Pages

June 9, 2015

Are You Happy?

As cited by the Daily Mail, scientists have cracked the happy code.
[...]Dr Amit Sood, who led the research, says 40 to 50 per cent of your happiness depends on the choices you make and where you place your focus each day.

'You can choose to live focusing on what is right and beautiful in your life,' said Dr Sood who is the author of a new book, 'The Mayo Clinic Handbook for Happiness: A Four-Step Plan for Resilient Living.
Practices include doing something known as the 5-3-2 technique.

[...]This involves making your first thought in the morning about five people that you're grateful to have in your life.

For the first three minutes you meet your family, meet them like a long lost friend, Dr Sood advises.

And he says, for the first two seconds when you see another person, send a silent 'I wish you well'.

The second step in the book's plan is building emotional resilience through gratitude, compassion, acceptance and forgiveness.
So who's happy?
Israel is one of the top five happiest countries in the world, according to a new Better Life Index report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

“Israelis are more satisfied with their lives than the OECD average. When asked to rate their general satisfaction with life on a scale from 0 to 10, Israelis gave it a 7.4 grade, higher than the OECD average of 6.6,” reads the report.

Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, and Finland took the top four spots in global happiness. The United States did not crack the top 10 for the fifth consecutive year.

3 comments:

Doom said...

I may not seem happy, but that isn't exactly true, nor completely false. I think there are great limits, and mistakes in defining the term. I cannot be, fully, happy. My body doesn't work right. Currently my days are started and ended with migraines. Full blown, hard, mean, painful. If you can't do, pretty much, as you should be able to do with a healthy body, you will never fully be happy. Though, I have to think, that is most people to some degree. More so for those with large health issues, intellectual or spiritual limitations, and such.

Now, with that as a given, I have found a great deal of happiness in life by doing what I can. Thinking about it? Not so much, or only as part in parcel to doing. Better to plan than to just leap. But only when I was able to figure out what I could do, understanding the limits, begin working within those, then plotting what of my life I can around those... even stretching those limits way out of what is considered possible, did I become happy.

More, personal happiness does not always include whole happiness. I don't trust my government. I don't trust law. I don't trust economics. I realize some really bad things are happening, don't know who to trust. And I see no reason to trust most groups, not even churches. So... what do you mean by the term happy?

I know a lot of people who seem to be happy who are anything but. They have buried themselves in something they love, or hopes and wishes, so that they don't have to look at reality. They have convinced themselves that they are happy, usually by surrendering to some power or powers, and declining to be responsible for... anything. They just do what they do, professing their happiness, while I see complete horror and fear in their eyes with just a touch of digging.

What is happiness? I say it is a limited function of right thinking leading to right action that benefits more than it harms, on a personal level, that will just be moments of life. I don't think you would want to walk around this world blissful as the day and night continuations were long. That isn't good in this world. It isn't a survivable solution. It will kill you. Then again, I think scientists, by a vast majority, have no faith in life or God, so believe that most of us should be dead. So... I take what they say with a huge grain of salt, then move on to do a few things... a little cleaning, a shower, laundry, food prep, hiking, or such. But with a long term goal of escaping whatever "happiness" they intend to unleash on a "happy" unsuspecting population.

Anam Cara said...

How unhappy are you? https://youtu.be/YYNkGTb2Zr4


Moral obligation to be happy https://youtu.be/_Zxnw0l499g

Woodsterman (Odie) said...

I hate hearing that I'm not happy.