You expect to get pregnant in the next five minutes. You've heard it all. Usually we spend our life to find a little happiness -- but it is not so easy for everyone. In this book, you will have the ultimate guide to finding and creating real feelings of happiness in daily life. It is not easy to make a perfect balance of work and personal life because of busy schedules.
When you want to improve your lifestyle, you will get help from the different chapters of this book. In Happiness by Design, happiness and behavior expert Paul Dolan combines the latest insights from economics and psychology to illustrate that in order to be happy we must behave happy Our happiness is experiences of both pleasure and purpose over time and it depends on what we actually pay attention to.
Using what Dolan calls deciding, designing, and doing, we can overcome the biases that make us miserable and redesign our environments to make it easier to experience happiness, fulfilment, and even health. It can be found in your mind. Some of his key points may be hard for the cynical to swallow at first, but Gilbert presents a strong piece of media that affirms the often uttered but rarely practiced adage that the true path to happiness is through ourselves.
He has written fashion columns and feature articles for AND and Xpress Magazines, maintained his own fashion blog at yourdailyfashionfix. He has a B. When he's not setting word to processor, he swims, jogs, and sings Linda Ronstadt classics. Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling On Happiness, begs to differ.
Gilbert opens with a look at the evolution of the human brain, which h. Get yours today. Whether on your desk at home or in your bag on the go our professionally designed! Specifications: Cover Finish: Matte Dimensions: 6" x 9" But defining happiness can be difficult.
By examining what it is, assessing its importance in our lives, and how we can and should pursue it, he considers the current thinking on happiness, from psychology to philosophy. Illustrating the diverse routes to happiness, Haybron reflects on contemporary ideas about the pursuit of a good life and considers the influence of social context on our satisfaction and well-being.
These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. In Against Happiness, the scholar Eric G. Wilson argues that melancholia is necessary to any thriving culture, that it is the muse of great literature, painting, music, and innovation—and that it is the force underlying original insights. So enough Prozac-ing of our brains. Let's embrace our depressive sides as the wellspring of creativity. What most people take for contentment, Wilson argues, is living death, and what the majority takes for depression is a vital force.
In Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, Wilson suggests it would be better to relish the blues that make humans people.
Happy amnesia The ability to imagine -- to try to predict our future state of mind -- is what sets us apart from less-evolved species. It's also the very thing that stunts our shot at true happiness. We assume that a sportier car, a bigger house, a better-paying job, or that dress will bring us joy because, well, they did in the past, right? Not really, says Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychology professor and the author of Stumbling on Happiness. We forget that the new-car high deflated well before our first trip to the mechanic, and the raise came with stressful late nights at the office and a steeper tax tab.
Our appetite for self-destruction What's so wrong with relishing and embellishing the good? It's costly. Faulty emotional recall makes us do dumb things with our money, like buying cool new stuff that never quite satisfies. In so many areas, we know when enough is enough.
When we're healthy, we don't strive for extreme health. After a good meal, we're sated -- we don't order another filet mignon to augment our satisfaction. Yet our "pause" button shorts out when it comes to money. The brief pick-me-up that accompanies a raise or windfall think of it like a caffeine buzz drives us to want more. We get a raise, spend it, adapt to our improved circumstances, and seek more money, working up a sweat on what University of Southern California economist Richard Easterlin calls the hedonic treadmill.
But somehow the happy-o-meter stays in the same place, or even slows down. Consider that the average American is less satisfied with life today than we were in the s -- yet we earn twice as much and, yes, that's adjusted for inflation.
The main characters of this non fiction, psychology story are ,. Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in Stumbling on Happiness may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.
Imagine that as you experience the newspaper article, your awareness becomes permanently unbound from your experience, and you never catch yourself drifting away—never return to the moment with a start to discover that you are reading. The young couple at the nearby table stop pawing each other long enough to lean over and ask you for the latest news on the campaign-finance reform bill, and you patiently explain that you could not possibly know that because, as they would surely see if only they would pay attention to something other than their glands, you are happily listening to the sounds of spring and not reading a newspaper.
The young couple is perplexed by this response, because as far as they can see, you do indeed have a newspaper in your hands and your eyeballs are, in fact, running rapidly across the page even as you deny it. After a bit of whispering and one more smooch, they decide to run a test to determine whether you are telling the truth.
But it appears that the only way to get these strange people to mind their own business is to tell them something, so you pull a number out of thin air. This scenario may seem too bizarre to be real after all, how likely is it that forty-one senators would actually vote for campaign-finance reform?
Our visual experience and our awareness of that experience are generated by different parts of our brains, and as such, certain kinds of brain damage specifically, lesions to the primary visual cortical receiving area known as V1 can impair one without impairing the other, causing experience and awareness to lose their normally tight grip on each other.
For example, people who suffer from the condition known as blindsight have no awareness of seeing, and will truthfully tell you that they are completely blind. On the other hand, the same scans reveal relatively normal activity in the areas associated with vision.
She is seeing, if by seeing we mean experiencing the light and acquiring knowledge about its location, but she is blind, if by blind we mean that she is not aware of having seen. Her eyes are projecting the movie of reality on the little theater screen in her head, but the audience is in the lobby getting popcorn. This dissociation between awareness and experience can cause the same sort of spookiness with regard to our emotions.
Others of us come equipped with a somewhat more basic emotional vocabulary that, much to the chagrin of our romantic partners, consists primarily of good, not so good, and I already told you. For instance, when researchers show volunteers emotionally evocative pictures of amputations and car wrecks, the physiological responses of alexithymics are indistinguishable from those of normal people. But when they are asked to make verbal ratings of the unpleasantness of those pictures, alexithymics are decidedly less capable than normal people of distinguishing them from pictures of rainbows and puppies.
Warm the Happyometer Once upon a time there was a bearded God who made a small, flat earth, and pasted it in the very middle of the sky so that human beings would be at the center of everything. Then physics came along and complicated the picture with big bangs, quarks, branes, and superstrings, and the payoff for all that critical analysis is that now, several hundred years later, most people have no idea where they are.
Psychology has also created problems where once there were none by exposing the flaws in our intuitive understandings of ourselves. Maybe the universe has several small dimensions tucked inside the large ones, maybe time will eventually stand still or flow backward, and maybe folks like us were never meant to fathom a bit of it.
But one thing we can always count on is our own experience. If the goal of science is to make us feel awkward and ignorant in the presence of things we once understood perfectly well, then psychology has succeeded above all others. But like happiness, science is one of those words that means too many things to too many people and is thus often at risk of meaning nothing at all.
My own definition of science is a bit more eclectic, but one thing about which I, my dad, and most other scientists can agree is that if a thing cannot be measured, then it cannot be studied scientifically. It can be studied, and one might even argue that the study of such unquantifiables is more worthwhile than all the sciences laid end to end.
But it is not science because science is about measurement, and if a thing cannot be measured—cannot be compared with a clock or a ruler or something other than itself—it is not a potential object of scientific inquiry. All of this suggests that the scientific study of subjective experience is bound to be tough going.
Tough, yes, but not impossible, because the chasm between experiences can be bridged—not with steel girders or a six-lane toll road, mind you, but with a length of reasonably sturdy rope—if we accept three premises. Measuring Right The first premise is something that any carpenter could tell you: Imperfect tools are a real pain, but they sure beat pounding nails with your teeth. But if we do that, then it is only fair that we hand them the study of almost everything else as well.
Chronometers, thermometers, barometers, spectrometers, and every other device that scientists use to measure the objects of their interest are imperfect. Every one of them introduces some degree of error into the observations it allows, which is why governments and universities pay obscene sums of money each year for the slightly more perfect version of each.
And if we are purging ourselves of all things that afford us only imperfect approximations of the truth, then we need to discard not only psychology and the physical sciences but law, economics, and history as well.
In short, if we adhere to the standard of perfection in all our endeavors, we are left with nothing but mathematics and the White Album.
So maybe we just need to accept a bit of fuzziness and stop complaining. The second premise is that of all the flawed measures of subjective experience that we can take, the honest, real-time report of the attentive individual is the least flawed. For example, electromyography allows us to measure the electrical signals produced by the striated muscles of the face, such as the corrugator supercillia, which furrows our brows when we experience something unpleasant, or the zygomaticus major, which pulls our mouths up toward our ears when we smile.
Physiography allows us to measure the electrodermal, respiratory, and cardiac activity of the autonomic nervous system, all of which change when we experience strong emotions. Electroencephalography, positron-emission tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging allow us to measure electrical activity and blood flow in different regions of the brain, such as the left and right prefrontal cortex, which tend to be active when we are experiencing positive and negative emotions, respectively.
Even a clock can be a useful device for measuring happiness, because startled people tend to blink more slowly when they are feeling happy than when they are feeling fearful or anxious. After all, the only reason why we take any of these bodily events—from muscle movement to cerebral blood flow—as indices of happiness is that people tell us they are. If everyone claimed to feel raging anger or thick, black depression when their zygomatic muscle contracted, their eyeblink slowed, and the left anterior brain region filled with blood, then we would have to revise our interpretations of these physiological changes and take them as indices of unhappiness instead.
She may not always remember what she felt before, and she may not always be aware of what she is feeling right now. We may be puzzled by her reports, skeptical of her memory, and worried about her ability to use language as we do. We will have greater confidence in her claims when they jibe with what other, less privileged observers tell us, when we feel confident that she evaluates her experience against the same background that we do, when her body does what most other bodies do when they experience what she is claiming to experience, and so on.
But even when all of these various indices of happiness dovetail nicely, we cannot be perfectly sure that we know the truth about her inner world.
We can, however, be sure that we have come as close as observers ever get, and that has to be good enough. But if we are cognizant of the scratch, we can do our best to factor it out of our observations, reminding ourselves that what looks like a rip in space is really just a flaw in the device we are using to observe it. The answer lies in a phenomenon that statisticians call the law of large numbers.
Many of us have a mistaken idea about large numbers, namely, that they are like small numbers, only bigger. As such, we expect them to do more of what small numbers do but not to do anything different. So, for instance, we know that two neurons swapping electrochemical signals across their axons and dendrites cannot possibly be conscious. Nerve cells are simple devices, less complex than walkie-talkies from Sears, and they do one simple thing, namely, react to the chemicals that reach them by releasing chemicals of their own.
If we blithely go on to assume that ten billion of these simple devices can only do ten billion simple things, we would never guess that billions of them can exhibit a property that two, ten, or ten thousand cannot.
Consciousness is precisely this sort of emergent property—a phenomenon that arises in part as a result of the sheer number of interconnections among neurons in the human brain and that does not exist in any of the parts or in the interconnection of just a few. We know that subatomic particles have the strange and charming ability to exist in two places at once, and if we assume that anything composed of these particles must behave likewise, we should expect all cows to be in all possible barns at the same time.
Which they obviously are not, because fixedness is another one of those properties that emerges from the interaction of a terribly large number of terribly tiny parts that do not themselves have it.
In short, more is not just more—it is sometimes other—than less. The magic of large numbers works along with the laws of probability to remedy many of the problems associated with the imperfect measurement of subjective experience. As such, if you have nothing better to do on a Tuesday evening, I invite you to meet me at the Grafton Street Pub in Harvard Square and play an endearingly mindless game called Splitting the Tab with Dan.
We flip a coin, I call heads, you call tails, and the loser pays the good barkeep, Paul, for our beers each time. Now, if we flipped the coin four times and I won on three of them, you would undoubtedly chalk it up to bad luck on your part and challenge me to darts. But if we flipped the coin four million times and I won on three million of them, then you and your associates would probably send out for a large order of tar and feathers.
But when numbers are large, such imperfections stop mattering. There may have been a dollop of sweat on the coin on a few of the flips, and there may have been a wayward puff of air on a few others, and these imperfections might well account for the fact that the coin came up heads once more than expected when we flipped it four times.
But what are the odds that these imperfections could have caused the coin to come up heads a million more times than expected? Infinitesimal, your intuition tells you, and your intuition is spot on. The odds are as close to infinitesimal as things on earth get without disappearing altogether.
This same logic can be applied to the problem of subjective experience. Suppose we were to give a pair of volunteers a pair of experiences that were meant to induce happiness—say, by giving a million dollars to one of them and the gift of a small-caliber revolver to the other.
We then ask each volunteer to tell us how happy he or she is. The nouveau riche volunteer says she is ecstatic, and the armed volunteer says he is mildly pleased though perhaps not quite as pleased as one ought to make an armed volunteer.
Is it possible that the two are actually having the same subjective emotional experiences but describing them differently? The new millionaire may be demonstrating politeness rather than joy. Or perhaps the new pistol owner is experiencing ecstasy but, because he recently shook the hand of God near the Great Barrier Reef, is describing his ecstasy as mere satisfaction. These problems are real problems, significant problems, and we would be foolish to conclude on the basis of these two reports that happiness is not, as it were, a warm gun.
But if we gave away a million pistols and a million envelopes of money, and if 90 percent of the people who got new money claimed to be happier than 90 percent of the people who got new weapons, the odds that we are being deceived by the idiosyncrasies of verbal descriptions become very small indeed. But if this were to happen over and over again with hundreds or thousands of people, some of whom tasted the coconut-cream pie before the banana-cream pie and some of whom tasted it after, we would have good reason to suspect that different pies really do give rise to different experiences, one of which is more pleasant than the other.
After all, what are the odds that everyone misremembers banana-cream pie as better and coconut-cream pie as worse than they really were? In other words, if the experience and description scales are calibrated a bit differently for every person who uses them, then it is impossible for scientists to compare the claims of two people.
Two is too small a number, and when it becomes two hundred or two thousand, the different calibrations of different individuals begin to cancel one another out. After all, we may have used pickled rulers. But if hundreds of people with hundreds of rulers stepped up to one of these objects and took its measurements, we could average those measurements and feel reasonably confident that a tyrannosaurus is indeed bigger than a root vegetable.
After all, what are the odds that all the people who measured the dinosaur just so happened to have used stretched rulers, and that all the people who measured the turnip just so happened to have used squished rulers?
When a fruit salad, a lover, or a jazz trio is just too imperfect for our tastes, we stop eating, kissing, and listening. But the law of large numbers suggests that when a measurement is too imperfect for our tastes, we should not stop measuring. Quite the opposite—we should measure again and again until niggling imperfections yield to the onslaught of data.
By the same logic, the careful collection of a large number of experiential reports allows the imperfections of one to cancel out the imperfections of another. The science of happiness requires that we play the odds, and thus the information it provides us is always at some risk of being wrong. But if you want to bet against it, then flip that coin one more time, get out your wallet, and tell Paul to make mine a Guinness.
What could be more important than feelings? Sure, war and peace may come to mind, but are war and peace important for any reason other than the feelings they produce? Are you looking to any other standard but pleasure and pain when you call them good?
We would expect any creature that feels pain when burned and pleasure when fed to call burning and eating bad and good, respectively, just as we would expect an asbestos creature with no digestive tract to find such designations arbitrary.
Moral philosophers have tried for centuries to find some other way to define good and bad, but none has ever convinced the rest or me. We cannot say that something is good unless we can say what it is good for, and if we examine all the many objects and experiences that our species calls good and ask what they are good for, the answer is clear: By and large, they are good for making us feel happy.
Given the importance of feelings, it would be nice to be able to say precisely what they are and how one might measure them.
Nonetheless, if the methodological and conceptual tools that science has developed do not allow us to measure the feelings of a single individual with pinpoint accuracy, they at least allow us to go stumbling in the dark with pickled rulers to measure dozens of individuals again and again. The problem facing us is a difficult one, but it is too important to ignore: Why do we so often fail to know what will make us happy in the future?
Science offers some intriguing answers to this question, and now that we have a sense of the problem and a general method for solving it, we are ready to inspect them.
He did not incite the riot. In fact, he was nowhere near the riot the night the policemen were killed. So Adolph Fischer was tried and, on the basis of paid and perjured testimony, sentenced to die for a crime he did not commit.
One year after Fischer was hanged, a bright young fellow perfected the process of dry photography, launched his revolutionary Kodak camera, and instantly became one of the richest men in the world. In the decades that followed, George Eastman developed a revolutionary management philosophy as well, giving his employees shorter hours, disability benefits, retirement annuities, life insurance, profit sharing, and, ultimately, one third of the stock in his company.
On March 14, , the beloved inventor and humanitarian sat down at his desk, wrote a brief note, neatly capped his fountain pen, and smoked a cigarette.
Then he surprised everyone by killing himself. Both men believed that common laborers have a right to fair wages and decent working conditions, and both dedicated much of their lives to bringing about social change at the dawn of the industrial age. Fischer failed abysmally and died a criminal, poor and reviled. Eastman succeeded absolutely and died a champion, affluent and venerated.
So why did a poor man who had accomplished so little stand happily at the threshold of his own lynching while a rich man who had accomplished so much felt driven to take his own life?
Fischer was apparently happy on the last day of a wretched existence, Eastman was apparently unhappy on the last day of a fulfilling life, and we know full well that if we had been standing in either of their places, we would have experienced precisely the opposite emotions.
So what was wrong with these guys? I will ask you to consider the possibility that there was nothing wrong with them but that there is something wrong with you. And with me too. Whenever we find ourselves on the front end of a decision—Should I have another fish stick or go directly for the Ding Dongs?
Accept the job in Kansas City or stay put and hope for a promotion? Have the knee surgery or try the physical therapy first? We are forced to consider the possibility that what clearly seems to be the better life may actually be the worse life and that when we look down the time line at the different lives we might lead, we may not always know which is which. We are forced to consider the possibility that we did something fundamentally wrong when we mentally slipped out of our shoes and into theirs, and that this fundamental mistake can cause us to choose the wrong future.
What might this mistake be? The best way to understand this particular shortcoming of imagination the faculty that allows us to see the future is to understand the shortcomings of memory the faculty that allows us to see the past and perception the faculty that allows us to see the present.
As you will learn, the shortcoming that causes us to misremember the past and misperceive the present is the very same shortcoming that causes us to misimagine the future. That shortcoming is caused by a trick that your brain plays on you every minute of every hour of every day—a trick that your brain is playing on you right now.
How can that tiny car hold all those merry clowns? How do we cram the vast universe of our experience into the relatively small storage compartment between our ears? We do what Harpo did: We cheat. As you learned in the previous chapters, the elaborate tapestry of our experience is not stored in memory—at least not in its entirety. Later, when we want to remember our experience, our brains quickly reweave the tapestry by fabricating—not by actually retrieving—the bulk of the information that we experience as a memory.
For example, volunteers in one study were shown a series of slides depicting a red car as it cruises toward a yield sign, turns right, and then knocks over a pedestrian. Now, if the volunteers had stored their experience in memory, then they should have pointed to the picture of the car approaching the yield sign, and indeed, more than 90 percent of the volunteers in the no-question group did just that.
But 80 percent of the volunteers in the question group pointed to the picture of the car approaching a stop sign. This general finding—that information acquired after an event alters memory of the event—has been replicated so many times in so many different laboratory and field settings that it has left most scientists convinced of two things.
Then I will trick you. Which of the following words was not on the list? Bed, doze, sleep, or gasoline? The right answer is gasoline, of course. Actually, you should lift your hand from the page in any case, as we really need to move along. Normally this would be a clever and economical strategy for remembering.
But in this case, your brain was tricked by the fact that the gist word—the key word, the essential word—was not actually on the list. When your brain rewove the tapestry of your experience, it mistakenly included a word that was implied by the gist but that had not actually appeared, just as volunteers in the previous study mistakenly included a stop sign that was implied by the question they had been asked but that had not actually appeared in the slides they saw.
This experiment has been done dozens of times with dozens of different word lists, and these studies have revealed two surprising findings.
Rather, they vividly remember seeing it and they feel completely confident that it appeared. Filling in Perception The powerful and undetectable filling in that suffuses our remembrances of things past pervades our perceptions of things present as well.
For instance, if on one particularly slow Tuesday you took it upon yourself to dissect your eyeball, you would eventually come across a spot on the back of your retina where your optic nerve leaves your eye and wends its way toward your brain.
The eyeball cannot register an image at the point at which the optic nerve attaches, and hence that point is known as the blind spot. No one can see an object that appears in the blind spot because there are no visual receptors there.
And yet, if you look out into your living room, you do not notice a black hole in the otherwise smooth picture of your brother-in-law sitting on the sofa, devouring cheese dip.
It just makes its best guess about the nature of the missing information and proceeds to fill in the scene—and the part of your visual experience of your cheese- dipping brother-in-law that is caused by real light reflecting off of his real face and the part that your brain just made up look exactly alike to you.
You can convince yourself of this by closing your left eye, focusing your right eye on the magician in figure 8, and then bringing the book slowly toward you. Stay focused on the magician, but notice that when the earth moves into your blind spot, it seems to disappear. You will suddenly see whiteness where the earth actually is because your brain sees whiteness all around the earth and thus mistakenly assumes there is whiteness in your blind spot as well.
If you keep moving the book toward you, the earth will reappear. Eventually, of course, your nose will touch the rabbit and you will commit an unnatural act. If you stare at the magician with your right eye and move the book slowly toward your nose, the earth will disappear into your blind spot. The filling-in trick is not limited to the visual world. Researchers tape-recorded the sentence The state governors met with their respective legislatures convening in the capital city. Then they doctored the tape, substituting a cough for the first s in legislatures.
Even when they were specifically instructed to listen for the missing sound, and even when they were given thousands of trials of practice, volunteers were unable to name the missing letter that their brains knew ought to be there and had thus helpfully supplied. But they did it, and they did it so smoothly and quickly that volunteers actually heard the missing information being spoken in its proper position.
Experiments such as these provide us with a backstage pass that allows us to see how the brain does its marvelous magic act. Of course, if you went backstage at a magic show and got a good look at all the wires, mirrors, and trapdoors, the show would be spoiled when you returned to your seat.
Well, if you go back and try the trick in figure 8 again, you will notice that despite the detailed scientific understanding of the visual blind spot that you acquired in the last few pages, the trick still works just fine. Indeed, no matter how much you learn about optics and no matter how long you spend nosing up to that rabbit, the trick will never fail. How can that be? I have tried to convince you that things are not always as they appear.
The Meat Loaf of Oz Unless you skipped over childhood and went straight from strained carrots to mortgage payments, you probably remember the scene in the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy and her pals are cowering before the great and terrible Oz, who appears menacingly as a giant floating head.
Toto the dog suddenly breaks loose, knocks over a screen in the corner of the room, and reveals a little man working the controls of a machine. The protagonists are astonished, and the Scarecrow accuses the little man of being a humbug.
Prior to that time, philosophers had thought of the senses as conduits that allowed information about the properties of objects in the world to travel from the object and into the mind. The mind was like a movie screen in which the object was rebroadcast. The operation broke down on occasion, hence people occasionally saw things as they were not.
But when the senses were working properly, they showed what was there. This theory of realism was described in by the philosopher John Locke: When our senses do actually convey into our understandings any idea, we cannot but be satisfied that there doth something at that time really exist without us, which doth affect our senses, and by them give notice of itself to our apprehensive faculties, and actually produce that idea which we then perceive: and we cannot so far distrust their testimony, as to doubt that such collections of simple ideas as we have observed by our senses to be united together, do really exist together.
When people see giant floating heads, it is because giant heads are actually floating in their purview, and the only question for a psychologically minded philosopher was how brains accomplish this amazing act of faithful reflection. But in a reclusive German professor named Immanuel Kant broke loose, knocked over the screen in the corner of the room, and exposed the brain as a humbug of the highest order.
This theory was a revelation, and in the centuries that followed, psychologists extended it by suggesting that each individual makes roughly the same journey of discovery that philosophy did.
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