I would consider myself happy., I fully follow the bolded red lines. Going luging was way outside my comfort zone. Trying to dance at the Winnipeg folk Festival is out there also but I do it anyway. When in Spain I tried quite a few local delicacies, maybe one was worth trying again(Fan shaped mushrooms in red pesto sauce).
By Robert Biswas-Diener, Todd B. Kashdan, published on July 2, 2013 - last reviewed on April 10, 2017
One of life's sharpest paradoxes is that the key to satisfaction is
doing things that feel risky, uncomfortable, and occasionally bad.
For psychologists who frequently fly cross-country, how we describe our
career
to seatmates—mentioning for example, that we are
psychologists—determines whether we get five hours of airborne intrigue
or inside access to a decaying
marriage
or more detail than you can imagine about an inability to resist
maple-glazed Krispy Kremes. Even wearing oversized headphones often
fails to dissuade the passenger hell-bent on telling her story of
childhood
abandonment (which is why it is handy for research psychologists to
simply say we study " judgments"). For those of us who risk the truth
and admit that we study
happiness, there's one practically guaranteed response:
What can I do to be happy?
The secret of happiness is a concern of growing importance in the
modern era, as increased financial security has given many the time to
focus on self-growth. No longer hunter-gatherers concerned with where to
find the next kill, we worry instead about how to live our best lives.
Happiness books have become a cottage industry; personal-development
trainings are a bigger business than ever.
The pursuit of happiness is not uniquely American either—in a study
of more than 10,000 participants from 48 countries, psychologists Ed
Diener of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Shigehiro
Oishi of the University of Virginia discovered that people from every
corner of the globe rated happiness as being more important than other
highly desirable personal outcomes, such as having meaning in life,
becoming rich, and getting into heaven.
The fever for happiness is spurred on, in part, by a growing body of
research suggesting that happiness does not just feel good but is good
for you—it's been linked to all sorts of benefits, from higher earnings
and better immune-system functioning to boosts in
creativity.
Most people accept that true happiness is more than a jumble of
intensely positive feelings—it's probably better described as a sense of
"peace" or "contentedness." Regardless of how it's defined, happiness
is partly emotional—and therefore tethered to the truth that each
individual's feelings have a natural set point, like a thermostat, which
genetic baggage and
personality
play a role in establishing. Yes, positive events give you a boost, but
before long you swing back toward your natural set point.
True happiness lasts longer than a burst of
dopamine, however, so it's important to think of it as something more than just emotion. Your sense of happiness also includes
cognitive reflections, such as when you give a mental thumbs-up or thumbs-down to your best friend's sense of
humor,
the shape of your nose, or the quality of your marriage. Only a bit of
this sense has to do with how you feel; the rest is the product of
mental arithmetic, when you compute your expectations, your ideals, your
acceptance of what you can't change—and countless other factors. That
is, happiness is a state of mind, and as such, can be intentional and
strategic.
Regardless of your emotional set point, your everyday habits and choices—from the way you operate in a
friendship
to how you reflect on your life decisions—can push the needle on your
well-being. Recent scholarship documenting the unique habits of those
who are happiest in life even provides something of an instruction
manual for emulating them. It turns out that activities that lead us to
feel uncertainty, discomfort, and even a dash of
guilt are
associated with some of the most memorable and enjoyable experiences of
people's lives. Happy people, it seems, engage in a wide range of
counterintuitive habits that seem, well, downright
unhappy.
It's a Friday night and you're planning on meeting friends for
dinner. If you want to ensure that you'll go home full, you grab pizza
or burgers. If you instead pick a cuisine you've never tried before
(Ethiopian—sure, why not?) you run the risk that you won't like your
injera and wat that much—but you might also uncover a surprising
delight.
Truly happy people seem to have an intuitive grasp of the fact that
sustained happiness is not just about doing things that you like. It
also requires growth and
adventuring beyond the boundaries of your
comfort zone. Happy people, are, simply put, curious. In a 2007 study,
Todd Kashdan and Colorado State psychologist Michael Steger found that
when participants monitored their own daily activities, as well as how
they felt, over the course of 21 days, those who frequently felt curious
on a given day also experienced the most satisfaction with their
life—and engaged in the highest number of happiness-inducing activities,
such as expressing
gratitude to a colleague or volunteering to help others.
Yet curiosity—that pulsing, eager state of not knowing—is
fundamentally an anxious state. When, for instance, psychologist Paul
Silvia showed research participants a variety of paintings, calming
images by Claude Monet and Claude Lorrain evoked happy feelings, whereas
the mysterious, unsettling works by Egon Schiele and Francisco Goya
evoked curiosity.
Curiosity, it seems, is largely about exploration—often at the price
of momentary happiness. Curious people generally accept the notion that
while being uncomfortable and vulnerable is not an easy path, it is the
most direct route to becoming stronger and wiser. In fact, a closer look
at the study by Kashdan and Steger suggests that curious people invest
in activities that cause them discomfort as a springboard to higher
psychological peaks.
Of course, there are plenty of instances in life where the best way
to increase your satisfaction is to simply do what you know feels good,
whether it's putting your favorite song on the jukebox or making plans
to see your best friend. But from time to time, it's worth seeking out
an experience that is novel, complicated, uncertain, or even
upsetting—whether that means finally taking the leap and doing karaoke
for the first time or hosting a screening of your college friend's
art-house film. The happiest people opt for both so that they can
benefit, at various times, from each.
