The Way to Happiness... ...
In a taxicab on a rainy day in New York City, Gretchen Rubin, 41, suddenly barcode labels asked herself what she wanted OIL COOLER most in life. "I realized I wanted to be happy," she recalls. "It was a lightning-bolt moment because I'd never even thought about it before."
A couple of years water separator ago, this wife, mother and former lawyer for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor launched a full-time happiness project to test-drive traditional and newly minted approaches toward her leather belt life goal. She kept a daily gratitude journal, read a poem every day and had regular date nights with her husband, among other strategies. Now she swears globe valve she's cheerier.
Everyone seems to packaging machine be jumping on the get-happier bandwagon. Happiness is making headlines, selling books, inspiring scientific studies and spawning laughter clubs and joyology workshops. The reason? As the burgeoning field of positive psychology has shown, happy people thrive. They're car horn more creative and productive, earn more money, attract more friends, enjoy fuel pump better marriages, stay healthier and even outlive their grumpier peers.
"Imagine a drug that causes you to live pipeline pump eight or nine years longer, make more a year, be less likely to get divorced," says Martin Seligman, who started the positive psychology movement almost a oil water separator decade ago. "Happiness seems to be that drug."
But others wonder, Is this just one Dining table more thing we feel pressured to achieve in our overscheduled, overmeasured lives? How could there be one path to happiness for all people? And if we aren't feeling blissful, are we playground equipment failures at happiness? Some skeptics dismiss "happichondria" as the latest feel-good fad. "The outdoor playgroundnotion that behavior modification can bring about true happiness is as bogus as outdoor fitness equipment can be," says psychiatrist Charles Goodstein, MD, of New York University.
But happiness researchers, backed by thousands of studies, say happiness film blowing machine is measurable and buildable. If you're willing to take reading glasses a chance on the upside of life and shoot for your bliss, in spite of the naysayers, here's help laying the groundwork.
Genetics, as research on 4,000 sets of twins has Plastic toys demonstrated, accounts for about 50 percent of your happiness quotient. But even if you inherited the family frown instead of joy genes, you're not fated to a life of gloom. Just don't play equipment pin your hopes on advantages like health, wealth, education and good looks those bring Band Sealer only somewhat greater happiness than what those who are less Impulse Sealer blessed feel. Unless you're extremely poor or gravely ill, life circumstances account for only about 10 percent of happiness. The other 40 percent depends on what you do to make yourself happy.
That's the tricky part. Most of us assume that external bronze sculpture things a bigger house, a better job, a winning lottery ticket will brighten our lives. While they do bring temporary delight, the thrill invariably fades. "After 18 years of studying happiness, I fell into the same trap as everyone else," says psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD, author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. "I was so Wholesale kitchen cabinets excited to get a new car, a hybrid I'd wanted for a long time, but within two months, driving it became routine. Happiness is like weight loss. We all know how to take off a few pounds; the trick is maintaining it."