Experiencing Positive Emotions and Happiness

Chapter 7: Experiencing Positive Emotions

When it comes to flourishing as human beings, what often takes center stage is our ability to feel positive emotions.

One of the core elements of flourishing is the study of positive emotions (PERMA).

Positive Emotions: a wide range of pleasant emotions in the past, present, and future; being able to know what it is to be happy and to experience an enduring sense of well-being.

Two ways of smiling:

- Duchenne smile: a full-face smile where not only your mouth turns up, but the corners of your eyes crinkle, as well. That is, you smile with your eyes as well as your mouth.

- “the other smile”: with the mouth only and does not involve the eyes.

The extent to which the women displayed the Duchenne smile in their high school photos strongly predicted their marital and life satisfaction decades later.

10 most frequent positive emotions:

• Joy
• Gratitude
• Amusement
• Serenity
• Hope
• Pride
• Interest
• Inspiration
• Awe
• Love

The theory explains that negative emotions help alert us to danger, positive emotions let us know we are safe.

Therefore, we are free to “broaden and build” upon our existing skills, because we don’t need to focus on fighting for survival in the present moment.

Broaden and build: theory explains the wide-ranging, beneficial effects of positive emotions which let us know that we are safe, thereby enabling us to engage in activities geared for the future which push our adaption in ways that enhance our abilities.

Undoing: theory which proposes that positive emotions can literally function as an antidote to undo the physiological effects of negative emotions.

Authentic happiness: refers to Seligman’s definition of happiness as something more akin to life satisfaction or contentment encompassing living a meaningful life, utilizing your skills and talents while living your life with purpose and as part of a community.

Hedonism: the pursuit of momentary pleasures.

Wealth and all the possessions it can buy have a surprisingly low correlation with levels of happiness.

The rich are only slightly happier than the typical middle-class American.

Progress paradox: despite the fact that life has improved for most Americans in terms of the standard of living and health, our self-reported happiness levels have not kept pace with the increase in health, wealth, and education.

Hedonic Treadmill: the fact that we tend to inevitably adapt to fortunate circumstances and take these for granted.

Two main explanations for why riches, beauty, health, or education do not lead to lasting happiness:

1. 1. Genetic makeup – reflects the fact that to a certain extent your level of positive emotion is genetically inherited.
   2. Hedonic treadmill - we tend to inevitably adapt to fortunate circumstances and take these for granted.

One potential reason: the survival of the human species

The fact that pleasurable experiences tend to be brief and diminish over time allows us to get back to the rest of our lives and not be diverted, which clearly has survival value.

i.e. the beginning stages of falling in love

They also overestimated the length of their emotional reaction to negative life events

Good news:

Adaptation does not permanently damage our ability to enjoy a given pleasure.

Rule: it is wise to spread your pleasures over time to maximize your satisfaction

Cramming them all together leads to adaptation and underappreciation.

The Role of Genetics:

Equation of happiness: H = S+C+V

H = enduring level of happiness

S = genetic set point; accounts for 50% of personality traits and happiness

C = circumstances of life; accounts for 10% of happiness

V = internal mindset; account for 40% of happiness

Hedonic capacity: the capacity of an individual to experience positive emotions based on both genetics as well as environment and learning histories. (the ability to experience positive emotions, aka: “cerebral joy juice)

Extroversion: the ability for an individual to be outgoing and comfortable around other people.

Positive Affectivity: another name for individual’s hedonic capacity.

Those high in positive affectivity tend to be:

Socially active

Have more friends and belong to more social organizations

More likely to be married

Be satisfied with their marriage

Feel happy with their job

Low in neuroticism

To maximize your chance of happiness:

Get married (strongly correlated with happiness)

Develop a varied social network (strongly correlated with happiness)

Involve yourself through religion or find meaning through spiritual belief or practice (moderately correlated with happiness)

Do not bother with the following if you hope to increase your happiness:

Make more money (just leads to materialistic things)

Stay healthy. Surprisingly, it is how you view your health rather than your objective health that affects happiness levels)

Get more education (Doesn’t relate to happiness)

Attempt to change your race

Move to a warmer or sunnier climate.

The single best predictor of happiness is the quality of your interpersonal relationships.

It is not about being married that makes one happy, it’s about the quality of the marriage.

How to Brighten Your Expectations for Your Future – Flexible Optimism and Hope:

Optimists believe that they are likely to experience positive outcomes and success, and in the event of a negative outcome, they will be able to cope.

Optimism is energizing, while pessimism is paralyzing.

Finding Happiness in Your Past:

Your feelings about your past are determined by the nature of your memories, which are heavily colored by your interpretations of past events.

Three main methods in moving your feeling about your past towards greater contentment and satisfaction:

1. Letting go of the paradigm that your past determines your future

2. Make a proactive effort to engage in gratitude.

3. Make a proactive effort to engage in forgiveness.

Attitude of Gratitude: involves noticing, appreciating, and being thankful for the people, events and even the small benefits of your life.

Forgiveness: the ability to let go of the negative energy attached to bad memories without necessarily forgetting what happened or allowing yourself to again be abused.

Peak-end theory: explains the fact that our recollections of pleasure are influenced by the intensity of the experience, as well as how it ended.

Duration neglect: the fact that the length of an experience influences how we interpret the positive or negative impact of experiences.

Gratitude improves your satisfaction with life.

Those with gratitude tend to be:

Less at risk for negative emotions

More empathic

Forgiving

Helpful to others

Present moment happiness falls into two separate categories:

1. The pleasures

2. The gratifications

Pleasures are temporary and typically involve enjoyable sensory sensations and minimal, if any, thoughts.

Gratifications represent activities that we find very fulfilling, that we tend to lose ourselves within, that absorb us fully.

Engagement: occurs when we are involved in gratifying activities, where we often lose track of time and our skills are matched to the challenges allowing us to tap into our strengths. This sets the stage for flow.

Savoring: the awareness of pleasure that comes from paying deliberate conscious attention to your experience of pleasure in the moment.

Four Kinds of Savoring:

1. Basking – openly receiving praise and/or congratulations
2. Thanksgiving – being thankful for your blessings
3. Marveling – being filled with awe at the wonder of the moment
4. Luxuriating – indulging your senses

Other savoring strategies:

Sharing – talking about it with others

Memory building – mental picture or physical souvenirs

Self-congratulation – remind yourself of a job well done

Sharpen your perception – narrow your focus into certain aspects of an experience and block others out

Absorption – allow yourself to get totally immersed in the pleasure of the moment and shut out other stimuli

Practicing mindfulness is one key to savoring pleasure.

The royal road to happiness is through the gratifications.

Flow: a state in which a person finds the challenge of a task to be equal to their skills whereby their abilities and interests are fully engaged. Often the person loses the concept of time and finds the involvement to be gratifying.

Flow = person working at full capacity

Gratifications = produce flow

Pleasures ≠ flow

“Junk Flow” or “Faux Flow” such as watching TV shows.

Suggestions in The Pursuit of Happiness

1. Fake it till you make it
2. Understand that success, wealth, or possessions do not lead to enduring happiness
3. Seek work and leisure activities that engage and make use of your skills
4. Build close relationships
5. Engage in regular exercise
6. Don’t let time control you
7. Get an adequate amount of sleep
8. Get in touch with your spirituality
9. Do good, feel good (good deeds)
10. Keep a gratitude journal

Eudemonia: a complex which refers to being true to your inner self and increasing happiness by identifying your own signature strengths and virtues and then living your life in accordance with these.

Eudemonic life = PERMA (meaning)

The 4 possible routes to happiness:

1. Hedonism

2. Eudemonia

3. Engagement

4. Victory

Well-being = Happiness + Meaning

If you learn to spend money in ways that enhance your life instead of just adding to your possessions.

1. Buy experiences
2. Make it a treat
3. Buy time
4. Pay now, consume later

Invest in others

In addition to curiosity, the researchers also point the following pointers on being happy:

Do not sweat the small stuff

Celebrate!

Practice flexibility

Find balance

Neuroplasticity allows us to gradually reshape the structure of our brains with our thoughts and our actions.

Negative Bias: through evolution, our brains have been primed to be extremely good at learning from bad experiences. We learn faster through pain than pleasure.

Implicit memory: the neural storehouse for our expectations, attitudes, assumptions, fears, motivations, and moods below the level of conscious awareness.

4-step method to facilitate the process of neural circuitry by turning passing positive experiences into lasting inner strengths.( HEAL)

1. H – have an experience
2. E – enrich this experience using any and all of the five factors that have shown to enhance learning (p. 245)
3. A – absorb the enriched experience
4. L – link this experience to the existing negative material to reframe it, assuage it or even replace it.

To summarize the research findings, happy individuals are more likely to experience success in many domains of life including:

Marriage

Employment

Income

Work performance

Friendships

Psychological Health

Happiness is contagious.

Experiential Avoidance: is a vicious cycle involving ongoing attempts to control, avoid, escape or banish unwanted or negative thoughts, feelings, memories or imagines, even when doing so becomes self-defeating, useless or costly.

The harder we try to get rid of unpleasant feelings, the more we create and perpetuate them.