Although each of us desires to be happy, it happens that from a very early stage we are simply not taught how to be happy.
Formal education generally aims to teach us how to be useful for society, such as being a skilled, disciplined, productive worker and a ‘good citizen’ able to live with others without causing too much trouble.
The topic of how to be happy is not addressed in textbooks or in most lessons. Far more value is placed on working hard and ‘knuckling down’ in order to get good qualifications to secure a ‘good job’ and ‘good relationship’ sometime in the future.
Also, society trains us in the importance to be beautiful (especially for women) and wealthy (especially for men).
Happiness doesn’t seem to be a very important matter in our life training.
So what happens then?
We get a qualification, a job and a partner but we still don’t feel happy. Instead, it seems that many of us are feeling stressed, depressed and unfulfilled in life.
In a society saturated with information, including advertising messages on what will make us happy, it still eludes us. The amount of information we receive via e-mail, Facebook, newspapers, magazines and T-shirts is overwhelming, and quite often contradictory, and finding ‘the truth’ is sometimes like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
Since the beginning of history, philosophers, religious leaders and other great men (and women) such as Plato, Aristotele, Jesus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Buddha, Benjamin Frankin, Nietzsche and Churchill, have explored the question of happiness and given us recipies on how to be happy. Not all say the same thing, so which should we follow? How do we decide whether to follow their advice?
For those of us who value the scientific method, science has offered no guidance regarding happiness as it simply was not a subject of investigation. It was not perceived as important. Scientists are often very good followers of what is taught at schools and universities, and the matter of happiness very seldom appears there. Also, happiness did not seem easy to measure.
But things have changed in the past 15 years, when some psychologists, led by Martin Seligman, began to apply the scientific method to the study of happiness, and started to demonstrate a number of facts about happiness.
While some of the results seemed like ‘nothing new’, at least now they were ‘scientifically’ demonstrated, leaving no room for doubt.
Other results, however, directly contradicted our common and traditional beliefs about happiness.
Positive psychology was born, and one of the great discoveries that has emerged from this has been that – yes, happiness can be taught. Indeed, it has been concluded that for the well-being of society, happiness should be taught from the early years in school.
According to the research in positive psychology, there are five key ingredients necessary for people to ‘flourish’:
Positive psychology has demonstrated that there are very simple exercises we can do to increase our happiness
• Positive emotions such as peace, gratitude, satisfaction, pleasure, inspiration, hope, curiosity and love;
• Engagement (to be absorbed in what we are doing, we concentrate intensely on the present);
• Relationships (healthy relationships are important for resilience and mental health);
• Meaning (belonging to and serving something bigger than one’s self);
• Achievement (determination counts for success more than IQ).
In the 21st century, with the pressure to succeed, earn money, be good parents, lovers, workers, to be slim, beautiful, and so on, many of us are forced to go in the opposite direction to happiness.
Indeed, depression has become the plague of the century, increasing exponetially and reaching even children in primary school age. Depression in children didn’t exist up to just a few years ago.
Psychology discovered that we all have a particular level of happiness to which we return after some external circumstance leads us to a peak or brings us down. Studies have demonstrated that just six months after a person’s happiness rises because, for example, they win a lottery, or falls because they become ill, their level of happiness tends to return to their personal happiness set-point.
Positive psychology has demonstrated that there are very simple exercises (positive interventions) we can do to increase our happiness base level. For example, taking five minutes every night before going to bed to write what were the three best things of the day and why they happened has been proven to increase this set-point.
Another very simple exercise is to ‘use your strength’. First you discover what your character strengths are. All of us know several of them, and with the help of some simple tests we can discover the ones we had not noticed before. Trying to use your strengths more in everyday life can lead to greater happiness.
For example, Seligman mentions the case of a woman who came to him for a consultation, saying she felt depressed at her job, which was to pack bags for customers at a supermarket checkout. She found it boring and lacking of any meaning. With Seligman the woman explored her strengths and discovered that she was very good at connecting with people and social relationships. So Seligman asked her to talk a little bit to customers while she was helping them to put the shopping in the bags. After a few weeks the woman came back very happy, and now she was enjoying her job.
Positive psychology has been demonstrated as especially effective to prevent depression in children and teenagers. Positive education has now been introduced in many schools all around the world with the aim of helping children to be aware of their strengths and how to use them, to practice gratitude, have better relationships with the others, choose more positive emotions, find meaning in their life and follow their passions while training their character in perseverance so that they can achieve more easily what they truly want in life.
This approach is central to the School of Positivity Project in Malta.
Julián Sáez is founder of the Positive Education Foundation in Malta and co-founder of the School of Positivity Project. For details e-mail contact@schoolofpositivity.com, call 7986 5771, or visit www.school ofpositivity.com or Facebook: School of Positivity.Waldorf Malta.