An article, luckily posted in US News, is entitled as "How Positive Psychology Can Increase Your Happiness". It was written by Lindsay Lyon. This article just appeared on my surfing screen after I tried to post a posting for my blog. Well, it's time to share what I read from Lindsay:
You can thank your parents—in part—for how happy you are; roughly half of human happiness is genetically determined. Another 10 percent comes from your life circumstances, like how happy you are with where you live. But because people quickly adapt to changes, swapping Midwest winters for West Coast warmth, say, won't lead to a lasting boost in life satisfaction, according to longtime happiness researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California-Riverside. What can give us a lasting boost is how we think and behave, she says: About 40 percent of our happiness is under our conscious control.
Happiness, as she and other researchers define it, is comprised of two main components: A cognitive component—that is, how you think about your life, how satisfied you are with your life, and whether you feel that you are progressing towards your life's goals—and an affective component, which has to do with how often you experience positive and negative emotions. Positive emotions, though fleeting, are arguably the hallmark of happiness, she says, and can lead to upward spirals in mood and behavior.
In Lyubomirsky's 2008 book, The How of Happiness, she discusses 12 activities that science suggests can lay the groundwork for increasing and sustaining happiness by creating bursts of positive emotions. These range from practicing acts of kindness to savoring positive things, like your morning pastry, a hot shower, or time with your kids. Because not all of these activities will suit your goals and values, Lyubomirsky advises people to take her Person-Activity Fit Diagnostic before choosing which to practice. Several other factors influence how much they'll work, such as how often you do them, the effort you put in, and how motivated you are to get happier—people motivated to increase their happiness got more benefit from such interventions than those randomly selected to try them, Lyubomirsky found in a recent study. "Happiness takes work," she says. "But over time these strategies will become habitual."
A new iPhone app that launched this month is based on Lyubomirsky's research and her book. The $6.99 Live Happy app allows users to track their happiness levels and practice some of her strategies—gratitude, for example, can be practiced by texting, emailing, or calling someone from your contact list. While Lyubomirsky is not profiting financially off the new app, she will be using it to study how her recommendations work in the real world.
Joy. Interest. Love. Serenity. Awe. Amusement. Pride. Such positive emotions, fleeting feelings that last just seconds or minutes, are the subject of Barbara Fredrickson's research. Fredrickson, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, examines how they can alter our thoughts and actions for the better. She finds, for example that when we're under the influence of positive emotions, our awareness expands. "We literally see more," she says. "Our peripheral vision is expanded." (Negative emotions, on the other hand, narrow our thinking.) She also finds that people who increase their "daily diet" of positive emotions develop closer connections with others, their resilience and optimism strengthens, and they become less depressed and more satisfied with life, compared with people who do nothing to experience them more frequently.
This isn't to suggest it's necessary to strive for constant euphoria—even mild positive emotions can impact a person's growth and outlook over time, she says. Nor must negative emotions be banished. In fact, doing so would be unhealthy, she adds. Instead, Fredrickson has identified a "prescription" for attaining balance between those polar feelings, the amount of each people need to flourish. On average, "we all need at least three positive emotions to lift us up for every negative emotion that drags us down," she says, a "positivity ratio" that arose from work she and a colleague published in 2005. People truly in the "flourishing zone" surpass that mark, although most of us clock in at 2 to 1 or even lower, she says.
The good news, says Fredrickson: "There are multiple ways to raise your ratio." You can increase your positive emotions, you can decrease your negative emotions, or you can do both, she says. Learning to meditate, for example, can boost positive emotions, Fredrickson has found, though a run in the woods, dancing, or reading a new cookbook work best for her. Evidence suggests that there's a correlation between experiencing positive emotions in life and living longer, says Fredrickson, who encourages people to visit her free website and track their positivity ratio nightly for two weeks to see what their average is. Doing so might help you learn the sources of your positive emotions and the triggers for your negative ones. "The truth emerging from the science is that feeling good is a wise investment in our future," she says.
Interested to read more from Lindsay Lion?
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