Matthew Henty

Authors@Google: Sonja Lyubomirsky

Research shows that happy people:

• Nurture and enjoy their social relationships
• Are comfortable expressing gratitude
• Are often the first to help others
• Practice optimism about the future
• Savor pleasures and live in the present moment
• Make physical activity a habit
• Are often spiritual or religious
• Are deeply committed to lifelong goals

Kind of obvious – “hokey” even – but supposedly backed up by experimental research.

Happiness takes work.

Measuring happiness, subjective, ask questions:
- Are you a happy person?
- Life satisfaction – how do you feel about your life right now (terrible to delighted)

Experiments:

Counting one’s blessings
- A gratitude journal, weekly vs  three times a week vs control
- Increase in self-reported gratitude, but only in the once a week group.
- Increase in reported happiness – only in the once a week group.
(Why? – three times a week is too often, not fresh, a chore. Effort, hard to do every few days so makes you feel worse. Too hard to think of.)
- Works on average, but not for everyone. Diagnostic tool in book to help identify what is likely to work for you.

Committing acts of kindness
- Chinese proverb – if you want happiness for an hour, take a nap; for a day, go fishing; for a month, get married; for a year, inherit a fortune; for a lifetime, help somebody else.
- three or nine acts of kindness a week. High variety, low variety and control.
- Only high variety worked, otherwise boring?

Effort is important.