Savor the moment. Happiness, said Benjamin Franklin, "is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by the little advantages that occur every day."
As a future-oriented person, I periodically remind myself of Pascal's remark that we too often live as if the present were merely our means to the future. "So we never live, but we hope to live—and as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so."
To live in the present means, for me, taking delight in the day's magic moments, from morning tea and cereal, hunched over a manuscript, to the day's last moments, snuggling and talking with my wife. Happiness isn't somewhere off in the future, but in this morning's phone conversation with someone seeking advice, in this noon's meal with a friend, in this evening's bedtime story with a child, in tonight's curling up with a good book.
Take control of your time. There is, nevertheless, a place for setting goals and managing time. Compared to those who've learned a sense of helplessness, those with an "internal locus of control" do better in school, cope better with stress, and live with greater well-being. Deprived of control over one's life—an experience studied in prisoners, nursing home patients, and people living under totalitarian regimes—people suffer lower morale and poorer health.
One way to feel more empowered is to master our use of time. For happy people, time is "filled and planned," says Oxford University psychologist Michael Argyle. "For unhappy people time is unfilled, open and uncommitted; they postpone things and are inefficient."
To manage time effectively, set big goals, then break them down into daily aims. Writing a book is, for me, too formidable and remote a goal. But writing two manuscript pages a day is easy enough. Repeat this little process 300 times over and, presto!, you have a book. Although we often overestimate how much we will accomplish in any given day (leaving us frustrated), we generally underestimate how much we can accomplish in a year, given just a little progress every day. Moreover, as each mini-deadline is met we get the delicious, confident feeling of being in control.
Act happy. As I stated in my previous article, study after study reveals three traits (in addition to the above-mentioned personal control) that mark happy people's lives. First, they like themselves. They exhibit self-esteem by agreeing with such statements as "I'm a lot of fun to be with" and "I have good ideas." Second, they are positive thinkers. Writing from a place called Hope [College], it is fitting that I concede the power of hope-filled optimism. Third, they are outgoing. We could imagine opposite findings—that introverts would be happiest, living in peaceful solitude, or that pessimists would live with greater gladness as things keep turning out better than expected. But its the sociable extroverts and the venturesome optimists who report more happiness.
Although self-esteem, optimism, and extroversion tend to be enduring traits, those who seek greater happiness can exploit one of social psychology's arch principles: We are as likely to act ourselves into a way of thinking as to think ourselves into action. In experiments, people who feign high self-esteem begin feeling better about themselves. Even when manipulated into a smiling expression, people feel better; when they scowl, the whole world seems to scowl back. So put on a happy face. Pretend optimism. Simulate outgoingness. Going through the motions can trigger the emotions.
Seek work and leisure that engage your skills. Sometimes the challenges of work or home are too great, and we feel stressed. At other times, we're underchallenged and bored. In between these two states is a zone where we feel challenged, but not overmatched. We get absorbed. We lose consciousness of time. We are in a state that University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow."
In his studies of writers, dancers, surgeons, chess players, mountain climbers, and the like, Csikszentmihalyi discovered that people find the flow experience satisfying. Even if we make a lower but livable wage, it pays to seek work that we find interesting and challenging.
The well-being that accompanies flow extends to leisure. Ironically, some of the most expensive forms of leisure are least likely to provide flow. Catch people sitting on a yacht or watching their big screen TV, and they typically don't feel all that great, for their skills aren't engaged. Catch them gardening, socializing, or writing a letter and you will likely find them feeling less apathetic and happier.
So off your duffs, couch potatoes. Pick up your camera. Tune that instrument. Sharpen those woodworking tools. Get out those quilting needles. Inflate the family basketball. Pull down a stimulating book. Oil the fishing reel. It's time to head out to the garden store. To invite friends over for tea. To pull down the Scrabble game. To go for a drive. Rather than vegetating in self-focused idleness, lose yourself in the flow of active work and play. "In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer," noted Robert Louis Stevenson. "To forget oneself is to be happy."
Tags:
age sex,
anger and anxiety,
close friends,
clue,
depression,
disadvantaged groups,
empty nest syndrome,
extroversion,
happiness,
hundred thousand,
men and women,
mental health,
personal control,
personality,
self esteem,
self-esteem,
sexes,
sorts,
stress,
troubled men
