Authentic Happiness

Authentic Happiness by Seligman

Autobiographical stuff

1. “I see patients for whom the disease model, but I also see patients who change markedly for the better under a set of circumstances that fit poorly in the disease model. I witness growth and transformation in these patients when they realize just how strong they are” (22).
2. Pessimists “are up to eight times more likely to become depressed when bad things happen to them; they do worse at school, sports, and most jobs than their talents augur; they have worse physical health and shorter lives; they have rockier interpersonal relations” (24).
3. Focus on prevention. What “we know about treating disordered brains and minds tells us little about how to prevent those disorders in the first place. What progress there is been in the prevention of mental illness comes from recognizing and nurturing a set of strengths, competencies, and virtues in young people--such as future-mindedness, hope, interpersonal skills, courage, the capacity for flow, faith, and worth ethic. The exercise of these strengths then buffers against the tribulations that put people at risk for mental illness. Depression can be prevented in a young person at genetic risk by nurturing her skills of optimism and hope,” as a study by Seligman found. “An inner-city young man, at risk for substance abuse b/c of all the drug traffic in his neighborhood, is much less vulnerable if he is future-minded, gets flow out of sports, and has a powerful work ethic” (27). Raising children is “far more than just fixing what [is] wrong with them. It [is] about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues, and helping them find the niche where they can live these positive traits to the fullest” (28).

Positive emotions

1. Evolution.
1. “Negative emotions--fear, sadness, and anger--are our first line of defense against external threats, calling us to battle stations” (30). “Those of our ancestors who felt negative emotions strongly when life and limb were the issue likely fought and fled the best, and they passed on the relevant genes” (31).
2. Positive emotions also have an evolutionary purpose. “When we are in a positive mood, people like us better, and friendship, love, and coalitions are more likely to cement. In contrast to the constrictions of negative emotion, our mental set is expansive, tolerant, and creative. We are open to new ideas and new experience” (35).
2. The benefits of positive emotions.
1. Happy people are smarter in some areas, depressed people in others (37-39).
2. Happy people are healthier, live longer, are more productive workers, and earn more money (40). Happy people endure pain better (41). Have people have more friends (42). Happy people give more to charity (43).

The happiness formula: H + S + C +V >> H (one’s enduring level of happiness).

1. Happiness Scale (46).
2. S (Set Range).
1. Twin studies show that “roughly 50 percent of almost every personality trait turns out to be attributable to genetic inheritance” (47).
2. People tend to revert to their baseline levels of happiness.
1. E.g., lottery winners and recent paraplegics (48).
2. The Hedonic Treadmill — we “rapidly and inevitably adapt to good things by taking them for granted — “If there were no treadmill, people who get more good things in life would in general be much happier than the less fortunate. But the less fortunate are, by and large, just as happy as the more fortunate. Good things and high accomplishments, studies have shown, have astonishingly little power to raise happiness more than transiently” (49).
1. Some exception: when a child or spouse dies in a car crash; when you’re a caregiver for someone with Alzheimer’s; extreme poverty (49).
3. C (Conditions, or circumstances of your life).
1. Some conditions can make us happier — e.g., getting out of extreme poverty (53); married people tend to be happier, although this could be a case of reverse correlation; happy people spend less time alone than unhappy people (56); religion (59-60).

V (Voluntary activities)

1. Positive emotions about the past.
1. Dwelling on the past
1. “I think that the events of childhood are overrated; in fact, I think past history in general is overrated. It has turned out to be difficult to find even small effects of childhood events on adult personality.” “The major traumas of childhood may have some influence on adult personality, but only a barely detectable one. Bad childhood events, in short, do not mandate adult troubles...Most of these studies turned out to be methodologically inadequate,” as “they fail to control for genes” (67).
2. “Identical twins reared apart are much more similar as adults than fraternal twins reared together with regard to authoritarianism, religiosity, job satisfaction, conservatism, anger, depression, intelligence, alcoholism, well-being, and neuroticism, to name only a few traits. In parallel, adopted children are much more similar as adults to their biological parents than they are to their adoptive parents. No childhood events contribute significantly to these characteristics. This means that the promissory note that Freud and his followers wrote about childhood events determining the course of adult lives is worthless” (68).
3. “Emotional hydraulics” — “Emotions are seen as forces inside a system closed by an impermeable membrane, like a balloon. If you do not allow yourself to express an emotion, it will squeeze its way out at some other point, usually as an undesirable symptom” (68). >> Psychodynamics holds that you can cure depression by getting clients “to open up about the past, and to ventilate cathartically about all the wounds and losses that they have suffered.” Aaron Beck realized that when people were ventilating about the past, “they often unraveled as they ventilated,” and he “could not find ways to ravel them up again.” CBT was his solution (69). Similarly, “[d]welling on trespasses and the expression of anger produces more cardiac disease and more anger” (69).
4. Contrary to emotional hydraulics, the fact is that humans adapt >> “usually over a short time, mood settles back into its set range. This tells us that emotions, left to themselves, will dissipate...Expressed and dwelt upon, though, emotions multiply and imprison you in a vicious cycle of dealing fruitlessly with past wrongs. Insufficient appreciation and savoring of the good events in your past and overemphasis on the bad ones are the two culprits that undermine serenity, contentment, and satisfaction. There are two ways of bringing these feelings about the past well into the region of contentment and satisfaction. Gratitude amplifies the savoring and appreciation of the good events gone by, and rewriting history by forgiveness loosens the power of the bad events to embitter (and actually can transform bad memories into good ones)” (70).
2. Gratitude — Gratitude increases life satisfaction b/c “it amplifies good memories about the past” (75).
1. Gratitude survey.
2. Two gratitude exercises (74-75).
3. Forgiveness.
1. “The human brain has evolved to ensure that our firefighting negative emotions will trump the broadening, building, and abiding--but more fragile--positive emotions. The only way out of this emotional wilderness is to change your thoughts by rewriting your past: forgiving, forgetting, or suppressing bad memories. There are, however, no known ways to enhance forgetting and suppressing of memory directly” (76).
2. How to forgive: REACH (79) — Recall the hurt, Empathize, give the Altruistic gift of forgiveness “(we give b/c it is for the trespasser’s ow good), Commit to forgive publicly, Hold onto forgiveness (79-81).
2. Optimism about the future
1. “Finding permanent and universal causes of good events along with temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope” (93).
2. Increasing optimism and hope — you must recognize and then dispute pessimistic thoughts (93). This is simple CBT.
3. Happiness in the present.
1. Pleasures and Gratifications.
1. Pleasures are "delights that have clear sensory and strong emotional components," e.g., "ecstasy, thrills, orgasm, delight, mirth, exuberance, and comfort" (102). "[I]t is not easy to build your life around the bodily pleasures, for they are just momentary" (103). Three ways to "help you increase the amount of momentary happiness in your life":
1. Habituation. "Rapidly repeated indulgence in the same pleasure does not work. The pleasure of the second taste of Basset's French vanilla ice cream is less than half of the first, and by the fourth taste it is just calories. Once the caloric needs are sated, the taste is little better than cardboard" (105). Therefore: "Inject into your life as many events that produce pleasure as you can, but spread them out, letting more time elapse b/t them than you normally do...Take one mouthful of the ice cream, then wait for thirty seconds (it will seem like an eternity). If you no longer crave the second mouthful, throw it down the drain" (106).
2. Savoring. Savoring is "the awareness of pleasure" and "the deliberate conscious attention to the experience of pleasure" (107). Five techniques that promote savoring: sharing with others, memory-building, self-congratulation, sharpening perceptions, absorption (108).
3. Mindfulness.
2. Gratifications are "activities we very much like doing, but they are not necessarily accompanied by any raw feelings at all," e.g., flow (102). More about flow:
1. Idea developed by Mike Csikzentmihalyi. "When does time stop for you? When do you find yourself doing exactly what you want to be doing, and never wanting it to end?" (114).
2. 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." There is no positive emotion in flow. 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" (116).
3. Youth who regularly experience flow do better on measures of psychological well-being. "Given all the benefits and the flow that gratifications produce, it is very puzzling that we choose pleasure...over gratification" (117).

Strengths and Virtue

1. There are six virtues "that are endorsed across every major religious and cultural tradition" (130): Wisdom and knowledge, Courage, Love and humanity, Justice, Temperance, Spirituality and transcendence. Strengths of character are the routes “by which we achieve the virtues” (133).

4. “[S[trengths are moral traits, while talents are nonmoral” (134). “Why do we feel so good about ourselves when we call the cashier’s attention to a fifty-dollar undercharge? We are not suddenly admiring some inborn trait of honesty, but instead we are proud that we did the right thing--that we chose a more difficult course of action than just silently pocketing the money” (135).
5. “To be a virtuous person is to display, by acts of will, all or at least most of the six ubiquitous virtues...There are several distinct routes [or strengths] to each of these six. For example, one can display the virtue of justice by acts of good citizenship, fairness, loyalty and teamwork, or human leadership” (137).
6. 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.” For each top strength, ask yourself [quoted verbatim]
1. A sense of ownership and authenticity (“This is the real me”)
2. A feeling of excitement while displaying it, particularly at first
3. A rapid learning curve as the strength is first practiced
4. Continuous learning of new ways to enact the strength
5. A sense of yearning to find ways to use it
6. A feeling of inevitability in using the strength (“Try and stop me”)
7. Invigoration rather than exhaustion while using the strength
8. The creation and pursuit of personal projects that revolve around it
9. Joy, zest, enthusiasm, even ecstasy while using it (160)
7. If one or more of the above apply to your top strengths, “they are signature strengths.” Seligman’s “formulation of the good life: Using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of your life to bring abundant gratification and authentic happiness. How to use these strengths in work, love, parenting, and in having a meaningful life is the subject of the final part of the book” (161).