The race of wealth is verily only the race of happiness in disguise. But as a succeed of the global financial crisis, many of us have realized we need strategies for wellbeing that are within our operate and not reliant on financial safety as their foundation stone.
Advice on how to get happy ranges from the practical (smile at a stranger) to the plain woolly (tell yourself 100 times that you are 'worth loving'). And the guidance in most help-yourself-to-happiness books is wishful-thinking rather than science-based. Add to that the fact that it is one thing getting happy, but quite someone else staying that way, and it all seems rather daunting.
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However, a new study at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, promises to tell us not only how to get happy, but how to stay happy too. "The Happiness Project", headed by academic Alison Ogier-Price, explores how we can motivate ourselves towards long term happiness by using strategies such as gratitude and savouring, surrounded by others.
There have been several studies linking the positive effects of gratitude to emotional and bodily wellbeing. One of the most curious findings, from a Us study, demonstrated that showing gratitude for the good things in our lives every day for just one week, has a positive impact on happiness that may last for six months or more.
Gratitude forms part of a positive reasoning attitude and it is pretty uncomplicated to be thankful for the obviously good things - waking up to a sunny day or a pay rise at work for example. Ogier-Price uses two further aspects of gratitude in her explore - being thankful for the tough stuff as well as the good stuff, and taking responsibility for how we brought that thing we are grateful for into our lives.
It is being thankful for hardships, and turning those around in our minds that we are better able to cope with life's difficulties. Here, Ogier-Price walks her talk with her positive perspective on her depression, which informed her foray into the field of positive psychology. She comments "When I was first diagnosed I had severe depression and just wanted to hide away from the world. Initially medication and then seeing new ways to carry on myself and my life changed that dramatically. Now I am able to view my depression verily positively. It forces me to slow down, to look after myself, to read my reasoning and emotional signs and act on them - I've harnessed its benefits."
While a sense of appreciation of the good and the bad is important, more crucial is acknowledging the part one plays in bringing things of value into one's own life, or the 'causal explanation' for those, as Ogier-Price puts it. Ogier-Price explains: "It is one thing to be thankful for something, but the key is the next step - acknowledging the active part we played in bringing that thing into our life. For example, if you are thankful that you had coffee with a favorite friend, retort the part you played in bringing this friendship about, and in being a good listener, which has nurtured that relationship".
Through this extended type of gratitude, we not only see more positive things in our lives in the first place, we create the further benefits of self-esteem and a sense of being in operate of our positive experiences.
Recent studies have hypothesized that our capability to contact religious feeling served an evolutionary purpose. Professor Jordan Grafman, from the Us National produce of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, near Washington conducted a study to analyze why religion is a universal human feature. Grafman says: "Our results retain modern psychological theories that ground religious reliance within evolutionary-adaptive cognitive functions." So humans could be hard-wired to be religious because for example, it is beneficial in overcoming adversity.
Thankfulness, for both the trials of life and for its blessings, is a quarterly highlight of religious worship and explore has shown that religious citizen are more likely to express gratitude, with faith improving the capability to be grateful. This maybe indicates that we are also predisposed, in an evolutionary sense, to use gratitude as a tool for creating harmonious public groups and overcoming hardship.
Ogier-Price runs quarterly Science of Happiness courses at the University of Canterbury, which use gratitude along with other strategies such as optimism, mindfulness and character strengths to growth the happiness levels and decrease depression in participants. A succeed she has shown with her own research. It is these strategies that are used in the new study, along with new strategies for maintaining the resulting increases in wellbeing.
The policy is research-based and is light years away from positive affirmation self-help techniques. The positive affirmation mantra with its statements such as "I am a fabulous human being who deserves to be loved", was recently discredited by a study at the University of Waterloo in Canada. It found that positive self-statements, when said by someone with low self-esteem, verily may cause negative moods because they friction with a person's true sense of identity.
Ogier-Price is keen to stress that her policy is verily about the science of wellbeing, with happiness just one of many emotions - together with the 'negative' ones - which have a requisite place in our lives. Without anger for example, we would not recognize a threat or a need to take activity to safe ourselves. Sadness helps us to see what is of value in our lives. And anxiety can spur us to prepare thoroughly for something. It is only when these emotions are experienced too often or for too long that they may come to be destructive. The same is true of the range of positive emotions. someone in a constant state of excitement for example would find it hard to apply themselves to anything.
According to scientists we think up to 50,000 thoughts every day, an estimated 80% of which are negative, and most of which are wrong. The thoughts we focus on depend on the type of filters we have which say what is, and what is not important. As Ogier-Price says "the truth is that we visit reality to get data and then retreat into our self-made views of the world". It's no wonder there is so much inherent for friction of view in our lives, and there is maybe a message here about being more tolerant to the world-view of others.
In evolutionary terms, it may have been beneficial to think negatively and take a pessimistic view of the world, as it was requisite to be on constant alert for danger. However, although we are hard-wired to be negative and pessimistic, the good news is two-fold. Firstly pessimism is not always such a bad thing. As Ogier-Price asks "would you want your lawyer or wedding planner to be an optimist, or a pessimist?" I know I'd want pessimists on my side who dotted every 'i' and crossed every 't' and had contingencies."
Secondly we have far more power to alter our level of positivity and happiness than we maybe think. explore has shown that practically 50 per cent of our habit is informed by genetics and only around ten per cent by our life circumstances such as our upbringing and material life. So there is very little point focusing on the new car and laying our ills at the door of our past, when this only accounts for such a measly proportion of our lifelong wellbeing. That leaves a whole 40 per cent which is down to our free will and comprises voluntary and intentional activities.
So while we can use that 40 per cent wisely with practices like gratitude, Ogier-Price's new study hopes to narrate how to apply at least some of that 40 per cent to maintaining our new found sense of wellbeing.
For further data about "The Happiness Project" by Alison Ogier-Price of the University of Canterbury: http://www.tinyurl.com/happyproject
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