Happiness — the 40% Solution — What’s your 40%?

Read (and apply the principles from) the book “Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy”. Or better yet – listen to it. The key takeaways:

Personal – We take things personally that may not be personal OR intended to be personal. Wondering if I should take something personal, or just re-frame it as a consequence of circumstances impacting me has helped me defuse my reactions and respond more than react.

Pervasive – We think sometimes that things that happen in one area of our lives infuse into others. Being mindful of that assumption and mentally countering it regularly can provide a useful perspective shift.

Permanence – Sometimes we extrapolate from 1 failure that future courses of action are automatically failures and we have doomed ourselves for the rest of our lives. Again, the mindfulness and mental countering are helpful with this extrapolation. Also helpful is breaking it down and looking for pieces that we can change or control to counter the permanence of the situation.

Embracing Paradox. For example, I can belong with a group of people with divergent thought processes practicing my own unique way of thinking AND learn how to think more in line with other people to be a contributing member of the societies around me. I can be a working mom AND support my children’s needs effectively (most of the time).

I have learned to recently suspect that if I am not experiencing a paradox in thinking, it means I am only getting 1 side of the truth (which is by default , incomplete, very biased, and limited). I got myself a yin-yang key chain last year for the set of keys I share with my husband. He thought it was because we are working to balance our marriage and complement each other (not entirely an untruth). In reality, I got it as a reminder to look for the paradoxes in life – because that means a fuller experience.

The movie “Stranger Than Fiction”.

Also small amounts of butter pecan ice cream [though you can insert your own highly prized edible item here].

-I don’t take myself, or anyone else, too seriously.

I’ve heard this phrase before, but I’ve always wondered what people mean by it — care to elaborate @dande? Or anyone who understands it?

:thumbdown: No disrespect to you personally Silent Dawning (I enjoy many of your posts), but I think Lyubomirsky is confusing innate optimism with happiness. There are also many ways to become unhappy that are not remotely genetic – the loss of a loved one, living in an oppressive regime, being bullied, even diet etc. I have recently been reading a book on trauma and it says the opposite – a lot of unhappiness stems from early childhood and physical & emotional stress back then. People who have been abused as small children are a lot more likely to develop physical ailments as stress compromises the immune system, and more physical illness means more unhappiness.

You have probably known (of) a child at some stage who has been heavily bullied at school, and who is extremely unhappy. Sometimes transferring them out of that environment makes their mood change altogether, and they become happy children again, but in some cases the damage may have already been done. The change in environment, both into the realm of bullying and out of it, has some effect.