Happiness For Dummies
Overview
Now, you can find the happiness you want and live “the good life” you deserve by applying the helpful information in Happiness For Dummies, the ultimate guide to achieving bliss! You’ll discover proven techniques for living a meaningful, healthy, and productive life no matter what your life circumstances happen to be. Positive concepts and techniques will help you change key behaviors, foster good habits, and be in sync with your surroundings.
This helpful guide will give you the chance to assess your happiness and understand what it means to be happy at each stage of self-actualization. You’ll learn why having positive emotions can improve your health and well-being. And, you will find out what happiness isn’t and how to avoid confusing happiness with culturally
valued outcomes like wealth, power, and success. Pursue what you want, seize the day, find benefits in life’s challenges, and live a coherent lifestyle. Find out how to:
- Assess your current capacity for happiness
- Live the life that you want
- Overcome common obstacles to happiness
- Identify your strengths and virtues
- Improve your emotional and spiritual life
- Create meaningful social ties and learn to be alone
- Find the silver lining
Complete with lists of ten ways to raise a happy child, ten common roadblocks to happiness, and ten personal habits to foster happiness, Happiness For Dummies is your one-stop, easy-to-follow guide to being happy and living your best life.
Read More
About The Author
W. Doyle Gentry, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, a distinguished Fellow in the American Psychological Association, and the Founding Editor of the Journal of Behavioral Medicine.
Sample Chapters
happiness for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Happiness is an important part of life — no less than anger, sadness, and fear. But how do you know if you're happy? Are you as happy as most people? If you have lots of money or a fancy title at work, shouldn't that be enough to make you happy? Discover how balancing your life is one way to achieve overall happiness.
View Cheat Sheet
View Cheat Sheet
HAVE THIS BOOK?
View Book Companion Site
Access practice tests
Additional Book Resources
Articles from
the book
Achieving happiness is a journey, and as with any journey, there are many potholes and roadblocks along the way. Think of these tips as a big orange cone, giving you enough warning to swerve out of the way.
An unrealistic sense of self
Do you think you can do anything? Or are you often telling yourself that you aren’t good at anything you try?
Happiness can be taught just as easily as unhappiness. Your own actions will serve as a lesson to your children. Helping your child learn what it takes to achieve happiness is a parental gift that keeps on giving.
Make sure your happy message gets through
Listen to your child and adapt your language to hers. If your child can’t understand you, he can’t learn from you.
If you're tired of being unhappy at work, you can do something about it. Here are five tips that you can use to remedy the problem:
Always say "please" and "thank you" to your fellow employees. The better you treat others, the more willing they'll be to help you get the job done.
Establish healthy boundaries.
Some people feel hassled all the time. If you don’t balance this with uplifting moments, you’re not likely to be a happy person. You probably don’t realize just how hassled you are, partly because you tend to ignore and trivialize the small stuff, but, even more important, because you have no way to measure how much stress you’re under.
Happiness
Benefit-finding and the resulting happiness is the result of asking yourself the right questions about the impact of tragedy on your life. It requires some introspection, some self-analysis, and a connection with your inner self. You have to decide if there is something beneficial about a negative life situation — others can’t do that for you.
If you want to know how close you are to happiness, here's some self-assessment you can do. Be honest with yourself as you answer the following questions — otherwise, the exercise won't be helpful.
Do you feel safe in your everyday life? If you feel unsafe, that's all you can focus on — you don't have the time or space to be happy.
Happiness
Negativity in the workplace is like a virus — sooner or later, it infects everyone. If you want to be a happy worker, try and avoid toxic workers. Consider the main types of toxic workers, and deal with them using the following tips. You may find your workplace a much better place to be.
The stress carriers
Ever work with someone who, when she enters the room, seems to instantly create chaos?
Happiness
A happy couple is one where the two partners retain their own separate, individual identities while working together to meet life’s many challenges and accomplish mutual goals. This is sometimes difficult to do, but if you both want it to work, it usually will.
A minister refused to continue the traditional marriage ritual where the bride and groom light a joint candle — symbolizing their union — and extinguish their respective individual candles.
Unlike other animals, humans have the gift of perspective, and perspective is about choice! You can choose to be happy. You can choose to see life as a glass half-full (optimistic) or a glass half-empty (pessimistic). It all comes down to whether you define problems as challenges or crises. Having the right perspective is a key to achieving happiness.
Happiness
How your raise you children doesn’t just affect how happy they’ll be; it affects how they perform in school, whether they take up smoking, how likely it is they’ll suffer from depression, and whether they engage in risky sexual behavior.
According to psychologists who study this sort of thing, there are four main styles of parenting: autocratic, authoritative, permissive, and unengaged.
Happiness
One of the keys to happiness in the workplace is for employees to find the right balance between structure and freedom. Structure involves those formal and informal rules or codes of conduct that govern how you behave at work. More important, structure imposes certain boundaries within which you’re expected to freely operate — boundaries that are not to be crossed.
Benefit-finding and happiness are not automatic things. You don’t suddenly think in the midst of some unfortunate circumstance in life, “Wow, this isn’t that bad after all.” Benefit-finding is a process — one that takes energy, requires that you forge closer ties to those around you, and involves several stages of readjustment
Redirect your energies to find happiness
Dealing with adversity takes a lot of energy — physical and psychological — especially when you see your circumstances as beyond your control.
Happiness is an important part of life — no less than anger, sadness, and fear. But how do you know if you're happy? Are you as happy as most people? If you have lots of money or a fancy title at work, shouldn't that be enough to make you happy? Discover how balancing your life is one way to achieve overall happiness.
If you believe yourself to be an unhappy person, consider these stages of self-actualization and what you may be missing to make a happy life. According to psychologist Abraham Maslow, a forerunner of the positive psychology movement, if you’re self-confident, enjoy solitude, you serve the greater good, have a keen sense of humor, and aren’t afraid to be creative and unique in your approach to life, you’re a self-actualized person.
Lately, it seems as if human beings need a plan for everything. Do these plans make you a happier person? Fewer and fewer people can get through the day without a BlackBerry. Parents plan for their children’s college education when the kids are in kindergarten. There are retirement planners, travel planners, wedding planners, and even people who — for a fee — will help you plan the perfect birthday for your 5-year-old.
Happiness
Truly happy people respond to hassles in a moderate way. Most people make two mistakes when it comes to being hassled — experiencing the small, micro-stresses that come their way each and every day just as surely as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west:
Because these stresses are not catastrophic, earth-shaking, life-altering events and circumstances, people think of them as unimportant and not worthy of their time or attention.
Empathy — the ability to walk in another person’s shoes — is the key to a happy relationship. An empathetic relationship is one in which each partner makes every effort to know what’s going on in the mind and heart of the other. Empathy makes all these other things — acceptance, appreciation, forbearance, forgiveness, tolerance, and understanding — possible.
All families fight. But, there are still happy families out there. The question is: “Do they fight fair?” Children fight for increased autonomy; parents fight for more respect. Families fight over ideas, values, how to spend money, curfews, who can drive the car, and the list goes on. There are winners and losers and sometimes there’s even compromise.
Happiness
The modern-day family finds itself in a major time crunch. But that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice happiness. Parents are pulled one way (work, work, work!) and kids another (school, sports, dance classes, studying for SATs). You’re lucky if you have one meal a day together — but, actually psychologists say that may be enough.
Happiness
Beyond the simple reality that optimists are happier people (and happiness is what you’re striving for), optimism has other benefits as well. So, if you want to achieve greater happiness, try being optimistic for a day.
Optimists enjoy a greater degree of academic success than pessimists do. Because optimistic students think it’s possible for them to make a good grade, they study hardier and they study smarter.
Happiness
Psychologists believe that, to cope with life, a person must have coherence — optimism, with a sense of control; each of us needs to feel that life is generally understandable, manageable, and valuable.For most people, it's easy to find one thing in life that gives them coherence, the sense of confidence they need to embrace life with all its twists and turns.
Happiness
Happiness comes from a balanced mix of what you have to do and what you want to do. In some Chinese restaurants, you can still order family style — choosing some items from Column A and others from Column B. Column A has the fancier, higher-priced dishes, and Column B has less costly but still tasty treats. It’s the combination of A and B that made the meal unique and memorable.
Happiness
Family happiness requires balance. There is a movie that shows how a mother bear gives her total attention to her cubs for one year…and then abruptly chases them up a tree, leaving them to survive on their own. Humans take a little longer to make sure their offspring can live on their own (autonomy) and with others (interdependence).
Daily confessions can be a good start toward being happy. Psychology in general concerns itself with how and what human beings think, how they feel, and how and why they behave the way they do. Positive psychology does the same thing — only it focuses on positive thoughts, positive emotions, and positive ways of acting toward others.
Happiness
Your emotions, including your happiness, are affected by the world you live in — your physical and social surroundings. If you’re in sync with that world, you have a much better chance of achieving happiness.Where do you stand when it comes to being in sync with your surroundings? Would you describe your relationship with the world around you as a tight fit, a loose fit, or no fit at all?
Happiness
If you want to be happy with what you do, try to be a productive employee. Everything you do at work falls into one of two categories — productive or counterproductive. How effective you are as an employee is determined by the balance between the two.
If you spend far too much time trying to look busy when you’re not, avoiding returning phone calls to someone you should, and arguing with coworkers, your work will suffer.
Flow is the ability to become deeply engrossed in something and losing your worries in the process. Flow is an important stepping stone to happiness. But how do you achieve it? Try this step-by-step process that will help you get involved in something so deeply that nothing else will seem to matter.
Step 1: Identify your sources of flow
Flow is the end result when you apply a set of skills to a challenging situation.
Happiness
If you act generously to others, shouldn’t you experience the “joy of giving” and be happy with your actions? It depends. If there is a positive motive behind your generosity — for example, compassion — the answer is “yes”. If, on the other hand, your generosity is motivated by a sense of obligation on your part or a need to control others, then the answer is decidedly “no.
Happiness
It’s not easy to revise your life and move into a positive, more satisfying, happier future. Major life challenges involving trauma and loss disrupt your life and force you to redirect your energies, interests, and commitments. But how do you do that? These steps can get you moving in the right direction:
Create a positive mindset by sitting quietly with your eyes closed while opening your mind to the possibility of hope, optimism, and creative behavioral change.
Happiness
Take a look at yourself and determine if you’re a pessimist. To achieve happiness a pessimist, you are going to need to move beyond that negative perspective. Here are some recommendations for doing just that:
Don’t fight it — change it. You have to begin by accepting, not resisting, the reality that you always start out with negative thoughts.
Happiness
The journey of life has many twists and turns. This should not impede your ability to be happy. One minute you think you know what your purpose in life is, and then everything changes. You get comfortable with one type of structure — having a career, being a parent — and suddenly you’re out of a job.
Then what do you do?
Perhaps you want to be happier this coming year. Being happier is a common New Year’s resolution. Although happiness is not entirely a state of mind, positive thinking can help make you a happier person. Here are ten thoughts that lead to happiness:
Life is ahead of you — and that’s where your focus should be: People who are weighed down by the past are rarely happy.
Happiness
Being angry in the workplace usually results in unhappy workers, not happy ones. It’s not anger that gets you in trouble at work; it’s how you express your anger. Charlie uses his anger destructively whenever he gets frustrated at his secretary. He hollers at her, berates her, and slams his fist on her desk.
Elaine uses a more constructive approach to anger.
Happiness
Some people have been cultivated in a life of pessimism and so, end up being pessimists. To achieve happiness, you may have to battle some negative emotions. Take Joe, for example. Joe, a middle-aged mental-health professional, is a closet pessimist.
On the outside, Joe looks and sounds like an optimist. He’s quick to offer advice to his clients, as well as friends and family, like: “Hey, it’ll work out — you’ll see.
Happiness
Happiness is about those great unforgettable moments in life. So, if you were asked to identify the ten best moments of your life, could you do it? If it’s difficult for you, is that because you haven’t had that many “best moments” or because it’s been so long since you had one that you can’t remember? Are you just too busy trying to survive the modern-day rat race?
Happiness
A truly happy person will try their best to find the win-win solution at work. All types of work inevitably involve conflict. Why? (Spoiler alert: it's human nature!)People who work alongside one another are either striving to achieve the same goals — recognition and advancement — or they have different views about how things should be done at work.
Are you a person who loves they do? This is important if you are trying to be truly happy. After all, working is what you do with a good chunk of your day.
Sandra has been a school teacher for 30 years. When she started in the early 1970s, teaching was relatively easy — children respected their teachers and did what they were told.
Happiness
All relationships have fights. It is natural and inevitable. However, maintaining happy relationships depends on your ability to reach out to those you care about. Many people have the instinct to withdraw during these confrontations, but that will not help nurture your relationship.
Greg and Cindy have been arguing for hours about his having too much to drink at a friend’s wedding.
Some families have priorities — things that they feel are most important, things that make them happy and are crucial to family life that give the family a clearly defined sense of direction and purpose. Other families do not — they’re like tumbleweeds, blowing this way and that and getting nowhere in particular.
Think about what a smile does for you. It attracts people. It says to the world “I’m a happy, confident, competent, satisfied person.” It makes it easier to build a support network — people who will rally to your side when adversity strikes. It helps you transcend difficult times. It lets others know at a glance that you’re optimistic and conscientious.
Happiness
Some people simply can’t comprehend the psychological benefit that comes from doing absolutely nothing, but it can make you a happier person. When you think of nothing, this means nothing that’s productive, that is, in a material or tangible sense like building things or making money. On the other hand, when you do nothing, you produce a state of relaxation.
Overall happiness results from striking a balance in all aspects of your life. Happiness occurs in moments, not in hours, days, weeks, months, or years. The trick is to enjoy the moment, to relish the experience, and to be mindful that it'll be gone before you know it.
Learn how to create and have more of these moments of happiness by balancing these factors:
Hassles and uplifts: The small pleasures of life offset the inevitable stresses, conflicts, and irritants that come your way.
Happiness
You have to work to achieve happiness — the greater and more consistent the effort, the greater the eventual reward. Here are ten simple, effective strategies that, if you make them part of your daily routine, will help you reach your goal of a life full of positive emotion.Think of these important points as prescriptions, think of them as the ten secrets to a happy life, think of them as the Ten Commandments of Happiness, think of them anyway you like — just make sure you turn thinking into action!
Happiness
Only in recent years have psychologists begun to appreciate the benefits of happiness and positive emotion — benefits that include everything from enhanced creativity to improved immune-system function. Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina, a leader in the field of positive psychology, posed the question, “What good are positive emotions?
Happiness
Human beings are social creatures. So, it makes sense that we need social support to be happy. People are also wired for emotions, and you experience those emotions within a social context. Most people are at their best when they’re engaging one another in the course of daily activities. If those activities are productive, constructive, involve mutual cooperation, and contribute to our ultimate survival, you feel joyful, happy, and satisfied.
There are three core components to a coherent life, without which it’s difficult, if not impossible, to achieve happiness. These components are order, affiliation, and meaning. Each of these components is important in its own right, but it’s the combination of the three that determines where you fall on the continuum of coherence.
Happiness is a very democratic emotion — it isn’t an emotion that’s available to only a certain group of individuals and not others. But there are some demographic characteristics that increase your chances of being happy.
Age and happiness
Age seems to increase a person’s overall likelihood of being happy. If you think that young people have the advantage here, you’re wrong.
These four ingredients are essential if your goal is happiness. Without any single ingredient, you will find yourself feeling down, depressed; certainly, absent of happiness. The foundation for true happiness consists of these basic ingredients:
A feeling of safety
A sense of satiation
A sense of perspective
Quietude
Safety and happiness
Not everyone lives in a safe world.
This might be tough to believe, but rituals are actually necessary to achieve happiness. Much of everyday life is made up of rituals — established, predictable, patterned behaviors that structure the day.
There are morning rituals (brushing your teeth, showering, reading the newspaper), midday rituals (everything from the so-called “power lunch” to a simple baloney sandwich in your office), and evening rituals (a cocktail or two, dinner at 6 p.
Humans are social creatures and socializing comes easy. Solitude is another matter. Solitude runs counter to the demands of society. Even so, happiness can be found in solitude, even though society depends on the combined efforts of all people to contribute to the greater good.Taking time for yourself is often viewed as selfish and unproductive.
Happiness
A balanced lifestyle is key to achieving happiness. In general, personality types play a role in this balance. The people who can’t seem to pull themselves away from work and are highly stressed are Type-A personalities. And the people who are a bit more laid back and relaxed are Type B’s.
To understand why Type A’s spend so much time working and too little time playing, you have to see the world from their perspective.
Happiness
Most people think the term healthy selfishness is an oxymoron. Realistically it’s necessary if you want to be happy, even if you have been taught that it’s bad to be selfish. And you may have been taught that’s it’s better to be selfless — to always put others before yourself. Martyrs are the extreme example of selflessness and many people believe that martyrdom is the surest route to sainthood.
Who doesn’t want to be in a happy relationship? Don’t worry, it can be done. Psychologists who study what makes for a successful, happy and loving relationship have narrowed it down to three components:
Passion: “I’m crazy about her.”
Shared interests: “We enjoy the same things — travel, golf.”
Intimacy: “I feel really close to him.
Happiness
One of the prerequisites of getting into flow and being happy has to do with knowing yourself. That doesn’t just mean name, rank, and serial number. Ask yourself the following questions to determine who you really are:
What makes you tick?
What makes you unique?
What satisfies you and makes you happy?
What gives your life a sense of purpose?
Human beings are wired with an innate, neurological potential for happiness, but if you're like most people, you're not entirely sure what happiness is. Well, here are six things that happiness isn't:
Happiness isn't about being wealthy. Money buys you comfort, support, and freedom of action, but it doesn't make you happy.
Happiness
Sometimes, terrible things happen. And, your sense of coherence and happiness are either temporarily or permanently disrupted. Most people have a plan for how they want to live their lives and they spend the majority of their time executing that plan. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, life cooperates with your plan, but not always.
Happiness
It is difficult not to get caught up in the idea that money and an abundant life will bring you happiness. If you have more of what you want, you should be happier, right? Between 1957 and 2005, the average income of Americans rose by a whopping 278 percent, yet the percentage of those who described themselves as “very happy” remained virtually the same — around 30 percent.
Load More Articles
Related Books
0:00
0:00
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6630d85d73068bc09c7c436c/69195ee32d5c606051d9f433_4.%20All%20For%20You.mp3
Frequently Asked Questions
No items found.
