How would she describe her own laugh? “There’s a difference between a laugh where you’re like ‘ha ha, good joke,’ and one where you’re caught off guard. And, of course, when I’m with my boyfriend my laugh is really cute and giggly.”

A Killer Joke

Chuckling heartily pumps up the expression of at least 14 genes that regulate natural killer-cell activity. These immunological assassins destroy tumors and cells besieged by viruses on contact.

A Bloody Good Time

Laughter causes the inner lining of blood vessels to expand, increasing blood flow. Such vasodilatation, also caused by aerobic activity, may be the result of a heaving diaphragm or the release of endorphins.

Milking it for Laughs

Breast-feeding mothers have even more reason to laugh. Watching a funny movie increases levels of the relaxing hormone melatonin in breast milk. And drinking the milk reduces allergic reactions in infants with atopic eczema.

Sweet Relief

Got diabetes? Some gentle ribbing could save your kidneys. Laughter increases their receptors for certain proteins that prevent cellular damage in diabetics. It also curbs the spikes in blood glucose after meals, either through muscle use or changes in neuroendocrine levels.

Wait for it…

Just the expectation of laughter can work wonders. Blood drawn from people right before they watched a comedy showed a beta-endorphin increase of 27 percent and a human growth hormone boost of 87 percent. Endorphins help the immune system, while HGH is good for muscles, bones, and internal organs.

Laugh One, Laugh All

A contagious laugh promotes bonding, reduces stress, and spreads the wealth of laughter’s physical benefits. And we’re programmed to capitalize on it: Just hearing laughter activates neurons in the pre-motor cortex that prepare the face to smile.

Psychology Today Magazine, May/June 2008 – Article Link

JILL BOLTE TAYLOR was a neuroscientist working at Harvard’s brain research center when she experienced nirvana.

On Dec. 10, 1996, Dr. Taylor, then 37, woke up in her apartment near Boston with a piercing pain behind her eye. A blood vessel in her brain had popped. Within minutes, her left lobe — the source of ego, analysis, judgment and context — began to fail her. Oddly, it felt great.

The incessant chatter that normally filled her mind disappeared. Her everyday worries — about a brother with schizophrenia and her high-powered job — untethered themselves from her and slid away.

Her perceptions changed, too. She could see that the atoms and molecules making up her body blended with the space around her; the whole world and the creatures in it were all part of the same magnificent field of shimmering energy.

“My perception of physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air,” she has written in her memoir, “My Stroke of Insight,” which was just published by Viking.

After experiencing intense pain, she said, her body disconnected from her mind. “I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle,” she wrote in her book. “The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.”

While her spirit soared, her body struggled to live. She had a clot the size of a golf ball in her head, and without the use of her left hemisphere she lost basic analytical functions like her ability to speak, to understand numbers or letters, and even, at first, to recognize her mother. A friend took her to the hospital. Surgery and eight years of recovery followed.

Her desire to teach others about nirvana, Dr. Taylor said, strongly motivated her to squeeze her spirit back into her body and to get well.

This story is not typical of stroke victims. Left-brain injuries don’t necessarily lead to blissful enlightenment; people sometimes sink into a helplessly moody state: their emotions run riot. Dr. Taylor was also helped because her left hemisphere was not destroyed, and that probably explains how she was able to recover fully.

Today, she says, she is a new person, one who “can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere” on command and be “one with all that is.”

To her it is not faith, but science. She brings a deep personal understanding to something she long studied: that the two lobes of the brain have very different personalities. Generally, the left brain gives us context, ego, time, logic. The right brain gives us creativity and empathy. For most English-speakers, the left brain, which processes language, is dominant. Dr. Taylor’s insight is that it doesn’t have to be so.

Her message, that people can choose to live a more peaceful, spiritual life by sidestepping their left brain, has resonated widely.

In February, Dr. Taylor spoke at the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference (known as TED), the annual forum for presenting innovative scientific ideas. The result was electric. After her 18-minute address was posted as a video on TED’s Web site, she become a mini-celebrity. More than two million viewers have watched her talk, and about 20,000 more a day continue to do so. An interview with her was also posted on Oprah Winfrey’s Web site, and she was chosen as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world for 2008.

She also receives more than 100 e-mail messages a day from fans. Some are brain scientists, who are fascinated that one of their own has had a stroke and can now come back and translate the experience in terms they can use. Some are stroke victims or their caregivers who want to share their stories and thank her for her openness.

But many reaching out are spiritual seekers, particularly Buddhists and meditation practitioners, who say her experience confirms their belief that there is an attainable state of joy.

“People are so taken with it,” said Sharon Salzberg, a founder of the Insight Mediation Society in Barre, Mass. “I keep getting that video in e-mail. I must have 100 copies.”

She is excited by Dr. Taylor’s speech because it uses the language of science to describe an occurrence that is normally ethereal. Dr. Taylor shows the less mystically inclined, she said, that this experience of deep contentment “is part of the capacity of the human mind.”

Since the stroke, Dr. Taylor has moved to Bloomington, Ind., an hour from where she was raised in Terre Haute and where her mother, Gladys Gillman Taylor, who nursed her back to health, still lives.

Originally, Dr. Taylor became a brain scientist — she has a Ph.D. in life sciences with a specialty in neuroanatomy — because she has a mentally ill brother who suffers from delusions that he is in direct contact with Jesus. And for her old research lab at Harvard, she continues to speak on behalf of the mentally ill.

But otherwise, she has dialed back her once loaded work schedule. Her house is on a leafy cul-de-sac minutes from Indiana University, which she attended as an undergraduate and where she now teaches at the medical school.

Her foyer is painted a vibrant purple. She greets a stranger at the door with a warm hug. When she talks, her pale blue eyes make extended contact.

Never married, she lives with her dog and two cats. She unselfconsciously calls her mother, 82, her best friend.

She seems bemused but not at all put off by the hundreds who have reached out to her on a spiritual level. Religious ecstatics who claim to see angels have asked her to appear on their radio and television programs.

She has declined these offers. Although her father is an Episcopal minister and she was raised in his church, she cannot be counted among the traditionally faithful. “Religion is a story that the left brain tells the right brain,” she said.

Still, Dr. Taylor says, “nirvana exists right now.”

“There is no doubt that it is a beautiful state and that we can get there,” she said.

That belief has certainly sparked debate. On Web sites like evolvingbeings.com and in Eckhart Tolle discussion groups, people debate whether she is truly enlightened or just physically damaged and confused.

Even her own scientific brethren have wondered.

“When I saw her on the TED video, at first I thought, Oh my god, is she losing it,” said Dr. Francine M. Benes, director of the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, where Dr. Taylor once worked.

Dr. Benes makes clear that she still thinks Dr. Taylor is an extraordinary and competent woman. “It is just that the mystical side was not apparent when she was at Harvard,” Dr. Benes said.

Dr. Taylor makes no excuses or apologies, or even explanations. She says instead that she continues to battle her left brain for the better. She gently offers tips on how it might be done.

“As the child of divorced parents and a mentally ill brother, I was angry,” she said. Now when she feels anger rising, she trumps it with a thought of a person or activity that brings her pleasure. No meditation necessary, she says, just the belief that the left brain can be tamed.

Her newfound connection to other living beings means that she is no longer interested in performing experiments on live rat brains, which she did as a researcher.

She is committed to making time for passions — physical and visual — that she believes exercise her right brain, including water-skiing, guitar playing and stained-glass making. A picture of one of her intricate stained-glass pieces — of a brain — graces the cover of her book.

Karen Armstrong, a religious historian who has written several popular books including one on the Buddha, says there are odd parallels between his story and Dr. Taylor’s.

“Like this lady, he was reluctant to return to this world,” she said. “He wanted to luxuriate in the sense of enlightenment.”

But, she said, “the dynamic of the religious required that he go out into the world and share his sense of compassion.”

And in the end, compassion is why Dr. Taylor says she wrote her memoir. She thinks there is much to be mined from her experience on how brain-trauma patients might best recover and, in fact, she hopes to open a center in Indiana to treat such patients based on those principles.

And then there is the question of world peace. No, Dr. Taylor doesn’t know how to attain that, but she does think the right hemisphere could help. Or as she told the TED conference:

“I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be.”

It almost seems like science.

From The New York Times, by Leslie Kaufman, May 25 2008 – Article Link

Bring to your mind a past occasion of inner joy and happiness,” writes Matthieu Ricard in his new book Happiness: A Guide To Developing Life’s Most Important Skill. “Recall how you felt. Consider the lasting effect this experience has had on your mind, and how it still nourishes a sense of fulfilment.”

“Now this,” I tell Ricard, “was the point where I started to run into trouble. However long I worked at this meditation exercise, the memory that kept coming back to me was of the evening in May 1999 when I was sitting in the Nou Camp in Barcelona, and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer scored the injury-time goal that won the Champions’ League for Manchester United.”

“I would suggest that what you experienced that night was elation. And elation is not really what we mean by happiness. It would be an interesting experiment for you to relive that night, and assess what you actually gained from it.”

“You’re right,” I tell him, remembering how, once the euphoria had worn off, I was left contemplating the same void that has been described by countless sports fans, from Frederick Exley, author of the classic A Fan’s Notes, to Doug Stanhope, American comedian and follower of the Boston Red Sox.

“When I woke up the next morning,” I tell him, “my head still ached, I was still working for a magazine editor who loathed me, and my laptop was still broken. Now that I come to think about it, Manchester United had done absolutely nothing for me.”

“Because elation is a transient thing – not true spiritual fulfilment.”

“But if I achieve spiritual fulfilment, will I lose interest in going to Old Trafford?”

“Absolutely not. That’s one of the mistakes people make: that a serene, balanced mind is a dull mind. I love football.”

Matthieu Ricard, French translator and right-hand man for the Dalai Lama, has been the subject of intensive clinical tests at the University of Wisconsin, as a result of which he is frequently described as the happiest man in the world. It’s a somewhat flattering title, he says, given the tiny percentage of the global population who have had their brain patterns monitored by the same state-of-the-art technology, which involves attaching 256 sensors to the skull, and three hours’ continuous MRI scanning. The fact remains that, out of hundreds of volunteers whose scores ranged from +0.3 (what you might call the Morrissey zone) to -0.3 (beatific) the Frenchman scored -0.45. He shows me the chart of volunteers’ results, on his laptop. To find Ricard, you have to keep scrolling left, away from the main curve, until you eventually find him – a remote dot at the beginning of the x-axis.

“It’s true,” he concedes, “that I was well outside the normal parameters.”

As a young man, Matthieu Ricard, 60, was regarded as one of the most promising biologists of his generation. He completed a starred PhD at the Institut Pasteur under the supervision of Nobel prize-winner François Jacob, but abandoned his scientific career in 1972, when he moved to Darjeeling. There, he devoted himself to studying under Kangyur Rinpoche, a Tibetan master in the Nyingma tradition: the most ancient school of Buddhism. He has been a monk, and celibate, since he was 30. Ricard still lives at the Schechen Monastery in Nepal.

All proceeds from his books go to funding hospitals and schools in Tibet – which makes it feel barely appropriate that we should be meeting in a large apartment in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, an area roughly comparable to Mayfair. The monk explains that the flat – sparsely decorated with Tibetan artwork, and pictures of the Dalai Lama – belongs to a wealthy philanthropist who has moved to the country. Before I met Ricard, who greeted me in his maroon robes, I confess to having harboured some scepticism about his good works. But within minutes of speaking to him, I can tell that the $30m mansion in Malibu, where he secretly retires to snort cocaine off the thighs of Lithuanian hookers, in the tradition of innumerable TV evangelists, cannot conceivably exist. In the foreword to Happiness, the psychologist Dr Daniel Goleman describes how a three-hour wait at an airport “sped by in minutes, due to the sheer pleasure of Matthieu’s orbit” – a phrase which had made me faintly nauseous when I first read it. Now, it seems to make perfect sense. Ricard exudes a sense of tranquillity, kindness and – surprisingly enough – humour.

Versatility has been the keynote in his life. An outstanding goalkeeper in his youth, Matthieu Ricard also enjoys an international reputation as a photographer, and was lauded by Cartier-Bresson. He shows me pictures he’s taken of the idyllic view from his hermitage. Having myself been described by Private Eye as “journaliste misérable” – harshly I think, given that, of the “84,000 negative emotions” described in Buddhist teaching, there are at least a dozen that I haven’t yet experienced – I feel obliged to concede to Ricard that I may have something to learn from him.

“On the other hand,” I ask the monk, “how hard is it to be happy when you live on a mountainside with breathtaking views of the Himalayas, where your only concern is polishing your wind chimes? What if you had my life, living in the shadow of the new Arsenal stadium, the streets crowded with vengeful Cockney van drivers, the supermarkets staffed by cashiers who pass on the oppression of their wretched existence by drumming their fingers and flinging goods down the checkout at a speed that would have tested Peter Schmeichel in his prime? Not that I’m saying you’d be any happier where I grew up in Manchester, where two of my three uncles have been fired at with Uzis…”

“What,” Ricard interrupts, “is an Uzi?”

“It’s a machine gun.”

“Ah.” The monk pauses. “I understand what you’re saying. I believe that, if I had to live where you live, I could. By choice, I would not move there. But if you allow exterior circumstances to determine your state of mind, then of course you will suffer; you become like a sponge, or like a chameleon. I have lived in difficult areas. I lived in Old Delhi for almost a year. That really is a miserable place. And yet sometimes I felt so light there. It was like – how can I put this – different weather.”

Happiness is a remarkable book, untainted by the pretentious tone of many works that offer life-enhancing advice – even if one of the reviews quoted on its first page praises Matthieu Ricard for locating “the chambers of the mind where serenity resides”. (“In the wardrobe of my soul,” I can hear the late Vivian Stanshall singing. “In the section labelled ‘Shirts’.”)

Developing happiness, Ricard argues, is a skill. Most people exist like beggars, “unaware of the treasure buried beneath their shack”. We can develop our potential as if “polishing a nugget” and eventually (omega) achieve happiness, “like a bird soaring into the sky when his cage is opened”.

Ricard’s book exudes inspiration and intelligence, qualities embodied in its author. Even so, I tell him, one line that resonates with me is a quotation from the critic Dominique Noguez, who argues that misery is more interesting than contentment: “Because it has a seductive intensity, and the attraction of always leaving something to anticipate: happiness.”

“What other things,” Ricard asks now, “make you happy?”

“I don’t know… a half case of Jaboulet’s Parallèle 45 Côtes du Rhône with friends, over prawn dhansak…”

“What you’re describing is a lull; a calm in the storm. You have to identify what it is in that situation that makes you happy. It’s as though you’re making a journey, and you look in your rucksack to find it half filled with provisions, half with stones. You need to take out the stones and put in more provisions.”

“More wine?”

“No. What I’m saying is that these interludes – of alcohol, or physical exercise – give a hint of what life could be like, if you changed the balance of your mind, instead of altering external circumstances.” A laboratory rat, he says, given access to a “pleasure bar” that stimulates euphoria in the brain, will keep pressing the lever until it dies of starvation.

Ricard is a highly unusual figure in that – by contrast with the unquestioning, some would say credulous, nature of many believers – he has brought the scientific rigour of his early life to his faith: first in the form of his translations of texts from Tibetan (the language in which he normally communicates) then, more recently, in his contribution to the question of whether science can accurately map an individual’s mental equilibrium.

He was assessed in a programme headed by the cognitive scientist Professor Richard K Davidson, principal of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Davidson is one of the world’s leading investigators in the field of neuroplasticity: the comparatively recent discovery that the brain is constantly evolving in response to experience, and that such evolution can be represented in a scan, then quantified.

“The relationship between the left and right cortex of the brain can be measured,” says Ricard, “and the relationship between them faithfully represents the subject’s temperament.” Heightened activity on the left, he says, is associated with pleasant emotions; bias to the right indicates negativity and depression.

“In these tests,” he explains, “all the meditators were outside the standard curve. Statistically, they fell into in a tight, well-defined group. Even though they came from different backgrounds: a Tibetan nomad, a young French boy, an academic. They all came in a cluster. That’s the point. If it was just me, it could have been a fluke.”

“Isn’t there an inherited predisposition to gloom?”

“It’s true that a difference in mental balance can be demonstrated in children aged two. So now you’re going to ask, what’s the point? It’s this: the important thing with mind training – probably a more useful term than meditation – is that you change your own base line. This is very different from the temporary sensation of feeling good that you might experience when you watch a Marx Brothers film. What you have to do is raise that base line.”

Matthieu Ricard was born into a family that could hardly have been better-connected. His mother, Yahne Le Toumelin – who has become a Buddhist nun herself – is an abstract artist, praised by André Breton in his 1957 study, Surrealism and Painting. His father, Jean-François Revel, who died last year, was one of France’s most celebrated philosophical authors and journalists. Matthieu attended the private Parisian Lycée Janson-de-Sailly; fellow alumni include Jean Gabin, Valerie Giscard d’Estaing and Lionel Jospin. He was 16 when he first had lunch with Stravinsky.

His father was less than delighted when Matthieu (influenced by films on Tibetan Buddhism, made by his friend Arnaud Desjardins) abandoned his studies and left for India. In 1998, father and son published a series of dialogues, The Monk and the Philosopher, which sold almost 500,000 copies in France, and is one of the most brilliantly informative works of modern philosophy ever written.

Happiness, a more accessible book, contains simple exercises designed to help the reader achieve the same sort of composure that radiates from Ricard himself. “Anger,” he says, “is a destructive emotion, which reduces us to puppets.”

“Have you never lost it?”

“Occasionally,” Ricard says. “In the 1980s I got my first laptop. I used it to translate Tibetan texts. A friend tossed flour on to the keyboard, as a joke. When he saw I was really angry, he said: ‘One moment of anger can destroy years of patience.’” Psychological studies, Ricard argues, “contradict the notion that giving free rein to the emotions relieves bottled-up tension.”

“Staying with laptop rage,” I tell him, “I had an Apple that was constantly crashing. In the end, I took it into the back garden and kicked it to pieces.” Like my friend Ralph Steadman who recently put a pickaxe through his fax machine, I explain, I felt much better for it. “Then with my next laptop – a Toshiba whose screen was forever whiting out – I tried to do the right thing. I posted it with a civil letter to Mr Walker at Toshiba’s PR company. He never returned the machine, or replied to my subsequent correspondence. This has left me subject to feelings of real loathing towards Mr Walker, which can surface at any time of the night or day. Are you absolutely sure that mindless vandalism can never be good?”

“I think this is an example where cognitive therapy could be very good for you,” Ricard replies. “Your problem is that you imagine Mr Walker had something against you personally. The truth is that he had (omega) nothing against you at all. He was probably overworked. If something is not going to happen, you have to leave it at peace. Let it go.”

“I know you had another laptop stolen not so long ago, when you were travelling in India.”

“I didn’t feel aggrieved at all,” Ricard says, adding that his only regret was that he hadn’t been able to send the thief the power lead.

But where does such passivity lead, I ask Ricard, in less trivial circumstances?

“Let’s say, for the sake of argument,” I continue, “that you live in a country governed by a man who has betrayed every principle he ever professed to believe in, who habitually lies, who has sent innocent citizens to die in illegal combat he wouldn’t choose to engage in himself, and who accepts the hospitality of at least one world leader who is shamelessly corrupt. What’s the correct response to that behaviour?”

“To expose it,” says Ricard. “It’s important to have a desire for honesty and truth. But in a practical way. Not through hatred.”

“To take a well-worn example: if you’d found yourself armed and alone in a room with Hitler at Berchtesgaden in 1937…”

“I’d have shot him, certainly. If there was no other way. Because it would have alleviated greater suffering. Somebody once asked the Dalai Lama what he’d do if someone came in wanting to murder everyone in the room. He replied: ‘I’d begin by shooting at his legs. If that didn’t work, I’d move up to his head.’”

“He has a sense of irony, then.”

“He does.”

“Does he watch the Marx Brothers too?”

“He doesn’t have to. His life is so full of humour. Although I think he used to watch Mash.”

My own limited knowledge of Buddhism, I tell Ricard, relates to the life of Chogyam Trungpa, who was one of Allen Ginsberg’s mentors. Trungpa, who died of cirrhosis in 1982 aged 48, was responsible for helping to popularise the religion in Britain. A notorious alcoholic and philanderer whose spiritual reputation suffered a public setback when, drunk at the wheel of his sports car, he crashed into a joke shop on the outskirts of Dumfries. Just as Christianity is symbolised by the crucifixion, for me, until now, just the mention of Buddhism has evoked the image of a robed figure lying semi-conscious among pieces of dashboard, whoopee cushions and chattering teeth.

“Trungpa was extremely unconventional, as you suggest. He never tried to hide his behaviour. I never met him. I would not take him as my teacher.”

The fundamentally unconfrontational philosophy of Buddhism, Ricard says, will triumph in the end.

“If you have a society of selfish people, combined one-to-one with altruistic people, theoretically the altruists should be wiped out. But altruists can co-operate. Which gives them a strong advantage. That is the cause of hope.”

“Hope’s the right word, because I don’t see the world getting any better.”

“It may look that way on the news,” Ricard replies, “but every serious study indicates a decrease in the number of deaths in armed conflict. At the time of Napoleon, the Spanish took French soldiers and nailed them between planks. It was the most terrible death.”

“Fair enough, but… they were French.”

“They were…” Ricard extinguishes the hint of a smile. “The point is that I do believe there is an increased tendency towards compassion.”

“In Baghdad?”

“Every conflict has its source in hatred. Once the forest is on fire, you’re not dealing with how to extinguish the spark. Of course you can’t go and teach meditation in the midst of genocide, say. But in the future, perhaps we can shift people’s thinking to discourage such developments. People don’t blow themselves up for no reason. Changes of mind build slowly, out of discontent, greed and neglect. These things have to be addressed before hatred is fully blown.”

Like the Dalai Lama himself, Ricard says, he is an ardent follower of the BBC World Service, and BBC News 24.

And yet watching live reportage is hardly conducive to happiness. When, I ask Ricard – it’s a question which, as I confess to him, makes me squirm slightly, but I don’t think it’s irrelevant in this context – did he last weep?

“I cried recently because of… what was it? I remember it was an item on the television news, about people who had suffered a lot. I believe it had to do with abuse. I cried for a long time.”

We talk for two or three hours, into the early evening. I’m struck by how much better-known Ricard might have become had he applied his wit to his father’s trade, in philosophy and journalism; and how much more impressive he’d have been than France’s best-known contemporary intellectual, Bernard-Henri Lévy. Lévy, who has proved more susceptible than most to the charm of his own ego, recently claimed to have developed stigmata, and last year received his seventh cream pie in the face from the Belgian Nöel Godin, who has made it his life’s work to subvert the immaculately preened thinker.

As it is, there’s only one moment in our conversation when Ricard risks his karma by addressing current affairs in a waspish spirit. It happens when I ask him if he has even been tempted to write political articles.

“I have. Because you turn on the radio, and you hear Jeb Bush saying he is suspending capital punishment for a month because it took one man 20 minutes to die. And then you hear [Socialist presidential candidate] Ségolène Royal say: ‘I admire Chinese justice because it is swift.’ Well, she’s right there. For sure,” says Ricard, who has spent much of his life attempting to repair the consequences of that nation’s brutal assaults on Tibet. “Chinese justice. It’s swift.”

By the time I leave, he has persuaded me of the benefits to be gained from forgiving my enemies – and I think I can forgive them, with the possible exceptions of Mr Walker and that bouncer at the Borderline.

And yet, I tell him, I know that, in terms of happiness, my nugget remains unpolished, my bird still caged.

“And as for the treasure buried under my shack – I’m not even sure I remember where my shack is. Apart from working with the meditation exercises in Happiness, what should I do next?”

“There’s a programme called MBSR: Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at Massachusetts University. They have produced a range of excellent tapes. But ultimately, it’s how your mind relates to the world that determines whether you’re miserable or not. You have to ask yourself: is my happiness dependent on other people?”

It’s dark by the time I leave Ricard’s borrowed apartment. Walking back into the streets of the city feels like re-entering another reality, a bit like coming out of a cinema to find that night has fallen. I have an appointment with a French journalist friend at a brasserie in north-eastern Paris. During the evening, a fellow diner who has clearly been pulling on the rat pleasure bar – which, in his case, takes the form of half litres of Stella Artois with Armagnac chasers – for a number of hours, makes the bold but mistaken decision to launch into solo renditions of anthems in praise of Olympique de Marseille. An ugly confrontation ensues, involving supporters of Paris Saint Germain.

I wonder if Matthieu Ricard would have sought to intervene in the ensuing fracas, at the height of which I’d guess that the Marseille supporter, had he been asked whether his happiness depended on other people, would have had a word or two to say. I couldn’t ask Ricard about this because he was across town, finessing his Tibetan aid programme. If he had been here, I’m sure this remarkable man would have thought of something. That said, I think even Ricard would acknowledge that – contagious though his patience, compassion and serenity are – it may be some time before they are espoused quite so enthusiastically by the wider world.

From, The Independent by Robert Chalmers, February 18 2007- Article Link

Stewart, however, politely gives Ben-Shahar a chance to explain the value of his book and his course on positive psychology. Ben-Shahar is proud that his course is the most popular one at Harvard, to which Stewart gets an audience laugh by suggesting that perhaps the real reason it is so popular is because it is easy. This results in a nervous laugh from Ben-Shahar, who retorts that his exams are “actually quite difficult.” Ben-Shahar then explains that there is now a “science of happiness” and offers a study to prove it, but an unimpressed Stewart quips, “How is that science?”

Finally, Stewart is no longer able to restrain his amazement that platitudes are considered profound at Harvard nowadays (the “Six Happiness Tips” on Ben-Shahar’s website are about acceptance of negative feelings, positive attitude, meaningful activities, being grateful, simplifying life and physical health). Stewart ends the interview in Groucho Marx fashion by saying, “It’s a fascinating subject and one that I can’t believe you are getting away with.”

Compared with the dangerously dehumanizing stuff in the mental health business, positive psychology is so innocuous that I almost felt sorry for Ben-Shahar. But Stewart’s derision was not groundless. Even if a pretend profundity is harmless enough, it is never completely harmless when people surrender their own authority to others based solely on affiliations and advanced degrees. When people allow credentials such as a Harvard Ph.D. to cut off their own critical thinking, they will eventually buy into some truly dangerous bullshit.

Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines bullshit as “nonsense, lies or exaggeration.” My recent articles have been about the corrupt partnership between Big Pharma and psychiatry — resulting in nonsense, lies and exaggerations about mental illness diagnoses, chemical imbalances and psychiatric drugs — and thus, lately, I have neglected discussing the particular bullshit of my fellow psychologists, some of which is seriously dehumanizing.

While psychologists and psychiatrists have different bullshit, they also have overlapping bullshit, one example being the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of mental illness diagnoses. When I was an undergraduate in the 1970s, the DSM-II included homosexuality as a mental illness. The good news is that gay rights activists succeeded in getting homosexuality voted out of the DSM-III. The bad news is that the DSM-III and the current DSM-IV dramatically increased the number of psychiatric diagnoses, including more childhood mental illnesses, one of which is “oppositional defiant disorder.” Kids don’t get to vote in DSM mental illness elections.

While psychiatry has its own biochemical bullshit, psychology has its low-tech bullshit, some of which is quite dehumanizing. When I was a psychology major, one of the most prominent psychologists in America was the Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner, famous for popularizing “behavior modification” — the use of positive and negative reinforcements to manipulate rats and people. One Skinner book that many psychology majors were required to read was Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which I remember thinking was a damn scary title.

My first institutional experience of Skinner’s behavior modification came while interning on a locked ward in a state psychiatric hospital that had something called a “token economy.” I recall one patient there — I’ll call him George — who was severely depressed. George refused to talk to staff but, for some reason, one day chose me to shoot pool with. When my boss, a clinical psychologist, spotted my interaction with George, he told me that I should give George a token, a cigarette, to reward his “pro-social behavior.” I fought it, trying to explain that I was 20 and George was 50, and that this would be humiliating, but the psychologist threatened to kick me off the ward. So with staff watching but not hearing from behind the nurse’s station window, I asked George what I should do. Fighting the zombifying effects of his heavy medication, he grinned and said, “We’ll win, let me have the cigarette.” In full view of staff, George took the cigarette and then placed it into the shirt pocket of another patient. George, unlike B.F. Skinner, was not “beyond freedom and dignity.”

In graduate school, psychologists receive training in administering, scoring and evaluating intelligence tests. I immediately noticed that these IQ tests excluded a good part of what I considered intelligence. On the most respected IQ tests, there were no tasks that assessed someone’s ability to read between the lines, see truth beyond obfuscation, and detect bullshit. Ernest Hemingway said, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector.” I had always thought that such a “shockproof shit detector” was a significant aspect of intelligence — but not according to these IQ tests.

In 1994 Richard Herrnstein, another Harvard psychologist, co-authored The Bell Curve, an influential book celebrating the value of these intelligence tests. Herrnstein wrote, “The identification of IQ with attractive human qualities in general is unfortunate and wrong. … For example, a person can have a terrific sense of humor without giving you a clue about where he is within thirty points on the IQ scale. … Many witty people do not have unusually high test scores.”

Thus, if we trust this Harvard psychologist, we conclude that Jon Stewart as well as George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Mark Twain could all conceivably have low IQs and be classified as unintelligent.

The quick-witted Stewart showed a first-rate shit detector when he questioned the validity of Ben-Shahar’s claim that now, with science, we can ascertain whether common sense about happiness is true. The reality is that the “science of happiness” is a shaky science. For one thing, the independent and dependent variables (such as meaningfulness and happiness) are subjective and not truly quantifiable in the manner that legitimate scientists would take too seriously. I respect the findings of real science, but shaky science provides far less authority than time-honored wisdom.

The current positive psychology craze is by no means the first time that academic psychology has taken basic common sense and elevated it with scientific-sounding jargon to create the illusion that psychologists have something special to offer. When I attended graduate school in clinical psychology, hot topics were “cognitive psychology” and “cognitive therapy,” which were considered radical shifts from “behaviorism” (which dogmatically focused only on “observable events”). Cognitive psychology’s great contribution? Just because you cannot see people’s thoughts, people actually do think, and thoughts affect our emotions. However, 2,500 years earlier, the Buddha taught about the thought-emotion connection in a far more profound way than any academic cognitive psychologist.

Another hot field for a time was “interpersonal psychotherapy,” which declared that how people act toward other people creates reactions in other people, which in turn will affect them. I recall one professor trying to make this stuff into a big deal; he wrote on the blackboard the word friendly next to an arrow pointed to another friendly, and then he wrote the word hostile next to an arrow pointed at another hostile. I raised my hand and stated that this reminded me of an episode of “Laverne & Shirley” in which Laverne was being mean and Shirley told her, “Laverne, remember nice gets nice.”

It seems ironic to me that my Ph.D. has made it easier to get books and articles published. Generally, a mental health advanced degree in and of itself should actually give its holders less credibility, as it is really nothing more than proof that one has completed a lengthy bullshit indoctrination.

By Bruce E. Levine, Alternet, July 4 2008 – Article Link

Denmark is the world’s most content nation, according to a new study on global wellbeing, but the good news is, despite the credit crunch and rising fuel and food prices, all of us are getting happier.

Denmark’s prosperity and democratic systems are seen as key to its contentment.

Researchers at the University of Michigan said Denmark’s prosperity, stability and democratic government placed the country at the top of the rankings, with Colombia, Canada, Puerto Rico and Iceland all in the top 10.

The United States — the world’s richest nation — ranked 16th among 97 countries, while Britain was placed 21st.

Zimbabwe, with its soaring inflation and continuing political crisis, unsurprisingly ranked 97th.

Top 10 Happiest Countries

Denmark

Puerto Rico

Colombia

Iceland

N. Ireland

Republic of Ireland

Switzerland

Netherlands

Canada

Austria

“I strongly suspect there is a strong correlation between peace and happiness,” said Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research.

“There is also a correlation between democracy and peace. Democracies are less likely to fight each other than non-democracies.”

Almost all the countries at the bottom of the list struggle with legacies of authoritarian rule and widespread poverty, the survey found.

Top 10 Most Miserable Countries

Zimbabwe

Armenia

Moldova

Belarus

Ukraine

Albania

Iraq

Bulgaria

Georgia

Russia

Moldova and Armenia, with long histories of repressive government, trumped Iraq for misery, which placed seven in the U.S. funded research.

Respondents were asked two questions to gauge their happiness:

Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy, rather happy, not very happy, or not at all happy?

All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days?

Researchers say that compared to a similar survey 20 years ago, everyone is a lot happier.

“Ultimately, the most important determinant of happiness is the extent to which people have free choice in how to live their lives,” Inglehart adds.

From CNN.com, July 2 2008 – Article Link

My impressions may have been swayed by the fact that their candy dish was always full, but several studies now show that the Sloans could well have been more content than most of the traditional families around them. In Daniel Gilbert’s 2006 book “Stumbling on Happiness,” the Harvard professor of psychology looks at several studies and concludes that marital satisfaction decreases dramatically after the birth of the first child—and increases only when the last child has left home. He also ascertains that parents are happier grocery shopping and even sleeping than spending time with their kids. Other data cited by 2008′s “Gross National Happiness” author, Arthur C. Brooks, finds that parents are about 7 percentage points less likely to report being happy than the childless.

The most recent comprehensive study on the emotional state of those with kids shows us that the term “bundle of joy” may not be the most accurate way to describe our offspring. “Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers,” says Florida State University’s Robin Simon, a sociology professor who’s conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. “In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.”

Simon received plenty of hate mail in response to her research (“Obviously Professor Simon hates her kids,” read one), which isn’t surprising. Her findings shake the very foundation of what we’ve been raised to believe is true. In a recent NEWSWEEK Poll, 50 percent of Americans said that adding new children to the family tends to increase happiness levels. Only one in six (16 percent) said that adding new children had a negative effect on the parents’ happiness. But which parent is willing to admit that the greatest gift life has to offer has in fact made his or her life less enjoyable?

Parents may openly lament their lack of sleep, hectic schedules and difficulty in dealing with their surly teens, but rarely will they cop to feeling depressed due to the everyday rigors of child rearing. “If you admit that kids and parenthood aren’t making you happy, it’s basically blasphemy,” says Jen Singer, a stay-at-home mother of two from New Jersey who runs the popular parenting blog MommaSaid.net. “From baby-lotion commercials that make motherhood look happy and well rested, to commercials for Disney World where you’re supposed to feel like a kid because you’re there with your kids, we’ve made parenthood out to be one blissful moment after another, and it’s disappointing when you find out it’s not.”

Is it possible that American parents have always been this disillusioned? Anecdotal evidence says no. In pre-industrial America, parents certainly loved their children, but their offspring also served a purpose—to work the farm, contribute to the household. Children were a necessity. Today, we have kids more for emotional reasons, but an increasingly complicated work and social environment has made finding satisfaction far more difficult. A key study by University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Sara McLanahan and Julia Adams, conducted some 20 years ago, found that parenthood was perceived as significantly more stressful in the 1970s than in the 1950s; the researchers attribute part of that change to major shifts in employment patterns. The majority of American parents now work outside the home, have less support from extended family and face a deteriorating education and health-care system, so raising children has not only become more complicated—it has become more expensive. Today the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that it costs anywhere from $134,370 to $237,520 to raise a child from birth to the age of 17—and that’s not counting school or college tuition. No wonder parents are feeling a little blue.

Societal ills aside, perhaps we also expect too much from the promise of parenting. The National Marriage Project’s 2006 “State of Our Unions” report says that parents have significantly lower marital satisfaction than nonparents because they experienced more single and child-free years than previous generations. Twenty-five years ago, women married around the age of 20, and men at 23. Today both sexes are marrying four to five years later. This means the experience of raising kids is now competing with highs in a parent’s past, like career wins (“I got a raise!”) or a carefree social life (“God, this is a great martini!”). Shuttling cranky kids to school or dashing to work with spit-up on your favorite sweater doesn’t skew as romantic.

For the childless, all this research must certainly feel redeeming. As for those of us with kids, well, the news isn’t all bad. Parents still report feeling a greater sense of purpose and meaning in their lives than those who’ve never had kids. And there are other rewarding aspects of parenting that are impossible to quantify. For example, I never thought it possible to love someone as deeply as I love my son. As for the Sloans, it’s hard to say whether they had a less meaningful existence than my parents, or if my parents were 7 percent less happy than the Sloans. Perhaps it just comes down to how you see the candy dish—half empty or half full. Or at least as a parent, that’s what I’ll keep telling myself.

From Newsweek, June 28 2008 – Article Link

A couple of years ago, this wife, mother and former lawyer for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor launched a full-time happiness project to test-drive traditional and newly minted approaches toward her life goal. She kept a daily gratitude journal, read a poem every day and had regular date nights with her husband, among other strategies. Now she swears she’s cheerier.

Everyone seems to be jumping on the get-happier bandwagon. Happiness is making headlines, selling books, inspiring scientific studies and spawning laughter clubs and joyology workshops. The reason? As the burgeoning field of positive psychology has shown, happy people thrive. They’re more creative and productive, earn more money, attract more friends, enjoy better marriages, stay healthier and even outlive their grumpier peers.

“Imagine a drug that causes you to live eight or nine years longer, make $15,000 more a year, be less likely to get divorced,” says Martin Seligman, PhD, who started the positive psychology movement almost a decade ago. “Happiness seems to be that drug.”

But others wonder, Is this just one more thing we feel pressured to achieve in our overscheduled, overmeasured lives? How could there be one path to happiness for all people? And if we aren’t feeling blissful, are we failures at happiness? Some skeptics dismiss “happichondria” as the latest feel-good fad. “The notion that behavior modification can bring about true happiness is as bogus as can be,” says psychiatrist Charles Goodstein, MD, of New York University.

But happiness researchers, backed by thousands of studies, say happiness is measurable and buildable. If you’re willing to take a chance on the upside of life and shoot for your bliss, in spite of the naysayers, here’s help laying the groundwork.

Genetics, as research on 4,000 sets of twins has demonstrated, accounts for about 50 percent of your happiness quotient. But even if you inherited the family frown instead of joy genes, you’re not fated to a life of gloom. Just don’t pin your hopes on advantages like health, wealth, education and good looks — those bring only somewhat greater happiness than what those who are less blessed feel. Unless you’re extremely poor or gravely ill, life circumstances account for only about 10 percent of happiness. The other 40 percent depends on what you do to make yourself happy.

That’s the tricky part. Most of us assume that external things — a bigger house, a better job, a winning lottery ticket — will brighten our lives. While they do bring temporary delight, the thrill invariably fades. “After 18 years of studying happiness, I fell into the same trap as everyone else,” says psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD, author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. “I was so excited to get a new car, a hybrid I’d wanted for a long time, but within two months, driving it became routine. Happiness is like weight loss. We all know how to take off a few pounds; the trick is maintaining it.”

In their research, Lyubomirsky and her colleagues found that the key to enduring joy is to look beyond fleeting pleasures, to the other pillars of what Seligman calls authentic happiness: engagement with family, work or a passionate pursuit, and finding meaning from some higher purpose. “Different methods are a better fit for different people,” Lyubomirsky explains. “Keeping a daily gratitude journal seems hokey to some people, but writing a letter of gratitude may be very meaningful.” Timing and “doses” also matter. Performing five acts of kindness on one day, she found, yielded a significant increase in well-being, while acts of kindness on different days didn’t. “To sustain happiness,” she emphasizes, “you have to make the effort and commitment every day for the rest of your life.

The long run generally brings greater contentment, according to studies that chart the trajectory of happiness over a life span. After even the most joyous childhood, happiness typically declines in the teens through the early 20s, but, believe it or not, increases as we age. “Young people tend to pay more attention to the bad,” explains neuropsychologist Stacey Wood, PhD, of Scripps College. “As we get older, we learn to regulate and overcome this reaction.”

In fact, some experts say, happiness seems to rise even into old age. “Older adults don’t react as intensely to life events, and they report fewer negative emotions and more positive ones,” says Wood.

Not everyone agrees. Nora Ephron, author of I Feel Bad
About My Neck, says that, yes, after a certain age you tend to factor the realization that life is short into your decisions. “And you try to eliminate people and things (like bad meals) that don’t make you happy,” she says. “But of course, all this is overlaid by a certain sadness because this is the time when people start to get sick, and that absolutely cuts into the happiness quotient.”

Dare to Laugh Out Loud

Regardless of your age or temperament, you can feel happier right this minute, claims psychologist Will Fleeson, PhD, of Wake Forest University, who says he has found a surefire strategy to boost the spirit: Do something, however small, that is energetic, adventurous, assertive or bold. When volunteers recorded their feelings throughout the day, all felt happier when active and engaged, regardless of whether they were naturally introverted or extroverted.

“The biggest surprise in this research was that you can change your behavior and make yourself feel happier readily and easily,” says Fleeson, who found that almost any active behavior — even singing or dancing to the radio — has a positive effect on mood. “Laughing out loud is exactly the kind of adventurous, bold action that makes you feel happier.”

Simply putting on a happy face, as the classic song lyric advises, can make a difference. In experiments at Clark University, psychologist James Laird, PhD, hooked volunteers up to sham electrodes and instructed them to contract and relax specific facial muscles, so they were, in effect, smiling for no reason at all. With the corners of their mouths pulled up, most of the volunteers rated cartoons funnier than did those instructed to pull their eyebrows together as if frowning.

In other studies, smiling individuals recalled happier memories than those with furled brows or neutral expressions. Whenever we smile, nerves and muscles may transmit messages that turn on happiness centers in the brain, Laird speculates. “The bottom line is that a smile doesn’t cost anything and may do you good.” So why not grin?

Still, not everyone is sold on the power of positive thinking. According to Bowdoin College psychologist Barbara Held, PhD, for those with a glass-half-empty view of the world, all this happy talk can be downright depressing. In her book Stop Smiling, Start Kvetching, Held wages war against the “tyranny of the positive attitude,” the put-on-a-happy-face mind-set, which she believes holds too much sway in American culture. Not everyone can strike a pose of sunny optimism in the face of life’s mishaps, Held says, and not everyone should. “If you try to force people to cope in ways that don’t fit their nature, it can do harm.”

So if you’re going through a rough patch, don’t feel bad about feeling bad. “When someone’s in pain over the loss of a job, the end of a relationship or the death of a loved one, telling them to be more optimistic and look on the bright side just adds insult to injury,” Held says. The person now feels bad for not coping more effectively, on top of everything else. Instead, having the freedom to complain to a friend, what Held calls creative kvetching, can be cathartic. Her message: The path to contentment depends on finding the coping strategy that suits you best, even if that means expressing anger or sadness along the way.

Smile Power
Whatever their disposition, Americans have plenty of reasons to smile, says Will Wilkinson, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, who recently reviewed social, economic and political perspectives on our national happiness. “We have more wealth, health and comforts than 99.9 percent of the people who have ever lived on the planet, and we feel as good as anyone ever has,” he says.

Gretchen Rubin says her personal quest for happiness has infused her life with meaning: “I realized that by working hard to keep a lighter tone, by taking time to be silly, to laugh more, to sing every morning, I managed to bring about deeper changes in myself — more loving and considerate feelings and actions. That’s why it’s a duty to be happy. When I put in the effort to take the steps that will make me happier, I’m far better able to make other people happier too.”

10 Ways to Turn That Frown Upside Down

1. Be less virtual, more 3-D. “If there’s one thing that separates happy people from ridiculously happy people, it’s the quality of their social relationships,” says psychologist Todd Kashdan of George Mason University. If you sit at a computer all day, get up and indulge in some human contact instead. Even time with strangers ramps up your sense of well-being, says Kashdan. “You laugh much harder when you’re with other people in a theater than when you watch a movie at home.”

2. 4, 6, 8 … who do we appreciate? Making a list of things you’re grateful for may seem silly, but it’s been proven to work. In fact, counting your blessings may be the single most helpful thing you can do for your happiness quotient, say experts.

3. Rack ‘em up. Think of every positive experience during the day as a bead on a string, and see how they add up. This simple exercise makes you focus on even the smallest positive moments, like a fellow driver waving you to go first at a four-way stop, or an e-mail from a friend in a spam-filled inbox.

4. Think memorable, not material. If you have to choose between, say, a new car and a family vacation, pack your bags. Even the sexiest sports car becomes routine over time. But the memory of a good time with friends and loved ones will last forever.

5. Go to the funny side. “Humor is like salt on meat,” observes psychologist Martin Seligman, PhD. “It amplifies everything.” Watch reruns of classic shows that never fail to make you laugh. Try to smile at the absurdities of life. And when you read the jokes in this issue, laugh out loud.

6. Escape to your stress-free zone. Think of a place where you always feel calm and happy. Then, when you’re tense and miserable, call it up mentally, with as much detail as possible. Smell the suntan lotion. Feel the sun. Hear the sea. Play this video in your mind when your spirits slump.

7. See the glass as half full. Whenever possible, try to look at the bright side. You might be feeling like your life right now is one giant downhill slope. But if you stop and assess it honestly, you’ll see you actually have it pretty good. And if things truly are against you, see No. 8.

8. Find your inner artist. Think back to when you had time for creative expression. Were you in a rock band? Did you write poetry? Did you love tinkering with cars? Remember feeling so engaged that you lost track of time? Why not pick up that Fender (or fender) again? Joyful expression can bring happiness.

9. Do good. Acts of kindness, however small, deliver as much pleasure to the giver as to the getter. For example, a real paper-and-pen letter, telling someone who’s helped you how much it meant to you, is a surefire cheer-upper. So is giving time, money or both to a good cause.

10. Seize the moment. Rather than waiting to celebrate a big event, why not do it today? Bake a cake just because. Take someone out to lunch. Buy pink nail polish.Have sex in the afternoon. Raise a toast to a good day. Go ahead, be happier.

From Reader’s Digest, February 2008 – Article Link

If Socrates was right, isn’t it reasonable to assume that a decent nation will, at minimum, create the conditions in which its citizens can best pursue happiness? In the Declaration of Independence, the Founders didn’t treat happiness as some fuzzy concept; they believed that people wanted happiness and had the right to pursue it. Along with life and liberty, happiness was the connection between the Creator and our nation’s destiny, and the ability of its citizens to pursue and achieve happiness was a measure of the effectiveness and morality of the state.
But today’s leaders and policymakers seem to have forgotten this. To hear politicians talk about gross domestic product, health-care reform, and Social Security, you’d think that this nation’s Founding Fathers held as self-evident that we are endowed by our Creator with the ability to purchase new, high-quality consumer durables each and every year, or to enjoy healthy economic growth with low inflation and full employment. The Founders didn’t talk about these matters, not because they’re unimportant, but because they believed happiness went deeper.

As a professor of business and government policy, I’ve long been interested in the pursuit of happiness as a national concept. According to hundreds of reliable surveys of thousands of people across the land, happy people increase our prosperity and strengthen our communities. They make better citizens — and better citizens are vital to making our nation healthy and strong. Happiness, in other words, is important for America. So when I chanced upon data a couple of years ago saying that certain Americans were living in a manner that facilitated happiness — while others were not — I jumped on it.

I wanted to be able to articulate which personal lifestyles and public policies would make us the happiest nation possible. I also wanted to know which of my own values, learned during my childhood in Seattle and practiced during my career as a university professor, were the most conducive to happiness. I had always thought that marching to the beat of my own drummer and making up my own values as I went along were the right things to do, and that traditional values, to put it bluntly, were for suckers.

Turns out that I was in for some surprises.

First, just what is happiness? Most researchers agree that it involves an assessment of the good and bad in our lives. It’s the emotional balance sheet we keep that allows us to say honestly whether we’re living a happy life, in spite of bad things now and then.

You might suspect that Americans are getting happier all the time. After all, many (though clearly not all) are getting richer, and this should make them better able and equipped to follow their dreams. On the other hand, there’s a lot of talk about the good old days, when kids could play outside without any worry about being kidnapped. And there’s a great deal of stress in this country right now, due to financial concerns, negative workplace environments, and chronic health problems, among other pressing issues.

But average happiness levels in America have stayed largely constant for many years. In 1972, 30 percent of the population said they were very happy with their lives, according to the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey. In 1982, 31 percent said so, and in 2006, 31 percent said so as well. The percentage saying they were not too happy was similarly constant, generally hovering around 13 percent.

The factors that add up to a happy life for most people are not what we typically hear about. Things like winning the lottery, getting liposuction, and earning a master’s degree don’t make people happy over the long haul. Rather, the key to happiness, and the difference between happy and unhappy Americans, is a life that reflects values and practices like faith, hard work, marriage, charity, and freedom.

Happiness Predictor 1: Faith

Roughly 85 percent of Americans identify with a religion, and about a third of Americans attend a house of worship every week or more. These statistics have changed relatively little over the decades. By international standards, America’s level of religious practice is exceptionally high. In Holland, for example, just 9 percent of the population attends church on a regular basis; in France, it’s 7 percent; in Latvia, 3 percent.

In general, religious Americans (those who attend a place of worship almost every week or more) are happier than those who rarely or never attend. In 2004 the General Social Survey found that 43 percent of religious folks said they were very happy with their lives, compared with 23 percent of secularists. Religious people were a third more likely than secularists to say they’re optimistic about the future. And secularists were nearly twice as likely as religious people to say “I’m inclined to feel I’m a failure.”

The connection between faith and happiness holds regardless of one’s religion. All nonpartisan surveys on the subject have found that Christians (Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and others) and Jews, as well as members of many other religious traditions, are far more likely than secularists to say they’re happy. It also doesn’t matter if we measure religious practice in ways other than attendance at worship services. In 2004, 36 percent of people who prayed every day said they were very happy, versus 21 percent of people who never prayed.

Of course, not every religious person is happy; neither is every secularist unhappy. Nonetheless, it’s clear that faith is a common value among happy Americans.

Happiness Predictor 2: Work

If you hit the lottery today, would you quit your job? If you’re like most Americans, you probably wouldn’t. When more than 1,000 people across the country were asked in 2002, “If you were to get enough money to live comfortably for the rest of your life, would you stop working?” fewer than a third of the respondents answered yes.

Contrary to widely held opinion, most Americans like or even love their work. In 2002 an amazing 89 percent of workers said they were very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their jobs. This isn’t true just for those with high-paying, highly skilled jobs but for all workers across the board. And the percentage is almost exactly the same among those with and without college degrees and among those working for private companies, nonprofit organizations, and the government.

For most Americans, job satisfaction is nearly equivalent to life satisfaction. Among those people who say they are very happy in their lives, 95 percent are also satisfied with their jobs. Furthermore, job satisfaction would seem to be causing overall happiness, not the other way around.

The bottom line here: If we want to be happy, we need to work. And that’s advice worth sharing with our kids as well.

Happiness Predictor 3: Marriage & Family

Matrimony has taken a lot of hits since the 1960s. It’s been said to hold many people, especially women, back from their full potential to be happy. Don’t believe it.

In 2004, 42 percent of married Americans said they were very happy. Just 23 percent of never-married people said this. The happiness numbers were even lower for other groups: Only 20 percent of those who were widowed, 17 percent of those who were divorced, and 11 percent of those who were separated but not divorced said they were happy. Overall, married people were six times more likely to say that they were very happy than to report that they were not too happy. And generally speaking, married women say they’re happy more often than married men.

Marriage isn’t just associated with happiness — it brings happiness, at least for a lot of us. One 2003 study that followed 24,000 people for more than a decade documented a significant increase in happiness after people married. For some, the happiness increase wore off in a few years, and they ended up back at their premarriage happiness levels. But for others, it lasted as long as a lifetime.

What about having kids? While children, on their own, don’t appear to raise the happiness level (they actually tend to slightly lower the happiness of a marriage), studies suggest that children are almost always part of an overall lifestyle of happiness, which is likely to include such things as marriage and religion. Consider this: While 50 percent of married people of faith who have children consider themselves to be very happy, only 17 percent of nonreligious, unmarried people without kids feel the same way.

We’ve all heard that money doesn’t buy happiness, and that’s certainly true. But there is one way to get it: Give money away.

The evidence is clear that gifts to charitable organizations and other worthy causes bring substantial life satisfaction to the givers. If you want $50 in authentic happiness today, just donate it to a favorite charity.

People who give money to charity are 43 percent more likely than nongivers to say they’re very happy. Volunteers are 42 percent more likely to be very happy than nonvolunteers. It doesn’t matter whether the gifts of money go to churches or symphony orchestras; religious giving and secular giving leave people equally happy, and far happier than people who don’t give. Even donating blood, an especially personal kind of giving, improves our attitude.

In essence, the more people give, the happier they get.

Happiness Predictor 5: Freedom

The Founders listed liberty right up there with the pursuit of happiness as an objective that merited a struggle for our national independence. In fact, freedom and happiness are intimately related: People who consider themselves free are a lot happier than those who don’t. In 2000 the General Social Survey revealed that people who personally feel “completely free” or “very free” were twice as likely as those who don’t to say they’re very happy about their lives.

Not all types of freedom are the same in terms of happiness, however. Researchers have shown that economic freedom brings happiness, as does political and religious freedom. On the other hand, moral freedom — a lack of constraints on behavior — does not. People who feel they have unlimited moral choices in their lives when it comes to matters of sex or drugs, for example, tend to be unhappier than those who do not feel they have so many choices in life.

Americans appear to understand this quite well. When pollsters asked voters in the 2004 Presidential election what the most important issue facing America was, the issue voters chose above all others was “moral values.” This beat out the economy, terrorism, the Iraq war, education, and health care as people’s primary concern. Pundits and politicians would certainly like us to think otherwise, and critics scoffed at the conclusion, interpreting it as evidence that ordinary Americans were out of touch. But moral values are critical to Americans. This suggests that, as a people, we do best by protecting our political and economic freedoms and guarding against a culture that sanctions licentiousness.

Lessons for America

The data tell us that what matters most for happiness is not having a lot of things but having healthy values. Without these values, our jobs and our economy will bring us soulless toil and joyless riches. Our education will teach us nothing. There will be no reason to fight — or to make peace, for that matter — to protect our way of life. Our health-care system will keep us healthier, but what’s the point of good health without a happy life to enjoy?

The facts can help remind us of what we should be paying attention to, as individuals and as families, if we want to be happy. There’s also an important message here for public policy and politics. We must hold our leaders accountable for the facts on happiness and refuse to take it lightly when politicians abridge the values of faith, work, family, charity, and freedom.

Candidates running for office should be grilled about happiness in debates and by the press, and their answers should determine our votes.

Our happiness is simply too important to us — and to America — to do anything less.

The American Way

Independence is happiness.
Susan B. Anthony

All you need for happiness is a good gun, a good horse, and a good wife.
Daniel Boone

That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.
Willa Cather

There is joy in work. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something.
Henry Ford

Being passionate about something is the key to success. But using that passion to help others is the key to happiness.
Arnold Schwarzenegger

Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness you are able to give.
Eleanor Roosevelt

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.
George Washington

Happiness is a by-product of a well-lived life, and it is achieved through the pursuit of endeavors that are meaningful and sometimes painful. Mark O’Connell in “The Marriage Benefit”

From Reader’s Digest, July 2008 – Article Link

Researchers for the study, published in the Public Library of Science, took blood samples from a group of 19 people who habitually meditated or prayed for years, and 19 others who never meditated.

The researchers ran genomic analyses of the blood and found that the meditating group suppressed more than twice the number of stress-related genes — about 1,000 of them — than the nonmeditating group.

The more these stress-related genes are expressed, the more the body will have a stress response like high blood pressure or inflammation. Over long periods of time, these stress responses can worsen high blood pressure, pain syndromes and other conditions.

The nonmeditating group then spent 10 minutes a day for eight weeks training in relaxation techniques that involved repeating a prayer, thought, sound, phrase or movement.

“What this does is to break the train of everyday thought — you no longer have stressful thoughts and because of that the body is able to return to a healthy state,” said Dr. Herbert Benson, director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute Mind/Body Medicine and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

By the end of the training, the novice meditating group was also suppressing stress-related genes, although at lower levels than those of the long-term meditating people.

“In the old days, we thought the mind didn’t affect the body,” Benson said. “In truth, it’s breaking down the very old rule.”

Indeed, fellow mind-body researchers are finding more evidence that meditation and spiritual practices can influence the body in elemental ways.

Dr. Dean Ornish, professor of medicine and founder of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute at the University of California at San Francisco, recently found a relationship between meditation and genes in prostate cancer.

“This is an important pilot study showing that meditation alone may favorably alter gene expression in whole blood,” Ornish said. “These findings provide additional evidence to our recent study in PNAS [the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] showing that meditation — when combined with better nutrition and moderate exercise — also favorably altered gene expression in prostate tissue.”

But researchers warn that only preliminary steps have been taken toward establishing a connection between genes and meditation.

“It’s on the limits of sensitivity of where we can go on genomics and proteomics,” said Towia Libermann, co-author of the study and director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Genomics Center in Boston. “We can’t go into the brain itself, so a lot of what we do is going on in the blood.”

That difficult step from brain to blood can make research to link meditation and genetics difficult.

“Things happen, and genes get turned on or turned off — the genes make RNA, then the RNA makes proteins,” said Dr. Charles Raison, clinical director of the Mind Body Program in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University in Atlanta.

Raison said it is those final proteins in the process that have a significant effect on the body, and sometimes RNA doesn’t end up making those proteins. Since genomic analysis measures only the RNA in the blood, it can’t guarantee that RNA had a specific effect on the body.

“Not everything gets down to the business end of the gun,” said Raison, who would also have liked to see more definition of what meditation means in the study as opposed to including any forms of repetitive prayer or yoga.

“Before you can say meditation does X, you’ve got to have a sense of what you mean by meditation,” Raison said. “There’s data to suggest that different meditative practices have different physical effects.”

Yet Raison found the stress-related study intriguing.

“The study is consistent with other lines of emerging research, including ours,” said Raison, who noted that lonely people have similar stress-related gene expression as the nonmeditating group in the study.

Another study by Dr. Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin found that people who were taught to meditate after a vaccination developed more antibodies to the virus than people who did not meditate afterward, Raison said.

According to Raison, it all falls in line with a modern-day misfiring of “danger pathways” that ramp up the body for fight or flight but also turn down the immune system and increase inflammation. If the meditation study proves correct, it could help stem these changes, along with exercise and diet.

“The gene changes have a lot to do with things that cause wear and tear on the body and the brain,” said Raison. “Diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia, many diseases in the modern world are linked to this sort of wear and tear.”

The researchers in the stress study would like to next focus on these types of individual diseases.

“If you’re about to be torn apart by a tiger, these stress responses are adaptive,” Raison said. “But if my boss is yelling at me every morning, these ancient responses are activated, but they are not useful.”