{"id":1148,"date":"2011-05-19T18:39:30","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T12:39:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bridgetobhutan.com\/blog\/?p=1148"},"modified":"2011-05-19T18:39:30","modified_gmt":"2011-05-19T12:39:30","slug":"is-happiness-overrated-a-new-gauge-to-see-whats-beyond-happiness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bridgetobhutan.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/19\/is-happiness-overrated-a-new-gauge-to-see-whats-beyond-happiness\/","title":{"rendered":"Is happiness overrated? A New Gauge to See What\u2019s Beyond Happiness"},"content":{"rendered":"

MAY 16, 2011 By\u00a0JOHN TIERNEY<\/span><\/h1>\n

<\/a>Martin Seligman now thinks so, which may seem like an odd position for the founder of the positive\u00a0psychology<\/a> movement. As president of the American Pyschological Association in the late 1990s, he criticized his colleagues for focusing relentlessly on mental illness and other problems. He prodded them to study life\u2019s joys, and wrote a best seller in 2002 titled \u201cAuthentic Happiness.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/h1>\n

But now he regrets that title. As the investigation of happiness proceeded, Dr. Seligman began seeing certain limitations of the concept. Why did couples go on having children even though the data clearly showed that parents are less happy than childless couples? Why did billionaires desperately seek more money even when there was nothing they wanted to do with it?<\/p>\n

And why did some people keep joylessly playing bridge? Dr. Seligman, an avid player himself, kept noticing them at tournaments. They never smiled, not even when they won. They didn\u2019t play to make money or make friends.<\/p>\n

They didn\u2019t savor that feeling of total engagement in a task that\u00a0psychologists<\/a> call flow. They didn\u2019t take aesthetic satisfaction in playing a hand cleverly and \u201cwinning pretty.\u201d They were quite willing to win ugly, sometimes even when that meant cheating.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey wanted to win for its own sake, even if it brought no positive emotion,\u201d says Dr. Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. \u201cThey were like hedge fund managers who just want to accumulate money and toys for their own sake. Watching them play, seeing them cheat, it kept hitting me that accomplishment is a human desiderata in itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

This feeling of accomplishment contributes to what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, which roughly translates to \u201cwell-being\u201d or \u201cflourishing,\u201d a concept that Dr. Seligman has borrowed for the title of his new book,\u00a0\u201cFlourish.\u201d<\/a> He has also created his own acronym, Perma, for what he defines as the five crucial elements of well-being, each pursued for its own sake: positive emotion, engagement (the feeling of being lost in a task), relationships, meaning and accomplishment.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell-being cannot exist just in your own head,\u201d he writes. \u201cWell-being is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The positive psychology movement has inspired efforts around the world to survey people\u2019s state of mind, like a new project in Britain to measure what David Cameron, the prime minister, calls GWB, for general well-being. Dr. Seligman says he\u2019s glad to see governments\u00a0measuring more than just the G.D.P.<\/a>, but he\u2019s concerned that these surveys mainly ask people about their \u201clife satisfaction.\u201d<\/p>\n

In theory, life satisfaction might include the various elements of well-being. But in practice, Dr. Seligman says, people\u2019s answers to that question are largely \u2014 more than 70 percent \u2014 determined by how they\u2019re feeling at the moment of the survey, not how they judge their lives over all.<\/p>\n

\u201cLife satisfaction essentially measures cheerful moods, so it is not entitled to a central place in any theory that aims to be more than a happiology,\u201d he writes in \u201cFlourish.\u201d By that standard, he notes, a government could improve its numbers just by handing out the kind of euphoriant drugs that Aldous Huxley described in \u201cBrave New World.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what should be measured instead? The best gauge so far of flourishing, Dr. Seligman says, comes from a study of 23 European countries by Felicia Huppert and Timothy So of the University of Cambridge. Besides asking respondents about their moods, the researchers asked about their relationships with others and their sense that they were accomplishing something worthwhile.<\/p>\n

Denmark and Switzerland ranked highest in Europe, with more than a quarter of their citizens meeting the definition of flourishing. Near the bottom, with fewer than 10 percent flourishing, were France, Hungary, Portugal and Russia.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no direct comparison available with the United States, although some other researchers say that Americans would do fairly well because of their sense of accomplishment. The economist Arthur Brooks notes that 51 percent of Americans say they\u2019re very satisfied with their jobs, which is a higher percentage than in any European country except Denmark, Switzerland and Austria.<\/p>\n

In his 2008 book, \u201cGross National Happiness,\u201d Dr. Brooks argues that what\u2019s crucial to well-being is not how cheerful you feel, not how much money you make, but rather the meaning you find in life and your sense of \u201cearned success\u201d \u2014 the belief that you have created value in your life or others\u2019 lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople find meaning in providing unconditional love for children,\u201d writes Dr. Brooks, who is now president of the American Enterprise Institute. \u201cParadoxically, your happiness is raised by the very fact that you are willing to have your happiness lowered through years of dirty diapers, tantrums and backtalk. Willingness to accept unhappiness from children is a source of happiness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some happiness researchers have suggested that parents delude themselves about the joys of children: They focus on the golden moments and forget the more frequent travails. But Dr. Seligman says that parents are wisely looking for more than happy feelings.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we just wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago,\u201d he says. \u201c We have children to pursue other elements of well-being. We want meaning in life. We want relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n

In observing people\u2019s need for accomplishment, Dr. Seligman says, he\u2019s reminded of his early experiments that famously identified the concept of \u201clearned helplessness.\u201d He found that when animals or people were given a series of arbitrary punishments or rewards, they stopped trying to do anything constructive.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe found that even when good things occurred that weren\u2019t earned, like nickels coming out of slot machines, it did not increase people\u2019s well-being,\u201d he said. \u201cIt produced helplessness. People gave up and became passive.\u201d<\/p>\n

To avoid that sort of\u00a0malaise<\/a>, Dr. Seligman recommends looking at the basic elements of well-being, identifying which ones matter most to you, setting goals and monitoring progress. Simply keeping track of how much time you spend daily pursuing each goal can make a difference, he says, because it\u2019s easy to see discrepancies between your goals and what you do.<\/p>\n

You might also start to question some of your goals and activities, the way that Dr. Seligman occasionally wonders why he spends so much time playing bridge. It\u2019s brought him some clear achievements \u2014 including a second-place finish in the North American pairs championship \u2014 but he doesn\u2019t pretend that bridge provides any meaning in life. He says he plays for another element of well-being, the feeling of engagement. \u201cI go into flow playing bridge,\u201d he writes, \u201cbut after a long tournament, when I look in the mirror, I worry that I am merely fidgeting until I die.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is playing bridge for the feeling of flow any more worthwhile than playing it just to win? Dr. Seligman doesn\u2019t want to judge.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy view of positive psychology is that it describes rather than prescribes what human beings do,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t want to mess with people\u2019s values. I\u2019m not saying it\u2019s a good or a bad thing to want to win for its own sake. I\u2019m just describing what lots of people do. One\u2019s job as a therapist is not to change what people value, but given what they value, to make them better at it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Source: NY Times<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MAY 16, 2011 By\u00a0JOHN TIERNEY Martin Seligman now thinks so, which may seem like an odd position for the founder of the positive\u00a0psychology movement. As president of the American Pyschological Association in the late 1990s, he criticized his colleagues for focusing relentlessly on mental illness and other problems. He prodded them to study life\u2019s joys, … Continue reading Is happiness overrated? A New Gauge to See What\u2019s Beyond Happiness<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[205,610,627],"class_list":["post-1148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gross-national-happiness","tag-bhutan","tag-gross-national-happiness-gnh","tag-happiness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bridgetobhutan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bridgetobhutan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bridgetobhutan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bridgetobhutan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bridgetobhutan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bridgetobhutan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bridgetobhutan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bridgetobhutan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bridgetobhutan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}