

Happiness 101 - tansengming
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/magazine/07happiness.t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

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kirse
_As a school, we would like to know how to make all students more resilient,
how to turn depressing thoughts into positive ones._

The article really seems to treat depressive, angry, and other emotions as
"negative", when in fact these emotions are really just neutral.

It is completely positive and OK to be depressed when someone dies or angry
when you've been hurt, and treating them as 100% "negative" emotions is one of
the reasons people can get stuck in the cyclical downward thinking:

1\. "I'm experiencing depressive emotions"

2\. "Oh no! These are negative and bad emotions. Therefore I'm not happy!"

(Brain releases more depressive feelings based on these thoughts)

3\. Start at step 1.

Instead of fearing oneself, it's much easier to understand that all feelings
are simply feelings, in the same way that all thoughts are simply thoughts.
This ties in very closely to mindfulness and not just reacting to your mind,
but engaging it and choosing what to do with thoughts and feelings.

Edit: Just to clarify, this is not to say depressive thoughts are always
positive, but to encourage others to be aware and engage their feelings from a
neutral perspective, then decide what to do with them. That is the point of
mindfulness.

~~~
electromagnetic
Depression has been shown to be one of the forces that teaches our brain.
Basically, when we're depressed our brain is using the time to restructure
itself so the next time an event occurs we're ready for it.

If my wife left me because I didn't pay enough attention to her then I'd get
depressed, but the next time I'm married I'd be unlikely to make the same
mistake because of the profound effect of depression. However, anti-
depressants can hinder this learning process, so quite literally if I took
anti-depressants after my wife (hypothetically) left me, it would be quite
probable that I'd make the exact same mistake again.

Clinical depression, of course, is different as it's like the emotional
equivalent of palpitations.

Personally I quite like depression, it's helped me a lot with my writing. It's
odd as I seem to get a new perspective afterwards, I'd be interested to know
if my depression is sometimes caused by my writing so I do learn a new
perspective because I've been depressed at some pretty weird times before, but
this is the kind of question that'll never be answered.

~~~
JoelSutherland
Divorce probably isn't the best example to support your point:

 _Fifty percent of first marriages, 67 percent of second and 74 percent of
third marriages end in divorce, according to Jennifer Baker of the Forest
Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Missouri._

<http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=363986>

I tend to see a stronger distinction between pain and depression.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Your numbers suggest very little, one way or the other. People who make bad
marriage choices are more likely to get divorced. Bayes rule implies that
divorcees are therefore more likely to be the type of people who make bad
marriage choices, and second/third marriages are more likely to fail.

I'll give a simple numerical example. I assume some people marry badly, and
have an intrinsically higher probability of divorce. I assume the probability
of divorce does not change after the first marriage.

Let MB = Marries Badly, and D = Divorce. Assume P(MB)=0.5, P(D|MB)=0.9 and
P(D|!MB)=0.1. Then:

P(MB | D) = P(D | MB) P(MB) / P(D) = 0.9 x 0.5 / 0.5 = 0.9.

So 90% of divorcees marry badly. Therefore, a person who has gotten one
divorce has a probability of getting divorced on their second marriage of:

P(D | MB) x 0.9 + P(D | !MB) x 0.1 = 0.82

Therefore, in this model, 50% of first marriages and 82% of second marriages
will end in divorce.

~~~
electromagnetic
I agree, the statistics seem to show that divorcees should have a huge failure
rate, however all evidence seems to indicate that their judgment improves
after they've been divorced, as the second marriage rate is surprisingly close
to first marriages to say its composed almost entirely of people who failed
the first time.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Other statistics might show this (if so, please post them), but my model
proves little. I could tweak it to get 67% second marriage failure rate (first
marriage has no effect, good or bad), or 60% failure rate (first marriage
adversely affects the second). More complex models are possible too.

My point is simply that the numbers provided prove nothing.

~~~
JoelSutherland
They certainly prove that someone who has been divorced and remarries is still
worse at staying married than the person who has not been divorced.

I don't think that is nothing.

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electromagnetic
This does make sense, our brains are hard-coded to perform acts of altruism
and without doing it then we're not satisfying a need of our body. I suppose
this depends largely on the person, some people get cranky with low blood
sugar so I wonder if some people get cranky when they don't do nice things.

Another interesting thing I've learnt on happiness is that you can make
yourself happy (especially when you're sad) by simply smiling. I've heard
numerous explanations as to why (the best is that performing the physical
action causes the nerves to activate that cause you to smile when you are
happy and in turn actually begin to make you happy) but I just know that it
works.

~~~
jscn
In Neuro-Linguistic Programming (and hypnosis, I'm pretty sure), this is known
as a "trigger". You can create arbitrary ones yourself by, e.g., touching
yourself in a certain place (say touching the tips of your forefinger and
thumb together) a couple times when a certain emotion occurs. After the
trigger is set, touching the same place will trigger the emotion. (Kind of a
simplistic explanation.)

~~~
Ardit20
Isn't that conditional learning? Pavlov; stimuli, the dog salivates.

Was not aware that hypnosis uses it though, sounds rather strange to me that
hypnosis uses conditional learning.

~~~
jscn
Yeah it's basically the same thing. Hypnosis, as far as I can tell, is a grab
bag of techniques (much like NLP) and anchoring/triggers is/are definitely
used. For instance, some trance inductions involve interrupting a
trigger/pattern before it can complete (i.e., the handshake interrupt).
Anchoring a command or suggestion to a physical trigger can help cement it,
too.

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markessien
If only happiness were the same as contentedness, the problems of the world
would be solved.

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wallflower
It was convincingly argued to me that happiness is a dynamic relationship
within ourselves. Something that needs to be renewed or something that can be
depleted. The argument continued (take this with a grain of salt!) but because
happiness is short-term - we don't only eat once, only have sex once, etc. and
then wither away.

~~~
theblackbox
speak for yourself - my sex life is a study in unity

...... I made myself sad =(

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cmos
For an article about happiness these are not very uplifting comments! I am
going to try a couple of the students projects myself.. anyone else?

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mhartl
I'd be happier if this article weren't behind a login wall.

