If someone wants to read just one book to learn about the complexities of life: what makes it go well, what brings meaning to it, how to make sense of conflicting advice and ideologies, I would easily recommend this book. Jonathan Haidt attempts to to provide a survey of several thousand years worth of advice (from religious and secular texts across the world) while integrating it into the best scientific knowledge the world currently possesses; I think he succeeds.

Haidt divides the multitude of questions into 11 chapters and ties them together with a metaphor he sees as most useful for understanding human beings: a rider on top of an elephant. The rider is our ‘reason’ while the elephant is our intertwined set of emotions. Though a rider can steer the elephant, it takes effort and sometimes it’s impossible to alter the elephant’s behavior much. For instance, this analogy is a good fit when we think about our new year’s resolutions (a common inability to break habits). Furthermore, the analogy yields to good advice about altering one’s behavior (and Haidt spells out how to do it).

Much like many good books about happiness, Haidt emphasizes what makes for a happy life (as well as describes the scientific findings and historical texts that support these conclusions when he can). Noise, commutes during traffic, lack of control are not things humans can get used to – these factors consistently drive down one’s happiness. Relationships (friends and romantic) are consistently shown to be one of the most important factors in one’s happiness.   (more…)

Perhaps one of the best books on happiness. While the author does not attempt to provide an overview of everything social scientists now know about happiness (what causes it and what diminishes it), he provides a coherent story about why we are so bad at forecasting our future happiness. Gilbert describes the numerous biases we have when dealing with the world and how they affect our perception of it. He gives a good overview of how psychologists are able to study happiness despite the numerous shortcomings people have when remembering and introspecting.

Gilbert gives three reasons humans are consistently bad at predicting how happy they will be in the future.

1. We have a “blind spot” in our minds – so fluently our brains fills in the missing details when we think of things, we do not notice how much is missing. Because of this general phenomenon, we are prone to make certain kinds of errors: we imagine the future outcomes with unfounded certainty about how they will be.
2. We often think our imagined future will be like our current state, often to our detriment. For instance, people who are stuffed with food will wrongly expect to not appreciate a tasty treat the following day.
3. We rationalize outcomes: bad events are not as bad as we imagine, and often good events turn out less enjoyable. Severely bad events like becoming paraplegic turn out to not be as detrimental to happiness as people think. When imagining a life without control of your legs, you will concentrate on all the things you will not be able to do, forgetting that numerous of life’s pleasures will still be there. When choosing a vacation spot, you often imagine all the things that will go right, while forgetting the annoyances you will run into: mosquitoes, bad weather, moody people.

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Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived is a collection of 13 articles written specifically on the topic, published in 2003. This book is meant to be read by scholars or readers interested in more scholarly writing. Each chapter is written in a style of a journal article and is followed up with numerous references. The chapters deal with the relationship between flourishing and many aspects of life: relationships, work, leisure, volunteering, morality, creativity, genius, wisdom. Each chapter will introduce the reader to the terminology, frame the importance of the problem, review the extant literature, synthesize the material, and propose further direction for research.

Despite  its technical nature, the contents of this book are very accessible, and contain very useful suggestions or at least hints about achieving flourishing. A curious reader will have plenty of references to follow up on in any direction she chooses. A particularly useful chapter on relationships has a thorough discussion concerning factors that improve or worsen relationships and points out the limitations of current research.

rapt (adj.) – deeply engrossed or absorbed.

This book provides many reasons to foster rapt attention within one’s life. The author has done her homework: the book contains numerous references and tidbits from her discussions with some of the most well-respected researchers in the field of psychology. She puts the wealth of information together to argue that attention may be one of the most important aspects of life; indeed that may be all life is.

For example, people who were asked to attend to the pleasant sights as they ran for 20 minutes a day for a week had better moods than those asked to attend to the unpleasant. While the advice may be obvious to most, many people forget to heed to the lesson, so the author forcefully reminds the reader. From taking the time to appreciate the food one eats, forming a laser-focused attention on the work one does,  or changing the way one attends to pain, the experience can be made more or less pleasurable. Not surprising to those familiar with findings in psychology: pain can be lessened with meditation, the costs of multitasking are not worth the benefits, attention on the good rather than rumination can lift people out of depression.

In this book the author provides a multitude of practical  lessons: for those experiencing anxiety, chronic pain, marital trouble, unruly children, or just lack of life satisfaction. Most recommendations are research-based and when the advice is too opaque the author provides references for further reading.

There is too much to summarize and praise, so I’ll simply provide one of numerous gems one should expect to find when reading this book:

Research shows that contented spouses see each other through rose-colored glasses, holding an even more favorable view than their partners have of themselves. Sandra Murray, a psychologist at the State University at Buffalo, finds evidence of something even better: over time, each person actually becomes more like the mate’s benignly biased vision.

While this book is not a self-help book, it contains a unified framework for the concept of the self. In the process of arguing for his particular view, the author describes numerous experimental studies in psychology that are useful to be aware of. As he argues in one section, just like we are better off learning about the processes undergoing in our digestive system by reading the results of scientific studies involving many people rather than introspecting, we will often gain more insight into the functioning of our psychological makeup by learning about what most people are like.

An set of intriguing studies shows that strangers are as good and sometimes better at knowing about your motives, goals, and satisfaction with life events. There are studies that indicate that people would do well in avoiding introspection in some situations, while some ways of ‘looking within’ are very beneficial. It would be a severe disservice to the book to summarize its contents into a paragraph, so I will abstain.

With reference to happiness, the book has a very helpful chapter which describes several studies from which one can draw self-help lessons. One argument I have not seen in other books was that the highly beneficial mechanism we have to deal with negative events in our lives (by explaining them away with some narrative) cuts both ways: by explaining away the happy occurrences, we undermine our enjoyment of them later on. It seems that savoring good events in life may require refraining from having a story. An important lesson comes from a study where people were asked to write a narrative about some difficult event in life; though expectedly the people were more sad immediately after the exercise, there were long-lasting benefits. A hypothesis is that when a person provides a coherent story describing the events (e.g. death of a loved one), remembrance of the event no longer brings forth many scattered thoughts but instead a cohesive narrative; it is such a narrative that makes dealing with a loss easier. There are also descriptions of several pitfalls people can make when aiming for more happiness in life that can surely be of help to some readers.

People may think that a lot of introspection will bring forth better understanding of one’s desires, feelings, and goals and thus will give a better compass to follow towards achieving more-lasting happiness. This book (amongst others) emphasizes that there are many times when introspection is not a fruitful approach, indeed it may be hurtful. Being wise is knowing when to ‘study’ oneself more, and when to let go; this book can help.

Even if this book is not directly aimed at the topic of happiness, it has a lot of content one can draw valuable self-help lessons from; I highly recommend this book.

The author of this book has developed a method for helping people get over their (lifetime & severe) phobias in under an hour (compare to months or years for psychoanalysis). He claims to never have had a patient with a phobia he couldn’t help cure. While the author does not cite scientific evidence for the claims he makes, the demand for his services by people across the US is an indication his advice works at least for some. It is entirely likely the techniques he provides in this book will be of help to many of the book’s readers.

In short summary: he provides a framework for dealing with emotions ranging from stress, anxiety, phobia to love, appreciation, and happiness. He describes a unified way of decreasing the unwanted emotions while replacing them with emotions one desires more. The premise is simple to describe, but I suspect as with anything requires at least some practice and patience.

Very generally: you are to become more aware of your  ”modalities” (e.g. hearing, seeing, feeling of emotion) and of the origins of your feelings. Most importantly, one’s fear of heights isn’t “out there” (others can stand at the same height without such fear) but is “in the body”. “Listening” to where such fear originates (e.g. in the gut) and noticing (a rather Zen-like way of being a non-judgmental observer) how the feeling spreads, one can begin to control it (Bandler claims it will always feel like it’s spinning). By grasping the control of it, accelerating or slowing/reversing the rotation, one can begin to handle such fears. Another approach is to play with the photos/movies that pop into your mind upon some stimulus. For example, rather than remembering a picture/movie of a snake biting and killing someone every time one sees a snake, one could rehearse and thus replace the response with imagining circus music along with pictures of non-lethal snakes being friendly. In human relations: instead of remembering all the minor things your partner did wrong through the day, remembering the best moments you’ve shared together upon seeing their face will provide for a more pleasant interaction every time.

The book provides advice (that seems very reasonable and I suspect will work very well for many people) about many aspects of life: falling out of love (in an abusive relationship), falling deeper in love, overcoming fears of public speaking, and much more. One of the great features is that the toolbox the author provides is diverse in use yet is a unified approach for dealing with life’s bads and goods.

This is an excellent book that argues with overwhelming evidence that having more choices not only does not translate into a happier life, but in fact makes one’s life less pleasurable. It describes the phenomenon of analysis paralysis and how it makes people less willing to make decisions even when no decision will lead to worse outcomes (eg. people postpone signing up for retirement plans). In cases of small purchases, for example, people will be more regretful and thus less satisfied with the pair of jeans (perhaps the other jeans would have been better).

The author then describes what one can do to ease the burden of the already choice-rich world. In summary, being a “satisficer” rather than a “maximizer” is a better choice overall. Instead of running through all the possible options, considering all the relevant factors, in most life’s choices one should opt to go for the “good enough” choice and never look back. While there are many choices that do require deliberation and time, most of the faced choices are not worth the effort.

For those interested in a 20 minute summary, here is video of Barry Schwartz on TED.com

Though not a book about happiness, it is thoroughly beneficial at getting a certain point across. Besides listing four scientifically found factors that correlate with people’s perception of their luck, there is a meta-lesson to be learned: even things that seem clearly outside one’s control can be influenced with the right approach.

The four factors listed in the book are:

1. Lucky people notice more things (they look more broadly and thus will more likely, for instance, notice a dollar bill on the floor). This disposition extends in many directions (eg. conversations) for continued benefit.
2. Lucky people are more cognizant of their “gut feelings”. In situations where we have much experience we are able to guess correctly despite lack of rational argument (see Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”).
3. Lucky people persevere in their goals. A lady who kept winning many sweepstakes shared her reason: “I send out about 40 entires per day”.
4. Lucky people spring back from failure.

The book provides descriptions of studies which confirm the above four factors as related to one’s perception of “luckiness”. This book paints a convincing picture that one can change her luck by changing her approach to life.

If you don’t want to read the book but want more information, visit theluckfactor.com, a website summarizing the book.

This is one of the best books for those interested in using research-based  methods in becoming happier. The author is a well-respected figure in the field of positive psychology and writes about the findings from her lab at University of California. As with most good books on the subject she carefully provides a working definition of happiness and why it is important. The author offers 12 sections, each containing explicit exercises one can perform to become happier followed by the description of the research that supports the suggestions. Here is a brief summary, all of these have been shown to improve happiness; provided are just possible examples:

If you are interested in becoming happier – read this book: it gives concrete advice you can easily follow; as a bonus, it’s a very quick and easy read.