Can you transmute your suffering? How much control do you have over your level of happiness or satisfaction? An interesting yet unsurprising series of conclusions from the Times Online: So what do you have to do to find happiness?
Great writers from Freud — “the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of Creation” — to Philip Larkin — “man hands on misery to man” — have painted happiness as an elusive butterfly. But ordinary people believe they are happier than average (an obvious impossibility) and that they’ll be even happier in 10 years’ time. If true, it would be good news because research shows that happier people are healthier, more successful, harder-working, caring and more socially engaged. Misery makes people self-obsessed and inactive.
Are they happier because they are harder-working, caring, and more socially-engaged? I think it’s the lack of these things that causes misery rather than the other way around.
One thing makes a striking difference. When two American psychologists studied hundreds of students and focused on the top 10% “very happy” people, they found they spent the least time alone and the most time socialising. Psychologists know that increasing the number of social contacts a miserable person has is the best way of cheering them up. When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote “hell is other people”, the arch-pessimist of existentialist angst was wrong.
On the idea of “learned-helplessness”.
As a psychology graduate working in animal- behaviour labs, Seligman discovered “learned helplessness” and became a big name. Dogs who experience electric shocks that they cannot avoid by their actions simply give up trying. They will passively endure later shocks that they could easily escape. Seligman went on to apply this to humans, with “learned helplessness” as a model for depression. People who feel battered by unsolvable problems learn to be helpless; they become passive, slower to learn, anxious and sad. This idea revolutionised behavioural psychology and therapy by suggesting the need to challenge depressed people’s beliefs and thought patterns, not just their behaviour.
On the six core virtues:
Their holy grail is the classification of strengths and virtues. After a solemn consultation of great works such as the samurai code, the Bhagavad-Gita and the writings of Confucius, Aristotle and Aquinas, Seligman’s happiness scouts discovered six core virtues recognised in all cultures: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence. They have subdivided these into 24 strengths, including humour and honesty.
On emotional stimulus in different areas of the brain. Does this mean that joy is a higher form of thought?
What is it about the structure of the brain that underlies our bias towards negative thinking? And is there a biology of joy? At Iowa University, neuroscientists studied what happens when people are shown pleasant and unpleasant pictures. When subjects see landscapes or dolphins playing, part of the frontal lobe of the brain becomes active. But when they are shown unpleasant images — a bird covered in oil, or a dead soldier with part of his face missing — the response comes from more primitive parts of the brain.
Psychoanalysis versus cognitive therapy:
The tragic legacy of Freud is that many are “unduly embittered about their past, and unduly passive about their future”, says Seligman. His colleague Aaron Beck developed cognitive therapy after becoming disillusioned with his Freudian training in the 1950s. Beck found that as depressed patients talked “cathartically” about past wounds and losses, some people began to unravel. Occasionally this led to suicide attempts, some of which were fatal. There was very little evidence that psychoanalysis worked.
Cognitive therapy places less emphasis on the past. It works by challenging a person’s thinking about the present and setting goals for the future. Another newcomer, brief solution-focused therapy, discourages talk about “problems” and helps clients identify strengths and resources to make positive changes in their lives.
I have to admit, I wonder about how reliable people’s reports of their own happiness really are. Obviously, it’s all you have to go on–you can’t determine someone is happy because they have all the things everyone else wants or whatever. But I’ve known people who always say they’re happy in general but always have something to complain about specifically, for example. People just have different standards for what they think happiness is. And some people might just not want to admit they’re unhappy. In some cases, the person who reports the highest degree of happiness may not be the sort of person we’d want people to emulate.