常聽到身邊的人說：「身心健康」–不錯，其實心靈上不感到安寧、人不感到快樂，哪有可能健康？今天剛讀到 Harvard Medical School newsletter 的文章，正就是我近年積極追求的生活。
要令自己避免不快樂，我有幾點可在此分享：
好多人由於「失預算」而不高興，所以盡早準備自己，永遠不要等到不想發生的事情發生後才後悔。
–青年人升學問題—盡早讀好自己的書，不要老給自己藉口吧！
–成年人工作煩惱—盡心為公司，將心比己，那老闆一定不會待薄你！
–男女感情問題—帶眼識人，切勿 100% 投入，因為對方會透不過氣來！
–子女問題—給予時間陪伴子女就是對他們最好的禮物，你今天給予他們多少時間，將來他們就會給你多少時間，你不可能不知吧？！
–退休問題—年青時作好充分準備，令自己有一份長期固定收入，以安享晚年，否則退休就等於找尋另一分工的開始吧！
–健康問題—盡快建立無毒健康生活模式，為自己，家人及朋友改善生活。
多親近「好人」，正所謂近朱者赤，如果你身邊大部分朋友都思想很負面，你不大可能是一個樂觀的人。當你想到沮喪時，切忌與思想負面的人傾訴，因為只會愈傾愈覺得世界很灰。記住，每一個你認為「很幸運的人」背後一定有其原因，上天是很公平的。
多主動幫助身的人，不論你認識的或在街上碰到的。就算只是一件微不足道的事情，你會發現感覺良好。如果對方因你的幫忙而得到好的改變，你會感到非常快樂的。
最後，你每天醒來都必須感恩，感謝上天又賜給你新的一天！美妙的一天又將要開始！
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The happiness-health connection <from Harvard Medical School>
Want to improve your health? Start by focusing on the things that bring you happiness. There is some scientific evidence that positive emotions can help make your life longer and healthier.
But to produce good health, positive emotions may need to be long term. In other words, thinking positive thoughts for a month when you already have heart disease won’t cure the disease. But lowering your stress levels over a period of years with a positive outlook and relaxation techniques could reduce your risk of heart problems.
Pathways to happiness
In an early phase of positive psychology research, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson of the University of Michigan chose three pathways to examine:
Feeling good. Seeking pleasurable emotions and sensations, from the hedonistic model of happiness put forth by Epicurus, which focused on reaching happiness by maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain.
Engaging fully. Pursuing activities that engage you fully, from the influential research by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. For decades, Csikszentmihalyi explored people’s satisfaction in their everyday activities, finding that people report the greatest satisfaction when they are totally immersed in and concentrating on what they are doing—he dubbed this state of intense absorption “flow.”
Doing good. Searching for meaning outside yourself, tracing back to Aristotle’s notion of eudemonia, which emphasized knowing your true self and acting in accordance with your virtues.
Through focus groups and testing hundreds of volunteers, they found that each of these pathways individually contributes to life satisfaction.
Things that won’t make you happy
People tend to be poor judges of what will make them happy. While most people say they want to be happy, they often believe in myths or carry assumptions that actually get in the way. Here are some widely held myths about what will bring happiness:
Money and material things. The question of whether money can buy happiness has, for more than 30 years, been addressed by the “Easterlin paradox,” a concept developed by economist Richard Easterlin. His research showed that people in poor countries are happier when their basic necessities are covered. But any money beyond that doesn’t make much difference in happiness level. This idea has been challenged periodically, as in 2008 when two University of Pennsylvania researchers analyzed Gallup poll data from around the world. They showed, in contrast to Easterlin’s work, that people in wealthier countries are happier in general. The two studies were not directly comparable in method, however. And Easterlin points out that the new study may be flawed by cultural bias, as people from different countries may have different ways of answering questions about wealth and happiness.
Youth. Being young and physically attractive has little or no bearing on happiness. In a study published by Richard Easterlin in 2006 in the Journal of Economic Psychology, not only did being young fail to contribute to happiness, but adults grew steadily happier as they moved into and through middle age. After that, happiness levels began to decline slowly as health problems and other life problems emerged.
Children. Children can be a tremendous source of joy and fulfillment, but their day-to-day care is quite demanding and can increase stress, financial pressures, and marital strife. When ranking their happiness during daily activities, mothers report being morehappy eating, exercising, shopping, napping, or watching TV than when spending time with their children. In several studies, marital satisfaction declines after the first child is born and only recovers after the last child leaves home. Personal relationships of all types are important, however. In studies, being married, having more friends, and having sexual intercourse more often are all moderately or strongly associated with happiness.
| How do you know if you’re in flow?
You lose awareness of time. You aren’t watching the clock, and hours can pass like minutes. As filmmaker George Lucas puts it, talent is “a combination of something you love a great deal and something you can lose yourself in—something that you can start at 9 o’clock, look up from your work and it’s 10 o’clock at night … .” You aren’t thinking about yourself. You aren’t focused on your comfort, and you aren’t wondering how you look or how your actions will be perceived by others. Your awareness of yourself is only in relation to the activity itself, such as your fingers on a piano keyboard, or the way you position a knife to cut vegetables, or the balance of your body parts as you ski or surf. You aren’t interrupted by extraneous thoughts. You aren’t thinking about such mundane matters as your shopping list or what to wear tomorrow. You are active. Flow activities aren’t passive, and you have some control over what you are doing. You work effortlessly. Flow activities require effort (usually more effort than involved in typical daily experience). Although you may be working harder than usual, at flow moments everything is “clicking” and feels almost effortless. |
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