True happiness
I'm very interested in sociology, psychology and philosophy, as well as the issues of happiness and depression. I was just reading the past weekend's issue of the Sunday Times magazine which I stole from one of my flatmates. I found a really interesting article on how to find true happiness, because, according to recent research, the things we think we want actually make us miserable."When two American psychologists studied hundreds of students and focused on the top 10% "very happy" people, they found they spent the least time alone and the most time socialising. Psychologists know that increasing the number of social contacts a miserable person has is the best way of cheering them up. When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote "hell is other people", the arch-pessimist of existentialist angst was wrong."
There you go. Groundbreaking scientific discovery: spending quality time with people you get along with makes you happy. And we didn't already know that, honest.
"Modern humans, stuck with an ancient brain, are like rats on a wheel. We can't stop running, because we're always looking over our shoulders and comparing our achievements with our neighbours'. At 20, we think we'd be happy with a house and a car. But if we get them, we start dreaming of a second home in Italy and a turbo-charged four-wheel drive.
This is called the 'hedonic treadmill' by happiness scholars. It causes us to rapidly and inevitably adapt to good things by taking them for granted. The more possessions and accomplishments we have, the more we need to boost our level of happiness. It makes sense that the brain of a species that has dominated others would evolve to strive to be the best."
This section definitely rings true, but is again quite obvious. Goals such as acquiring a nice house and a good car are based purely on material gain, so these achievements are unlikely to provide lasting happiness.
"Psychologists such as Seligman are convinced you can train yourself to be happier. His team are developing new positive interventions (treatments) to counteract the brain's nagging insistence on seeking out bad news. The treatments work by boosting positive emotion about the past, by teaching people to savour the present, and by increasing the amount of engagement and meaning in their lives.
Since the days of Freud, the emphasis in consulting rooms has been on talk about negative effects of the past and how they damage people in the present. Seligman names this approach 'victimology' and says research shows it to be worthless. "It is difficult to find even small effects of childhood events on adult personality, and there is no evidence at all of large effects."
The tragic legacy of Freud is that many are "unduly embittered about their past, and unduly passive about their future", says Seligman. His colleague Aaron Beck developed cognitive therapy after becoming disillusioned with his Freudian training in the 1950s. Beck found that as depressed patients talked 'cathartically' about past wounds and losses, some people began to unravel. Occasionally this led to suicide attempts, some of which were fatal. There was very little evidence that psychoanalysis worked."
This part really sparked my interest. It turns out that, despite what many psychologists would like to believe, the technique of focusing on past events, particularly bad ones, doesn't hold the key to solving the problems in a person's life. In fact, unlocking painful memories can cause someone to relive these events, and this may have devastating consequences. Instead it seems that concentrating on the positives in a person's life and encouraging them to recognise and be thankful for them is the process which produces more positive and long-lasting effects.
Sorry if this post is quite boring for you. I just wanted to share some passages from the article which provoked a great deal of interest from me. I've long been fascinated by different states of mind and their causes and effects. In the future, perhaps when I reach retirement age and have a wealth of life experience to delve into, I would like to train to become a counsellor. I find other people deeply interesting and would love to find out more about emotions and states of mind, and maybe even be given the opportunity to help people. Someone very close to me once attended one-to-one counselling sessions, one of which I was lucky enough to sit in on. I witnessed an intelligent female counsellor listen carefully and impartially to everything that was said, then respond in a fair, neutral and non-judgmental manner. The counselling proved to be extremely helpful, and it is this which sparked my interest in following this particular career path later in life.
posted by Becca @ 10:22 PM
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