The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want

The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want | Sonja Lyubomirsky | A unique marriage of self-help and science

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The How of Happine...

	The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want Sonja Lyubomirsky Penguin Press HC, The, 2007 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 50 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Bible of Happiness

I must agree with the previous reviewer who said that reading The How of Happiness will not make you happier. The How of Happiness is an emotional how-to manual. Reading it will no more make you lastingly happier than merely reading a car-repair manual will tune your engine and change your timing belt. You have to do much more than read. You have to take action.

Fortunately, the book helps you identify for yourself the actions to take. Because it is grounded in evidence gathered from thousands of studies and systematically analyzed by researchers like Ms. Lyubomirsky, it can be trusted by even a diehard empiricist like me. Everyone throughout history has sought to be happy, many of them in misguided ways. But now science, in just the same way as it has uncovered the causes of good and bad physical health, has revealed many of the root sources of happiness, and, still more encouragingly, has revealed that they are greatly in your control.

This book will help you plot your course and steer you clear of many of the common pitfalls on the road to happiness. In my case, though I've read many of the ideas in this book before, I would try to apply them all at once, get overwhelmed, and end up back at square one. But The How of Happiness has helped me focus my initial efforts on the two or three happiness-enhancing activities that would work best for me.

Before I began applying these strategies, I was mildly depressed and every day seemed overburdened with nuisances. Where have they all gone? Since I began, on the book's recommendation, keeping a weekly gratitude journal, I find much more to appreciate in life, and have many fewer complaints.

I've also chosen to work on my optimism, using the book's "Best Possible Selves" exercise. I wrote of a future ten years from now in which I had the life I dream of. I was blissed out just forming a picture of this ideal future. But the book doesn't just leave the reader there, hoping for the possible. The next step for me in the exercise is to "remember" from the vantage point of that future how I got from here to there. It provides not only hope, but also a road map, so I can *act* optimistically too, and realize the best life I can. This simple exercise makes concrete the words of Thoreau: "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. There is where they should be. Now put foundations under them."

Inspired by The How of Happiness, I've also taken time to volunteer at a hospice service and begun sponsoring a child. Being happy, as Sonja Lyubomirsky shows in this book, both results from and results in greater generosity to others. Happiness isn't just a personal pursuit, but also a moral and spiritual one.

In the religious tradition in which I was raised (Mormonism), there is a teaching about happiness by the founder Joseph Smith: "Happiness is the object and design of our existence." Whatever else in this tradition may or may not be true, this teaching cannot be wide of the mark. Spreading happiness helps to fulfill the purpose and promise of human lives, and helps people transform themselves into kinder, more generous, more productive human beings.

This book is the Bible of happiness. And its work of empowering people to build happier lives is, even in my skeptical eyes, God's work.

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A unique marriage of self-help and science

In this book, psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky presents a simple, step-by-step process to creating a happier life. What is unique about Lyubomirsky's approach is that each and every recommendation she makes is supported by decades of research and scientific evidence; in short, the twelve happiness activities she presents have been thoroughly vetted in their ability to produce ongoing feelings of pleasure and contentment in one's life.

The basic premise of this book is that 50% of one's "set point" happiness is genetic, 10% is related to life circumstances, and the remaining 40% is changeable through our own activities. Lyubomirsky suggests that all of us can be happier if we simply engage in any one of the 12 happiness activities which she describes in detail in this book. However, she acknowledges that certain activities will be a better "fit" for certain individuals, and so she includes a "Person-Activity Fit Diagnostic" to determine which activities might work best for you. (Note: Those who find themselves to be depressed upon the initial assessment are encouraged to skip ahead to the book's postscript, "If You Are Depressed.")

Once you have identified your best fit happiness activities, Lyubomirsky recommends actively pursuing up to four of them. Some of these activities may well be things that you are already doing in your life, such as expressing gratitude, nurturing social relationships, practicing religion, and engaging in physical activity. Lyubomirsky goes on to explain that in order to provide sustainable happiness, these activities need to include several "hows," including eliciting positive emotion, providing optimal timing and variety, including an element of social support, involving motivation/effort/commitment, and finally, becoming a habit.

This book is similar in style to Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness in that it presents a wealth of scientific evidence in an extremely readable format. Although Lyubomirsky isn't quite the entertainer that Gilbert is, her writing is interesting and engaging. As a psychologist myself, I know that I will use the concepts presented here in my work with my clients, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book as a direct resource for my clients as well.

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A WOW of a book

I haven't even finished this and I am already happier. I consider myself to actually be pretty happy and I know enough to know that happiness is not in material things. Nonetheless, I am pretty cynical, not very forgiving and I don't have that many friends. A lot of other happiness books and articles I've read insist that if you just look on the bright side, have a big social circle, and learn to forgive other people you will be happier. According to this book that is all good advice but it is not the only way to achieve happiness. There is plenty of room for lots of different approaches to happy. This evidence based book explains them all and give you concrete and specifics steps to work on all of them. Very very worth reading!

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Proven techniques for developing and maintaining a positive outlook

Dr. Sonia's text is filled with descriptions of empirical studies that help lift the moods of everyday people. If you want to feel better, practice some of the techniques that she advocates. The book presents several methods for turning your attitude about people and events around to a balanced and optimistic point of view.

Happiness for Dummies

By titling this review, "Happiness for Dummies" I don't meant to insult readers or the author. I am thinking of that series of how-to books "_____ for Dummies". That is what this book reminds me of. It is an extremely tightly organized book. You can just see the outline format the author must have used peeking thourgh every few pages. Every idea has a number associated with it. There are twelve big ideas, two cross-references, X further activities, etc. It is also full of short quotes and brief references to scientific studies. Again, I could just see index cards with quotes on them and notes about this or that study being put to work by the author. In contrast, Jonathan Haidt's "The Happiness Hypothesis" with its various references to literary works, religious and philosophical thinking throughout the ages and more generally discursive style seems to me to be a more sophisticated work and may be better suited to some readers. Also, although I loved the 50/40/10 idea that is one of the book's principal arguments and the one that has probably attracted the most press, I wasn't as sold on the strength of the inference as I had hoped I would be.

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