1. How happy are you?
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#happy#
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Everyone has a baseline of happiness that is partly dependent on genes. Some ot us are ‘born lucky’, others are less fortunate. But there’s no need to leave things to chance. Whatever your baseline, you can become much, much happier than you are now. You just have to work at it. That’s what this book is all about. Happiness really is a skill that can be studied.
It will help if you treat being happy as a challenge, just like learning a foreign language, mastering tha lotus position or climbing a mountain. It calls of dedication and, quite often, the setting aside of other less important goals. To be happy you have to make happiness your priority. This is a notion that surprises many people. They think happiness should come as easily as breating or drinking. But it doesn’t.
Can you really teach yourself how to be happy? The answer is emphatically ‘yes’.
You can learn how to make yourself warm and how to make yourself cold. You can learn how to make yourself hungry and how to make yourself full. You can learn all manner of things. Why should happiness be any different?
In essence, it isn’t. Philosophers have long said it. Scientists have proven it. But, like so many things that have to be learned, it requires effort.
Do you really want to be happy?
The answer would seem obvious. And the fact that you’re reading this book only underlines what would appear to be common sense. Surely, everybody wants to be happy!
Well, yes, but the problem is that when it comes to making a choice between happiness and something else, peple so often choose the something else. When ti comes down to it, many people would choose, for example, wealth or power or ‘success’ over happiness. That’s not to say, of course, that you can’t be rich, powerful, ‘successful’ and happy. But there will come occasions when you’re faced with a choice: happiness or wealth; happiness or power; happiness or revenge. Which will you choose then?
In a film called City Slickers, an old cowboy (played by the late Jack Palance) holds up a gloved finger and tells the impressionable tenderfoot Billy Crystal that the secret of happiness is just one thing. Just one. Naturally, Billy wants to know what the one thing is. Jack gives a mysterious little smile and tells him: ‘That’s what you’ve got to figure out.’
In reality, a huge number of things contribute to happiness, but if it was all to be condensed into one piece of advice, just one like Jack Palance’s finger, it would have to be that to be happier than you normally are requires a conscious dedication to happiness.
So the question needs to be repeated. Do you really want to be happy? If the answer is ‘yes’, this book will tell you how. It’s no idle promise. Modern science has unravelled the secrets-or, rather, con- firmed and explained what many philosophers have been saying for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
So you want me to prove that I can make you happier? OK, try this: smile. Turn up the corners of your mouth, wrinkle your nose, raise your checks and narrow your eyes.
How does it feel? Pretty good! When you smile, even without a reason, you cause your’happiness chemicals’to shoot up. So, in future, don’t wait for a reason. Smile anyway.
Now try these two ideas. They’re a little bit more tricky:
*Be grateful. Right now scribble down ten things you can be grateful for. Look at them and think about them. Remember that no matter how bad the situation seems, there are always things to be grateful for.
- Make the decision this minute that you’re going to forgive someone against whom you’ve been harbouring feelings of resentment. Always let go of negative emotions-when you brew poison against someone else you only end up poisoning yourself.
These are examples of the kind of internal changes you’ll need to make. How to increase your internal happiness is the subject of the first few chapters of this book. Still not happier? I don’t believe it, but here are two more quick tips anyway. They’re to do with external happiness, which is dealt with later in the book:
- Go and do something completely crazy immediately. Throw a paper aeroplane at the nearest person, tickle a friend, roll at your partner’s feet like a dog and ask to have your tummy rubbed, or put on some suitably exhilarating music, extend your arms and ‘fly’ round the room. Anything. Being playful boosts the immune system and creates optimism. And, of course, don’t forget to…
- If playing hasn’t done it, watch a funny DVD or log onto a humorous website. Laughter reduces stress and blood pressure and boosts the immune system.
How this book works
This book is designed for everyone who feels they’re somehow not as happy as they could be. If you’re sometimes happy but not a consistently as you’d like, or if when you’re happy you still have that nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right, there should be more, then this book is for you.
Unlike a lot of other books, this one tackles happiness on many fronts. As we’ve seen, it aims to increase both your internal and external happiness. It will teach you how to get rid of your negative thoughts and emotions and replace them with positive ones. It will encourage you to discovery yourself as you are now, to create yourself as you want to be and, above all, to be uninhibited enough to be yourself. It will reveal a whole new way of prioritizing everything in your life. It will show you how to improve your relationships-the bedrock of happiness. It will explain how – even for an atheist – happiness needs a spiritual component. And it will describe simple lifestyle changes that make a positive contirbution to happiness.
Ten things this book will do for you
- Increase your inner
- Increase your external
- Change the physical structure of your brain into that of a ‘happy brain’.
- Give you a more positive
- Teach you how to let go of negative
- Describe simple lifestyle changes that can increase
- Encourage you to find happiness by being
- Help you to make all your relationships
- Convince you that’s morally right to be
- Explain how to develop a happy connection with the world around
Yes, I’m happy, but…
Maybe, if I asked you if you were happy, you’d answer positively. But then, after a few moments, add, ‘but…’.
For most of us there’s always the ‘but’. Sometimes it’s an identifiable ‘but’.
- but it’s difficult when my mother is so ill
- but it’s difficult when I have to die some day
- but it’s difficult when so many people are
At other times it’s because something was good but not perfect:
- but I’d be even happier if only I could afford such-and-such
- but I’d be even happier if I was doing this with someone I was in Love with
- but I’d be even happier if it was just a little for others it’s much less definable:
- but, I don’t know, there always seems to be something lacking
- but there’s always an emptiness inside
- but my soul feels
Let’s deal with one of those ‘buts’ straight away-being happy when many others are not.
Is it morally right to be happy?
You want to be happy and yet somewhere inside a little voice is telling you it’s wrong to be happy. How can you be happy, the little voice insists, when there are people who are starving?
Well, supposing I tell you that the whole point of life is to be happy? Answer this: Are you more likely to help someone else when you’re feeling happy, positive and optimistic or when you’re feeling miserable, irritable and low?
Undoubtedly you know the answer. And research confirms it. When you’re happy you make the people around you happy. In addition, when you’re happy you’re far more likely to help other people than when you’re feeling irritable of depressed. There’s plenty of research to confirm it. So there’s nothing at all wrong with wanting to be happy. On the contrary, it’s the morally right course. Go ahead with a com- pletely clear conscience.
Is true happiness within or without?
Your happiness and your genes
David Lykken, emeritus psychology professor at the University of Minnesota, has studied hun- dreds of identical twins, including those who were separated shortly after birth. His conclusion is that happiness is’at least 50 percent inherited’.
It seems there are genes related to happiness as well as genes related to negative thinking and anxiety. In other words, some people are simply born happier than others.
Other scientists have put the percentage due to heredity as low as 30 percent or as high as 70 percent. But even the scientists who put the genetic factor at the top end, still concede that how happy you feel right now (or anytime) is about half due to the circumstances. In other words, even someone born with a low genetic tendency to be happy can be pretty happy if something good happens. So one of the answers is to make sure nice things keep happening-and we’ll be looking at that later in the book.
In any event, your genes don’t tie you to a specific level of happiness. Rather, they seem to create a tendency towards a certain range of happiness. This book will teach you how to stay at the top of your range.
But there’s another difference in the brain of people who are generally happy and those who are generally unhappy. Richard Davidson, a neuropsychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has discovered that people in whom the left side of the prefrontal cortex dominates are self-confident, optimistic and happy, while those in whom the right side dominates tend to be suspicious, pessimitsic and unhappy.
About a third of people are thought to be left dominant, a third neutral and a third right dominant. In the short term, the side that dominates doesn’t change with circumstances but is a part of your person- ality. But in the long term, you can learn to switch form right-side to left-side dominance.
Davidson confirmed this by testing ten-year-olds whom he’d also studied as babies and found that, in many cases, the dominant side had changed.
But perhaps the strongest evidence came from a man whom Davidson found to have the great- est left-side activity he’d encountered in 20 years. The man was a Tibetan monk who had meditated for more than 10,000 hours.
