr. Cutler’s outstanding commentary and very skillful way of making it accessible to Western audiences. While the Dalai Lama’s views are of course rooted in Buddhist thought, this book is written for a secular audience, for individuals from any tradition or background, whether Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or any other religion, as well as those who adhere to no religion at all. Dr. Cutler did a remarkably effective job in framing the Dalai Lama’s ideas within a contemporary Western context, finding supporting scientific evidence corroborating the Dalai Lama’s suggestions and advice about achieving greater happiness, as well as providing compelling illustrations of how we might go about applying the Dalai Lama’s ideas in everyday life. While the book did not have the benefit of some of the newer scientific studies on happiness, the remarkable thing is that in the intervening years since the book was first published, the newer scientific studies have seemed to invariably confirm and support the Dalai Lama’s views–which are based on the 2500 year old Buddhist tradition.
So, while there are many wonderful and helpful books on happiness in recent years, personally I feel that The Art of Happiness still stands alone, with its skillful integration of East and West — first, it is not the traditional “spiritual book” sometimes seen these days, written by some self-styled guru who makes up his or her own theories based on nothing but odds and ends of their own good imagination, and a dash of pseudo-science, and representing it as enlightened “Eastern Wisdom.” By contrast, besides the Dalai Lama’s unparalleled qualifications of course, in this book Dr. Cutler has sought to ground the principles in empirical scientific evidence and sound research. At the same time, it is not another clone of the same Positive Psychology research we sometimes see repeated from book to book, because this book is based on the Dalai Lama’s views of achieving a happier life, drawn from his vast knowledge, rooted in a tradition dating back 2500 years, as well as his personal experience.