Why be happy?

Why happiness

Our confusion

1. Where does true happiness come from?

2. What is my happiness index? Do I have more or less happiness than others?

In p>1932, Opan was sworn as a nun in Milwaukee. She swore at Notre Dame Abbey that she was determined to devote her life to early childhood education. In her brief autobiography, she wrote:

Thank God for giving me priceless virtues. The past year in Notre Dame Abbey was very pleasant, and I am very happy to look forward to officially becoming a member of the monastery and starting a new life with the loving God.

in the same year, in the same city, Danali wrote in her autobiography:

I was born on September 26th, 199, the eldest of seven children? During my one-year probation in the monastery, I taught chemistry and second-grade Latin. Thanks to the grace of God, I would like to devote myself to the priesthood in order to preach the doctrine and complete my self-cultivation.

These two nuns, together with 178 other nuns, are the subjects of one of the best studies on happiness and longevity.

Do people with happiness live longer?

How long people can live and what circumstances will shorten or extend their life span are very complicated scientific issues. For example, it is documented that people in Utah live longer than those in neighboring Nevada. Why? Is it because the air in Utah is fresher and the air in Las Vegas is too dirty? Or is it because Mormons live a rigorous life and Nevada people live an indulgent life? Or is it because Nevada people's unhealthy eating habits-eating junk food, eating midnight snacks, drinking alcohol, drinking coffee, smoking, etc.-make them live shorter than Utah people who eat fresh food, smoke, ban alcohol and coffee? There are so many confounding variables that scientists can't isolate the real reason.

Unlike the above situation, nuns lead a regular and isolated life, which is very different from the life of Nevada people and even Utah people. These nuns eat the same food, don't smoke or drink; They have similar birth and marriage history, have never had sexually transmitted diseases, and have the same social status and medical conditions. Therefore, the above confounding variables are eliminated here, but the life span and health status of these nuns are still very different. When Opan was 98 years old, he was still healthy and almost never got sick. On the contrary, Danielle suffered a stroke at the age of 59 and died soon after. We can be sure that the nun's lifestyle, diet and medical conditions are not the reasons for Danali's early death. When the autobiographies of these 18 nuns were taken out for study, an amazing difference appeared. Now let's look back at the descriptions of Opan and Danielle in their autobiographies. Can you see their differences?

Sister Opan used two positive words to express happiness: "very happy" and "very happy to look forward to". On the contrary, there is no positive breath in Sister Denali's autobiography. When people who don't know the life span of these nuns were asked to rate the positive feelings conveyed in their autobiographies, it was found that 9% of the nuns who fell on the happy side were still alive over 85 years old, while only 34% of the nuns who fell on the unhappy side were still alive. Similarly, 34% of the nuns who are at the happy end are still alive when they are 94 years old, while only 11% of the nuns who are not happy are still alive.

Do the above differences really come from the differences in happiness conveyed in their autobiographies? This difference may be caused by variables such as the degree to which they express happiness, the degree to which they look forward to the future, the degree to which they devote themselves, and even the degree to which their autobiographies are well written. However, the study finds that these variables are irrelevant, and the only thing that matters is the intensity of their happiness expressed in their autobiographies. It seems that a happy nun will live a long life.

Women who love to laugh are happier

The University Graduation Album is also a gold mine for studying positive psychology. Photographers will tell you to "look at the camera and smile", so you try your best to smile. As a result, it is easier said than done to smile at the request of others. Some people can smile brightly, while others just move their mouths politely. There are two kinds of smiles: one is called "Duchenne smile", which is named to commemorate the Frenchman Guillaume Duchenne who discovered it. This kind of smile refers to a smile from the heart. Your mouth corners rise, fish lines appear, and the muscles that affect these places are very difficult to control with your will; Another kind of smile is called "Pan American smile". This kind of smile is not from the heart, and has no characteristics of Du Xiang's slight smile. It is not so much happiness as the expression of lower primates when they are frightened, which is what China people call "skin smiles but meat doesn't smile".

Experienced and trained psychologists can quickly distinguish between Du Xiang smiles and non-Du Xiang smiles. Kettner and Huck of the University of California, Berkeley studied 141 girls who attended the graduation photo in 196 at Mills College. Except for three girls, all of them were smiling, and half of these smiles were Du Xiang smiles. The researchers interviewed these girls when they were 27, 43 and 52 years old, asking them about their marital status and their satisfaction with life. When Huck and Kettner took over the research in 199, they were very doubtful whether they could predict the marriage life of these people from graduation photo. As a result, they were surprised to find that girls with Duxiang Weixiao are generally more likely to get married, and can maintain their marriage for a long time, and they will have a better life in the next 3 years. It turns out that people's happiness can be predicted from the crow's feet of a smile.

Huck and Kettner once questioned their results and wondered whether people with Du Xiang's smile were inherently beautiful, and it was their beauty rather than the sincerity of their smile that predicted their happiness in future life. So the two researchers went back to make a beauty evaluation, and found that beauty has nothing to do with whether the marriage is perfect or not, and a woman with a sincere smile will have a happy marriage and a happy life.

Happiness in Positive Psychology

Both of the above two studies are surprising, because their results show that positive emotions conveyed in biographies and smiles in photos can actually predict life expectancy and marital happiness. The first part of this book is about these happiness: happiness, flow experience, pleasure, satisfaction, sincerity, hope and ecstasy. Here, I would like to raise three questions in particular.

why does evolution give us happiness? Besides making us feel good, what are the other functions and meanings of happiness?

who will have more happiness and who doesn't? How does happiness come about, and what makes it disappear?

how do you build a lasting happiness in your life?

Everyone wants to know the answers to these questions, and naturally they will turn to psychology, but you will be surprised to find that psychology completely ignores the positive aspects of life. If there are 1 papers about depression and sadness in academic journals, only one will talk about happiness. One of the goals of this book is to provide scientific answers to the above three questions. Unfortunately, we know very little about how to get happiness, unlike depression, we already have a manual to relieve depression. Therefore, on some topics, I can provide conclusive scientific evidence; On some topics, I can only infer from the latest research and suggest how you should guide your life. But anyway, I will tell you clearly what is known and what is my inference. In the following three chapters, you will find that my ultimate goal is to correct the imbalance in psychology in the past and bring out more knowledge about happiness, personal advantages and virtues by using the knowledge about psychological problems and pains accumulated in the past.

The interweaving of happiness and misfortune

How do advantages and virtues come into being? Why does a book about happiness talk more about other contents than "happiness or hedonics"? Happiness scientists hope that the more happy time in life, the better, and the less unhappy time, the better. The simple happiness theory is this: the quality of life is equal to the happy time MINUS the unhappy time. Happiness is not just a theory in an ivory tower. Many people run their lives in this way. But I think this is an illusion, because the feelings of all time add up, which is very different from our judgment of an event, such as a movie, a holiday, a married life or even the whole life.

Daniel Kahneman, a professor of economics at Princeton University (winner of the 22 Nobel Prize in Economics), is a top figure in the study of happiness in the world. One of the instruments he used to test the theory of happiness was colonoscopy: although the uncomfortable time caused by the colonoscopy moving up and down after being inserted into the rectum was only a few minutes, the patient felt it was a long time. In Kahneman's experiment, 682 patients were randomly assigned for routine colonoscopy, or extended for one minute before the end to keep the camera still. The colonoscopy at rest is not as uncomfortable as when it is moving, so the patients in the latter experimental group feel a little more comfortable at the last minute. The whole examination process was extended by one minute, and the pain time of the patients in the experimental group was actually longer than that of the other group, but because the experimental group finally experienced a passable feeling, the patients in the experimental group felt more positive about the whole incident. They are more willing to accept this kind of inspection again than the control group.

In our life, we should deal with the situation when we break up in love, because this last scene will always remain in your memory. If we handle it well, you will be willing to start intimate relationship again. This book will discuss why we should be happy, learn to fail and what this means to us. Positive psychology is the texture of happy and unhappy times, and the advantages and virtues shown here, which determine our quality of life. Ludwig Wittgenstein, a great philosopher born in Vienna, is an unhappy person in all aspects. I am a fan of Wittgenstein, and I have collected a lot of things about Wittgenstein. I have never seen a photo of him smiling (whether it is Du Xiang style or a smile). Wittgenstein is a depressed man, irritable and very mean to the people around him, but he is more harsh on himself. When he holds a regular seminar in his home in Cambridge, England, where there is no heating and almost no furniture, he will pace back and forth and mutter, "Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein, what a terrible teacher you are." But when he was lying alone in bed and dying, his last words were actually to say to his landlady, "Tell them that I am satisfied with my life and have no regrets."