What is happiness and well-being?

[yesthattom]

The Lonon Sunday Times has this excellent article on the new research being done into happiness.

The man who’s trying to do for happiness what Newton did for gravity has found it a scarce commodity in life. Seligman describes himself as a “walking nimbus cloud” who spent 50 years “enduring mostly wet weather in my soul”.
...
Since its origins in a Leipzig laboratory 130 years ago, psychology has had little to say about goodness and contentment. Mostly psychologists have concerned themselves with weakness and misery. There are libraries full of theories about why we get sad, worried, and angry. It hasn’t been respectable science to study what happens when lives go well. Positive experiences, such as joy, kindness, altruism and heroism, have mainly been ignored. For every 100 psychology papers dealing with anxiety or depression, only one concerns a positive trait.

As a big fan of cognitive therapy as a way to solve depression without drugs, I’m glad to see more research being done in this area. (and if you want to know what book helped me in this area, check out this book. I'm not a doctor, but if it worked for me, it could work for you.)

Comments

[dossy.livejournal.com]

At first, I thought the link was going to be to your book. :-)

I think I agree with you, here. Management geeks know the "you get what you measure" mantra, and if all you focus on is measuring unhappiness, then you'll know very clearly exactly how unhappy you are and why.

Learning the necessary skills to accurately assess your happiness and what causes it or increases it is a critical skill. It's unfortunate we don't have more attention being paid to learning it and developing it.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Agreed. And when we do try to raise our kids with high self-esteem it gets mocked. Remember all the jokes made when California established the commission on self-esteem?

[andrewfeland.livejournal.com]

That's because so many people seem to equate self-esteem with rewards. Rewarding kids for putting on their pants in the morning doesn't raise their self-esteem; giving children challenges that are appropriate to each child's level and then rewarding them for successfully meeting those challenges--THAT will raise their self-esteem. Teaching them to be self-sufficient will raise their self-esteem.

Of course, figuring out each child's challenge level and helping them all become self-sufficient 1) takes effort on the part of educational administrators (versus the teachers who are all too often fighting an uphill battle with no resources trying to do this) and 2) can't be easily measured on a standardized test, so it'll never take hold on a national scale.

Teaching you to feel good about yourself isn't the same as teaching you that the rest of the world OWES you goodwill. Most "self-esteem" teaching mistakes one for the other, and in doing so, becomes its own worst enemy.

[cyan-blue.livejournal.com]

Seconding the Feeling Good Handbook... I recommend it to clients tons.

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

I'm not so much a fan of cognitive therapy personally...I believe it works well for some personality types but not so much for people like me who are slower to connect feelings and language (I can't help feeling like there's still a place for kid-style play therapy in at least some of us adults).

[pyffe.livejournal.com]

I've been doing some interesting research on dietary issues. Did you know that food "alergens" can cause everything from depression, ADHD, neurological disorders, skin rashes, etc.

My mom is a celiac (reacts to wheat and gluten) and when we went to a seminar in NYC last month, we discovered all kinds of new things that show up from this.

The really weird thing is, it's a simple blood test. But it's usually tested after exhausting all the really nasty, expensive tests that they can run!

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I agree. I wouldn't be where I am today if it weren't for the fact that in 5th grade my mother discovered The Feingold Association, read their book and changed my diet.

[pyffe.livejournal.com]

I'll check out the link tomorrow at work. Dialup at home tonight is s-l-o-w!