These are the things that made feel happy and some tips that is very important to my everyday activities that guides me in everyway........
| 1. WEALTH | Money can buy a degree of
happiness. But once you can afford to feed, clothe and house yourself, each
extra money makes less and less difference.
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| 2. DESIRE | How much stuff do you need to
feel good? In the 1980's Canadian political scientist Alex Michalos asked
18,000 university students in 39 countries to rate their happiness on a
numeric scale. Then he asked them how close they were to having all they
wanted. He found out that the people whose aspirations -not just money, but
for friends, family, job, health the works - soared furthest beyond what
they already had tended to be less happy than those who perceived a smaller
gap. Indeed the size of the gap predicted happiness about five times better
than income alone. "The gap measures just blow away the absolute measures of
income," says Michalos.
This "aspiration gap" might explain why most people fail to get much happier as their salaries rise. Instead of satisfying our desires , most of us merely want more. In surveys over the past two decades, people were asked to list the material possessions they thought important to the "good life". The researchers found that more of these goods people already people had, the longer their list was. The good life remained always just out of reach.
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| 3. INTELLIGENCE | Only few surveys have examined whether smart people are happier, but they indicate that intelligence has no effect. That seems so surprising at first, since brighter people often earn more, and the rich tend to be happier. some researchers speculated that brighter people could have higher expectations and thus be satisfied with anything less than the highest achievements." Or maybe scoring high in IQ test - which means you have a high vocabulary and can rotate things in your mind - doesn't have a lot to do with your abilities to get along well with people," says psychologist Ed Diener. He thinks "social intelligence" could be the real key to happiness. |
| 4. GENETICS | Are some people born happy or
unhappy? David Lykken a behavioural geneticist and former professor of
psychology, believes our feeling of well being at any moment is determined
by half by what is going on in our lives at that time and half by a "set
point" of happiness, which is up to 90 percent genetically determined
and to which we eventually return after dramatic events. "While our
happiness set point is largely determined by our genes," explains Lykken,
"whether we bounce along above it or slump along under it depends on our -
or our parents' - good sense and good training.
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| 5. BEAUTY | First the bad news:
good-looking people are really happier. When Ed Diener got people rate their
own looks, there was a "small but positive effect of physical attractiveness
on subjective well- being. Perhaps the explanation is that life is kinder to
the beautiful. Or it could be more subtle than that. The most attractive
faces are highly symmetrical, and there is evidence that symmetry is a
reflection of good genes and a healthy immune system. So perhaps beautiful
people are happier because they are healthier. You could cash in on beauty's
emotional high even if you aren't gorgeous - if you believe that you
look great. Unfortunately, studies show that women tend to think that they
are too fat and men worry about being puny.
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| 6. FRIENDSHIP | It is hard to imagine more
pitiful experience than the life of the streets of Calcutta or in one of its
teeming slums, or making a living there as a prostitute. Yet despite the
poverty and squalor they face, these people are much happier than you might
imagine. Diener interviewed 83 people from these three groups and measured
their life satisfaction using a scale for which a score of 2 is considered
neutral. Overall, they averaged 1.93 - not great, but creditable, compared
with a control group of middle-class city students who scored 2.43. and the
slum dwellers, who were happiest of the three disadvantaged groups, scored
2.23, not significantly different from the students score. "We think that
social relationships are partly responsible," says Diener. He says that all
three deprived groups got high satisfaction ratings in specific areas, such
as family(2.5), and friends (2.4). Slum dwellers did particularly well,
perhaps because they can cash in on their social support of the extended
family in the Indian culture.
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| 7. MARRIAGE | In an analysis of reports
from 42 countries, researchers found that married people are consistently
happier than singles. The effect is small, but still begs the question: does
marriage make you happy, or are happy people simple more likely to get
married? Both answers may be true. In a study that followed more than 30,000
Germans for 15 years, Diener and his colleagues found that happy people are
more likely to get married and stay married. But anyone can improve his or
her mood by getting married. The effect begins about a year before the
"happy day" and lasts for at least a year afterwards. For most people,
satisfaction levels return to their baseline, but the researchers says this
conceals the fact that a good marriage can have a permanent positive
effect. Furthermore, people people who are less happy to begin with well get
a bigger boost from marriage.
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| 8. FAITH | Karl Marx was fairly
close to the mark when he described religion as an opiate for the masses. Of
the dozens of studies that have looked at religion and happiness, the vast
majority have found a positive link. Belief in an afterlife can give people
meaning and purpose and reduce the feeling of being alone in the world, says
Harold Koening of Duke University Medical Centre in Durham North Carolina,
especially as people age. "You really see the effect in times of stress.
Religious belief can be very powerful way of coping with adversity."
Religion also brings social interaction and support. But Koening believes it
is not just about receiving, "Studies have shown that people who provide
support to other are better off themselves. They even live longer." This,
researchers agree , makes religious involvement in a source of greater
satisfaction than other socially inclusive activities such as book groups.
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| 9. CHARITY | Several studies have found a
link between happiness and altruistic behavioural traits, it is not always
clear whether doing good makes you feel good, or whether happy people are
more likely to be altruistic. James Konow, an economist at Loyola Marymount
University in Los Angeles, tries to teased apart cause and effect in a lab
experiment. He recruited subjects to answer questionnaires, and towards the
end of the session gave half of them $10 and half nothing. He then told the
subjects who had been paid that they could share their money with those who
had not been compensated. Konow found that the happier students were overall
the more likely they were to share their money. However, being in a happy
mood on the day of the test did not make them any more generous, and the
students who gave did not report any immediate increase in happiness.
In fact, they were slightly less happy. But those who shared their money
were more likely to show the personality traits of a "self-actualiser" -
they were concerned with their own personal growth and improvement.
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| 10. AGE | Old age may not be so bad.
"Given all the problems of ageing, how could the elderly be more satisfied?"
ask Laura Carstensen, a psychology professor at Stanford University. In one
study, Carstensen gave pagers to 184 people aged between 18-94, and paged
them five times a week, asking them to fill in an emotions questionnaire
each time. Old people reported positive emotions just often as young people,
but they reported negative emotions much les frequently. Why are old people
happier? Some scientist suggest that older people may expect life to be
harder and learn to live with it, or they're more realistic about their
goals, setting only ones that they know they can achieve. But Carstensen
thinks that time running out, older people have learned to focus on things
that make them happy and let go of those that don't.
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Bond, M., Douglas, K., Holmes, H., Kleiner, K. 10 Keys to True Happiness. Readers Digest July 2004. pp.44-49 |
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