Tal Ben-Shahar argues that we can learn to be happier in the same way that we can learn to drive a car or speak a foreign language.

Many of us, looking back now at school or college, would have preferred to study the speed of electrons or the history of ancient Mesopotamia for something more useful, such as how to become happier.Actually there is educational institution where such a course is actually being studied.

Teacher and writer Tal Ben Shahar teaches at Harvard University courses in Positive Psychology and Psychology of Leadership, which have become one of the most popular in the history of the University. Tal Ben-Shahar argues that we can learn to be happier in the same way that we can learn to drive a car or speak a foreign language.

10 tips to be happy from Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar

1. Become aware of all the things that make you happy.

There is a good and simple technique to do this.

Take a piece of paper and complete the following sentence:“To bring 5% happiness into my life…”

Think about new experiences rather than things. A million dollars is unlikely to make you happy.

But maybe it will be: the opportunity to spend more time with your family, travel around the world, financial stability.

Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar suggests that we can start with rather modest wishes.

2. Combine pleasure and meaning

Aristotle had a great concept called the golden mean.

He believed that we should strive for a middle ground between two extremes.

This seems pretty reasonable, but when it comes to everyday life choices we often forget to follow his wise advice.

Let's take this as an example of food. We often tend to consume foods that, on the one hand, give us quick pleasure, but on the other hand, make us feel guilty later (for example, for some, this can be sweets or cakes).

Or we go to the other extreme, decide to go on a strict diet and eat only low-calorie, low-fat and tasteless food.

What does Ben Shahar offer?

You don't have to choose one extreme or the other. We can find what, after all, is both delicious and healthy for us.

He says:

“SATISFACTION OF THE CONTINUOUS NEED FOR HAPPINESS INDICATES THAT WE ENJOY THE ALL JOURNEY IN THE DIRECTION THAT WE CONSIDER AS MEANING. HAPPINESS, THEREFORE, IS NOT SOMETHING AT THE TOP OF A MOUNTAIN OR WALKING AIMlessly AROUND THE MOUNTAIN: HAPPINESS IS THE EXPERIENCE OF CLIMBING TO THE TOP.

3. Don't make happiness your ultimate goal

You will not be happy if you do or get something, because happiness is not an end state.It is something that we must constantly work on throughout our lives.

Ben Shahar is convinced thatwe can become happier every day, instead of putting our happiness in the hands of other people or looking for it in external events and material things.

4. Create traditions

Is there a happiness ritual? A professor at Harvard University is convinced that yes.

For him, such a ritual was the maintenance of the “Journal of gratitude”, in which every day before going to bed he writes down five things for which he feels grateful.

Your happiness ritual may not require journaling.

Maybe you enjoy taking an afternoon walk or praying for 15 minutes a day.

5. Imagine yourself at the age of 110

Look back at your life: what advice would you give to your younger self? What important lessons have you learned? What trivial, negative, superficial things are not worth your time and effort?

If you manage to look at your present from this angle, many things fall into place.

6. Simplify your life

Organize your busy schedule to free up time for goals and accomplishments that make you happier.

Ask yourself what you can not do, what can you say "no" to?

Free your mind from emotional debris. Simplify your routine. Stop living with the feeling that you don't have enough time.

This state makes it impossible to enjoy or fully immerse yourself in those activities that make you happy.

7. Remember the close connection between the body and consciousness

Have you noticed when you feel refreshed and full of strength? Most people didn't pay. They take their health as something natural.

However, when something in our body suddenly disrupts its normal functioning, it is impossible to ignore persistent thoughts about a diseased condition. We are thinking about it. We talk about it.

We feel that it affects our mood, attitude to life, our interaction with people.

So if you want to keep your mind positive, take care of your body.

Get enough sleep, pay attention to your diet, exercise regularly.

8. Accept your own emotions

Take not only positive emotions, such as pleasure and enthusiasm, but also emotions such as anger, rage, anxiety, sadness.

Don't try to deny them or run from them. Expecting permanent happiness is unrealistic and absolutely impossible.

Ben-Shahar is also convinced that such an expectation will only lead to more frustration and a sense of lack of happiness.

9. Start with your attitude

Beyond extreme cases, our happiness is largely determined by what we focus our attention on and how we choose to relate to external events.

If we focus on something that angers, annoys, or scares us s, we seem to “feed” these emotions and subconsciously looking for other triggers that make us even more angry or scared.

The fastest way to break this negative circle is to direct your thoughts in a different direction and “teach” your mind to draw positive lessons from any situation.

10. Turn happiness into your universal currency

It is happiness, not money, connections or social status should become the value by which our life can be measured.

If we feel our days as meaningless and empty, then it is worth asking ourselves the question - what have we exchanged our happiness for?

The answer to this question is the key to our life satisfaction and self-development.

P.S. And remember, just by changing your consciousness - together we change the world! © econet

Current page: 1 (total book has 15 pages) [accessible reading excerpt: 4 pages]

Tal Ben Shahar
be happier

Foreword

We all live for the sole purpose of being happy; Our lives are so different, but so similar.

Anne Frank

I started teaching a Positive Psychology Seminar at Harvard in 2002. Eight students signed up for it; very soon the two stopped attending classes. Each week in the workshop, we searched for an answer to what I consider to be the question of questions: how can we help ourselves and others—whether individuals, groups, or society as a whole—become happier? We have read articles in scientific journals, tested various ideas and hypotheses, told stories from own life, saddened and rejoiced, and by the end of the year we had a clearer understanding of what psychology can teach us in the pursuit of a happier and more fulfilling life.

The following year, our seminar became popular. My mentor, Philip Stone, who first introduced me to this field of study and was also the first professor to teach positive psychology at Harvard, suggested that I offer a lecture course on this topic. Three hundred and eighty students signed up for it. When we summed up the results at the end of the year, over 20 percent of students noted that “studying this course helps people improve the quality of life.” And when I offered it again, eight hundred and fifty-five students had already signed up for it: the course became the most attended in the entire university.

Such a success almost turned my head, but William James - the same one who laid the foundations of American psychology more than a hundred years ago - did not let me go astray. He reminded in time that one must always remain a realist and try to "estimate the value of truth in the specie of empiricism." The cash value that my students so desperately needed was measured not in hard currency, not in terms of success and honors, but in what I later came to call the "universal equivalent", since this is the ultimate goal to which all others are striving. purpose is happiness.

And these were not just abstract lectures “about the good life”. Students not only read articles and studied scientific data on this issue - I also asked them to apply the material they learned in practice. They wrote essays in which they tried to overcome fears and reflected on strengths nature, set ambitious goals for the next week and the next decade. I urged them to take a risk and try to find their growth zone (the golden mean between the comfort zone and the panic zone).

Personally, I have not always been able to find this middle ground. Being a naturally shy introvert, I felt more or less comfortable when I taught a seminar with six students. However, the next year, when I had to lecture to almost four hundred students, this, of course, required a fair amount of effort from me. And when in the third year my audience more than doubled, I did not get out of the panic zone, especially since the parents of students, their grandparents, and then journalists began to appear in the lecture hall.

Since the day the newspapers Harvard Crimson And Boston Globe rang out about the popularity of my lecture course, an avalanche of questions fell upon me, and this continues to this day. People themselves feel the real results of this science and cannot understand why this is happening.

What explains the frenzied demand for positive psychology at Harvard and other college campuses? Where does this growing interest in the science of happiness come from, which is rapidly spreading not only in elementary and secondary schools, but also among the adult population? Is it because people are more prone to depression these days? What does this indicate - about the new prospects for education in the 21st century, or about the vices of the Western way of life?

In fact, the science of happiness does not exist only in the Western Hemisphere, and it originated long before the era of postmodernism. People have always and everywhere searched for the key to happiness. Even Plato in his Academy legitimized the teaching of a special science of the good life, and his best student Aristotle founded a competing organization - the lyceum - to promote his own approach to the problems of personal development. More than a hundred years before Aristotle, on another continent, Confucius moved from village to village to convey to people his instructions on how to become happy. Not one of the great religions, not one of the universal philosophical systems has bypassed the problem of happiness, and it does not matter whether we are talking about our world or the afterlife. And recently the shelves bookstores literally bursting with books by popular psychologists, who also occupied a huge number of conference rooms around the world - from India to Indiana, from Jerusalem to Mecca.

But despite all the fact that the philistine and scientific interest in " happy life» knows no boundaries either in time or space, our era is characterized by some aspects unknown to previous generations. These aspects help to understand why the demand for positive psychology in our society is so high. In the United States today 1
The book was written in 2007. Note. ed.

The number of depressions is ten times higher than it was in the 1960s, and the average age of depression is fourteen and a half years, while in 1960 it was twenty-nine and a half years. Nearly 45 percent of college students were "so overwhelmed that they struggle to manage their day-to-day responsibilities and even just live," according to a recent survey of American colleges. And other countries practically do not lag behind the United States in this. In 1957, 52 percent of people in the UK said they were very happy, compared to only 36 percent in 2005, despite the fact that over the course of the second half of the century, the British tripled their material well-being. Along with the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, the number of adults and children who suffer from nervousness and depression is rapidly increasing. According to the Chinese Ministry of Health, "the state of mental health of children and young people in the country is truly alarming."

Along with an increase in the level of material well-being, the level of susceptibility to depression also increases. Despite the fact that in most Western countries, and in many countries in the East, our generation lives richer than their fathers and grandfathers, we do not become happier from this. Leading scientist in the field of positive psychology Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 2
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi is professor of psychology, former dean of the faculty at the University of Chicago, author of several bestsellers and over 120 journal and book articles, winner of the Thinker of the Year Award (2000), one of the most widely cited psychologists of our time. Csikszentmihalyi's greatest achievement is the "flow" theory, which is discussed extensively in this book. Here and further approx. transl.

He asks an elementary question, to which it is not so easy to find an answer: “If we are so rich, then why are we so unhappy?”

As long as people firmly believed that a full life was unthinkable without satisfaction of basic material needs, it was not so difficult to somehow justify their dissatisfaction with life. However, now that the minimum needs of most people for food, clothing, and shelter have already been met, we no longer have accepted arguments for our dissatisfaction with life. More and more people are trying to resolve this paradox - because it seems that we bought our dissatisfaction with life with our own money - and many of these people are turning to positive psychology for help.

Why do we choose positive psychology?

Positive psychology, most often defined as "the science of optimal human functioning" 3
This definition is taken from the Positive Psychology Manifesto, which was first published in 1999. Here is how this definition sounds in full: “Positive psychology is the science of optimal human functioning. It aims to study and promote those factors that contribute to the well-being of individuals and communities. Positive psychology as a special direction in science is new approach by psychologists, which proposes to focus as much as possible on the origins of mental health and thus overcome the previous approach, in which the main emphasis was on diseases and disorders.

It was officially proclaimed an independent branch of scientific research in 1998. Her father is American Psychological Association President Martin Seligman. 4
Seligman, Martin - famous American psychologist and writer, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, vice-champion of the United States in bridge. Takes 13th place in the world ranking of citations of psychologists throughout the 20th century. He is best known for his theory of "learned helplessness", which he formulated as early as 1964 and which later became the cornerstone of positive psychology. Our publishing house published a book by Professor Seligman "In Search of Happiness" (M., Mann, Ivanov and Ferber).

Up until 1998, the science of happiness, that is, how to improve the quality of our lives, was largely usurped by popular psychology.

But most self-improvement books promise too much and deliver too little because they aren't subjected to rigorous scientific scrutiny. Conversely, ideas that appear in scientific journals that have gone a long way from conception to publication tend to be much more meaningful. The authors of these works are usually not so pretentious and do not make such a huge number of promises - and they have fewer readers - but they most often keep what they promise.

And yet, because positive psychology bridges the gap between the ivory tower where professors and academics live and the world of ordinary people, even the most sober scientific recommendations of positive psychologists - in the form of books, lectures, or articles posted on the Internet - often perceived as coming from some guru of popular psychology. This information is simple and accessible - well, just like popular psychology - but their simplicity and accessibility are of a completely different nature.

Leonardo da Vinci wittily remarked that "simplicity is the height of sophistication." In an attempt to extract the essence of a happy life, positive psychologists - alongside philosophers and specialists in other branches of the social sciences - have spent a lot of time and effort to achieve this simplicity on the other side of complexity. Their ideas, which I share in part in this book, will help you live a happy, fulfilling life. I know from my own experience that this is possible, because these ideas helped me at one time.

How to use this book

This book is designed to help you understand the very nature of happiness, more than that, to help you become happier. But if you just read it (or, for that matter, any other book), you are unlikely to succeed. I don't believe there are shortcuts that change everything overnight, and if you want this book to have a real impact on your life, you need to treat it like a textbook. Working with her, you will not only have to think a lot, but also actively act.

Merely thoughtlessly glancing over the text is clearly not enough; you need to think about every sentence. For this purpose, the book provides special sidebars marked "A Minute for Reflection." This is to give you an opportunity – and a reminder of the need – to stop for a few minutes, reflect on what you have just read, and look inside yourself with dispassion. If you do not take breaks, do not take a minute to think, then most of the material presented in this book will most likely remain for you the purest abstraction and disappear from your head very quickly.

In addition to the "thinking minutes" at the end of each chapter, there are longer exercises designed to get you to think and act, and thus help you absorb the material on a deeper level. You will probably enjoy some of these exercises more than others (for example, you may find that keeping a diary is easier and more convenient for you than just thinking). Start with those exercises that will make you feel like a duck to water, and only after they begin to bring you real benefits, gradually expand your range by connecting other exercises. If any exercise in this book doesn't make you feel better, don't do it and move on to the next one. The basis of all these exercises are, in my opinion, best practices corrections that only psychologists can offer us - and the more time you devote to them, the easier it will be for you to benefit from this book.

The book consists of three parts. In the first part, in chapters one through five, I discuss what happiness is and what are the necessary components of a happy life; in part two, chapters six through eight, I look at how to put these ideas into practice—in school, work, and personal life; the final section consists of seven meditations in which I have tried to formulate some thoughts about the nature of happiness and its place in our lives.

The first chapter begins with a story about those events and experiences, because of which I went in search of a better life. In the next chapter, I will argue against conventional wisdom that happiness does not arise from the mere satisfaction of our basic needs, nor from the endless delay in satisfaction. In this regard, the attitude to happiness of the hedonist who lives only for the sake of momentary pleasure, and the participant in the rat race, who puts off all the joys of life for later in the name of achieving some future goal, is considered. In reality, neither approach works for most people, because both fail to take into account our fundamental need for whatever we do to be of tangible benefit to us now and in the future.

In the third chapter on concrete examples I demonstrate why, in order to be happy, we need to find meaning and at the same time get pleasure - to feel that we do not live in vain, and at the same time experience positive emotions.

In the fourth chapter, I argue that the universal equivalent by which the quality of our lives is measured should not be money and prestige, but happiness. I reflect on the relationship between material well-being and happiness, and I ask why, despite unprecedented levels of material wealth, so many people are in danger of spiritual bankruptcy.

Chapter 5 attempts to link the ideas presented in this book with existing literature on the psychology of existence.

In the sixth chapter, I begin to put the theory into practice and ask why almost all students hate school. Then I try to figure out what parents and teachers can do to help students be both happy and successful. Two radically different approaches to the learning process itself are presented for your consideration: learning like drowning and learning like a love game.

Chapter 7 challenges the commonly accepted but completely unfounded assumption that there is an inevitable trade-off between inner satisfaction and outer success at work. I will tell you about a technique that allows us to determine in advance what kind of work could serve as a source of meaning and pleasure for us and would allow us to show our strengths.

The eighth chapter deals with one of the most important components of happiness - personal life. I will talk about what it really means to love and be loved unconditionally, why this kind of love is so necessary for happiness in our personal lives, and how unconditional love enhances the pleasure that we receive in other areas of life and gives our existence additional meaning.

In the first meditation, which opens the final part of the book, I discuss how happiness, selfishness, and altruism are related to each other. In the second meditation, for the first time, the concept of “vent” is introduced into everyday life - any activity that can serve as a source of meaning and pleasure for us, which has the most direct impact on the overall level of our spiritual well-being. In the third meditation, I allow myself to question the current notion that our level of happiness is supposedly predetermined by the structure of our genes or events of early childhood and cannot be changed. In the fourth meditation, we will look for ways to overcome some psychological barriers - those internal restrictions that we often impose on ourselves and which prevent us from living a full life. In the fifth meditation, we will try to conduct a thought experiment that will give us a basis for further reflection and answers to the "question of questions" before us. The sixth meditation is about how our attempts to cram in more and more large quantity doing things in smaller and smaller periods of time deprive us of any opportunity to live a happier life.

And finally, the final meditation is dedicated to the revolution of happiness. I believe that if enough people can learn the true nature of happiness and begin to perceive it as a universal equivalent, we will witness an unprecedented flowering of not only happiness, but also virtue on a society-wide scale.

Acknowledgments

In the process of writing this book, my friends, teachers and students helped me a lot. When I first asked Kim Cooper to help me with the draft manuscript for this book, I expected her to limit herself to a few minor suggestions, after which I could immediately send the book to the publishers. But it didn't work out that way. Subsequently, we spent hundreds of hours working together on this book - we argued, discussed everything to the smallest detail, told each other stories from our own lives, laughed, turning the writing of this book into a selfless labor filled with happiness.

I want to give special thanks to Sean Achor, Warren Bennis, Johan Berman, Aleta Camille Bertelsen, Nathaniel Branden, Sandra Cha, Aijin Choo, Limur Defny, Margo and Udi Eiran, Liet and Shai Feinberg, Dave Fish, Shane Fitz-Coy, Jessica Glazer , Adam Grant, Richard Hackman, Nat Harrison, Ann Hwang, Ohad Kamin, Joy Kaplan, Ellen Lenger, Maren Lau, Pat Lee, Brian Little, Joshua Margolis, Dan Merkel, Bonnie Masland, Sasha Matt, Jamie Miller, Michni Moldovean, Demian Moskowitz, Ronen Nakas, Jeff Perrotti, Josephine Pichanik, Samuel Raskoff, Shannon Rungvelski, Emir and Ronnita Rubin, Philip Stone, Moshe Talmon and Pavel Vasiliev. A lot of new ideas - and a sea of ​​\u200b\u200bhappiness - were given to me by professors and students who attended my course in positive psychology.

Colleagues and friends from tanker pacific5
Tanker Pacific Management Group is the largest private fleet of tankers in the world headquartered in Singapore.

– many of the thoughts in this book matured during our joint seminars and in leisurely conversations over a glass of wine. I am especially grateful to Idan Ofer 6
Ofer, Idan - Israeli billionaire, founder and longtime CEO Tanker Pacific Management Group. Owner of several large companies in Israel. He currently resides in London and is the chairman of an international holding company engaged in semiconductors, chemicals and shipping, energy and high technology. Idan Ofer is also known for his unconventional political views. Thus, he believes that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be extinguished by paying generous compensation to the Palestinians and creating a large industrial zone on the territory of the Palestinian Autonomy.

Hugh Hang, Sam Norton, Indigo Singh, Tadik Tonga and Patricia Lim.

I am grateful to my agent Rafe Segaline for his patience, support and ability to cheer me up in difficult times. John Ahearn is my publishing editor McGraw Hill- believed in my book from the first day, and it was with his light hand that the process of publication was so pleasant for me.

God blessed me with a large and friendly family - this is my circle of happiness. Many thanks to all of them - the Ben-Shahars, the Ben-Porats, the Ben-Urams, the Grobers, the Kolodnys, the Marxes, the Melniks, the Moses and the Roses - for the countless hours that we have spent and will continue to spend in conversation and in enjoying life. And also thanks to my grandparents for the fact that they survived the worst and managed to become a clear illustration of the best.

Many of the thoughts in this book came from conversations with my brother and sister, Ze'ev and Ateret, two brilliant and insightful psychologists. Tami, my wife and life friend, patiently listened to my ideas when they were still raw, and then read and discussed with me everything I wrote. While my wife and I talked about the book, our children David and Shiril sat patiently on my lap (and occasionally turned around and smiled at me, as if to remind me of what true happiness is). And my parents laid the foundations in me, thanks to which I was able to write about happiness and, more importantly, to find it in my own life.

Part I
What is happiness?

Chapter 1
The Problem of Happiness

Opportunity lurks among difficulties and challenges.

Albert Einstein

I was sixteen years old when I won the Israeli national squash championship. It is because of this incident that the theme of happiness has become central to my life.

I have always believed that if I win the title, it will make me happy and fill the void that I have so often felt. For all five years, while I was preparing for this tournament, I felt that something very important was missing in my life - and no matter how many kilometers I ran, no matter what weights I lifted and no matter what incendiary speeches again and again I didn’t replay it in my head - nothing could replace it for me. But I believed that it was only a matter of time and sooner or later the “missing something” would make its own way into my life.

And indeed, when I won the Israeli national championship, I was in seventh heaven with happiness - a hundred times happier than I could have imagined. After the final match, my friends and family and I went to a restaurant to celebrate this event.

We celebrated the whole night, and then I went to my room. I sat on the bed and wanted to last time before going to sleep, feel the feeling of supreme happiness experienced that day. But suddenly the bliss evaporated somewhere and the same hopeless feeling of emptiness returned. I was surprised and frightened, because if I was not happy now, when it seemed that I had achieved everything that my soul desired, how could I hope for happiness that would last forever?

I tried to convince myself that this was a temporary decline, but days, weeks and months passed, and I did not feel happier. In fact, I felt even more empty because I began to realize that simply changing the goal - say, winning the world championship - in itself would not bring me happiness.

Minute to think

Recall two or three times in your life when, contrary to your hopes, the achievement of one or another important milestone did not give you anything emotionally.

And then I realized the need to change my ideas about happiness - to understand its very nature more deeply, or even look at it with completely different eyes. I was literally obsessed with finding the answer to a single question: how to find lasting happiness that would last until the end of my days? I went to college to study philosophy and psychology. I learned to read and analyze any text literally under a magnifying glass. I read what Plato wrote about "the good" and what Emerson wrote about "the incorruptibility of your own soul." And all this turned out to be for me something like new lenses, through which both my own life and the life of those people who surrounded me looked much clearer.

I was not alone in my misfortune, for I saw that many of my classmates were despondent and depressed. Their entire lives were spent chasing high marks, sporting achievements, and prestigious jobs, but no matter how passionately they pursued their goals - even if they managed to achieve them - this did not bring them a sense of stable well-being. After graduating from college, their specific goals changed in many ways (for example, instead of academic success, they began to dream of promotion), but general scheme life remained the same.

It seemed as if all these people perceived their mental problems as the inevitable price of success. Was Thoreau right? 7
Thoreau, Henry David (1817-1862), American writer and campaigner civil rights. Actively participated in the struggle for the liberation of blacks, and once even was imprisoned for one day for protesting against the war with Mexico and active participation in the abolitionist movement. Most of his life he lived alone in a hut in the forest, doing physical work, writing essays (the most famous of them is Walden, or Life in the Forest, 1854) and contemplating nature. In 1960, his name was inscribed in the Great American Hall of Fame.

Ever noticed that most people lead a life of "quiet desperation"? I stubbornly refused to accept this ominous postulate as an inevitable fact of life and began to look for answers to next questions: how can you succeed while remaining at the same time happy man? how to reconcile ambition and happiness? Is it really impossible to get out of your head once and for all the notorious maxim “Be patient, Cossack, you will be an ataman”?

Trying to answer these questions, I realized that first of all I need to find out what happiness is. Words such as "enjoyment", "bliss", "ecstasy" and "satisfaction" are often used with the word "happiness", but none of them is able to express exactly what I mean when I think of happiness. These emotions are fleeting, and although they are pleasant and meaningful in themselves, they are neither a measure of happiness nor its bulwark.

As a result, it became clear to me which words and definitions are not suitable for defining happiness, but it turned out to be much more difficult to find words that would be able to adequately designate its nature. English word happiness(happiness) comes from the Icelandic word happy, which means "luck", "chance", "happy occasion"; the same root for English words haphazard(accident, chance, accident) and chance(accident, accident) 8
There is no generally accepted point of view regarding the origin of the Russian word "happiness". The point of view of M. Fasmer and I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay, according to which the Proto-Slavic Sҍčęstiĵe comes from ancient Indian su(good) + cleanliness(part), that is, "a good lot."

I did not want to reduce the experience of happiness to luck or a stupid accident, so I sought to define and understand what it is.

Minute to think

How would you define happiness? What does this word mean to you?

I do not have an exhaustive answer to the one question that I asked myself at the age of sixteen, and I suspect that I never will. I never found any secret formula, no "five easy ways to happiness." My purpose in writing this book was simply to better understand the principles that underlie a happy and fulfilling life.

Of course, these general principles- by no means a panacea, besides, they are not suitable for all people and not in all situations. The ideas outlined here do not apply if the person has major depression or acute anxiety disorder, nor does it apply to most of the external obstacles that interfere with a prosperous life: war, conditions of extreme poverty or political repression, the recent loss of a loved one. Under certain circumstances, the best thing we can do is to endure negative emotions and let things take their course.

Suffering in life is inevitable, and there are many external and internal barriers that cannot be overcome in one fell swoop. Nevertheless, people in most situations can become happier if they learn to better understand the very nature of happiness and, more importantly, to apply certain ideas in practice.

Foreword

We all live for the sole purpose of being happy; Our lives are so different, but so similar.

Anne Frank

I started teaching a Positive Psychology Seminar at Harvard in 2002. Eight students signed up for it; two stopped attending classes very soon. Each week in the workshop, we searched for an answer to what I consider to be the question of questions: how can we help ourselves and others - be they individuals, communities, or society as a whole - become happier? We read articles in scientific journals, tested various ideas and hypotheses, told stories from our own lives, saddened and rejoiced, and by the end of the year we had a clearer understanding of what psychology can teach us in the pursuit of a happier and more fulfilling life.

The following year, our seminar became popular. My mentor, Philip Stone, who first introduced me to this field of study and was also the first professor to teach positive psychology at Harvard, suggested that I offer a lecture course on this topic. Three hundred and eighty students signed up for it. When we summed up the results at the end of the year, over 20 % participants noted that "studying this course helps people improve the quality of life." And when I offered it again, 855 students signed up, so the course became the most attended in the whole university.

Such success almost turned my head, but William James - the same one who laid the foundations of American psychology more than a hundred years ago - did not let me go astray. He reminded in time that one must always remain a realist and try to "estimate the value of truth in the specie of empiricism." The cash value that my students so desperately needed was measured not in hard currency, not in terms of success and honors, but in what I later called the "universal equivalent", since this is the ultimate goal towards which all the rest are striving. goals - that is, happiness.

And these were not just abstract lectures “about the good life”. Students not only read articles and studied scientific data on this issue, I also asked them to apply the material they learned in practice. They wrote essays in which they tried to overcome fears and reflected on the strengths of their character, set themselves ambitious goals for the next week and the next decade. I urged them to take a risk and try to find their growth zone (the golden mean between the comfort zone and the panic zone).

Personally, I have not always been able to find this middle ground. Being a naturally shy introvert, I felt quite comfortable the first time I taught a seminar with six students. However, the next year, when I had to lecture to almost four hundred students, this, of course, required a fair amount of effort from me. And when in the third year my audience more than doubled, I did not get out of the panic zone, especially since the parents of students, their grandparents, and then journalists began to appear in the lecture hall.

From the day the Harvard Crimson, and then the Boston Globe, ranted about how popular my lecture course was, I was bombarded with questions, and it continues to this day. For some time now, people have felt the innovation and real results of this science and cannot understand why this is happening. What explains the frenzied demand for positive psychology at Harvard and other college campuses? Where does this growing interest in the science of happiness come from, which is rapidly spreading not only in elementary and secondary schools, but also among the adult population? Is it because people are more prone to depression these days? What does this indicate - about the new prospects for education in the 21st century, or about the vices of the Western way of life?

In fact, the science of happiness does not exist only in the Western Hemisphere, and it originated long before the era of postmodernism. People have always and everywhere searched for the key to happiness. Even Plato in his Academy legitimized the teaching of a special science of the good life, and his best student, Aristotle, founded a competing organization - the Lyceum - to promote his own approach to the problems of personal development. More than a hundred years before Aristotle, on another continent, Confucius moved from village to village to convey to people his instructions on how to become happy. Not one of the great religions, not one of the universal philosophical systems has bypassed the problem of happiness, whether in our world or in the afterlife. And from recent. Since then, bookstore shelves have been literally bursting with books by popular psychologists, who, moreover, have occupied a huge number of conference rooms around the world - from India to Indiana, from Jerusalem to Mecca.

But despite the fact that the philistine and scientific interest in a “happy life” knows no boundaries either in time or space, our era is characterized by some aspects not known to previous generations. These aspects help to understand why the demand for positive psychology in our society is so high. In the United States today, the number of depressions is ten times higher than it was in the 1960s, and the average age of depression is fourteen and a half years, compared with twenty-nine and a half years in 1960. A recent survey of American colleges shows that almost 45% of students are "so depressed that they have a hard time coping with their daily responsibilities and even just living." And other countries practically do not lag behind the United States in this. In 1957, 52% of people in the UK said they were very happy, while in 2005 there were only 36% of those - despite the fact that during the second half of the century the British tripled their material well-being. Along with the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, the number of adults and children who suffer from nervousness and depression is rapidly increasing. According to the Chinese Ministry of Health, "the state of mental health of children and young people in the country is truly alarming."

Along with an increase in the level of material well-being, the level of susceptibility to depression also increases. Despite the fact that in most Western countries, and in many countries in the East, our generation lives richer than their fathers and grandfathers, we do not become happier because of this. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a leading positive psychologist, asks an elementary and hard-to-answer question: “If we are so rich, why are we so miserable?”

As long as people firmly believed that a full life was unthinkable without satisfaction of basic material needs, it was not so difficult to somehow justify their dissatisfaction with life. However, now that the minimum needs of most people for food, clothing, and shelter have already been met, we no longer have accepted arguments for our dissatisfaction with life. More and more people are trying to resolve this paradox - because it seems that we bought our dissatisfaction with life with our own money - and many of these people are turning to positive psychology for help.

Why do we choose positive psychology?

Most often defined as "the science of optimal human functioning", Positive Psychology was formally established as a separate branch of scientific research in 1998. Her father is American Psychological Association President Martin Seligman. Up until 1998, the science of happiness, that is, how to improve the quality of our lives, was largely usurped by popular psychology. In those days, a real boom of seminars and books on this topic broke out, which were sometimes really interesting and enjoyed well-deserved success among the people. However, most of these books (although by no means all) were too lightweight. They promised five easy ways to happiness, three secrets of quick success, and four ways to meet a handsome prince. As a rule, they contained nothing but empty promises, and over the years people have lost faith in the very idea of ​​self-improvement with the help of books.

Foreword

We all live for the sole purpose of being happy; Our lives are so different, but so similar.

Anne Frank

I started teaching a Positive Psychology Seminar at Harvard in 2002. Eight students signed up for it; two stopped attending classes very soon. Each week in the workshop, we searched for an answer to what I consider to be the question of questions: how can we help ourselves and others - be they individuals, communities, or society as a whole - become happier? We read articles in scientific journals, tested various ideas and hypotheses, told stories from our own lives, saddened and rejoiced, and by the end of the year we had a clearer understanding of what psychology can teach us in the pursuit of a happier and more fulfilling life.

The following year, our seminar became popular. My mentor, Philip Stone, who first introduced me to this field of study and was also the first professor to teach positive psychology at Harvard, suggested that I offer a lecture course on this topic. Three hundred and eighty students signed up for it. When we summed up the results at the end of the year, over 20 % participants noted that "studying this course helps people improve the quality of life." And when I offered it again, 855 students signed up, so the course became the most attended in the whole university.

Such success almost turned my head, but William James - the same one who laid the foundations of American psychology more than a hundred years ago - did not let me go astray. He reminded in time that one must always remain a realist and try to "estimate the value of truth in the specie of empiricism." The cash value that my students so desperately needed was measured not in hard currency, not in terms of success and honors, but in what I later called the "universal equivalent", since this is the ultimate goal towards which all the rest are striving. goals - that is, happiness.

And these were not just abstract lectures “about the good life”. Students not only read articles and studied scientific data on this issue, I also asked them to apply the material they learned in practice. They wrote essays in which they tried to overcome fears and reflected on the strengths of their character, set themselves ambitious goals for the next week and the next decade. I urged them to take a risk and try to find their growth zone (the golden mean between the comfort zone and the panic zone).

Personally, I have not always been able to find this middle ground. Being a naturally shy introvert, I felt quite comfortable the first time I taught a seminar with six students. However, the next year, when I had to lecture to almost four hundred students, this, of course, required a fair amount of effort from me. And when in the third year my audience more than doubled, I did not get out of the panic zone, especially since the parents of students, their grandparents, and then journalists began to appear in the lecture hall.

From the day the Harvard Crimson, and then the Boston Globe, ranted about how popular my lecture course was, I was bombarded with questions, and it continues to this day. For some time now, people have felt the innovation and real results of this science and cannot understand why this is happening. What explains the frenzied demand for positive psychology at Harvard and other college campuses? Where does this growing interest in the science of happiness come from, which is rapidly spreading not only in elementary and secondary schools, but also among the adult population? Is it because people are more prone to depression these days? What does this indicate - about the new prospects for education in the 21st century, or about the vices of the Western way of life?

In fact, the science of happiness does not exist only in the Western Hemisphere, and it originated long before the era of postmodernism. People have always and everywhere searched for the key to happiness. Even Plato in his Academy legitimized the teaching of a special science of the good life, and his best student, Aristotle, founded a competing organization - the Lyceum - to promote his own approach to the problems of personal development. More than a hundred years before Aristotle, on another continent, Confucius moved from village to village to convey to people his instructions on how to become happy. Not one of the great religions, not one of the universal philosophical systems has bypassed the problem of happiness, whether in our world or in the afterlife. And from recent. Since then, bookstore shelves have been literally bursting with books by popular psychologists, who, moreover, have occupied a huge number of conference rooms around the world - from India to Indiana, from Jerusalem to Mecca.

But despite the fact that the philistine and scientific interest in a “happy life” knows no boundaries either in time or space, our era is characterized by some aspects not known to previous generations. These aspects help to understand why the demand for positive psychology in our society is so high. In the United States today, the number of depressions is ten times higher than it was in the 1960s, and the average age of depression is fourteen and a half years, compared with twenty-nine and a half years in 1960. A recent survey of American colleges shows that almost 45% of students are "so depressed that they have a hard time coping with their daily responsibilities and even just living." And other countries practically do not lag behind the United States in this. In 1957, 52% of people in the UK said they were very happy, while in 2005 there were only 36% of those - despite the fact that during the second half of the century the British tripled their material well-being. Along with the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, the number of adults and children who suffer from nervousness and depression is rapidly increasing. According to the Chinese Ministry of Health, "the state of mental health of children and young people in the country is truly alarming."

Along with an increase in the level of material well-being, the level of susceptibility to depression also increases. Despite the fact that in most Western countries, and in many countries in the East, our generation lives richer than their fathers and grandfathers, we do not become happier because of this. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a leading positive psychologist, asks an elementary and hard-to-answer question: “If we are so rich, why are we so miserable?”

"We can always be happier than we are now." This book is based on the Harvard training course, which became the most popular at the university in three years.

Professor Ben-Shahar and his students did research simple question: "how we can help ourselves and others - whether individuals, communities or society as a whole - become happier" using both scientific research and good old common sense. And they put the principles they found into practice. Therefore, before you is one of the few books on a very relevant and very hackneyed topic that are really trustworthy.

You will learn what happiness is scientifically, how it can be measured, why “am I happy” is a harmful question, and what to ask yourself instead. And most importantly - what are the necessary components of a happy life and how to finally learn to be happier in the strictly scientific sense of the word.

This book will make its readers happier.

On our website you can download the book "Be Happier" by Ben-Shahar Tal for free and without registration in fb2, rtf, epub, pdf, txt format, read the book online or buy a book in an online store.