Happiness and the Work it Requires

This blog is about time and beauty and skies and philosophy and time. I think talking about happiness fits into this somewhere, so I am looking at an article in Scientific American today - now that scientists are busy trying to help people figure out happiness, and at least be realistic about what it is.

Sorry if you don't like happy faces, but I really do.

Marina Krakovsky writes about Sonja Lyubomirsky and her work. She had to lay some groundwork before she could go into the lab. A while back, happiness was a fuzzy, unscientific topic, Lyubomirsky says.

Although no instrument yet exists for giving perfectly valid, reliable and precise readings of someone's happiness from session to session, Lyubomirsky has brought scientific rigor to the study of happiness.

From her firm belief that it is each person's self-reported happiness that matters, she developed a four-question Subjective Happiness Scale.

Lyubomirsky's working definition of happiness -"a joyful, contented life"- gets at both the feelings and judgments necessary for overall happiness.

Her aim is not merely to confirm the strategies' effectiveness but to gain insights into how happiness works. For example, conventional wisdom suggests keeping a daily gratitude journal. But one study revealed that those who had been assigned to do that ended up less happy than those who had to count their blessings only once a week. Lyubomirsky therefore confirmed her hunch that timing is important.

The biggest factor may be getting over the idea that happiness is fixed - and realizing that sustained effort can boost it. She says that a lot of people don't apply the notion of effort to their emotional lives but the effort it takes is enormous.