Searching for a happiness strategy
Maybe there’s a science to happiness. A set of principles we could study, master, then apply to the disappointments, disasters and dirty dishes in our own lives. Whether gloomy by nature or not, we’d at least have some emotional hydraulics to lift ourselves out of despair after the inevitable arguments at home, mess-ups at work, personal insults. We might even learn how to enjoy ourselves and thrive doing work we thought miserable.
Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, is determined to find the principles that underlie the good life. Seligman is a driving force behind positive psychology, the growing effort among sociologists, economists and other social scientists to study how humans succeed, develop virtue and achieve fulfillment.
He has spent 20 years researching depression and his findings have helped influence how therapists treat the condition. That background gives Seligman the authority to talk about happiness without being written off as a self-help guru or Pollyanna. His recently released book, “Authentic Happiness” (Free Press), details the research findings and how they apply to daily life.
“I believe psychology has done very well in working out how to understand and treat disease,” Seligman said in a recent interview. “But I think that is literally half-baked. If all you do is work to fix problems, to alleviate suffering, then by definition you are working to get people to zero, to neutral.
“What I’m saying is, ‘Why not try to get them to plus-two, or plus-three?’ ... Even people in great pain want more than to merely endure. They want the good things in life, just like the rest of us.”
Still much to discover
As a field of study, positive psychology is a work in progress. For one thing, as other psychologists have observed, most measures of happiness are self-reported questionnaires, which can be difficult to interpret. A person who calls herself “very happy” on a survey may or may not be truly content. For another, the research has yet to explore the positive qualities of universal emotional states such as envy, regret and frustration.
“Many of my patients would love to lift their moods,” said Alan Rappoport, a therapist in Menlo Park, Calif. “The problem is that they’re stuck. They know they ought to be able to learn to be happy; they just can’t yet get there.”
Seligman has tried to provide a blueprint. To make ourselves happier, he argues, we need to learn two important skills: how to mind our thoughts, moment to moment. And how to forget ourselves altogether.
Separating beliefs, facts
In previous work, Seligman has described an effective technique for countering what he refers to as “catastrophic thoughts.” The trick is first to recognize the despairing idea -- “I’m the weakest employee in the department, and I’m probably going to get fired” -- and then check it against real evidence, as if the statement were being uttered by another person trying to make you miserable. “Did anyone actually say I was doing consistently poor work? So my last project fell apart -- yet the one before that was praised highly. Given the expectations, everyone in the department is struggling.”
By arguing with yourself in this way, Seligman has shown, you can separate beliefs from facts, defusing many pessimistic assumptions by editing them according to logic and evidence. In effect, you act as your own therapist, talking hard sense to yourself precisely when your thoughts begin to darken. The same kind of self-disputing can be applied to almost any variety of gloominess.
Psychologists find, for example, that depressed people often turn small foibles and mistakes into stinging self-criticism. If they get a bad grade, it’s not because they didn’t prepare: It’s because they’re not very smart. If they lose a tennis match, it’s time to quit: They’ve never been athletic. If they actually win, or get a good grade, it’s all luck.
In studies during the 1970s and 1980s, Seligman and other investigators showed that depressed people who learn to recognize and disarm this kind of reflexive pessimism and self-attacking can free themselves of feelings of worthlessness, fatigue and other symptoms of the condition. They are no longer depressed. They have pulled themselves from the depths.
Seligman argues that they can get to even higher ground, using techniques that rely partly on the work of the Hungarian-born psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a leading researcher in the field of creativity. In experiments using moment-to-moment mood monitoring, Csikszentmihalyi has shown that creatively successful adults and teenagers tend to experience regular periods of what he calls “flow.”
A widely recognized psychological state, flow is the total absorption that occurs when people are involved in an activity for its own sake, using their skills to solve a puzzle, complete a job or play a game, whether tennis or chess. It’s the equivalent of an athlete being “in the zone” or a jazz player losing himself in a melody. During “flow” moments one’s ego and sense of time are set aside. “People who are in flow don’t really feel anything in the moment,” Csikszentmihalyi said, “but we have good evidence that afterward they feel very satisfied. They think, ‘Gee, that was wonderful.’ ” Not surprisingly, people who love their jobs and their families report high levels of flow and satisfaction, he said.
Seligman maintains that the way to find more flow is to first recognize our natural skills, what he calls “signature strengths.” As opposed to innate gifts, such as physical beauty or lightning quickness, the strengths are moral qualities valued in almost all cultures, including valor, originality, perseverance and more than a dozen others. Each of us scores high in two or three of these qualities, and it’s when expressing them that we’re most likely to enter a state of flow, Seligman believes.
Who can flow through a miserable job? Not everyone, perhaps. Seligman, however, believes that even tedious work can be “re-crafted” to allow for some flow. “Look at what hairdressers do,” he said. “They change what could be a very menial job into something they’re really good at. These are people who would score very high on social intelligence as a signature strength.”
Flow should not be mistaken for purpose. In the end, Seligman says, there’s deeper fulfillment in joining our signature strengths to a larger cause, such as education, science, justice, religion.
The evidence for this comes in part from surveys showing that deeply religious people report high levels of life satisfaction and mental health. They often demonstrate remarkable resilience in the face of disease and disaster, such as the death of a loved one.
Benefits of generosity
In several recent experiments, psychologists have also demonstrated that performing an act of generosity -- helping someone with homework or writing a long letter to a dear friend -- provides sensations of contentment that last measurably longer than a good meal or a good movie.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that people who report being very happy also have many good friends to write or call, as the Hope College psychologist David Myers has shown.
In short, research is beginning to confirm what many devoted altruists have long maintained: that doing good feels very good.
“The good life,” writes Seligman, “consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power or goodness.”
