english class 3.5pagesMLA formatdue within 12 hoursEssay 0: Now that you have read about positive psychology and the modern Stoic approach to wellbeing, focus on one and write about its useful
Positive Psychology
Positive psychology is a branch of psychology that studies the lives of healthy, happy people. It is a relatively recent area of study, launched by psychologist Martin Seligman and several of his colleagues, who believe that good character can be learned and, if we develop good character, that will result in our being happy.
Traditionally, psychology has not studied happy people. Instead, it has studied psychologically troubled people, as Sue Halpern reports in her online article, “Are You Happy?” The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which psychiatrists and psychologists use to diagnose their patients, is a catalog of “all that can go wrong in life—alcoholism, anorexia, schizophrenia, kleptomania. . . .” It describes the symptoms of hundreds of mental illnesses (Halpern).
In contrast, positive psychologists recommend that we study and learn from people who report that they are happy. Across differences of race, wealth, age, and social class, positive psychologists have found that happy people have the same types of habits. Tal Ben-Shahar, a lecturer at Harvard on a course about happiness, aptly summarizes their lives: "We are living a happy life when we derive pleasure and meaning while spending time with our loved ones, or learning something new, or engaging in a project at work. The more our days are filled with these experiences, the happier we become. This is all there is to it" (Halpern).
Other researchers, such as Professors David Lykken and Auke Tellegan, suggest that we all have a “set point” for happiness and that it is genetic. Our “set point” is the point to which we return after periods of great happiness or sadness. If our parents and their parents tended to be jolly people, we will probably be jolly, too; happiness will be our set point. If our parents and grandparents were depressed much of the time, we may be, too. They note that our genetic inheritance is not the only influence on our happiness, but it is surely the largest (Halpern).
Positive psychologists such as Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky, concede that genetics influence our happiness a great deal. But they argue we are still capable of cultivating our own happiness by choosing well what we do in daily life. Prof. Lyubomirsky maintains that, while 50% of our capacity to be happy is influenced by genetics, another 40% is influenced by what we choose to do in life, and only 10% of our capability to be happy is determined by our circumstances. She argues that, even if a person tends to depression, s/he can avoid the “triggers” of depression, such as stress, by avoiding stressful situations (Halpern).
On the other hand, some writers question the value of Positive Psychology. Halpern asks if it fair to assume, as positive psychologists seem to, that everyone is on the same “level playing field”[1]—that is, that everyone has the same emotional and economic resources in their lives. This is manifestly not true, yet the advice books give one-size-fits-all advice. Even Ben-Shahar admits that his “happiness exercises” are not likely to benefit someone who lacks basic necessities, or is in a serious depression, or is living in wartime (8). At least some circumstances in life seem to exert more than a 10% influence on our happiness.
Advocates of positive psychology say that unhappy people should be seeking to make themselves happier and that no harm is done in trying to change their habits with that goal in mind. At the same time, however, others argue that subtle changes in our attitudes can occur when we tell ourselves that we all have control over our happiness. We begin to blame those people who are unhappy; we don’t consider their life circumstances. If everyone can be happy, we reason, then what is wrong with the people who are not cheerful and positive (Ehrenreich 32)? Finally, by concentrating on happiness and working toward it, we might focus our lives too narrowly -- like a person who tries to stay healthy by taking his temperature five times a day. The point of health, or of life, is to create something meaningful, not to continually measure how we are doing.
Works Cited
Ben-Shahar, Tal. Happier. McGraw-Hill, 2007.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Bright-sided. Picador, 2009.
Halpern, Sue. “Are You Happy?” New York Review of Books. 3 Apr. 2008. www. nybooks.com/articles/2008/04/03/are-you-happy/ Accessed 25 Mar. 2016.
[1] A “level playing field” is an image from sports. In the literal sense, a soccer field built on land that slopes down, for example, is not level. It will give an advantage to the team whose goal is downhill. Figuratively, a “level playing field” would mean that the people involved have roughly equal advantages in life. But life does not offer a level playing field.
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NOTE: If you wish to read the original text from which the text of Positive Psychology was taken, see: Halpern, Sue. "Are You Happy?" New York Review of Books. 3 April 2009. URL: www. nybooks.com/articles/2008/04/03/are-you-happy/. (This site no longer provides free access, so you will get only a portion of the article.)
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Excerpts: Burkeman, Oliver. The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. New York: Faber and Faber, 2012.
(KEY: [ ] means Wendy substituted these words to make the reading simpler.
[= ] means Wendy supplied a definition of the preceding word or words.
(5) means the text that follows can be found on page 5 of Burkeman’s The Antidote.
(5) For a civilization so fixated on achieving happiness, we seem remarkably incompetent at the task. One of the best-known general findings of the ‘science of happiness’ has been the discovery that the countless advantages of modern life have done so little to lift our collective mood. The awkward truth seems to be that increased economic growth does not necessarily make for happier societies, just as increased personal income, above a certain basic level, doesn’t make for happier people. Nor does better education, at least according to some studies. Nor does an increased choice of consumer products. Nor do bigger and fancier homes, which instead seem mainly to provide the privilege of more space in which to feel gloomy.
Perhaps you don’t need telling that self-help books, the modern day apotheosis [=great example] of the quest [=search] for happiness, are among the things that fail to make us happy. But, for the record, research strongly suggests that they rarely much help. This is why, among themselves, some self-help publishers refer to the ‘eighteen-month rule,’ which states that the person most likely to purchase any given self-help book is someone who, within the previous eighteen months, purchased a self-help book – one that evidently didn’t solve all their problems. When you look at the self-help shelves with a coldly impartial eye, this isn’t especially surprising. That we yearn [=wish very much] for neat, book-sized solutions to the problem of being human is understandable, but strip away the packaging, and you’ll find that the messages of such works are frequently banal [=trivial, boring]. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People essentially tells you to decide (6) what matters most to you in life, and then do it; How to Win Friends and Influence People advises its readers to be pleasant rather than obnoxious and to use people’s first names a lot. One of the most successful management manuals of the last few years, Fish!, is intended to help foster [=encourage] happiness and productivity in the workplace, suggests handing out small toy fish to your hardest-working employees.
As we’ll see, when the messages get more specific than that, self-help gurus [=spiritual teachers] tend to make claims that simply aren’t supported by more reputable research. The evidence suggests, for example, that . . .visualizing your goals doesn’t seem to make you more likely to achieve them. And whatever you make of the country-by-country surveys of national happiness that are now published with some regularity, it’s striking that the ‘happiest’ countries are never those where self-help books sell the most, nor indeed where professional psycho-therapists are most widely consulted. The existence of a thriving [=strong & growing] ‘happiness industry’ clearly isn’t sufficient to engender [= produce] national happiness, and it’s not unreasonable to suspect that it might make matters worse.
Yet the ineffectiveness of modern strategies for happiness is really just a small part of the problem. There are good reasons to believe that the whole notion of ‘seeking happiness’ is flawed to begin with. For one thing, who says happiness is a valid goal in the first place? Religions have never placed much explicit emphasis on it, at least as far as this world is concerned; philosophers have certainly not been unanimous in endorsing [=approving] it, either. And any [scientist] will tell you that evolution has little interest in your being happy [although it wants to be sure that you are happy enough to reproduce!].
Even assuming happiness to be a worthy target, though, a worse (7) pitfall [=danger] awaits, which is that aiming for it seems to reduce your chances of ever attaining it. ‘Ask yourself whether you are happy,’ observed the philosopher John Stuart Mill, ‘and you cease to be so.’ At best, it would appear, happiness can only be glimpsed [=seen just for a second] out of the corner of the eye, not stared at directly. (We tend to remember having been happy in the past much more frequently than we are conscious of being happy in the present.) Making matters worse still, what happiness actually is feels impossible to define in words; even supposing you could do so, you’d presumably end up with as many different definitions as there are people on the planet. [So] it’s tempting to conclude that ‘How can we be happy?’ is simply the wrong question – that we might as well resign ourselves to never finding an answer and get on with something more productive instead.
But could there be a third possibility, besides futile effort to pursue solutions that never seem to work, on the one hand, and just giving up, on the other? After several years reporting on the field of psychology as a journalist, I finally realized that there might be. I began to think that something united all those psychologists and philosophers . . . whose ideas seemed to actually hold water [=seemed right]. The startling conclusion [that they all made] was this: that the effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure, sadness – that [cause] us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy. They didn’t see this conclusion as depressing, though. **Instead, they argued that it pointed to an alternative approach, a ‘negative path’ to happiness, that entailed [=involved] taking a radically different stance toward those things that most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, (8) stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions – or at the very least, to learn to stop running quite so hard from them. Which is a bewildering thought, and one that calls into question not just our methods for achieving happiness, but also our assumptions about what ‘happiness’ really means.
These days, this notion certainly gets less press [=less public attention] than the admonition [=command] to remain positive at all times. But it is a viewpoint with a surprisingly long and respectable history. You’ll find it in the works of the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, who emphasized the benefits of always contemplating [=thinking about] how badly things might go. It lies deep near the core of Buddhism, which counsels that true security lies in the unrestrained embrace [=full acceptance] of insecurity – in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground, and never can. . . . This same ‘negative’ approach to happiness also helps explain why so many people find . . . meditation so beneficial; why a new generation of business thinkers are advising companies to drop their obsession with goal-setting and embrace uncertainty instead; and why, in recent years, some psychologists have [concluded that] pessimism may often be as healthy and productive as optimism.
(28) . . . . From their earliest days, Stoic teachings emphasized the fundamental importance of reason. Nature had bestowed uniquely upon humans, the Stoics argued, the capacity to reason, and therefore [a good life meant] living in accordance with reason. The (29) Roman Stoics added a psychological twist: living [such a life] would lead to inner tranquility -- ‘a state of mind,’ writes the scholar of Stoicism, William Irvine, ‘marked by the absence of negative emotions, such as grief, anger, and anxiety, and the presence of positive emotions, such as joy.’ And here lies the essential difference between Stoicism and the modern-day ‘cult of optimism.’ For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word ‘happiness.’ And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating [=developing] a kind of calm indifference towards one’s circumstances.
(30). . . .It is a curious truth that the Stoics’ approach to happiness through negativity begins with exactly the kind of insight that [positive thinkers] might endorse [=agree with]: that when it comes to feeling upbeat or despondent, it’s our beliefs that really matter. Most of us . . . go through life under the delusion [=mistaken belief] that it is certain people, situations or events that make us sad, anxious, or angry. When you’re irritated by a colleague at the next desk who won’t stop talking, you naturally assume that the colleague is the source of the irritation. . . .Look closely at your experience, though, say the Stoics, and you will eventually be forced to conclude that [the external event is not] ‘negative’ in itself. . . . What actually causes suffering are the beliefs you hold about [the event]. . . .
(31) We think of distress as a one-step procedure: something in the outside world causes distress in your interior world. In fact, it is a two-step procedure: between the outside event and the inside emotion is a belief. ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,’ Shakespeare has Hamlet say, very Stoically indeed.
The suggestion here is not that negative emotions don’t really exist, or that they don’t matter, or that they can easily be brushed aside . . .The Stoics aren’t making any such claims; they are merely specifying the mechanism through which all distress arises. [A.A. Long, a scholar of Stoicism, notes that the Stoics offered us the idea] ‘that judgments are in our power, that our emotions are determined by our judgments, and that we can always step back and ask: Is it other people that bother me? Or the judgment I make about other people?’
(32) The distinction is crucial. The idea that it is ultimately our beliefs that cause our distress, as we’ve seen, is a perspective shared by Stoics and positive thinkers alike. Beyond this, though, the two traditions diverge utterly [= separate completely] – and the divergence becomes most baldly [=clearly] apparent when it comes to beliefs about the future. The evangelists of optimism argue that you should cultivate as many positive expectations about the future as you can. But this is not the good idea that it may at first appear to be. For a start, . . . focusing on the outcome you desire may actually sabotage [=hurt, ruin] your efforts to achieve it. More generally, a Stoic would point out, it just isn’t a particularly good technique for feeling happier. Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared . . . when things eventually happen that he can’t persuade himself to believe are good. (And such things will happen.) This is a problem underlying all approaches to happiness that set too great a store by [= rely too much on] optimism. Trying to see things in an exclusively positive light is an attitude that requires constant, effortful replenishment [=reinforcement, support].
Applying their . . . rationality to the situation, the Stoics propose a more elegant, sustainable and calming way to deal with the possibility of things going wrong: rather than struggling to avoid all thought of these worst-case scenarios, they counsel actively dwelling on them [=thinking often about them] staring them in the face. . .
(33) The first benefit of dwelling on how bad things might get is a straightforward one. [Psychologists have noted that we all experience ‘hedonic adaptation.’ That means that we are happy about good events when they occur in our lives, but soon, we take them for granted; they become simply normal, and they don’t make us especially happy anymore.] It follows, then, that regularly reminding yourself that you might lose any of the things you currently enjoy – indeed, that you will definitely lose them all, in the end . . . would reverse the adaptation effect. ‘Whenever you grow attached to something,’ writes Epictetus [a Stoic], ‘do not act as though it were one of those things that cannot be taken away . . . if you kiss your child, your brother, your friend, . . . remind yourself that you love a mortal, something not your own; it has been given to you for the present, not . . . forever.’
The second, . . . arguably even more powerful benefit of [imagining worst-case scenarios is to cure our anxiety. Normally, we try to stop our anxiety by reassuring ourselves that everything will be all right.] (34) But reassurance is a double-edged sword [=can help but also hurt you]. In the short term, it can be wonderful, but like all forms of optimism, it requires constant maintenance; if you offer reassurance to a friend who is in the grip of anxiety, you’ll often find that a few days later, [the friend needs still more reassurance]. Worse, reassurance can actually exacerbate anxiety [= make anxiety worse]; when you reassure your friend that the worst-case scenario he fears probably won’t occur, you inadvertently reinforce his belief that it would be catastrophic if it did [occur].
But it is also true that, when things do go wrong, they’ll almost certainly go less wrong than you were fearing. Losing your job won’t condemn you to starvation and death; losing a boyfriend or girlfriend won’t condemn you to a life of unrelenting misery. Those fears are based on irrational judgments about the future, [and you make such judgments because] you haven’t thought the matter through in sufficient detail. You heard the rumour about cutbacks at the company, and instantly jumped to a mental image of being utterly destitute [=poor]; a lover behaved coldly and you leapt to imagining lifelong loneliness. [When you spend time imagining] exactly how things could go wrong in reality, you will usually find that your fears were exaggerated. Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it [= robs it] of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness [which you get from] positive thinking can be fleeting [quickly disappearing] and brittle; negative visualization [=imagining bad events] generates a vastly more dependable calm.
