The Happiness Hypothesis

Reading The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth In Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt has been a revelation and a joy. Haidt is a teacher at the Univ. of Virginia and a social psychologist. He says his "corner is morality and the human emotions."

In the book, he lays out a path to happiness buttressed by psychological study and generous references to spirituality and philosophy. Here are a few nuggets that I'd gleaned so far (I am on page 101 of 243):

• Emotion is critical in decision making.
  
  
• Learning to understand, distract and coax the beast of our unconscious mind is critical to happiness.
  
  "An emotionally intelligent person has a skilled rider [conscious mind /reason] who knows how to distract and coax the elephant [our unconscious mind] without having to engage in a direct contest of wills" because the elephant will win such a contest every time.
  
  
• We make decisions based on unconscious emotion and justify them based on reason.
  
  "It is the elephant that decides what is good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Gut feelings, intuitions, and snap judgments happen constantly (as Malcolm Gladwell described in Blink), but only the rider can string sentences together and create arguments to give to other people."
  
  
• Negative emotions leave stronger impressions that positive ones.
  
  For example, "If you were designing the mind of a fish would you have it respond as strongly to opportunities as to threats? No way. The cost of missing a cue that signals food is low; odds are there are other fish [meals] in the sea ... The cost of missing the sign of a nearby predator, however can be catastrophic. Game over ..."
  
  This reminded me of the post that I made about reputation and transparency in June of 2007. One mistake can outweigh hundreds of successes when it comes to people's perceptions of you.
  
  
• Happier people have greater activity in the left side of the frontal cortex in the brain.
  Less happy people have greater activity in the right side of the frontal cortex in the brain.
  
  
• To change your level of happiness ("your affect"), you need to change your thoughts.
  
  
• The 3 best methods for changing your affect are:
  1) Meditation,
  2) Cognitive therapy,
  3) Prozac.
  
  
• The "happiness formula" is: H=S+C+V
  H = Happiness
  S = biological Set point (happiness determined by genetics)
  C = Conditions of your life
  V = Voluntary activities you do.
  
  
• Happiness is determined by strength and number of relationships.
  
  
• Activities that induced happiness are described as the "flow" state, a phrase coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
  
  
• There are 3 key qualities to "flow" experiences:
  1) "There's a clear challenge that fully engages your attention"
  2) "You have the skills to meet the challenge"
  3) "You get immediate feedback about how you are doing at every step."
  
  (Qualities that are present when delivering a well-crafted, successful presentation, by the way.)
  
  
• If you spend money, spend it on experiences, not on stuff - assuming you want to increase your happiness level.
  
  
• You can chart your own happiness and find out what activities are likely to make you happy online at the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center site here. (My chart is below.)

I am happy I found the book ... or the book found me.