5 Ways to Live Happier as You Live (Must-Read for Middle-Aged People)

People all pursue happiness, but what exactly is happiness? People still have many misunderstandings about happiness. The most common one is confusing "happiness" with "pleasure".

If a forward of a football team tries his best to break through the opponent's defense when the team is one point behind, and he feels anxious and stressed inside, but bravely takes on the responsibility and fulfills his talent - is this happiness?

The answer is yes.

Happiness is not only about pleasure, but also about the realization of personal potential, the meaning of life, helping others, and self-growth. If we regard happiness as a complete picture, there is a theory that can tell us the five pieces of the puzzle that make up the picture, which is PERMA from Martin Seligman.

PERMA is the abbreviation of the five elements of happiness, which are:

Positive emotion

Engagement

Positive Relationships

Meaning and purpose

Accomplishment

The benefit of PERMA is not only that it scientifically deconstructs happiness, but also provides us with a starting point to pursue happiness in our daily lives.

Next, let’s take a look at how we can use PERMA to pursue a higher level of happiness.

Broaden your sources of positive emotions

In our daily lives, we are often exposed to the misconception that happiness is equivalent to money, status, reputation, appearance and property.

This idea has become more and more popular in the past few years. Although these things can bring people pleasure in many cases, studies have found that once you attach too much importance to these things, anxiety and depression levels will increase. You may think that you will be happy if you have money, but because you care too much about this, no matter how much money you have, you will definitely think that you are "not rich enough", which affects your happiness.

Falling into the trap of "materialism" and paying too much attention to the above-mentioned things will most directly result in squeezing out our opportunities to experience other positive emotions and thus enhance our sense of happiness.

If you care too much about wealth and spend a lot of time doing part-time jobs to earn extra money, you may not be able to experience the comfort of "stealing a little time off from life"; if you attach great importance to your figure and grit your teeth into excessive dieting and fitness, you may miss the joy of showing off a big meal with your relatives and friends; if you spend a lot of time "watching the market" on your mobile phone every day in order to keep up with stock market fluctuations, you may miss the birdsong, grass leaves and flowers.

Positive emotions are not just "feeling good". Peace, tranquility, comfort, relief, and touching are all positive emotions. "I am better than others" can only be regarded as an experience based on winning a competition, which is far from encompassing all positive emotions.

Finding Flow

What do you do when you feel time flies by? Sports? Reading? Fishing? Crafts? Playing with your kids?

No matter what you are doing, when you feel that time flies, you are actually experiencing "flow", which means that you are "fully engaged".

The flow experience is often not a sense of happiness in the popular sense, and may also be related to negative emotions. If you are a highly skilled surgeon, you may also enter a state of flow when you are anxious and nervous while performing surgery. This is actually not contradictory. In the flow state, you can experience anxiety, tension, happiness and excitement at the same time.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term flow, asked dozens of experts in various fields when they felt and performed best in their lives, and all of them described the experience of flow. This experience occurs when you voluntarily engage in a challenging but manageable task, when you achieve a series of goals, and when you continuously process feedback about your progress and adjust your behavior based on that feedback.

The value of "full commitment" is self-evident. Using talents, overcoming difficulties and achieving value are integrated at this moment, which will have a positive effect on people's sense of happiness.

Gaining happiness from socializing

Family, friendship, and love all contribute to a sense of happiness, and the power of positive relationships goes far beyond that.

In fact, it’s even difficult to scientifically distinguish whether happy people are more social or whether social people are happier – studies have found that happy people tend to prioritize socializing and spend more time with others.

However, this causal myth does not affect the actions we should choose in life: to communicate, to communicate, to get along with others. Even if you are in a big city and feel that there is no one around you who is particularly close, you can still use this method, because even if the person you are talking to is a stranger, your happiness level can be improved. Even if you are really "socially anxious", playing with dogs can actually increase the secretion of endorphins, oxytocin and dopamine.

There seems to be a rejection of deep relationships in contemporary culture, and more and more people seem to reject intimacy in both thought and action, or are determined to avoid dealing with others as much as possible. But from a psychological perspective, as a species that lives in an interpersonal network, even if there is an objective need for solitude, it is difficult for humans to gain true happiness from complete social isolation.

Let the meaning of yourself

Achieving unity of purpose for others

Finnish philosopher Frank Martella described the meaning of life as "doing things that are meaningful to you and to others."

There is a strong correlation between kind and altruistic behavior and happiness. From the data, the expression "giving roses to others, the fragrance lingers on your hands" cannot even describe the real objective fact - after you help others, your level of happiness may even increase more than that of the recipient.

Of course, "meaning" itself can also have a very distinct personality. For example, in your family, adhering to traditional etiquette between the elders and the younger is meaningful, which can also promote the happiness of family members; or if you come from a military family, a sense of order is very important to you, then you can also gain happiness by putting your life in order through your own actions.

In short, aligning your own meaning with the meaning of others is a good way to make everyone feel happy.

There is more than one way to achieve happiness

In our daily lives, we often overlook this point: "achievement" has many different forms, far more than just one.

Education, wealth and status may be important, but can they constitute the absolute meaning of our lives? If everyone accepts this kind of meaning, then "rolling" will become the inevitable final destination, and happiness will naturally be out of the question. Some people find themselves still unhappy after obtaining education and wealth, and the most likely reason is that they have overlooked that the achievements they really care about are actually something else.

Being a good father; being able to make scrambled eggs with tomatoes that no one else can match; being able to identify various types of minerals; being proficient in Tang poetry... These achievements cannot directly exchange for wealth and power, but they may create a sense of happiness in life.

Don’t be the person who queues up after seeing others queuing up—the things they are queuing up to buy may not be suitable for you, or you don’t actually need them. People can completely speed along their own achievement track, instead of being forcibly dragged into an involutionary arena to fight each other.

According to the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, happiness is "the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain", but this view does not break away from the utilitarian thinking that confuses happiness with pleasure. Perhaps in understanding happiness, we should adopt a Marxist perspective: people have their social and developmental characteristics, and at the same time have the right and should pursue comprehensive, free, and developed real happiness. Perhaps you are in an environment where work is hard, competition is fierce, and relationships are complicated, but this does not prevent you from deeply and scientifically interpreting what true happiness is. After all, only by understanding happiness can you be truly happy.

I believe that if you collect the five pieces of the puzzle above, you will also be able to obtain great happiness.

References

[1] R. Ryan; E. Deci. On happiness and human potentials: a review of research on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Annual review of psychology.

[2]Krems; D. Kenrick; Rebecca Neel. Individual Perceptions of Self-Actualization: What Functional Motives Are Linked to Fulfilling One's Full Potential? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

[3]Park, N., Peterson, C., & Ruch, W. (2009). Orientations to happiness and life satisfaction in twenty-seven nations. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 4(4), 273-279.

[4]Martin Seligman, “PERMA and the Building Blocks of Well Being,” Journal of Positive Psychology 13, no. 4 (February 2018): 1–3.

[5]JeanM. Twenge and Tim Kasser, “Generational Changes in Materialism and Work Centrality, 1976–2007: Associations with Temporal Changes in Societal Insecurity and MaterialisticRole Modeling,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 39, no. 7 (May 1, 2013): 883–97.

[6]TimKasser, The High Price of Materialism (Toronto, ON: Bradford Books, 2003).

[7]Jean Nakamura and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “The Concept of Flow,” in Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology: The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (New York: Springer, 2014), 239– 63.

[8]Marian Diamond and Janet Hopson, MagicTrees of the Mind (New York: Plume, 1999).

[9]Laurence Steinberg, Age of Opportunity (NewYork: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

[10] Nora D. Volkow et al., "Evaluating Dopamine Reward Pathway in ADHD," JAMA 302, no. 10 (September 9, 2009): 1084–91.

[11] Matthew H. Schneps, "The Advantages of Dyslexia," ScientificAmerican, August 19, 2014, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/theadvantagesofdyslexia/.

[12] Shu Yongzheng. (2013). Comparative study of the human nature foundation of Marx and Bentham’s views on happiness. Journal of Theory, (22), 41-42.

Author: Ye Zhuang, psychologist, member of the Chinese Psychological Society

Reviewer: Fan Chunlei, Associate Researcher, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

<<: After checking out more than 30 types of vinegar in the supermarket, the most recommended one is... You won’t waste your money after reading this!

>>: There are "microplastics" in the water you drink, which are harmful to the human body! But 1 super simple step can remove them