positive psychology – Mutual Responsibility

The quotes in this post are all by Martin Seligman, from the lecture “Ideas at the House: Martin Seligman – Well-Being and Happiness,” which can be viewed at the bottom of this post.

1) Traditional Psychotherapy Doesn’t Deal with Achieving Happiness, but with Reducing Suffering

Freud and Schopenhauer told us the best we could ever do in life was not to be miserable; that the object of human progress, the object of psychotherapy was to reduce suffering to zero. I’m going to argue today that that’s empirically false, it’s morally insidious, and it’s politically a dead end; that there’s much more to life than zero.

2) 30 Years Ago There Was No Way to Measure Happiness. Today There Is

30 years ago, the word “happiness” was a tremendously vague word. It meant very many different things to different people, and it could not be measured. But now, we have good measures of the elements of well-being.

3) There Is Higher Chance of Making Less Happy People Happier, then Already Happy People Even Happier

Technically, we call these states “positive affectivity” and they are bell shaped. That means, right now, 50% of the people in the world are not cheerful and merry. They are not smiling. It is highly genetic. It is about 50% heritable and most importantly, the best we can to with smiling, being merry, being cheerful, is to raise it by about 5-15%.

In fact, I spent most of my life working on misery and people would ask me: why didn’t I work on happiness? The reason I didn’t, there was a very influential study in the mid-1970s by Phil Brickman in which he found 14 people who had won the lottery and he was able to track their happiness.

It turned out you get very happy when you win the lottery and it lasts for about three months. And then three months later you’re back to where you were, back to your curmudgeonly self. It turns out you can’t change a curmudgeon into a giggler, but you can get those of us who are in the lower 50% of positive affectivity to live at the upper part of our envelope.

4) In Corporations: 2.9 Positive Words to Every 1 Negative Word = More Success

Barbara Fredrickson and Marcel Losada go into corporations, 60 American corporations, and they write, they record every word that’s said. And they classify the words into positive and negative words and then they relate this to how the corporation is doing economically. So, it turns out, there is a ratio of positive to negative words said that correlates with economic status of corporations. So:

If your ratio is 2.9:1 or greater positive words to negative words, then it turns out that your corporation is making a lot of money; it’s flourishing.
If it’s between 2.9: 1 and 1:1, it’s going along.
If it’s 1:1, or lower, the corporation’s going bankrupt.

5) In Marriage: 5 Positive Words or Lower to Every 1 Negative Word = Likely Chance of Divorce

John and Julie Gottman, two of the leading marital therapists in the world, locked couples in an apartment for a weekend. They listened to every word that was said and computed the ratio of positive words to negative words, and predicted divorce.

If your ratio is below 5:1, it predicts divorce: five positive things to every negative thing.

6) Five Strengths that Predict Increases in Well-Being

One month we said: “Has something awful happened to you?” on the website AuthenticHappiness.org. Within a couple of weeks, 1700 people had answered saying:

One or more of the worst 15 things that can happen to a human being had happened to them. We measured their well-being and their strengths.

Our findings were very surprising:

First, we found that people who had one awful event, were stronger and had better well-being than people to whom none of these things had happened. These are events like rape, held captive, tortured, potentially lethal disease, and the like; death of a child; death of a spouse.
Then we found people who had two of these events were stronger than people who had one, and people who had three.

Now, remember these people survived. They’re on our website. They’ve come to it with- stronger than people who had two. We asked the question then, this is an example of what Nietzsche told us: “If it doesn’t kill us, it makes us stronger.” It seems to be true.

Then, we asked a question: “What strengths predicted the people who would grow?”

And here are the five strengths:

Religiousness
Gratitude
Kindness
Hope
Bravery

…were the predictors of who would show the most increases in well-being.

7) Altruism and Philanthropy Bring Longer Lasting Pleasure

We have an exercise that we have young people do. It’s the distinction between pleasure and philanthropy.

I assign my students to do something fun next week, and to do something philanthropic, altruistic. And then, to write up what happens. And what happens, I’ll just tell you emblematically, one of my students, ah, when you do something fun like shopping, going to the movies, hanging out with your friends, it has a square wave offset. That is, when it’s done, it’s done.

When you do something altruistic, something else happens.

For one of my students, her 9-year-old nephew called her on the phone during this assignment. It was her mid-term week, and she needed to tutor him. She’d spent two hours tutoring him in fractions and she said:

“After that, the whole day went better. I was mellow. I could listen to people. People liked me more.”

Then, one of my business students said:

“I’m in the business school because I want to make a lot of money. And, I want to make a lot of money. It’s reasonable. Money brings happiness, it brings security, it brings contentment, it brings control, but I was astonished to find out that I was happier helping another person than I was shopping.”

This, it turns out, to be a human regularity; important to know that. It’s the way we’re built.

When you are really involved in this completely engaging process of creating something new, you do not have enough attention left over to monitor how your body feels, or your problems at home.

You cannot feel even that you’re hungry or tired.

Your body disappears, your identity disappears from your consciousness, because you don’t have enough attention, like none of us do, to really do well something that requires a lot of concentration, and at the same time to feel that you exist.

So existence is temporarily suspended.

This automatic, spontaneous process that is being described can only happen to someone who is very well trained and who has developed technique. And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you cannot be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical-knowledge immersion in a particular field.

Whether it is mathematics or music, it takes that long to be able to begin to change something in a way that it is better than what was there before. Now, when that happens, he says the music just flows out.

This is the flow experience, and it happens in different realms.

–Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the TED Talk “Flow, The Secret to Happiness.” All quotes in this post are from this TED talk, which can be viewed also at the bottom of this post.

Flow Experience for a Poet

For instance, a poet describes it in this form. This is by a student of mine who interviewed some of the leading writers and poets in the United States. And it describes the same effortless, spontaneous feeling that you get when you enter into this ecstatic state. This poet describes it as opening a door that floats in the sky — a very similar description to what Albert Einstein gave as to how he imagined the forces of relativity, when he was struggling with trying to understand how it worked.

Flow Experience for an Athlete

But it happens in other activities. For instance, this is another student of mine, Susan Jackson from Australia, who did work with some of the leading athletes in the world. And you see here in this description of an Olympic skater, the same essential description of the phenomenology of the inner state of the person. You don’t think; it goes automatically, if you merge yourself with the music, and so forth.

Flow Experience for CEOs

It happens also, actually, in the most recent book I wrote, called “Good Business,” where I interviewed some of the CEOs who had been nominated by their peers as being both very successful and very ethical, very socially responsible. You see that these people define success as something that helps others and at the same time makes you feel happy as you are working at it. And like all of these successful and responsible CEOs say, you can’t have just one of these things be successful if you want a meaningful and successful job. Anita Roddick is another one of these CEOs we interviewed. She is the founder of Body Shop, the natural cosmetics king. It’s kind of a passion that comes from doing the best and having flow while you’re working.

This is an interesting little quote from Masaru Ibuka, who was at that time starting out Sony without any money, without a product — they didn’t have a product, they didn’t have anything, but they had an idea. And the idea he had was to establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society and work to their heart’s content. I couldn’t improve on this as a good example of how flow enters the workplace.

Flow Experience during Work

Now, when we do studies — we have, with other colleagues around the world, done over 8,000 interviews of people — from Dominican monks, to blind nuns, to Himalayan climbers, to Navajo shepherds — who enjoy their work. And regardless of the culture, regardless of education or whatever, there are these seven conditions that seem to be there when a person is in flow. There’s this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback. You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. And once the conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake.

7 Conditions of Flow Experience

1. Completely involved in what you are doing – focused, concentrated.

2. A sense of ecstasy – of being outside everyday reality.

3. Great inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done, and how well you are doing.

4. Knowing that the activity is doable – that our skills are adequate to the task.

5. A sense of serenity – no worries about oneself, and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego.

6. Timelessness – thoroughly focused on the present, hours seem to pass by in minutes.

7. Intrinsic motivation – whatever produces flow becomes it own reward.

What Do You Think?

What could help people have a flow experience regardless of their profession or skill?

Is there a common flow experience we could all help each other achieve, and thus experience this exalted state much more often, and not in connection to our profession or skills? If there is, how could we achieve that?

Please write your answers in the comments below!

Watch Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – Flow, The Secret to Happiness [TED Talk] »

Image: "The Flow of Water" by "John T. Howard."

Tag: positive psychology

7 Quotes on Well-Being and Happiness to Inspire Positivity, Altruism and Kindness in Social Interactions