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The Science Of Happiness
Hogwash McFly writes "There's an interesting article over at The Times that attempts to answer the question 'So what do you have to do to find happiness?' by exploring the biology and psychology behind this highly sought-after emotion. This article opens up new insight into the common perceptions of what makes us happy, such as having more friends and more money. Detailed in the article is the idea that our early ancestors' struggles against adverse weather and predators have led us to instinctually focus on what is wrong or out of place in order to react with more efficiency, then going onto autopilot when things are going well."
Enjoy every day as if it was your last, life is a big party, Work is slavery
After having been chronically depressed for the past years i found out that happiness is just a balance of the right drugs.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
No matter where you are or what you acheive, one is never truly happy. To be happy is to be content.. and to be content is to lack the craving to better oneself. And to lack that craving is to lack a fundamental part of 'survival of the fittest.'
Yes.. It's human nature to be discontent.. and that separates some of us from the apes.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
For happiness levels are probably genetic: identical twins are usually equally bubbly or grumpy.
This doesn't mean it's genetic. Twins most likely grew up together, right? Couldn't it have something to do with the environment/family instead of genes?
Bradley Holt
I'm surprised the article doesn't explore Religion and it's affect on people's happiness.
Soma
Happiness isn't having what you want, it's wanting what you have.
Sarcams is a bloody joy and irony is jolly good too =)
"Learn that you do not need anything except the biological neccessities for survival."
Why are you posting on /. and engaging in higher thought processes and abstract conversation then? What has that to do with biological necessities?
"Appreciate the present, but don't be considered with the future."
Really? You don't care about the future? I'm glad you value your present so much as to not be concerned with the future. Strictly speaking as going by your first comment, survival machines worry about the future. Their biological necessity for survival as you put it is very much concerned with the future. Looks like you have a value conflict here eh?
"Not only can you not buy happiness, buying actively makes you unhappy."
Says who? Do you have any scientific evidence that states that the brain state is unhappy when buying products? Or are you just playing to the /. groupthink so you get modded up?
To find a complete science of happiness, we'd need to find out a master formula to create/rate good music, a formula for art, one for thought and games (sport, console or otherwise), and the various other senses (touch, smell, taste).
Those are the fundamentals.
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I'm not sure that's entirely true, but I will say this: While money can't buy happiness, below a certain point, a lack thereof will assuredly buy misery.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Serious question: how do they sort out cause and effect? They observed a correlation between happiness and social interaction; but which is which?
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_Pyramid
Physiological, Safety, Love/Belonging, Esteem, Actualization.
Fulfill these needs and you'll find happiness. (An interesting thought is that this view does not oppose christianity at all, they seem to fit very well)
A personal observation upon myself is that the darkest times of my life were the ones where none (or only one) of these needs were fulfilled. If I didn't believe in God, i would surely have killed myself - so maybe Maslow's pyramid could also be used as an indicator for potential suicides. Just a thought.
If you don't take the "free gift" of "forgiveness" for perceived sins of any magnitude, you get an infinite (all eternity) amount of punishment in God's private dungeon, which is disproportionate to *any* amount of sin one could conceivably commit in a lifetime. This is the definition of coercion.
For me, you cannot be happy until you have been horribly unhappy first.
I am now approaching the second year of my divorce. My marital breakup was equivalent to the asteroid that ended the dinosaurs. I lost massive weight before working out and putting back on muscle. I learned to jog and became a better father. I read book after book on relationships, divorce, psychology and religion and finally came to the conclusion that most, if not all, of my unhappiness in life came from the fact of trying to control the free will of others. I happened upon a theory I call "reality philosophy." I mainly base this on Robert Ringer who points out in his theory of reality:
Reality isn't what you hope it would be. It isn't what it even appears to be, but with careful investigation it is what it is. You either go with it and benefit from it or fight it and suffer.
I have learned to let go and stop trying to control things. I think Fight Club says it best when Tyler tells the narrator in the car as he's trying to keep it between the lines, "look at you! you're pathetic! just let it go...." Truly, it isn't until we've lost everything that we are free to do anything. I am a living example of this.
Looking back, if anything made me a man it was my divorce. I went through a crash course of the legal system, the hell of financial trauma, work stress, single-fatherhood, on and on. Divorce hits you on every level imaginable. But I was determined to survive and thrive. I now am in the third basketball season as a YMCA children's coach. I have found one of the most therapuetic things is to volunteer my time for something like this. The kids are my doctors, counselors as I watch them grow, learn and each season as I've coached basketball, soccer, etc. I find the practices and the games are the highlights of my life. I am better at my job, my appearance, my relationships, name it. I wouldn't trade my divorce for anything because I never knew that I wasn't even happy before it.
I am now leaner and wiser than ever and am a far better person to be around. I dove into religion and books as I said. Here are some qoutes I carried in my pocket for a solid year and committed to memory. Each chance I got -- if waiting somewhere with nothing to do for example -- I would get them out and go over them:
Attitudes are more important than facts. -Karl Menninger
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your mind in Christ Jesus. -Philippians 4:6-7
Stand up to an obstacle. Just stand up to it, that's all, and don't give way under it, and it will finally break. You will break it. Something has to break, and it won't be you, it will be the obstacle. -Peale
Do not take the attitude that you are in a situation in which nobody has ever been before. There is no such situation. -Peale
People have overcome every conceivable difficult situation. -Peale
A clean engine always delivers power. -Peale
Never tell me the odds. -Hans Solo
A mind free of negatives will always produce positives. -Peale
There is no spoon. -Peale
Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain. -Emerson
If you had faith... nothing would be impossible. -Matthew 17:20
Throw your heart over the bar and your body will follow. -Peale
The rough is only mental. -Peale
There is a time when we must decide and act and never look back. -Phillips
If a man will devote his time to securing facts in an impartial, objective way, his worries will usually evaporate in the light of knowledge. -Hawkes
When worrying about something always ask two questions: 1. What am I worrying about? 2. What can I do about it? -Litchfie
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
They had that meeting. Half of them decided to try for consistency and the other half decided to go for completeness. The completeness half is doing great, but makes absolutely no sense. And the consistency half gave up and became atheists.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
"Men don't know what happiness is until they are married, but by then it's too late"
“Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.”—Oscar Levant
For me, happiness doesn't come from what I can get, only from what I can do.
I don't know if you spend much money on your medication, or if you have noticed any unwanted side-effects from it at all, but the brunt of what follows is simply a rant about why you really don't need to be taking any such medication. Although this implies that you would have any desire to remove your dependency upon the drugs, and that you're willing to perform the necessary self-experimentation (or, at the very least, research) to discover what the true root cause(s) of your problems is(/are).
The body is an intricate machine. I truly hope that at some point you become aware that your imbalances are due largely to the myriad consequential effects of the various substances you ingest, inhale, absorb, or otherwise take in. Additionally, recent studies (and I have to say I'd arrived at this conclusion just from my own experiences) seem to indicate that your mind-set (whether it feels as though you have control over it or not) will have a large impact on your physical well-being; the more you feel angry/upset/helpless/stressed/afraid or various other sensations, the harder it can be (and seemingly almost always is) for your body to recover from injuries, produce white blood cells, cleanse toxins from the colon/sinuses/lymph glands, and a whole slew of other adverse effects.
Certainly there's a lot more to be known in these areas, but there's one idea which I perceive as blatantly clear: any dependency on any sort of drug is an indicator that something deeper is going wrong to prevent the body from functioning as well as it is capable.
Happiness is:
A wonderful woman on your lap,
a lit joint in your lips,
a cold highball in your hand,
a leather wallet full of cash,
and the knowledge that
you don't have to set
the alarm clock for tomorrow.
...because you always give what you have.
The unhappy people can't stand happy people. So if you're unhappy, you will more likely seek depressing and complaining company, than cheerful, vibrant and active people. That doesn't mean they don't exist, you just shut everything positive away, so you can live what you think you are right now. Depression leads to dullness and stagnation, and is also fueled by it, while the way to come out of it is to become active and seek out good company/do good things for others etc. It's really very simple! Yet, when you're stuck with your unhappiness, it seems so hard. You think that 'you' are unhappy, so you stay there longer. We know what to do, yet, we find so many excuses for not doing it. This is mainly because we have been trained to do so, and have perfected its mastery very well. The mind is pretty sneaky actually!
Don't fall for the truth of unhappy people about what is our true nature. Have you seen a child? It is never depressed. A child cannot be depressed. It learns that behaviour from the environment, which it eagerly emulates, and when put under stress for a long time. The younger the child, the more happiness, creativity, laughter, playfullness, innocense and all the other good qualities.
So we need to get rid of our stress and negative patterns that lets us be stuck with a worldview that dictates we shouldn't be 'too happy'. That is truly an art, and then we will discover WHO WE TRULY ARE.
'Old trite arguments'? There's no such thing. It depends on the listener!
Are you your stress?
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
set realistic boundaries with people, and stick to them.
don't involve yourself with unhealthy social behaviour.
set aside time to yourself everyday.
appreciate what you have, not what you have not.
flying muppet yoda would say:
simple things are they, improve life they will.
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If you search for happiness in the external world, you'll never find it. Because, logically, happiness comes from the mind itself. If you consider the rich, the famous, and even, the successful, they aren't necessarily happy because happiness doesn't depend on external things. I think if more people realized this truly, there would be less focus on materialism, and *more* peace in the world. As far as finding happiness through drugs... the brain is not the mind. It's related to the mind and it *can* affect the mind. How we feel is determined by what we believe in, not by our current predicament.
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For me, _Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience_ by Mihaly Csiksczentmihalyi defines happiness. I'm happiest when I'm actively engaged in an activity that is neither so difficult that it's frustrating nor so easy that it's boring. If I'm mentally and psychologically engaged in doing something that's near the limits of my abilities, so that success is possible but not guaranteed, then life is good.