In pursuit of a temporal anonmaly [happiness]Psychologists know "increasing the number of social contacts a miserable person has is the best way of cheering up".
People who feel battered by unsolvable problems learn to be helpless; they become passive, slower to learn, anxious and sad. There is a need to challenge depressed people's beliefs and thought patterns, not just their behaviour.
"What you feel is a result of what you're thinking, so I was able to monitor my irrational, negative thought processes."
Seligman's core virtues of happiness: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence.
Of the six universal emotions, four - anger, fear, disgust and sadness- are negative and only one, joy, is positive.
"Hedonic treadmill" modern humans, stuck with ancient brains, rapidly and inevitably adapt to good things by taking them for granted.
"The things that you desire are not the things that you end up liking"
The mechanisms of desire are insatiable.
There are things that you we really like and tire of less quickly - having good friend, the beauty of the natural world, spirituality. But our economic system plays into the pyschology of wanting and the psychology of liking gets drowned out.
Increase happiness??
- Write down three things that went well and why, every day for a week.
- Identify your signature strengths and using one them in a new and different way every day for a week.
- Writing a long letter to someone you're grateful to but have never properly thanked, and visiting them to read it out in person.
www.reflectivehappiness.com
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