Strategies for enhancing happiness
Relationships
- Mate with someone similar, communicate kindly and clearly and forgive faults
- Maintain contact with your extended family
- Maintain a few close friendships
- Co-operate with acquaintances
- Engage in religious or spiritual practices
Environment
- Secure physical and financial safety and comfort for yourself and your family, but don’t get on the hedonic treadmill of consumerism
- Periodically enjoy fine weather
- Live in a geographically beautiful environment
- Live in an environment where there is pleasing music and art
Physical state
- Maintain good health
- Engage in regular physical
- exercise
Productivity
- Use skills that are intrinsically pleasing for tasks that are challenging
- Achieve success and approval at work that is interesting and challenging
- Work towards a coherent set of goals
Recreation
- Eat quality food in moderation
- Rest, relax, and take holidays in moderation
- Do co-operative recreational activities with groups of friends like music, dance, physical work projects, and exhilarating activities (sailing/surfing)
Habituation
- For excessive striving for material gain to increase happiness, accept that you will inevitably habituate to material goods and situations that initially bring increases in happiness
Comparisons
- For low self-esteem due to negative comparisons with media images, judge yourself against your immediate local reference group and those worse off than yourself, not the false images of the media; check the validity of resources and happiness of media images.
- Set realistic personal goals and standards consistent with your abilities and resources Inequitable reactions to losses and gains
- For disappointment associated with inequity of reactions to gains and losses, expect to get small increases in happiness from large gains and successes; and large reductions in happiness from small losses and failures
Distressing emotions
- Avoid distressing situations; focus on non-distressing aspects of difficult situations,
- Assertively challenge distressing people, challenge pessimistic and perfectionistic thinking
- Challenge threat oriented thinking and practice courage by entering threatening situations and using coping strategies to reduce anxiety
- Avoid provocative situations, focus on non-distressing aspects of difficult situations
- Assertively ask provocative people to be less provocative, stand back and practise empathy
Source: Based on Argyle (2001); Seligman (2002); Diener et al. (1999); Buss (2000); Myers (1992); Lykken (1999).
Quoted from Positive Psychology by Martin Seligman, 2004, Brunner-Routlege, New York, NY (page 39-40).
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