Articles about happiness

The Happiness Project — Gretchen Rubin

This book made me happy. Gretchen Rubin did her research, found out every possible method for becoming more happy, and then spent a year trying them all out. In the end she decides it has worked — she is happier — and she evaluates which methods worked best for her. She’s read a stack of popular psychology books and self-help guides, so we won’t have to.

The thing that works best for her is a resolutions chart: for example, she’ll resolve to sing every morning, and then put a checkmark on the chart every morning when she remembers to sing. She says that was the best thing because it helped her get other things done, but mainly because it was so satisfying to award herself a checkmark and to look back on the month and see all the evidence of resolutions kept. It’s interesting that this technique, often recommended to help children remember to brush their teeth or put their clothes away, can also work well with adults. I bet Rubin had very clean teeth as a child, and probably still does.

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Flourish — Martin Seligman

FlourishHuman well-being consists of more than just happiness. In this book, Martin Seligman presents one way of breaking down well-being into its components, so we can try to improve all of them and enable ourselves to flourish. PERMA is the acronym for the five components he identifies:

  • Positive emotion
  • Engagement
  • Relationships
  • Meaning
  • Achievement

All five of these elements must be present for a person to truly flourish. This shows, for example, why money cannot buy happiness. It can buy positive emotion and possibly achievement, but leaves you short in the other three elements and therefore unfulfilled despite your riches.

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The Happiness Advantage — Shawn Achor

The Happiness Advantage

Success does not lead to happiness. Rather, happiness leads to success, according to this book. The brains’s neuroplasticity means we can make our thinking more flexible and actually become smarter, and we can help this to happen by taking steps to become happier. For example, in one study, doctors made more accurate diagnoses if they were given a lollipop beforehand. Such trivial mood enhancers make us more effective — that’s The Happiness Advantage, the first of his seven principles.

Achor lists some ways to become happier: Continue reading

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100 Ways to Happy Children

100 Ways to Happy Children: A guide for busy parents by Dr Timothy Sharp

What parent, busy or otherwise, doesn’t want happy children? This book is a good list of reminders for all these things that parents know they should do, but sometimes forget.

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