Authentic Happiness

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Table of Contents

PREFACE

Positive Psychology, shows how you can come to live in the upper reaches of your set range of happiness; (Location 60)

I cannot say this too strongly: In spite of the widespread acceptance of the rotten-to-the-core dogma in the religious and secular world, there is not a shred of evidence that strength and virtue are derived from negative motivation. (Location 80)

Authentic happiness comes from identifying and cultivating your most fundamental strengths and using them every day in work, love, play, and parenting. (Location 84)

Positive Psychology has three pillars: First is the study of positive emotion. Second is the study of the positive traits, foremost among them the strengths and virtues, but also the “abilities” such as intelligence and athleticism. Third is the study of the positive institutions, such as democracy, strong families, and free inquiry, that support the virtues, which in turn support the positive emotions. (Location 85)

The best therapists do not merely heal damage; they help people identify and build their strengths and their virtues. (Location 97)

Positive Psychology takes seriously the bright hope that if you find yourself stuck in the parking lot of life, with few and only ephemeral pleasures, with minimal gratifications, and without meaning, there is a road out. This road takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment: meaning and purpose. (Location 98)

Part I: Positive Emotion

Chapter 1: Positive Feeling And Positive Character

There are two kinds of smiles. The first, called a Duchenne smile (after its discoverer, Guillaume Duchenne), is genuine. The corners of your mouth turn up and the skin around the corners of your eyes crinkles (like crow’s feet). The muscles that do this, the orbicularis oculi and the zygomaticus, are exceedingly difficult to control voluntarily. The other smile, called the Pan American smile (after the flight attendants in television ads for the now-defunct airline), is inauthentic, with none of the Duchenne features. Indeed, it is probably more related to the rictus that lower primates display when frightened than it is to happiness. (Location 140)

Psychology has badly neglected the positive side of life. For every one hundred journal articles on sadness, there is just one on happiness. (Location 162)

A hedonist wants as many good moments and as few bad moments as possible in his life, and simple hedonic theory says that the quality of his life is just the quantity of good moments minus the quantity of bad moments. But it is a delusion, I believe, because the sum total of our momentary feelings turns out to be a very flawed measure of how good or how bad we judge an episode—a movie, a vacation, a marriage, or an entire life—to be. (Location 170)

In your own life, you should take particular care with endings, for their color will forever tinge your memory of the entire relationship and your willingness to reenter it. (Location 182)

The belief that we can rely on shortcuts to happiness, joy, rapture, comfort, and ecstasy, rather than be entitled to these feelings by the exercise of personal strengths and virtues, leads to legions of people who in the middle of great wealth are starving spiritually. Positive emotion alienated from the exercise of character leads to emptiness, to inauthenticity, to depression, and, as we age, to the gnawing realization that we are fidgeting until we die. (Location 194)

The exercise of kindness is a gratification, in contrast to a pleasure. Kindness is not accompanied by a separable stream of positive emotion like joy; rather, it consists in total engagement and in the loss of self-consciousness. (Location 214)

When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity. Feelings are states, momentary occurrences that need not be recurring features of personality. Traits, in contrast to states, are either negative or positive characteristics that recur across time and different situations, and strengths and virtues are the positive characteristics that bring about good feeling and gratification. Traits are abiding dispositions whose exercise makes momentary feelings more likely. The negative trait of paranoia makes the momentary state of jealousy more likely, just as the positive trait of being humorous makes the state of laughing more likely. (Location 219)

Optimistic people tend to interpret their troubles as transient, controllable, and specific to one situation. Pessimistic people, in contrast, believe that their troubles last forever, undermine everything they do, and are uncontrollable. (Location 224)

George Vaillant, a Harvard professor who runs the two most thorough psychological investigations of men across their entire lives, studies strengths he calls “mature defenses.” These include altruism, the ability to postpone gratification, future-mindedness, and humor. Some men never grow up and never display these traits, while other men revel in them as they age. (Location 231)

Confucius, Aristotle, Aquinas, the Bushido samurai code, the Bhagavad-Gita, and other venerable traditions disagree on the details, but all of these codes include six core virtues: • Wisdom and knowledge • Courage • Love and humanity • Justice • Temperance • Spirituality and transcendence Each core virtue can be subdivided for the purpose of classification and measurement. Wisdom, for example, can be broken down into the strengths of curiosity, love of learning, judgment, originality, social intelligence, and perspective. Love includes kindness, generosity, nurturance, and the capacity to be loved as well as to love. Convergence across thousands of years and among unrelated philosophical traditions is remarkable and Positive Psychology takes this cross-cultural agreement as its guide. (Location 252)

we all contain ancient strengths inside of us that we may not know about until we are truly challenged. Why were the adults who faced World War II the “greatest generation”? Not because they were made of different stuff than we are, but because they faced a time of trouble that evoked the ancient strengths within. (Location 277)

I believe that the highest success in living and the deepest emotional satisfaction comes from building and using your signature strengths. (Location 286)

Rather, the good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification. This is something you can learn to do in each of the main realms of your life: work, love, and raising children. (Location 290)

Chapter 2: How Psychology Lost Its Way And I Found Mine

I am a hideous example of my own theory. Pessimists have a particularly pernicious way of construing their setbacks and frustrations. They automatically think that the cause is permanent, pervasive, and personal: “It’s going to last forever, it’s going to undermine everything, and it’s my fault.” (Location 457)

Optimists, in contrast, have a strength that allows them to interpret their setbacks as surmountable, particular to a single problem, and resulting from temporary circumstances or other people. (Location 461)

Raising children, I knew now, was far more than just fixing what was wrong with them. It was about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues, and helping them find the niche where they can live these positive traits to the fullest. (Location 538)

Chapter 3: Why Bother To Be Happy?

EVOLUTION AND POSITIVE FEELING

Negative emotions—fear, sadness, and anger—are our first line of defense against external threats, calling us to battle stations. Fear is a signal that danger is lurking, sadness is a signal that loss is impending, and anger signals someone trespassing against us. (Location 558)

Those of our ancestors who felt negative emotions strongly when life and limb were the issue likely fought and fled the best, and they passed on the relevant genes. (Location 566)

All emotions have a feeling component, a sensory component, a thinking component, and an action component. The feeling component of all the negative emotions is aversion—disgust, fear, repulsion, hatred, and the like. (Location 567)

Careful research from the University of Minnesota shows that there is a personality trait of good cheer and bubbliness (called positive affectivity), which, it turns out, is highly heritable. (Location 596)

HAPPY BUT DUMB? (Location 674)

The depressed people were sadder but wiser, in short, than the nondepressed people. (Location 686)

Depressed people are accurate judges of how much skill they have, whereas happy people think they are much more skillful than others judge them to be. (Location 687)

Happy people remember more good events than actually happened, and they forget more of the bad events. Depressed people, in contrast, are accurate about both. (Location 690)

happy people rely on their tried and true positive past experiences, whereas less happy people are more skeptical. (Location 703)

There is an exciting possibility with rich implications that integrates all these findings: A positive mood jolts us into an entirely different way of thinking from a negative mood. (Location 707)

BUILDING PHYSICAL RESOURCES

High-energy positive emotions like joy make people playful, and play is deeply implicated in the building of physical resources. (Location 726)

Positive emotion also protects people against the ravages of aging. ... Happy people, furthermore, have better health habits, lower blood pressure, and feistier immune systems than less happy people. When you combine all this with Aspinwall’s findings that happy people seek out and absorb more health risk information, it adds up to an unambiguous picture of happiness as a prolonger of life and improver of health. (Location 735)

Productivity

Research suggests, however, that more happiness actually causes more productivity and higher income. ... In attempts to define whether happiness or productivity comes first (by inducing happiness experimentally and then looking at later performance), it turns out that adults and children who are put into a good mood select higher goals, perform better, and persist longer on a variety of laboratory tasks, such as solving anagrams. (Location 744)

When Bad Things Happen to Happy People

The final edge that happy people have for building physical resources is how well they deal with untoward events. (Location 751)

Not only do happy people endure pain better and take more health and safety precautions when threatened, but positive emotions undo negative emotions. (Location 757)

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BUILDING SOCIAL RESOURCES

Many other studies show that happy people have more casual friends and more close friends, are more likely to be married, and are more involved in group activities than unhappy people. (Location 783)

A corollary of the enmeshment with others that happy people have is their altruism. (Location 785)

When we are happy, we are less self-focused, we like others more, and we want to share our good fortune even with strangers. When we are down, though, we become distrustful, turn inward, and focus defensively on our own needs. Looking out for number one is more characteristic of sadness than of well-being. (Location 788)

HAPPINESS AND WIN-WIN: EVOLUTION RECONSIDERED

feeling positive emotion is important, not just because it is pleasant in its own right, but because it causes much better commerce with the world. Developing more positive emotion in our lives will build friendship, love, better physical health, and greater achievement. (Location 794)

Positive feeling is a neon “here-be-growth” marquee that tells you that a potential win-win encounter is at hand. By activating an expansive, tolerant, and creative mindset, positive feelings maximize the social, intellectual, and physical benefits that will accrue. (Location 804)

Chapter 4: Can You Make Yourself Lastingly Happier?

THE HAPPINESS FORMULA

H = S + C + V where H is your enduring level of happiness, S is your set range, C is the circumstances of your life, and V represents factors under your voluntary control. (Location 811)

H (ENDURING LEVEL OF HAPPINESS)

It is important to distinguish your momentary happiness from your enduring level of happiness. Momentary happiness can easily be increased by any number of uplifts, such as chocolate, a comedy film, a back rub, a compliment, flowers, or a new blouse. ... The challenge is to raise your enduring level of happiness, and merely increasing the number of bursts of momentary positive feelings will not (for reasons you will read about shortly) accomplish this. (Location 816)

roughly 50 percent of almost every personality trait turns out to be attributable to genetic inheritance. But high heritability does not determine how unchangeable a trait is. Some highly heritable traits (like sexual orientation and body weight) don’t change much at all, while other highly heritable traits (like pessimism and fearfulness) are very changeable. (Location 874)

S (SET RANGE): THE BARRIERS TO BECOMING HAPPIER

The Happiness Thermostat

In fact, depression is almost always episodic, with recovery occurring within a few months of onset. (Location 896)

These findings fit the idea that we each have a personal set range for our level of positive (and negative) emotion, and this range may represent the inherited aspect of overall happiness. (Location 900)

The Hedonic Treadmill

Another barrier to raising your level of happiness is the “hedonic treadmill,” which causes you to rapidly and inevitably adapt to good things by taking them for granted. As you accumulate more material possessions and accomplishments, your expectations rise. (Location 902)

Together, the S variables (your genetic steersman, the hedonic treadmill, and your set range) tend to keep your level of happiness from increasing. But there are two other powerful forces, C and V, that do raise the level of happiness. (Location 922)

C (CIRCUMSTANCES)

Money

How important money is to you, more than money itself, influences your happiness. Materialism seems to be counterproductive: at all levels of real income, people who value money more than other goals are less satisfied with their income and with their lives as a whole, although precisely why is a mystery. (Location 1024)

Marriage

Unlike money, which has at most a small effect, marriage is robustly related to happiness. (Location 1028)

Negative Emotion

In order to experience more positive emotion in your life, should you strive to experience less negative emotion by minimizing bad events in your life? ... There is only a moderate negative correlation between positive and negative emotion. This means that if you have a lot of negative emotion in your life, you may have somewhat less positive emotion than average, but that you are not remotely doomed to a joyless life. Similarly, if you have a lot of positive emotion in your life, this only protects you moderately well from sorrows. (Location 1050)

The ancient Greek word soteria refers to our high, irrational joys. This word is the opposite of phobia, which means high, irrational fear. (Location 1065)

Age

An authoritative study of 60,000 adults from forty nations divides happiness into three components: life satisfaction, pleasant affect, and unpleasant affect. Life satisfaction goes up slightly with age, pleasant affect declines slightly, and negative affect does not change. What does change as we age is the intensity of our emotions. Both “feeling on top of the world” and being “in the depths of despair” become less common with age and experience. (Location 1073)

Health

Surely you would think health is a key to happiness, ... It turns out, however, that objective good health is barely related to happiness; what matters is our subjective perception of how healthy we are, ... When disabling illness is severe and long-lasting, happiness and life satisfaction do decline, although not nearly as much as you might expect. (Location 1077)

Education, Climate, Race, and Gender

I group these circumstances together because, surprisingly, none of them much matters for happiness. (Location 1087)

To summarize, if you want to lastingly raise your level of happiness by changing the external circumstances of your life, you should do the following: 1. Live in a wealthy democracy, not in an impoverished dictatorship (a strong effect) 2. Get married (a robust effect, but perhaps not causal) 3. Avoid negative events and negative emotion (only a moderate effect) 4. Acquire a rich social network (a robust effect, but perhaps not causal) 5. Get religion (a moderate effect) (Location 1123)

As far as happiness and life satisfaction are concerned, however, you needn’t bother to do the following: 6. Make more money (money has little or no effect once you are comfortable enough to buy this book, and more materialistic people are less happy) 7. Stay healthy (subjective health, not objective health matters) 8. Get as much education as possible (no effect) 9. Change your race or move to a sunnier climate (no effect) (Location 1127)

Chapter 5: Satisfaction About The Past

When an individual is depressed, it is much easier for her to have sad than happy memories. (Location 1171)

The imperialistic Freudian view claims that emotion always drives thought, while the imperialistic cognitive view claims that thought always drives emotion. The evidence, however, is that each drives the other at times. So the question for twenty-first century psychology is this: under what conditions does emotion drive thinking, and under what conditions does thinking drive emotion? (Location 1185)

DWELLING IN THE PAST

It has turned out to be difficult to find even small effects of childhood events on adult personality, and there is no evidence at all of large—to say nothing of determining—effects. (Location 1220)

If, for example, your mother dies before you are eleven, you are somewhat more depressive in adult-hood—but not a lot more depressive, and only if you are female, and only in about half the studies. Your father’s dying has no measurable impact. (Location 1226)

The major traumas of childhood may have some influence on adult personality, but only a barely detectable one. Bad childhood events, in short, do not mandate adult troubles. There is no justification in these studies for blaming your adult depression, anxiety, bad marriage, drug use, sexual problems, unemployment, aggression against your children, alcoholism, or anger on what happened to you as a child. (Location 1231)

Merely to know the surprising facts here—that early past events, in fact, exert little or no influence on adult lives—is liberating, and such liberation is the whole point of this section. So if you are among those who view your past as marching you toward an unhappy future, you have ample reason to discard this notion. (Location 1248)

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Emotions, in my view, are indeed encapsulated by a membrane—but it is highly permeable and its name is “adaptation,” as we saw in the last chapter. Remarkably, the evidence shows that when positive and negative events happen, there is a temporary burst of mood in the right direction. But usually over a short time, mood settles back into its set range. This tells us that emotions, left to themselves, will dissipate. Their energy seeps out through the membrane, and by “emotional osmosis” the person returns in time to his or her baseline condition. Expressed and dwelt upon, though, emotions multiply and imprison you in a vicious cycle of dealing fruitlessly with past wrongs. (Location 1277)

Insufficient appreciation and savoring of the good events in your past and overemphasis of the bad ones are the two culprits that undermine serenity, contentment, and satisfaction. There are two ways of bringing these feelings about the past well into the region of contentment and satisfaction. Gratitude amplifies the savoring and appreciation of the good events gone by, and rewriting history by forgiveness loosens the power of the bad events to embitter (and actually can transform bad memories into good ones). (Location 1282)

GRATITUDE

The first night, take the Satisfaction with Life Scale (page 63) and the General Happiness Scale (page 46) once again and score them. Then think back over the previous twenty-four hours and write down, on separate lines, up to five things in your life you are grateful or thankful for. Common examples include “waking up this morning,” “the generosity of friends,” “God for giving me determination,” “wonderful parents,” “robust good health,” and “the Rolling Stones” (or some other artistic inspiration). Repeat the Life Satisfaction and General Happiness Scales on the final night, two weeks after you start, and compare your scores to the first night’s scores. If this worked for you, incorporate it into your nightly routine. (Location 1355)

FORGIVING AND FORGETTING

How you feel about the past—contentment or pride, versus bitterness or shame—depends entirely on your memories. There is no other source. The reason gratitude works to increase life satisfaction is that it amplifies good memories about the past: their intensity, their frequency, and the tag lines the memories have. (Location 1362)

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The human brain has evolved to ensure that our firefighting negative emotions will trump the broadening, building, and abiding—but more fragile—positive emotions. The only way out of this emotional wilderness is to change your thoughts by rewriting your past: forgiving, forgetting, or suppressing bad memories. (Location 1383)

Here are some of the usual reasons for holding on to unforgiveness. • Forgiving is unjust. It undermines the motivation to catch and punish the perpetrator, and it saps the righteous anger that might be transmuted into helping other victims as well. • Forgiving may be loving toward the perpetrator, but it shows a want of love toward the victim. • Forgiving blocks revenge, and revenge is right and natural. (Location 1392)

HOW TO FORGIVE

REACH: R stands for recall the hurt, in as objective a way as you can. Do not think of the other person as evil. Do not wallow in self-pity. Take deep, slow, and calming breaths as you visualize the event. ... E stands for empathize. Try to understand from the perpetrator’s point of view why this person hurt you. ... A stands for giving the altruistic gift of forgiveness, another difficult step. First recall a time you transgressed, felt guilty, and were forgiven. This was a gift you were given by another person because you needed it, and you were grateful for this gift. Giving this gift usually makes us feel better. ... C stands for commit yourself to forgive publicly. In Worthington’s groups, his clients write a “certificate of forgiveness,” write a letter of forgiveness to the offender, write it in their diary, write a poem or song, or tell a trusted friend what they have done. ... H stands for hold onto forgiveness. ... It is important to realize that the memories do not mean unforgiveness. Don’t dwell vengefully on the memories, and don’t wallow in them. Remind yourself that you have forgiven, and read the documents you composed. (Location 1474)

WEIGHING UP YOUR LIFE

There are three ways you can lastingly feel more happiness about your past. The first is intellectual—letting go of an ideology that your past determines your future. ... The second and third V’s are emotional, and both involve voluntarily changing your memories. Increasing your gratitude about the good things in your past intensifies positive memories, and learning how to forgive past wrongs defuses the bitterness that makes satisfaction impossible. ... The key to disputing your own pessimistic thoughts is to first recognize them and then to treat them as if they were uttered by an external person, a rival whose mission in life was to make you miserable. (Location 1522)

Chapter 6: Optimism About The Future

TEST YOUR OWN OPTIMISM

Permanence

People who give up easily believe the causes of the bad events that happen to them are permanent—the bad events will persist, are always going to be there to affect their lives. People who resist helplessness believe the causes of bad events are temporary. (Location 1656)

you think about bad things in terms of “always” and “never” and abiding traits, you have a permanent, pessimistic style. If you think in terms of “sometimes” and “lately,” using qualifiers and blaming bad events on ephemera, you have an optimistic style. (Location 1668)

Optimistic people explain good events to themselves in terms of permanent causes such as traits and abilities. Pessimists name transient causes, such as moods and effort. (Location 1689)

Pervasiveness: Specific versus Universal

Permanence is about time. Pervasiveness is about space. (Location 1698)

Some people can put their troubles neatly into a box and go about their lives even when one important aspect of it—their job, for example, or their love life—is crumbling. Others let one problem bleed all over everything. They catastrophize. When one thread of their lives breaks, the whole fabric unravels. It comes down to this: People who make universal explanations for their failures give up on everything when a failure strikes in one area. People who make specific explanations may become helpless in that one part of their lives, yet march stalwartly on in the others. (Location 1704)

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The optimistic explanatory style for good events is opposite that for bad events. The optimist believes good events will enhance everything he does, while the pessimist believes good events are caused by specific factors. (Location 1726)

THE STUFF OF HOPE

Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions taken together. Finding permanent and universal causes of good events along with temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope; finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune and temporary and specific causes of good events is the practice of despair. (Location 1744)

INCREASING OPTIMISM AND HOPE

There is a well-documented method for building optimism that consists of recognizing and then disputing pessimistic thoughts. (Location 1770)

Once you recognize that you have a pessimistic thought that seems unwarranted, argue against it using the ABCDE model. A stands for adversity, B for the beliefs you automatically have when it occurs, C for the usual consequences of the belief, D for your disputation of your routine belief, and E for the energization that occurs when you dispute it successfully. By effectively disputing the beliefs that follow an adversity, you can change your reaction from dejection and giving up to activity and good cheer. (Location 1777)

It is essential to realize your beliefs are just that—beliefs. They may or may not be facts. (Location 1796)

We can, then, more or less easily distance ourselves from the unfounded accusations of others. But we are much worse at distancing ourselves from the accusations that we launch daily at ourselves. After all, if we think them about ourselves, they must be true, right? Wrong! What we say to ourselves when we face a setback can be just as baseless as the ravings of a jealous rival. Our reflexive explanations are usually distortions. They are mere bad habits of thought produced by unpleasant experiences in the past—childhood conflicts, strict parents, an overly critical Little League coach, or a big sister’s jealousy. But because they now seem to issue from ourselves, we treat them as gospel. (Location 1801)

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LEARNING TO ARGUE WITH YOURSELF

The most convincing way of disputing a negative belief is to show that it is factually incorrect. ... It is important to see the difference between this approach and the so-called power of positive thinking. Positive thinking often involves trying to believe upbeat statements such as “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” in the absence of evidence, or even in the face of contrary evidence. ... Learned optimism, in contrast, is about accuracy. One of your most effective techniques in disputation will be to search for evidence pointing to the distortions in your catastrophic explanations. (Location 1811)

Almost nothing that happens to you has just one cause; most events have many causes. ... Pessimists have a way of latching onto the worst of all these causes—the most permanent and pervasive one. ... To dispute your own beliefs, scan for all possible contributing causes. Focus on those that are changeable (not enough time spent studying), specific (this particular exam was uncharacteristically hard), and nonpersonal (the professor graded unfairly). (Location 1822)

But the way things go in this world, the facts won’t always be on your side. Reality may be against you, and the negative belief you hold about yourself may be true. In this situation, the technique to use is decata-strophizing. Even if the belief is true, you say to yourself, what are its implications? (Location 1831)

Sometimes the consequences of holding a belief matter more than its truth. Is the belief destructive? ... What good will it do me to dwell on the belief that the world should be fair? (Location 1838)

YOUR DISPUTATION RECORD

Now you do it in your daily life over the next week. Don’t search out adversity, but as it comes along, tune in carefully to your internal dialogue. When you hear the negative beliefs, dispute them. Beat them into the ground, then record the ABCDE. (Location 1884)

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Chapter 7: Happiness In The Present

HAPPINESS in the present moment consists of very different states from happiness about the past and about the future, and itself embraces two very distinct kinds of things: pleasures and gratifications. The pleasures are delights that have clear sensory and strong emotional components, what philosophers call “raw feels”: ecstasy, thrills, orgasm, delight, mirth, exuberance, and comfort. They are evanescent, and they involve little, if any, thinking. The gratifications are activities we very much like doing, but they are not necessarily accompanied by any raw feelings at all. Rather, the gratifications engage us fully, we become immersed and absorbed in them, and we lose self-consciousness. (Location 1895)

The gratifications last longer than the pleasures, they involve quite a lot of thinking and interpretation, they do not habituate easily, and they are undergirded by our strengths and virtues. (Location 1902)

THE PLEASURES

The Bodily Pleasures (Location 1908)

Despite the delights they so reliably bring, however, it is not easy to build your life around the bodily pleasures, for they are all just momentary. They fade very rapidly once the external stimulus disappears, and we become accustomed to them very readily (“habituation”), often requiring bigger doses to deliver the same kick as originally. It is only the first taste of French vanilla ice cream, the first wisp of Shalimar, and the first few seconds of warmth from the blazing fire that gives you a buzz. Unless you space these encounters out abstemiously, these pleasures are enormously diminished. (Location 1919)

The Higher Pleasures

The higher pleasures have a lot in common with the bodily pleasures. Like the latter, they have positive “raw feels,” are momentary, melt easily, and habituate readily. But they are considerably more complex in what sets them off externally. They are more cognitive, and they are also vastly more numerous and more varied than the bodily pleasures. (Location 1924)

The high-intensity pleasures include rapture, bliss, ecstasy, thrill, hilarity, euphoria, kick, buzz, elation, and excitement. The moderate-intensity pleasures include ebullience, sparkle, vigor, glee, mirth, gladness, good cheer, enthusiasm, attraction, and fun. The low-intensity pleasures include comfort, harmony, amusement, satiation, and relaxation. (Location 1931)

Enhancing the Pleasures

At the outset, I must say that you don’t need an expert to advise you about the pleasures in your own life. You know better about what turns you on and how to get it than any psychologist. But three concepts that come out of the scientific study of positive emotion can help you increase the amount of momentary happiness in your life: habituation, savoring, and mindfulness. Unlocking the power of these psychological concepts can provide lessons for a lifetime of increased positive feeling. (Location 1935)

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HABITUATION AND WORSE (Location 1939)

The pleasures, both bodily and higher, have a uniform and peculiar set of properties that limit their usefulness as sources of lasting happiness. ... Not only do the pleasures fade quickly, many even have a negative aftermath. (Location 1939)

Neurons are wired to respond to novel events, and not to fire if the events do not provide new information. (Location 1947)

Having your back scratched satisfies an itch, but quite remarkably it also causes more itching when you stop. This itch grows in urgency for a time, and can be relieved by the next scratch. But that scratch sets up the next itch and the cycle continues. If you grind your teeth and wait, the itch will fade, but the craving for the next relieving scratch usually overcomes your will power. This is how a coughing jag, salted peanuts, smoking, and French vanilla ice cream all work. Far more seriously, it is also the mechanism of drug addictions. (Location 1958)

you find that your desire to engage in a particular pleasure diminishes to zero (or below, to aversion) when you space it far enough apart, you are probably dealing with an addiction and not a pleasure. (Location 1967)

Try to find the optimal spacing that keeps habituation of your pleasures at bay. If you love the music of Bruce Springsteen, experiment with listening both more and less frequently. You will discover an interval that keeps his music freshest. Surprise, as well as spacing, keeps pleasures from habituating. Try to take yourself by surprise—or, even better, arrange it so that the people you live with or otherwise see frequently surprise each other with “presents” of the pleasures. (Location 1970)

SAVORING

Fred B. Bryant and Joseph Veroff of Loyola University are the founders of a small field, still in its infancy, that they call savoring. ... Savoring, for Bryant and Veroff, is the awareness of pleasure and of the deliberate conscious attention to the experience of pleasure. (Location 1982)

From testing thousands of undergraduates, these authors detail five techniques that promote savoring: ... Sharing with others. ... Memory-building. Take mental photographs or even a physical souvenir of the event, and reminisce about it later with others. ... Self-congratulation. ... Sharpening perceptions. Focusing on certain elements and block out others. ... Absorption. Let yourself get totally immersed and try not to think, just sense. (Location 1996)

MINDFULNESS

After three years of study, the novice monk arrives at the dwelling of his teacher. He enters the room, bursting with ideas about knotty issues of Buddhist metaphysics, and well-prepared for the deep questions that await him in his examination. “I have but one question,” his teacher intones. “I am ready, master,” he replies. “In the doorway, were the flowers to the left or to the right of the umbrella?” The novice retires, abashed, for three more years of study. (Location 2013)

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Ellen Langer, a Harvard professor and the leading academic in the field of mindlessness, had people try to butt into a line of office workers waiting to copy material. When the would-be queue-jumpers asked, “Would you mind if I cut in front of you?” they were refused. When they asked, “Would you mind if I cut in front of you, because I have to copy something,” they were allowed to cut in. (Location 2018)

Have a Beautiful Day

Habituation can be countered by spacing your pleasures carefully and entering into a reciprocal surprise arrangement with a friend or lover. Savoring and mindfulness happen by sharing your pleasures with someone else, by taking mental photographs, by self-congratulation, by sharpening your perceptions (particularly using perspective shifting), and by absorption. Basking, giving thanks, marveling, and luxuriating are all means to amplifying pleasures. (Location 2037)

THE GRATIFICATIONS

It is the total absorption, the suspension of consciousness, and the flow that the gratifications produce that defines liking these activities—not the presence of pleasure. Total immersion, in fact, blocks consciousness, and emotions are completely absent. This distinction is the difference between the good life and the pleasant life. (Location 2054)

The great benefit of distinguishing between pleasure and gratification is that even the bottom half of the population (three billion people) in terms of positive affect is not consigned to unhappiness. Rather, their happiness lies in the abundant gratifications that they can have and hold. (Location 2060)

For Aristotle, distinct from the bodily pleasures, happiness (eudaimonia) is akin to grace in dancing. Grace is not an entity that accompanies the dance or that comes at the end of the dance; it is part and parcel of a dance well done. ... Eudaimonia, what I call gratification, is part and parcel of right action. It cannot be derived from bodily pleasure, nor is it a state that can be chemically induced or attained by any shortcuts. It can only be had by activity consonant with noble purpose. (Location 2063)

The pleasures can be discovered, nurtured, and amplified in the ways I discussed in the last section, but the gratifications cannot. The pleasures are about the senses and the emotions. The gratifications, in contrast, are about enacting personal strengths and virtues. (Location 2069)

In spite of the huge differences in the activities themselves—from meditating Koreans to motorcycle gang members to chess players to sculptors to assembly-line workers to ballerinas—they all describe the psychological components of gratification in notably similar ways. Here are the components: • The task is challenging and requires skill • We concentrate • There are clear goals • We get immediate feedback • We have deep, effortless involvement • There is a sense of control • Our sense of self vanishes • Time stops Notice a salient absence: there is no positive emotion on the list of essential components. (Location 2128)

In fact, it is the absence of emotion, of any kind of consciousness, that is at the heart of flow. Consciousness and emotion are there to correct your trajectory; when what you are doing is seamlessly perfect, you don’t need them. (Location 2136)

Perhaps flow is the state that marks psychological growth. Absorption, the loss of consciousness, and the stopping of time may be evolution’s way of telling us that we are stocking up psychological resources for the future. In this analogy, pleasure marks the achievement of biological satiation, whereas gratification marks the achievement of psychological growth. (Location 2144)

Given all the benefits and the flow that the gratifications produce, it is very puzzling that we often choose pleasure (and worse, displeasure) over gratification. In the nightly choice between reading a good book and watching a sitcom on television, we often choose the latter—although surveys show again and again that the average mood while watching sitcoms on television is mild depression. (Location 2157)

Depression is now ten times as prevalent as it was in 1960, and it strikes at a much younger age. The mean age of a person’s first episode of depression forty years ago was 29.5, while today it is 14.5 years. This is a paradox, since every objective indicator of well-being—purchasing power, amount of education, availability of music, and nutrition—has been going north, while every indicator of subjective well-being has been going south. How is this epidemic to be explained? (Location 2162)

The epidemic is not biological, since our genes and hormones have not changed enough in forty years to account for a tenfold increase in depression. It is not ecological, since the Old Order Amish, living in eighteenth-century circumstances forty miles down the road from me, have only one-tenth the rate of depression as we do in Philadelphia; yet they drink the same water, breathe the same air, and provide a lot of the food we eat. And it is not that life conditions are worse, since the epidemic as we know it occurs only in wealthy nations (and carefully done diagnostic studies demonstrate that in the United States, black and Hispanic people actually have less depression than white people, even though their average objective life conditions are worse). (Location 2166)

There is another factor that looms as a cause of the epidemic: the over-reliance on shortcuts to happiness. Every wealthy nation creates more and more shortcuts to pleasure: television, drugs, shopping, loveless sex, spectator sports, and chocolate to name just a few. (Location 2173)

One of the major symptoms of depression is self-absorption. The depressed person thinks about how she feels a great deal, excessively so. Her low mood is not a fact of life, but is very salient to her. When she detects sadness, she ruminates about it, projecting it into the future and across all her activities, and this in turn increases her sadness. (Location 2179)

Here, then, is a powerful antidote to the epidemic of depression in youth: strive for more gratifications, while toning down the pursuit of pleasure. The pleasures come easily, and the gratifications (which result from the exercise of personal strengths) are hard-won. A determination to identify and develop these strengths is therefore the great buffer against depression. (Location 2185)

To start the process of eschewing easy pleasures and engaging in more gratifications is hard. The gratifications produce flow, but they require skill and effort; even more deterring is the fact that because they meet challenges, they offer the possibility of failing. (Location 2188)

The belief that we can rely on shortcuts to gratification and bypass the exercise of personal strengths and virtues is folly. (Location 2210)

Such people ask, “How can I be happy?” This is the wrong question, because without the distinction between pleasure and gratification it leads all too easily to a total reliance on shortcuts, to a life of snatching up as many easy pleasures as possible. (Location 2212)

When an entire lifetime is taken up in the pursuit of the positive emotions, however, authenticity and meaning are nowhere to be found. The right question is the one Aristotle posed two thousand five hundred years ago: “What is the good life?” ... My answer is tied up in the identification and the use of your signature strengths. (Location 2218)

Part II: Strength And Virtue

Chapter 8: Renewing Strength And Virtue

THE UBIQUITY OF SIX VIRTUES

Led by Katherine Dahlsgaard, we read Aristotle and Plato, Aquinas and Augustine, the Old Testament and the Talmud, Confucius, Buddha, Lao-Tze, Bushido (the samurai code), the Koran, Benjamin Franklin, and the Upanishads—some two hundred virtue catalogues in all. To our surprise, almost every single one of these traditions flung across three thousand years and the entire face of the earth endorsed six virtues: • Wisdom and knowledge • Courage • Love and humanity • Justice • Temperance • Spirituality and transcendence (Location 2366)

So we see these six virtues as the core characteristics endorsed by almost all religious and philosophical traditions, and taken together they capture the notion of good character. (Location 2375)

Chapter 9: Your Signature Strengths

TALENTS AND STRENGTHS

Strengths, such as integrity, valor, originality, and kindness, are not the same thing as talents, such as perfect pitch, facial beauty, or lightning-fast sprinting speed. They are both topics of Positive Psychology and while they have many similarities, one clear difference is that strengths are moral traits, while talents are nonmoral. (Location 2385)

For the most part, you either have a talent or you don’t; if you are not born with perfect pitch or the lungs of a long-distance runner, there are, sadly, severe limits on how much of them you can acquire. (Location 2392)

This is not true of love of learning or prudence or humility or optimism. When you acquire these strengths, it seems that you have the real thing. (Location 2393)

With enough time, effort, and determination, the strengths I discuss below can be acquired by almost any ordinary person. (Location 2401)

There is a difference between the emotion we feel when we watch Michael Jordan effortlessly slam dunk over an outclassed opponent versus when we watch him score thirty-eight points in spite of his having the flu and a 103-degree fever. Witnessing effortless virtuosity elicits thrill, adoration, admiration, and awe. But since there is no possibility of emulation, it does not elicit inspiration and elevation in the way that soaring over a formidable obstacle does. (Location 2409)

Because of the paramount role of will in the display of virtue, we feel that praise and credit is deserved. (Location 2418)

Building strengths and virtues and using them in daily life are very much a matter of making choices. (Location 2429)

THE TWENTY-FOUR STRENGTHS

To be a virtuous person is to display, by acts of will, all or at least most of the six ubiquitous virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. There are several distinct routes to each of these six. ... I call these routes strengths, and unlike the abstract virtues, each of these strengths is measurable and acquirable. (Location 2436)

Here are some of the criteria by which we know that a characteristic is a strength: First, a strength is a trait, a psychological characteristic that can be seen across different situations and over time. ... Second, a strength is valued in its own right. ... Remember that the gratifications are undertaken for their own sake, not because they may produce a squirt of felt positive emotion in addition. (Location 2441)

The strengths are states we desire that require no further justification. (Location 2451)

Engaging in a strength usually produces authentic positive emotion in the doer: pride, satisfaction, joy, fulfillment, or harmony. For this reason, strengths and virtues are often enacted in win-win situations. (Location 2453)

The culture supports strengths by providing institutions, rituals, role models, parables, maxims, and children’s stories. (Location 2455)

Role models and paragons in the culture compellingly illustrate a strength or virtue. Models may be real (Mahatma Ghandi and humane leadership), apocryphal (George Washington and honesty), or explicitly mythic (Luke Skywalker and flow). Cal Ripken, and Lou Gehrig before him, is a paragon of perseverance. Helen Keller is a paragon of love of learning, Thomas Edison of creativity, Florence Nightingale of kindness, Mother Theresa of the capacity to love, Willie Stargell of leadership, Jackie Robinson of self-control, and Aung San of integrity. (Location 2460)

What Are Your Highest Personal Strengths?

Wisdom and Knowledge

The first virtue cluster is wisdom. I have arranged the six routes to displaying wisdom and its necessary antecedent, knowledge, from the most developmentally basic (curiosity) up to the most mature (perspective). (Location 2496)

1. CURIOSITY/INTEREST IN THE WORLD (Location 2498)

Curiosity is actively engaging novelty, and the passive absorption of information (as in the case of couch potatoes clicking their remotes) does not display this strength. The opposite end of the dimension of curiosity is being easily bored. (Location 2501)

2. LOVE OF LEARNING (Location 2517)

3. JUDGMENT/CRITICAL THINKING/OPEN-MINDEDNESS (Location 2535)

Thinking things through and examining them from all sides are important aspects of who you are. You do not jump to conclusions, and you rely only on solid evidence to make your decisions. You are able to change your mind. By judgment, I mean the exercise of sifting information objectively and rationally, in the service of the good for self and others. Judgment in this sense is synonymous with critical thinking. It embodies reality orientation, and is the opposite of the logical errors that plague so many depressives, such as overpersonalization (“It’s always my fault”) and black-or-white thinking. The opposite of this strength is thinking in ways that favor and confirm what you already believe. This is a significant part of the healthy trait of not confusing your own wants and needs with the facts of the world. (Location 2536)

4. INGENUITY/ORIGINALITY/PRACTICAL INTELLIGENCE/STREET SMARTS (Location 2555)

When you are faced with something you want, are you outstanding at finding novel yet appropriate behavior to reach that goal? You are rarely content with doing something the conventional way. This strength category includes what people mean by creativity, but I do not limit it to traditional endeavors within the fine arts. This strength is also called practical intelligence, common sense, or street smarts. (Location 2556)

5. SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE/PERSONAL INTELLIGENCE/EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE (Location 2572)

Social and personal intelligence are knowledge of self and others. You are aware of the motives and feelings of others, and you can respond well to them. (Location 2574)

6. PERSPECTIVE (Location 2598)

Others seek you out to draw on your experience to help them solve problems and gain perspective for themselves. You have a way of looking at the world that makes sense to others and yourself. (Location 2599)

Courage

The strengths that make up courage reflect the open-eyed exercise of will toward the worthy ends that are not certain of attainment. To qualify as courage, such acts must be done in the face of strong adversity. This virtue is universally admired, and every culture has heroes who exemplify this virtue. (Location 2614)

7. VALOR AND BRAVERY (Location 2617)

You do not shrink from threat, challenge, pain, or difficulty. Valor is more than bravery under fire, when one’s physical well-being is threatened. It refers as well to intellectual or emotional stances that are unpopular, difficult, or dangerous. (Location 2618)

The brave person is able to uncouple the emotional and behavioral components of fear, resisting the behavioral response of flight and facing the fearful situation, despite the discomfort produced by subjective and physical reactions. Fearlessness, boldness, and rashness are not valor; facing danger, despite fear, is. (Location 2621)

8. PERSEVERANCE/INDUSTRY/DILIGENCE (Location 2641)

You finish what you start. ... At the same time, perseverance does not mean obsessive pursuit of unattainable goals. The truly industrious person is flexible, realistic, and not perfectionistic. (Location 2641)

9. INTEGRITY/GENUINENESS/HONESTY (Location 2658)

You are an honest person, not only by speaking the truth but by living your life in a genuine and authentic way. You are down to earth and without pretense; you are a “real” person. (Location 2658)

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Humanity and Love

The strengths here are displayed in positive social interaction with other people: friends, acquaintances, family members, and also strangers. (Location 2675)

10. KINDNESS AND GENEROSITY (Location 2677)

You are kind and generous to others, and you are never too busy to do a favor. You enjoy doing good deeds for others, even if you do not know them well. ... Empathy and sympathy are useful components of this strength. (Location 2677)

11. LOVING AND ALLOWING ONESELF TO BE LOVED (Location 2697)

Justice

These strengths show up in civic activities. They go beyond your one-on-one relationships to how you relate to larger groups, such as your family, your community, the nation, and the world. (Location 2720)

12. CITIZENSHIP/DUTY/TEAMWORK/LOYALTY (Location 2722)

You excel as a member of a group. You are a loyal and dedicated teammate, you always do your share, and you work hard for the success of the group. (Location 2722)

13. FAIRNESS AND EQUITY (Location 2741)

You do not let your personal feelings bias your decisions about other people. You give everyone a chance. (Location 2741)

14. LEADERSHIP (Location 2757)

You do a good job organizing activities and seeing to it that they happen. The humane leader must first of all be an effective leader, attending to getting the group’s work done while maintaining good relations among group members. (Location 2758)

Temperance

As a core virtue, temperance refers to the appropriate and moderate expression of your appetites and wants. The temperate person does not suppress motives, but waits for opportunities to satisfy them so that harm is not done to self or others. (Location 2778)

15. SELF-CONTROL (Location 2780)

You can easily hold your desires, needs, and impulses in check when it is appropriate. It is not enough to know what is correct; you must also be able to put this knowledge into action. When something bad happens, can you regulate your emotions yourself? Can you repair and neutralize your negative feelings on your own? Can you make yourself feel cheerful even in a trying situation? (Location 2780)

16. PRUDENCE/DISCRETION/CAUTION (Location 2796)

You are a careful person. You do not say or do things you might later regret. Prudence is waiting until all the votes are in before embarking on a course of action. Prudent individuals are far-sighted and deliberative. They are good at resisting impulses about short-term goals for the sake of longer-term success. (Location 2797)

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17. HUMILITY AND MODESTY (Location 2814)

You do not seek the spotlight, preferring to let your accomplishments speak for themselves. You do not regard yourself as special, and others recognize and value your modesty. You are unpretentious. (Location 2814)

Transcendence

By transcendence, I mean emotional strengths that reach outside and beyond you to connect you to something larger and more permanent: to other people, to the future, to evolution, to the divine, or to the universe. (Location 2834)

18. APPRECIATION OF BEAUTY AND EXCELLENCE (Location 2835)

You stop and smell the roses. You appreciate beauty, excellence, and skill in all domains: in nature and art, mathematics and science, and everyday things. When intense, it is accompanied by awe and wonder. (Location 2836)

19. GRATITUDE (Location 2852)

You are aware of the good things that happen to you, and you never take them for granted. You always take the time to express your thanks. (Location 2852)

20. HOPE/OPTIMISM/FUTURE-MINDEDNESS (Location 2871)

You expect the best in the future, and you plan and work in order to achieve it. Hope, optimism, and future-mindedness are a family of strengths that represent a positive stance toward the future. Expecting that good events will occur, feeling that these will ensue if you try hard, and planning for the future sustain good cheer in the here and now, and galvanize a goal-directed life. (Location 2872)

21. SPIRITUALITY/SENSE OF PURPOSE/FAITH/RELIGIOUSNESS (Location 2888)

You have strong and coherent beliefs about the higher purpose and meaning of the universe. You know where you fit in the larger scheme. Your beliefs shape your actions and are a source of comfort to you. (Location 2889)

22. FORGIVENESS AND MERCY (Location 2904)

You forgive those who have done you wrong. You always give people a second chance. Your guiding principle is mercy, not revenge. (Location 2905)

23. PLAYFULNESS AND HUMOR (Location 2921)

You like to laugh and bring smiles to other people. You can easily see the light side of life. (Location 2921)

24. ZEST/PASSION/ENTHUSIASM (Location 2937)

You are a spirited person. Do you throw yourself, body and soul, into the activities you undertake? Do you wake up in the morning looking forward to the day? Is the passion that you bring to activities infectious? Do you feel inspired? (Location 2937)

SIGNATURE STRENGTHS

I believe that each person possesses several signature strengths. These are strengths of character that a person self-consciously owns, celebrates, and (if he or she can arrange life successfully) exercises every day in work, love, play, and parenting. (Location 2976)

Take your list of top strengths, and for each one ask if any of these criteria apply: • A sense of ownership and authenticity (“This is the real me”) • A feeling of excitement while displaying it, particularly at first • A rapid learning curve as the strength is first practiced • Continuous learning of new ways to enact the strength • A sense of yearning to find ways to use it • A feeling of inevitability in using the strength (“Try and stop me”) • Invigoration rather than exhaustion while using the strength • The creation and pursuit of personal projects that revolve around it • Joy, zest, enthusiasm, even ecstasy while using it If one or more of these apply to your top strengths, they are signature strengths. (Location 2977)

Herein is my formulation of the good life: Using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of your life to bring abundant gratification and authentic happiness. (Location 2985)

Part III: In The Mansions Of Life

Chapter 10: Work And Personal Satisfaction

Recrafting your job to deploy your strengths and virtues every day not only makes work more enjoyable, but transmogrifies a routine job or a stalled career into a calling. A calling is the most satisfying form of work because, as a gratification, it is done for its own sake rather than for the material benefits it brings. (Location 3010)

Scholars distinguish three kinds of “work orientation”: a job, a career, and a calling. You do a job for the paycheck at the end of the week. You do not seek other rewards from it. It is just a means to another end (like leisure, or supporting your family), and when the wage stops, you quit. A career entails a deeper personal investment in work. You mark your achievements through money, but also through advancement. Each promotion brings you higher prestige and more power, as well as a raise. ... When the promotions stop—when you “top out”—alienation starts, and you begin to look elsewhere for gratification and meaning. ... A calling (or vocation) is a passionate commitment to work for its own sake. Individuals with a calling see their work as contributing to the greater good, to something larger than they are, and hence the religious connotation is entirely appropriate. The work is fulfilling in its own right, without regard for money or for advancement. When the money stops and the promotions end, the work goes on. ... But there has been an important discovery in this field: any job can become a calling, and any calling can become a job. “A physician who views the work as a Job and is simply interested in making a good income does not have a Calling, while a garbage collector who sees the work as making the world a cleaner, healthier place could have a Calling.” (Location 3049)

If you can find a way to use your signature strengths at work often, and you also see your work as contributing to the greater good, you have a calling. Your job is transformed from a burdensome means into a gratification. (Location 3137)

Flow cannot be sustained through an entire eight-hour workday; rather, under the best of circumstances, flow visits you for a few minutes on several occasions. Flow occurs when the challenges you face perfectly mesh with your abilities to meet them. When you recognize that these abilities include not merely your talents but your strengths and virtues, the implications for what work to choose or how to recraft it become clear. (Location 3144)

Americans surprisingly have considerably more flow at work than in leisure time. In one study of 824 American teenagers, Mike dissected free time into its active versus passive components. Games and hobbies are active and produce flow 39 percent of the time, and produce the negative emotion of apathy 17 percent of the time. Watching television and listening to music, in contrast, are passive and produce flow only 14 percent of the time while producing apathy 37 percent of the time. (Location 3188)

My recipe for more flow is as follows: • Identify your signature strengths. • Choose work that lets you use them every day. • Recraft your present work to use your signature strengths more. (Location 3197)

WHY ARE LAWYERS SO UNHAPPY?

Thus, pessimists are losers on many fronts. But there is one glaring exception; pessimists do better at law. (Location 3225)

Pessimism is seen as a plus among lawyers, because seeing troubles as pervasive and permanent is a component of what the law profession deems prudence. (Location 3230)

As Positive Psychology diagnoses the problem of demoralization among lawyers, three factors emerge: pessimism, low decision latitude, and being part of a giant win-loss enterprise. (Location 3278)

There are clear benefits to choosing the win-win option by using signature strengths to better advantage. This approach makes work more fun, transforms the job or the career into a calling, increases flow, builds loyalty, and it is decidedly more profitable. Moreover, by filling work with gratification, it is a long stride on the road to the good life. (Location 3335)

Chapter 11: Love

Leaf Van Boven, a young professor of business at the University of British Columbia, has shown how very commonplace the process of irrational commitment is. ... Mere possession itself markedly increases the value of an object to you, and increases your commitment to it. This finding tells us that homo sapiens is not homo economicus, a creature obedient to the “laws” of economics and motivated solely by rational exchange. (Location 3339)

The tedious law of homo economicus maintains that human beings are fundamentally selfish. Social life is seen as governed by the same bottom-line principles as the marketplace. So, just as in making a purchase or deciding on a stock, we supposedly ask ourselves of another human being, “What is their likely utility for us?” The more we expect to gain, the more we invest in the other person. Love, however, is evolution’s most spectacular way of defying this law. (Location 3350)

Love displays the capacity of human beings to make commitments that transcend “What have you done for me lately?” and mocks the theory of universal human selfishness. (Location 3363)

As David Myers says in his wise and scrupulously documented American Paradox, “In fact, there are few stronger predictors of happiness than a close, nurturing, equitable, intimate, lifelong companionship with one’s best friend.” (Location 3372)

Cindy Hazan, a Cornell psychologist, tells us that there are three kinds of love. First is love of the people who give us comfort, acceptance, and help, who bolster our confidence and guide us. The prototype is children’s love of their parents. Second, we love the people who depend on us for these provisions; the prototype of this is parents’ love for their children. Finally comes romantic love—the idealization of another, idealizing their strengths and virtues and downplaying their shortcomings. Marriage is unique as the arrangement that gives us all three kinds of love under the same umbrella, and it is this property that makes marriage so successful. (Location 3384)

Evolution has a very strong interest in reproductive success, and thus in the institution of marriage. Successful reproduction in our species is not a matter of quick fertilization, with both partners then going their own separate ways; rather, humans are born big-brained and immature, a state that necessitates a vast amount of learning from parents. This advantage only works with the addition of pair-bonding. Immature, dependent offspring who have parents that stick around to protect and mentor them do much better than their cousins whose parents abandon them. Those of our ancestors, therefore, who were inclined to make a deep commitment to each other were more likely to have viable children and thereby pass on their genes. Thus marriage was “invented” by natural selection, not by culture. (Location 3392)

THE CAPACITY TO LOVE AND BE LOVED

Styles of Loving and Being Loved in Childhood (Location 3426)

Consequences of Secure Attachment in Romance (Location 3505)

The bottom line is that by almost every criterion, securely attached people and secure romantic relationships do better. (Location 3526)

MAKING GOOD LOVE (BETTER) (Location 3527)

The first blush of love almost always pales, however, and marital satisfaction shows a steady decline over the first decade, dipping even in strong marriages. The strengths that initially drew us to our partners easily get taken for granted, and they transmogrify from admired traits into more tedious habits—and, if things go badly, into objects of contempt. The steadfastness and loyalty that you so loved at first becomes stodginess, and it can teeter on the edge of boring unadventurousness. Her sparkling, outgoing wit becomes superficial chattiness, and during fallow times it is in danger of being seen as compulsive airheadedness. Integrity can eventually be seen as stubbornness, perseverance becomes rigidity, and kindness migrates toward soft-headedness. (Location 3541)

John Gottman, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and the co-director of the Gottman Institute ... predicts accurately which marriages will improve over the years. He finds that these couples devote an extra five hours per week to their marriage. Here is what these couples do, and I commend his wisdom to you: • Partings. Before these couples say goodbye every morning, they find out one thing that each is going to do that day. (2 minutes X 5 days = 10 minutes) • Reunions. At the end of each workday, these couples have a low-stress reunion conversation. (20 minutes X 5 days = 1 hour, 40 minutes) • Affection. Touching, grabbing, holding, and kissing—all laced with tenderness and forgiveness. (5 minutes X 7 days = 35 minutes) • One weekly date. Just the two of you in a relaxed atmosphere, updating your love. (2 hours once a week) • Admiration and appreciation. Every day, genuine affection and appreciation is given at least once. (5 minutes X 7 days = 35 minutes) (Location 3547)

I discussed the importance of optimistic explanations for happiness, for success at work, for physical health, and for fighting depression. Love is yet another domain in which such explanations help. Optimistic people, you will recall, make temporary and specific explanations for bad events, and they make permanent and pervasive explanations for good events. (Location 3616)

Optimism helps marriage. When your partner does something that displeases you, try hard to find a credible temporary and local explanation for it: “He was tired,” “He was in a bad mood,” or “He had a hangover,” as opposed to “He’s always inattentive,” “He’s a grouch,” or “He’s an alcoholic.” When your partner does something admirable, amplify it with plausible explanations that are permanent (always) and pervasive (character traits): “She’s brilliant,” or “She’s always at the top of her game,” as opposed to “The opposition caved in,” or “What a lucky day she had.” (Location 3638)

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Responsive and Attentive Listening

The overarching principle of good listening is validation. The speaker first wants to know that he has been understood ... If possible, he additionally wants to know that the listener agrees or is at least sympathetic (Location 3651)

Two principles for making good love better pervade this chapter: attention and irreplaceability. You must not scrimp on the attention you pay to the person you love. (Location 3706)

The people we love can only be deeply and irrationally committed to us if we are one of a kind in their eyes. ... Part of what makes us irreplaceable in the eyes of those who love us is the profile of our strengths and the unique ways in which we express them. Some fortunate people have the capacity to love and be loved as a signature strength. Love flows out of them like a river and they soak it up like sponges, and this is the straightest road to love. Many of us, however, do not own this as a signature strength, and we have to work at it. ... Fortunately, there are many routes: kindness, gratitude, forgiveness, social intelligence, perspective, integrity, humor, zest, fairness, self-control, prudence, and humility are all strengths from which love can be wrought. (Location 3719)

Chapter 14: Meaning And Purpose

I wonder if Positive Psychology will only appeal to people near the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of basic needs. (Location 4643)

Positive emotions are part of a sensory system that alerts to us the presence of a potential win-win. (Location 4663)

The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power, or goodness. A life that does this is pregnant with meaning, and if God comes at the end, such a life is sacred. (Location 4729)