Happiness Happens
Things are not bad on all fronts in Malta where clowns risk arrest as Happiness Happens Day looms. This month, citizens around the world are invited to wear silver sunglasses to show that this cloudy world does, indeed, have a silver lining!
August 8 is Happiness Happens Day for the Secret Society of Happy People. This was the day, founder Pamela Gail Johnson revealed to me, when the society signed on its first official member. The idea is to actively promote happiness. Jarring as it may sound, in view of the parade-raining clown incident in Valletta, our island's placing on the global scales of happiness is such that it should cheer us up.
The society upholds the belief that there is a place for happiness despite social and personal upheaval. Why call the society secret? It was founded in August 1998, a time when it was becoming clear that happiness was not in. Reality TV was doing well by showcasing extreme dysfunction. As Ms Johnson explains, at www.sohp.com, people were being politically correct by keeping their joyful moments under wraps. Displays of happiness were given the boot in favour of hanging dirty linen in public. Happiness thrived in the privacy of one's inner circle.
By founding the society, Ms Johnson gave happiness a boost. Happiness is contagious. Expressing it can do us a world of good. Ever since the society was founded, social and environmental turmoil has marred the global arena to the extent that feelings of insecurity have upped the need for reassurance and comfort. The fallout, some of it of our own making, like the scorching costs of pollution, has drawn out our nesting instinct.
The need for a home where we can feel safe emphasises, even further, how welcome the genuine smile of a stranger is when we step outside our sanctuary. The society seeks to illuminate the world beyond our doorstep; it encourages its members to make donations, treat someone to a free bus ride and send Happiness Happens postcards.
Wear silver during the month of August, the society proposes, because making happiness happen is about looking for the proverbial silver lining in the present, however dark it may be. As Frankie Laine crooned for the cloud with silver lining in That Lucky Old Sun, 1949 chart-topper for eight weeks, so are we better off trying to find that which is positive in ourselves and others.
While psychology has always considered well-being as a valid area of research, the dissection of happiness has not been a priority in a field where the focus has been on restoring a degree of normalcy to the mentally ill. The term psychology elicits a quasi Pavlovian response which stems from the field's interest in disorder. This is not a minus. It is proof of the relief delivered to people experiencing drawn-out conditions of palpable distress.
Reality TV aside, black humour and drama in art has managed to mitigate the stigma of taking a seat on the therapist's couch. Take David Lodge's novel Therapy. In what presents itself like an allsorts of therapists, one professional after another attempts to help the central character, Lawrence Tubby Passmore, get over his mid-life crisis. Although he is a successful sitcom writer he is beset by existential doubts which, in my view, reflect a modern paradox. The West is developed. Is it happy?
Think of Tony Soprano, mafia boss in the ground-breaking HBO series The Sopranos, whose visits to Dr Jennifer Melfi were central to the plot. His role as head of both his family and the Family, dictated by birth and gender, makes us question our prejudices regarding therapy. Psychological problems are not a sign of weakness. Recovering from mental illness is not simply a matter of pulling oneself together.
I have, however, found it heartening to rediscover optimism. Twenty years ago I read Dale Carnegie to weed out the grumbling and the worrying. Today there is Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Martin E.P. Seligman. His work in cognitive science and positive psychology proposes that optimism may be learnt and internalised, minimising vulnerability to depression.
How does happiness happen? Of late, this is the question a number of psychologists have been asking as their field widens its vista to give the subject of well-being an upgrade. Happiness, in positive psychology, is not so much the mad-dash high one gets for a few hours as a general sense of satisfaction with the life one is living.
Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, Edward Diener and Sonja Lyubomirsky, together with Dr Seligman, have been doing a lot of groundwork in the investigation of happiness, seeking precise ways to examine an emotional state which is hard to define and harder to measure. This is what distinguishes their efforts from those of self-help gurus who do not always have the merits of scientific research to back their proposals.
As Dr Seligman, research psychologist at Pennsylvania University's Positive Psychology Centre, posts in Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realise Your Potential for Lasting Fulfilment, achieving happiness is about using one's strengths. This reminds me of the parable of the talents. I feel that the wisdom of the Sunday Gospel, the contemporary implications of which Fr Renè Camilleri writes about in The Sunday Times, is reflected by current findings on happiness. Mr Seligman has shown that virtues like kindness, tolerance, faith and a good work ethic are major players in the enjoyment of long-term satisfaction.
By means of research conducted by Ruut Veehoven at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, a world database of happiness was compiled. People were asked if, on the whole, they were satisfied with life. At www.worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl Malta's footing is on the higher end of the chart.
Malta ranked 14th in the global map of happiness drawn up by Adrian G. White, analytic social psychologist at the University of Leicester, using 2006 data by Marks, Abdullah, Simms and Thomson. The map, in happiness jargon, depicts Subjective Well-Being, abbreviated as SWB. At the moment, one of the popular measures of SWB is Pavot & Diener's Satisfaction With Life Scale, which is what the SWLS score stands for in the happiness map. Denmark topped the chart with a score of 273; Malta got a score of 250.
As Mr White explains in his document at www.le.ac.uk/pc/aw57/world/sample.html - A Global Projection of Subjective Well-being: A Challenge to Positive Psychology? - the map mirrors previous studies in which SWB was found to correlate strongly with health, wealth and access to basic education. However, there seems to be a cut-off level at which well-being stops increasing in proportion to wealth. The challenge in Mr White's question refers to the comparative lack of SWB studies in countries where SWB is low. Is the work in positive psychology helping the developed world only by aiding what Mr White describes as the "worried well"? Valid as this criticism may be in outing the limitations of this new science, I cannot but applaud what may eventually be a successful effort in minimising the suffering of depression through increased knowledge concerning happiness.
I got a good idea of positive psychology when I stumbled on the Daily Diary Study at www.swbresearch.netfirms.com, where participants are asked to rate their positive and negative emotions for at least a week. As I logged in daily for a few minutes to rate my emotions, anticipating an epiphany on my eighth log-in, I realised why the experts on happiness frequently underline the part memory plays in well-being. Apparently it is healthier to have a realistic memory of the past. To get an idea of whether or not one sums up the past realistically the survey compares daily answers to answers given on Day 8, the day on which the participant is asked to answer questions about the week in general.
In Time's 2005 special mind and body issue concerning the science of happiness, Sonya Lyubomirsky's advice included routinely recording things we are thankful for, thanking a mentor and learning to forgive. This year's coverage of the subject added on to her insight by naming 20 things which, according to science, make us happy. Cherishing heritage is one (although I would disagree in circumstances where keeping tradition alive involves maiming or killing animals or when heritage is used as an excuse to incite hatred against those who are foreign to our ways). In this I see the wisdom of prizing the beauty of the past and letting go of the negative once we have worked our way through it.
In The Psychology of Laughter by Boris Sidis published in 1913 religious services and football games are described as descendants of the play instinct from which satisfaction is derived. Music, theatre and other forms of art are similarly linked to our need to take part in activities which make us laugh and smile. Coincidentally, in Ian Buruma's most recent book, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, similarities between the cathedral and the football ground are also drawn. Here they represent man's need to connect with something bigger than him. This was, partly, the point of the Live Earth shows on Global Happiness Day last month.
Life is not a Fraser spiral of separate circles. The links we perceive do exist. This is why the Happy Planet Index takes into consideration the effect we have on the environment. The planet holds and sustains us. Trampling the life out of it to increase our well-being is inefficient and self-destructive. Islands score well on this index, a main reason being that they adopt what I like to call the Gene Kelly attitude. He showed us that you can sing and dance in the rain; islands are used to getting the best out of their limited resources.
While I shake my head at the sight of uniform structures of magnolia as the green soul disappears from the valley beneath my home, I try to look on the bright side. The vegetation is lost but a few gardens remain, refuges for the life - snakes, lizards and hedgehogs - remained unharmed during the destruction of its habitat.
I concede that things are not bad on all fronts in this patch of ours where clowns risk arrest, God's name is taken in vain, skin colour draws abuse and carobs are replaced by stones as attempts are made, in their vicinity, to plant new trees. Herman Grech's article in The Times on July 18 reported that Malta ranked high in the Happy Planet Index. The positive thinker in me hopes that the news will make us loosen up the next time we are greeted by the smile of a stranger.
If you think Ms Johnson is overly optimistic, consider this. When the time came for the second anniversary of Happiness Happens Day the society extended the day to a month. It was a practical move aimed at giving people more options to celebrate. "Sometimes," she told me, "August 8 just isn't the right day to celebrate happiness."
Denmark: The happiest of all
Married couple Nadya and Jan Hansen live in Malta. She is Maltese, he is a Dane. These are the reasons they gave for Denmark's status as the happiest nation:
- Hygeligt, the relaxation time where atmosphere is key as in coffee table, candles and a bottle of wine.
- A high standard of living.
- Good family ties, maintained even in cases where a couple has divorced.
- A good work ethic.
- A strong environmental conscience which prohibits the use of weed killers or insecticides in gardens and guarantees national waste separation.
- A preference for Danish items, oiling the economy and safeguarding ecology.
- A holiday guaranteed yearly by means of Union subsidies.
- A laissez-faire stance which prevents people from getting hot under the collar.
- A tendency to make up any excuse to hold a party!
The society upholds the belief that there is a place for happiness despite social and personal upheaval. Why call the society secret? It was founded in August 1998, a time when it was becoming clear that happiness was not in. Reality TV was doing well by showcasing extreme dysfunction. As Ms Johnson explains, at www.sohp.com, people were being politically correct by keeping their joyful moments under wraps. Displays of happiness were given the boot in favour of hanging dirty linen in public. Happiness thrived in the privacy of one's inner circle.
By founding the society, Ms Johnson gave happiness a boost. Happiness is contagious. Expressing it can do us a world of good. Ever since the society was founded, social and environmental turmoil has marred the global arena to the extent that feelings of insecurity have upped the need for reassurance and comfort. The fallout, some of it of our own making, like the scorching costs of pollution, has drawn out our nesting instinct.
The need for a home where we can feel safe emphasises, even further, how welcome the genuine smile of a stranger is when we step outside our sanctuary. The society seeks to illuminate the world beyond our doorstep; it encourages its members to make donations, treat someone to a free bus ride and send Happiness Happens postcards.
Wear silver during the month of August, the society proposes, because making happiness happen is about looking for the proverbial silver lining in the present, however dark it may be. As Frankie Laine crooned for the cloud with silver lining in That Lucky Old Sun, 1949 chart-topper for eight weeks, so are we better off trying to find that which is positive in ourselves and others.
While psychology has always considered well-being as a valid area of research, the dissection of happiness has not been a priority in a field where the focus has been on restoring a degree of normalcy to the mentally ill. The term psychology elicits a quasi Pavlovian response which stems from the field's interest in disorder. This is not a minus. It is proof of the relief delivered to people experiencing drawn-out conditions of palpable distress.
Reality TV aside, black humour and drama in art has managed to mitigate the stigma of taking a seat on the therapist's couch. Take David Lodge's novel Therapy. In what presents itself like an allsorts of therapists, one professional after another attempts to help the central character, Lawrence Tubby Passmore, get over his mid-life crisis. Although he is a successful sitcom writer he is beset by existential doubts which, in my view, reflect a modern paradox. The West is developed. Is it happy?
Think of Tony Soprano, mafia boss in the ground-breaking HBO series The Sopranos, whose visits to Dr Jennifer Melfi were central to the plot. His role as head of both his family and the Family, dictated by birth and gender, makes us question our prejudices regarding therapy. Psychological problems are not a sign of weakness. Recovering from mental illness is not simply a matter of pulling oneself together.
I have, however, found it heartening to rediscover optimism. Twenty years ago I read Dale Carnegie to weed out the grumbling and the worrying. Today there is Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Martin E.P. Seligman. His work in cognitive science and positive psychology proposes that optimism may be learnt and internalised, minimising vulnerability to depression.
How does happiness happen? Of late, this is the question a number of psychologists have been asking as their field widens its vista to give the subject of well-being an upgrade. Happiness, in positive psychology, is not so much the mad-dash high one gets for a few hours as a general sense of satisfaction with the life one is living.
Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, Edward Diener and Sonja Lyubomirsky, together with Dr Seligman, have been doing a lot of groundwork in the investigation of happiness, seeking precise ways to examine an emotional state which is hard to define and harder to measure. This is what distinguishes their efforts from those of self-help gurus who do not always have the merits of scientific research to back their proposals.
As Dr Seligman, research psychologist at Pennsylvania University's Positive Psychology Centre, posts in Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realise Your Potential for Lasting Fulfilment, achieving happiness is about using one's strengths. This reminds me of the parable of the talents. I feel that the wisdom of the Sunday Gospel, the contemporary implications of which Fr Renè Camilleri writes about in The Sunday Times, is reflected by current findings on happiness. Mr Seligman has shown that virtues like kindness, tolerance, faith and a good work ethic are major players in the enjoyment of long-term satisfaction.
By means of research conducted by Ruut Veehoven at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, a world database of happiness was compiled. People were asked if, on the whole, they were satisfied with life. At www.worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl Malta's footing is on the higher end of the chart.
Malta ranked 14th in the global map of happiness drawn up by Adrian G. White, analytic social psychologist at the University of Leicester, using 2006 data by Marks, Abdullah, Simms and Thomson. The map, in happiness jargon, depicts Subjective Well-Being, abbreviated as SWB. At the moment, one of the popular measures of SWB is Pavot & Diener's Satisfaction With Life Scale, which is what the SWLS score stands for in the happiness map. Denmark topped the chart with a score of 273; Malta got a score of 250.
As Mr White explains in his document at www.le.ac.uk/pc/aw57/world/sample.html - A Global Projection of Subjective Well-being: A Challenge to Positive Psychology? - the map mirrors previous studies in which SWB was found to correlate strongly with health, wealth and access to basic education. However, there seems to be a cut-off level at which well-being stops increasing in proportion to wealth. The challenge in Mr White's question refers to the comparative lack of SWB studies in countries where SWB is low. Is the work in positive psychology helping the developed world only by aiding what Mr White describes as the "worried well"? Valid as this criticism may be in outing the limitations of this new science, I cannot but applaud what may eventually be a successful effort in minimising the suffering of depression through increased knowledge concerning happiness.
I got a good idea of positive psychology when I stumbled on the Daily Diary Study at www.swbresearch.netfirms.com, where participants are asked to rate their positive and negative emotions for at least a week. As I logged in daily for a few minutes to rate my emotions, anticipating an epiphany on my eighth log-in, I realised why the experts on happiness frequently underline the part memory plays in well-being. Apparently it is healthier to have a realistic memory of the past. To get an idea of whether or not one sums up the past realistically the survey compares daily answers to answers given on Day 8, the day on which the participant is asked to answer questions about the week in general.
In Time's 2005 special mind and body issue concerning the science of happiness, Sonya Lyubomirsky's advice included routinely recording things we are thankful for, thanking a mentor and learning to forgive. This year's coverage of the subject added on to her insight by naming 20 things which, according to science, make us happy. Cherishing heritage is one (although I would disagree in circumstances where keeping tradition alive involves maiming or killing animals or when heritage is used as an excuse to incite hatred against those who are foreign to our ways). In this I see the wisdom of prizing the beauty of the past and letting go of the negative once we have worked our way through it.
In The Psychology of Laughter by Boris Sidis published in 1913 religious services and football games are described as descendants of the play instinct from which satisfaction is derived. Music, theatre and other forms of art are similarly linked to our need to take part in activities which make us laugh and smile. Coincidentally, in Ian Buruma's most recent book, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, similarities between the cathedral and the football ground are also drawn. Here they represent man's need to connect with something bigger than him. This was, partly, the point of the Live Earth shows on Global Happiness Day last month.
Life is not a Fraser spiral of separate circles. The links we perceive do exist. This is why the Happy Planet Index takes into consideration the effect we have on the environment. The planet holds and sustains us. Trampling the life out of it to increase our well-being is inefficient and self-destructive. Islands score well on this index, a main reason being that they adopt what I like to call the Gene Kelly attitude. He showed us that you can sing and dance in the rain; islands are used to getting the best out of their limited resources.
While I shake my head at the sight of uniform structures of magnolia as the green soul disappears from the valley beneath my home, I try to look on the bright side. The vegetation is lost but a few gardens remain, refuges for the life - snakes, lizards and hedgehogs - remained unharmed during the destruction of its habitat.
I concede that things are not bad on all fronts in this patch of ours where clowns risk arrest, God's name is taken in vain, skin colour draws abuse and carobs are replaced by stones as attempts are made, in their vicinity, to plant new trees. Herman Grech's article in The Times on July 18 reported that Malta ranked high in the Happy Planet Index. The positive thinker in me hopes that the news will make us loosen up the next time we are greeted by the smile of a stranger.
If you think Ms Johnson is overly optimistic, consider this. When the time came for the second anniversary of Happiness Happens Day the society extended the day to a month. It was a practical move aimed at giving people more options to celebrate. "Sometimes," she told me, "August 8 just isn't the right day to celebrate happiness."
Denmark: The happiest of all
Married couple Nadya and Jan Hansen live in Malta. She is Maltese, he is a Dane. These are the reasons they gave for Denmark's status as the happiest nation:
- Hygeligt, the relaxation time where atmosphere is key as in coffee table, candles and a bottle of wine.
- A high standard of living.
- Good family ties, maintained even in cases where a couple has divorced.
- A good work ethic.
- A strong environmental conscience which prohibits the use of weed killers or insecticides in gardens and guarantees national waste separation.
- A preference for Danish items, oiling the economy and safeguarding ecology.
- A holiday guaranteed yearly by means of Union subsidies.
- A laissez-faire stance which prevents people from getting hot under the collar.
- A tendency to make up any excuse to hold a party!