Happiness Strategies | How to be Happy

William James, considered by many to be the father of psychology, said:

To give up pretensions
is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified.

This is wonderful wisdom for a happier life. For most of us, there are things about ourselves that we might like to be true, that we might struggle to make true, but that we know in our hearts to be more or less bollocks. And as long as we cling to them, happiness is hard to find.

One such pretension for me is that I’m academic. Last year after finishing a Bachelor of Psychology I was offered a PhD scholarship. I agonised over whether to take it, whether I had the right stuff to be a scholar.

One of my concerns was that I’d spent much of the year watching favourite TV shows, reading books about serial killers, eating junk food, rearranging my playlists, surfing the net, sticking post-its on key pages of fashion magazines and making up very lame jokes with my husband (eg
Q: What does a grammarian get after having a colectomy?
A: A semi-colon).

My friend Sally* spent her time (a) studying and (b) berating me for my inane tastes.

(This became a fun diversion: on seeing her coming, I’d hide Advanced Concepts in Cognition and Perception and start reading Cosmo, bringing forth a vitriolic diatribe of condemnation. What larks! I’d defend myself by quoting that great sage, Homer J. Simpson: Sally, please! I enjoy all the meats of our cultural stew.)

Now it’s not that being an academic and having my interests are mutually exclusive – although let’s face it: leather elbow patches and tweed don’t easily match denim minis, skinny jeans and faux-fur puffa jackets. Rather, it’s a question of what comes from inside out and what comes from outside in.

While pondering the PhD, I realised that for people like Sally esoteric trumps entertaining every time. They’re not doing it to be fancy, it’s who they are. This was liberating, allowing me to embrace my inner bimbo and release my pretensions:

• I’d rather de-clutter my wardrobe than decipher Wernicke’s encephalopathy
• I’m more gifted at lip-synching to Abba at the gym than liberating the secrets of personality disorders in the lab.
• I’m not the person carping about the crap on TV at dinner parties – I’m the one late to the dinner party because I had to set the video for Californication, The L Word and Chaser’s War on Everything.

I decided against the PhD. Instead, I’ve spent this year doing a life coaching course and starting to turn my happiness thesis into a self-help book. I wish things were moving faster but at least I feel they’re moving in the right direction – for me.

And WJ was right – it is a blessed relief.

*Not her real name

Technology can be overwhelming and sometimes it feels more like work than a way to save time or improve productivity. But other times you find tools that really do make life easier.

Here are 3 of my favourite (free) downloads:

1. For searching – Desktop Toolbar

Desktop Toolbar is a nifty, movable toolbar that lets you launch searches across a range of categories:

It automatically opens a new tab or window in your browser, goes to the relevant site, and executes the search on the term you typed in. Destinations are customizable to the ones you use most often – so for instance, my toolbar has Google, iTunes, IMDB, FaceBook, Amazon, Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Wikipedia.

I keep it open at the bottom of my screen while I’m working on a document or post to launch searches quickly and easily, and minimise it at other times.

2. For blogging – Live Writer

Live Writer is a Microsoft blog writer. It lets you write your post offline yet see exactly how it will look in your blog (WordPress, TypePad, etc). You can create new posts, edit drafts, add tags and categories, schedule posts, insert videos and images and spell-check before you post direct to your blog.

It’s super simple and much nicer than working in the blogging software.

Formatting options are poor, but the other benefits make up for this frustration.

3. For downloading – LeechGet

I’m not exactly a power-downloader, but I do get the odd thing and I find LeechGet a handy tool. It’s especially good for capturing those elusive MP3s that open a new window and start playing without providing a download option.

The personal edition is free. But if you want support, updates and the ability to download more than one file at a time, you’ll need to register for LeechGet Premium.

Got a favourite download of your own? Please feel free to share it by making a Comment – the link is just above the next post down.

Albert Schweitzer – humanitarian, prolific author and Nobel Peace Prize winner – said:

Success is not the key to happiness.
Happiness is the key to success.
If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.

If you find that hard to believe, you might like to take a(nother) look at 101 Happiness Strategies: How to be happy – 4. Be happy now.

In that happiness strategy we saw how, across a range of life areas like relationships, work and health, being happy:

- accompanies success
- precedes success
- and even seems to cause success.

So don’t put off happiness till you achieve your dreams. Be happy today and boost your chances of being successful at the things you desire.

Technorati Tags: Happiness,success,Albert Schweitzer,happiness strategies

Eve Ensler created Vagina Monologues after interviewing more than 200 women about their bodies. Its worldwide success helped her establish V-Day, a movement fighting violence against females that has raised more than $35 million for campaigns and direct action.

Here’s what Ensler has to say about happiness:

Happiness exists in action.
It exists in telling the truth and saying what your truth is.
And it exists in giving away what you want the most.

By giving to others what we seek for ourselves, ‘we heal the broken part inside each of us’.

Source of quotes: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/64

Technorati Tags: Happiness,Eve Ensler,On happiness,How to be happy

Dan Gilbert February 2004

This 21-minute talk by Dan Gilbert, whose book Stumbling on Happiness I recently reviewed, is worth watching or listening to. Or get the gist from my summary, below.

In essence:

Different outcomes aren’t so different when it comes to happiness

Outcomes have less impact in both intensity and duration than you’d expect. There’s not much happiness-producing difference between such outcomes as gaining/losing a partner, or getting/not getting a promotion. Research shows:

• A year after winning the lottery or becoming paraplegic, both groups are equally happy with their lives.
• About 3 months after a change (except extremes) there’s negligible impact on happiness.

(This tendency to adapt to life changes is also discussed in 101 Happiness Strategies: How to be happy – 9. Get off the hedonic treadmill.)

Why is there little difference in happiness between outcomes?

Natural versus synthetic happiness

‘Natural’ happiness follows from getting what you want. But happiness can also be synthesised – we have cognitive processes that help us make the most of the worlds we find ourselves in. Whichever outcome we end up with, we tend to retrospectively rate it as the better one.

Some things are better than others

That’s not to say we shouldn’t  have preferences – we should, for instance, prefer a trip to Paris over surgery. But it’s when we overrate the difference between possible outcomes and let ourselves be driven too hard by our preferences, that we risk bad behavior, recklessness and cowardice, and become vulnerable to remorse and shame. 

Don’t worry, be happy

Gilbert final lesson to us is:

Our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown, because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience.

In other words, don’t worry too much.

Whatever happens, if you let yourself, you will be happy.

Technorati Tags: Happiness,Daniel Gilbert,Stumbling on Happiness,synthetic happiness