Three Ways to be Happier

   

The joyfulness of a man prolongeth his days.  Ecclesiastes

There is an exciting and relatively new area of psychology called positive psychology.  Positive psychology aims at studying scientifically what makes us happy and how we can improve our general level of happiness, well-being, and health.  Historically psychology has mainly focussed on the negative e.g. mental illness.  In contrast, positive psychology aims to restore balance by focusing also on the positive.  However it is extremely important to note that the goal of positive psychology is not to ignore the negative or to focus exclusively on the positive but to see that objective reality contains both the negative and the positive. 

I hope to convince you of the benefits of this wonderful new science of positive psychology by describing three strategies for increasing your well being and happiness.  In future posts I will describe more of the many techniques provided by positive psychology. 

Previously I wrote about the three A’s and how useful they were to solve problems. Here I use them to emphasize the three separate but interactive aspects of human nature which we can modify to increase our happiness.  These areas are:

1. awareness (cognitions, thoughts,  perceptions, attitudes)
2. acceptance (i.e. emotional acceptance, affect, emotions)
3. action (behaviour, doing specific things).