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WHAT'S NEW
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How to pave your path to lasting happiness
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Find out why joy is learned -- not inate -- and get tips on how to find it every day.
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By Krista Foss
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As a result of this analysis of what happy people know, Baker has identified six happiness tools: practising appreciation, exercising choice, building personal power, leading with your strengths, using positive language and framing, and aiming for multidimensional or balanced living. Like all good tools, they come with an explanation and guidelines for use.
Appreciation
At age 92, Jessie Norton Beck has a knack for looking on the bright side of things. She lives alone in Charlottetown where she is busy working on a history book of island churches. If she reflects on the death of her husband, Preston, several years ago, she recalls mainly that 500 people came to his funeral to pay tribute to his life. When she thinks about her daughter who died of breast cancer, she considers the legacy of health and charity she left behind as a doctor in Antigua. And sometimes for a lift, she opens a Mother's Day present she received three years ago from another of her five children, a book filled with handwritten notes about how she was a wonderful parent. "It gives me a lot of happiness," says Jessie.
Psychologist Barbara Frederickson's research at the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Laboratory at the University of Michigan has demonstrated that such daily acts of appreciation and gratitude buffer people against future depression, return their anxiety-spiked heart rates to normal after a negative event and create an upward spiral of positive mental effects that increase their ability to solve problems. Baker's guideline: focus on something that makes or has made you happy and appreciate it anew three times a day, up to five minutes each time. It can be your children, chocolate chip cookies or your first kiss, he writes.
Choice
When Janet Thurston was diagnosed with breast cancer seven years ago, she worried the disease would consume her identity while she underwent lumpectomy and radiation treatments. So she fought back. Janet kept active, rode her bicycle to almost every radiation treatment and usually met with her oncologist wearing Lycra.
By exercising small daily choices, such as what to wear to a doctor's appointment, you gain a sense of triumph over fear, which leads to being able to make bigger choices. Choice is at the heart of psychological health, writes Baker. In situations where we feel helpless, the brain becomes hijacked by fear and we often cannot see the options.
Personal power
Baker has an acronym for the foes of personal power: VERBs. I've been Victimized. I'm Entitled to more. I'll be Rescued. Someone else is to Blame. Gaining personal power means taking responsibility, taking action and practising optimism. "When I'm really stressed out, the house is spotless," says Carol Husband. "I focus on the smallest action I can do and I do it. You can't delete the bad things that happen from your mind, but you can displace them with good things."
Language and stories
Everyone can control the language she uses to describe herself or her life, says Baker, citing another happiness tool. For instance, Jessie Norton Beck could have told her story like this: "I worked hard all my life and look what happened: I lost a precious daughter at an unfair early age. My husband died and I am all alone. Why me?" Instead she says, "I am really grateful for my own happy childhood, my children, 58 years of marriage and my interest in church work."
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