Word: seligmans
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...been known to tell them at the Black Cat bar, one of the two wateringholes in tiny Seligman, Ariz., with a longneck Budweiser in front of him. One recent night, after gently tapping some Bull Durham tobacco into his rolling paper, Knox pulled tight the yellow drawstrings on the pouch. He moistened the paper, rolled the cigarette, lit it. Then he leaned over the bar and, in a soft voice, recited an old Bruce Kiskaddon verse about the dangers of an enraged cow: "Think a cow boy cain't run? Well you aint seen one sail/ When a cow blows...
...Seligman, in contrast, puts the emphasis on the remembering self. "I think we are our memories more than we are the sum total of our experiences," he says. For him, studying moment-to-moment experiences puts too much emphasis on transient pleasures and displeasures. Happiness goes deeper than that, he argues in his 2002 book Authentic Happiness. As a result of his research, he finds three components of happiness: pleasure ("the smiley-face piece"), engagement (the depth of involvement with one's family, work, romance and hobbies) and meaning (using personal strengths to serve some larger end). Of those three...
Lykken's revisionist thinking coincides with the view of the positive-psychology movement, which has put a premium on research showing you can raise your level of happiness. For Seligman and like-minded researchers, that involves working on the three components of happiness--getting more pleasure out of life (which can be done by savoring sensory experiences, although, he warns, "you're never going to make a curmudgeon into a giggly person"), becoming more engaged in what you do and finding ways of making your life feel more meaningful...
...Seligman has tested similar interventions in controlled trials at Penn and in huge experiments conducted over the Internet. The single most effective way to turbocharge your joy, he says, is to make a "gratitude visit." That means writing a testimonial thanking a teacher, pastor or grandparent--anyone to whom you owe a debt of gratitude--and then visiting that person to read him or her the letter of appreciation. "The remarkable thing," says Seligman, "is that people who do this just once are measurably happier and less depressed a month later. But it's gone by three months." Less powerful...
...Seligman's biggest recommendation for lasting happiness is to figure out (courtesy of his website, reflectivehappiness.com your strengths and find new ways to deploy them. Increasingly, his work, done in collaboration with Christopher Peterson at the University of Michigan, has focused on defining such human strengths and virtues as generosity, humor, gratitude and zest and studying how they relate to happiness. "As a professor, I don't like this," Seligman says, "but the cerebral virtues--curiosity, love of learning--are less strongly tied to happiness than interpersonal virtues like kindness, gratitude and capacity for love...