Happiness and Meaning Flashcards
happiness
subjective wellbeing and experiential state that contains a globally positive affective tone.
- Affect balance: having more pleasant than unpleasant emotional stages, aggregate of feelings at different moments
- Life satisfaction: integrative, evaluative assessment of ones life as a whole
Meaning
assessment of whether one’s life has purpose and value
meaning vs happiness
🔹 Meaning – Integrates past, present, and future; involves giving, personal identity, and deep relationships. Can bring worry and stress but provides fulfillment.
🔹 Happiness – Present-oriented; focused on taking, pleasure, and ease. Linked to satisfying basic needs and enjoying life without struggle.
✨ Long-term fulfillment (meaning) vs. short-term pleasure (happiness).
The flow state (how to find more meaning)
When high skill and high challenge meet. Being in the “zone”.
Full feeling of master and challenge. The flow experience is where we want to work.
Don’t try too hard to be happy.
Evaluation can interrupt experience. When in a flow state, we don’t think about whether they are happy or not. Afterwards they know they enjoy it.
Seeking happiness can be self-defeating. The more people value it, the more likely they are not be disappointed.
how to be more happy
- Choosing a job that make the world better can be motivating.
- Live close to work
- Spend time with people you like
- Spend extra money on experiences, not things – including houses
- Exercise outside
- Buy time or outsource tasks you dislike
- Have a helthy relationship with money
- Don’t make counterfactual comparisons (silver medalists less satisfied than gold from who they compared themselves with)
Social comparison
when we compare ourselves to social media.
- Happiest countries have the highest suicide rates
- Spring and summer are the worst for lonely people
Don’t let your goals go wild
Those who satisfice are happier but less productive than people who maximize.
Goals help achieve difficult things, but also make us miserable
Self-comparison
- Being kind and understanding with ourselves when being in pain or failure tather than harshly or self-critical.
- Perceive one’s experiences as part of larger human experience rather than seeing themselves as isolating.
Cultivate gratitude
- Listing positive things that happened in day reduces stress and improve health.
- Counterfactuals work too. Imagining hood things has not happen or good person was not in your life create gratitude.
mindfullness
training to be in the present.
- Make people more aware of their emotions
- Label them
- Be less bothered by them
- It is easily acsessible by focusing on physical sensations or paying attention to thoughts or emotions as they arise, when for short time
Heuristic thought in mindfullness
“if I feel bad, can I use this negative feeling to perform better?”
“if not, mindfulness/gratitude may help”
