How To Be Happy: Information and Resources

This page lists many ways you can learn more about improving your short- and long-term happiness.

If you haven't read our "Happiness Week" features, that's a good place to start. It's a week's worth of articles that use Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar's book "Happier" as a guide and toolkit for improving your happiness every day. Each "day" includes a lesson about happiness and one to two quick exercises you can do to implement what you've learned into your own life. The goal of those exercises is to help you become happier--both now and over the long-term.

Can You Believe It? There's More Happiness At LifeTwo!

Midlife is a time when many start to wonder why they aren't as happy as they expected they'd be, and think about what they should do to be happier. For anyone seeking to make the second half of their life happier than the first, LifeTwo has plenty of additional information and news about happiness and positive psychology. Some good starting points are these posts:

• Want to be Happier? Some Brain Fitness 101 may help
• Study: If You Want To Be Happy, Get Off The Sofa
• Gratitude and Happiness; Research shows that appreciation increases happiness
• Can You Organize Your Way To Happiness (And Health Too)?
• Does Money Make You Happy? (... or, Everything You Wanted to Know About Unhappy Lottery Winners)
• Study: Putting Feelings Into Words Makes Sadness and Anger "Less Intense"; Buddhists and bartenders not surprised
• Stressed? Meditate On It.
• Want career satisfaction and overall happiness in your life? Pick the right occupation

You can also browse our articles by topic:

• all our posts with the keyword 'happiness; and
• our articles about positive psychology -- the 'science of happiness;'

More About Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar's "Happier"

The centerpiece of LifeTwo's Happiness Week is Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar's book "Happier." Its Amazon page is here. We recorded our initial impressions here.

Dr. Ben-Shahar first came to widespread public notice with this widely reprinted article from the hometown Boston Globe on his popular Harvard course. This piece from the UK's Guardian has a slightly different angle on the same story. If you'd like to learn more about the course, here is Harvard's Positive Psychology (Psych 1504) class website. It includes lecture video and Powerpoint slides.

Link to far more information on Tal Ben-Shahar.

Other Happiness and Positive Psychology Resources

What is positive psychology, and where does the study of happiness fit within it? The University of Michigan's Chris Peterson provides the best explanation we've found:

.. the underlying assumptions of psychology have shifted to embrace a disease model of human nature. ... Positive psychology proposes that it is time to correct this imbalance and to challenge (those assumptions). Positive psychology calls for as much focus on strength as on weakness, as much interest in building the best things in life as in repairing the worst, and as much attention to fulfilling the lives of healthy people as to healing the wounds of the distressed. ... the psychology of the past sixty years is incomplete.
... The most basic assumption that positive psychology urges is that human goodness and excellence are as authentic as disease, disorder, and distress. The concerns of positive psychology includes three related topics: the study of positive subjective experiences (happiness, pleasure, gratification, fulfillment, well-being), the study of positive individual traits (character, talents, interests, values) that enable positive experiences, and the study of institutions (families, schools, businesses, communities, societies) that enable positive traits and thereby positive experiences. (source)

With that in mind, here is where you can learn more ...

On The Web

We've looked at dozens of sites to select this combination of interesting and informative web resources.

Dr. Martin Seligman, one of the founders of the positive psychology movement, directs the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center. Their website has a ton of information and a slew of links to other resources. Among the most useful pages are the Positive Psychology FAQ, a list of suggested reading, and a pdf reprint of Time magazine's January 17, 2005 story, "The New Science of Happiness."

The Science of Happiness is the home page for the BBC's six part 2006 TV series of the same name. You can watch the episodes online if you have Windows Media Player or Real Player. The page has many high quality links.

Scotland's Centre for Confidence and Well-Being has excellent lists of links about positive psychology and happiness, among others.

The Happiness-Project -- Gretchen Rubin is testing every happiness-improving recommendation she comes across. Read the results in her always-interesting blog.

Popular econoblog Marginal Revolution has frequent intriguing updates on happiness. Some are economic -- how people value happiness, or trade off against it -- and some are just interesting tidbits. This link will show Google results for their happiness-related posts.

An interesting stop is the World Database of Happiness, which serves as a central library of academic research and survey data about happiness around the world.

Values in Action is a non-profit research institute based at the University of Michigan. Chris Peterson directs studies in the positive psychology sub-specialty of character strength, looking into how to measure it and how it's linked to life satisfaction. VIA has a page of fascinating questions and answers such as "Is there a downside of persistence?", "Can children be taught to be more optimistic?", and "Is curiosity related to longevity?"

Positive Psychology News Daily is what you'd expect -- a virtual newspaper. It leans toward the academic side but is completely accessible to the lay reader.

Mainstream Books

Recent years have seen the release of several excellent books on happiness. Here are some highlights:

	Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, by Martin Seligman (Vintage, 2006 paperback). One of the founders of positive psychology teaches how to break patterns of "learned helplessness" and become optimistic, which has many benefits.
	Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment by Martin Seligman (Free Press, 2004). Seligman's most recent mass market book goes beyond optimism and tells how to become more happy by using characteristics you already have.
	Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert (Vintage, 2005) -- Harvard professor Gilbert offers what Publisher's Weekly calls "a scientific explanation of the limitations of the human imagination and how it steers us wrong in our search for happiness."
	Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Harper Perennial, 1999). Another leader in the field first described the notion of flow -- becoming completely lost in an activity -- to a large audience in this book. "Flow" is satisfying, if not happiness-producing.
	The Psychology of Happiness by Michael Argyle (Routeledge, 2001; first edition, 1987) -- another one of the founders of the positive psychology movement. Summarizes the state of the art as of 2002; written in a way that should appeal to sophisticated lay readers, academics curious about the field, and clinicians.
	The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong ," by Jennifer Michael (Hecht Harper, 2007). A well written and wide ranging look at how society influences what is supposed to make us happy.
	Happiness Is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual, by Dennis Prager (Harper Paperbacks, 1999). Radio personality and speaker Prager prescribes what readers call a "common sense" approach to happiness. Parts of it sync with Ben-Shahar: look inward to create happiness; be appreciative; focusing on our own happiness and not what others say should make us happy.

Books on Related Topics:

If you want to explore a little farther afield, these books make interesting linkages between positive psychology or happiness research and diverse areas of human experience.

	The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness, by J. Mark G. Williams, John D. Teasdale, Zindel V. Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn (Guilford, 2007). Mindfulness, like positive psychology, is a relatively new and promising area of research. It involves a meditation-like focus on your thoughts that can be used to allay depressive symptoms, reduce stress, and relieve chronic pain.
	The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, by Jonathan Haidt (Basic, 2006). Haidt looks at key Eastern and Western philosophical traditions and tries to reconcile them with what researchers -- especially positive psychologists -- have learned.
	The Positive Psychology of Buddhism and Yoga : Paths to a Mature Happiness, by Marvin Levene (Erlbaum, 2000). This well reviewed book is not only supposed to be an excellent introduction to the Eastern traditions of the title, but he squares them with the precepts of cognitive therapy and positive psychology.

Textbooks and Reference Works

If you're really serious about positive psychology, try these (but expect to pay textbook prices!):

• A Primer in Positive Psychology
• Handbook of Positive Psychology
• Positive Psychology: The Scientific and Practical Explorations of Human Strengths
• Introduction to Positive Psychology -- undergraduate level survey that places positive psychology concepts in the framework of traditional psychology.
• Oxford Handbook of Methods in Positive Psychology
• Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived -- despite the attractive title, this American Psychiatric Association work is for the professional.