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Now Reading | How to Intentionally Design a Happier Life
According to US News and World Report, things that rank highest on producing happiness in our lives are education, engagement with people that we love—and creativity. Discovering what makes us happy is actually an active field of study today. Positive psychology is the scientific study of the strengths that enable humans and organizations to flourish and the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania was the first in the world to offer a degree in this field of study.
Paul Zak, TED speaker, has studied the link between happiness and empathy and has found that we are happier when we feel connected to other people. As you might expect, research also shows that the best indicator of a person’s happiness is the quality of his or her close relationships according to study.com. They share that whether you’re talking about romantic relationships, family dynamics, or simply close friendships, the happier you are in your social engagements, the happier you are in general.
Apparently, it’s harder than it sounds to know if we’re happy.
“We tell stories about the things we think should make us happy, but sometimes, when we look a bit closer, we’re not really that happy at all,” says Paul Dolan, a professor at the London School of Economics, a government policy advisor and one of the world’s leading happiness scholars.
Dolan has concluded that thoughtful, driven people spend so long reflecting about what makes a meaningful life, they sometimes lose sight of what actually feels good to them on a daily basis. Dolan goes on to say that he has found the actual formula for happiness. He believes that happy people pay attention to the everyday experiences that give them pleasure and purpose, then organize their lives so that they are doing more of those things.
In this Fast Company article, Dolan gives some tips to creating a happy life—and flourishing. I love the word flourish and what it means: to grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way, especially as the result of a particularly favorable environment. Here’s his advice:
First, do a happiness audit.
Dolan does not recommend fixating on your daily happiness levels, but rather taking one day a week or month to observe yourself. “It’s about tuning in to what you are doing, who you are doing it with and how it makes you feel,” Dolan says. “How much worry, stress, anger, joy or contentment do you experience on a given day?”
And second, design your life for happiness.
Dolan believes we can structure our time and design our surroundings in such a way that we can quickly make a habit out of doing things that make us happy. These changes are small and incremental, but this is precisely why he thinks they work so well. “People think that we need big solutions to do the issue of happiness justice,” he says. “There’s this belief that anything worth having has to be effortful, but really the opposite it true. Just make happiness as easy as possible.”
Read the rest of the article here: http://m.fastcompany.com/3042346/my-creative-life/how-to-intentionally-design-a-happier-life
“It’s not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness.” —Charles Spurgeon.
