Three Pathways

In my experience, people high in spirituality are imbued with a strong, contagious, positive glow that others can feel. They seem to navigate life calmly and serenely with the winds of spiritual awareness and faith billowing their sails. But is this how it really works? Todd Kashdan and John Nezlek have studied questions about spirituality. Does it vary from day to day, or is it more solid and trait-like? Does it predict well-being? If spirituality fluctuates within a person and within a day, what impact does that have on well-being?

Something unusual and significant is happening in Toronto, quietly and under the radar. Every other Sunday afternoon, people from all walks of life gather at my home for our regular Meaningful Living Meetup. On average, more than 30 people cram into my living room. Participants learn that the human capacity for meaning-seeking and meaning-making not only repairs what is broken, but also provides pathways to well-being and flourishing.

I am disappointed that I won’t be able to attend the International Meaning Conference coming up in Toronto at the end of July. They are putting together an all-star line up of researchers in positive psychology with an emphasis on “healing and flourishing through meaning.” They are also honoring 3 major contributors to our understanding of meaning.

This is the 1,000th article published on Positive Psychology News Daily.

Here we express our thanks to authors, researchers, twitterers, commenters, practitioners — all who have made PPND a vibrant exchange for more than 5 years. We celebrate this occasion with 2 drawings for books by PPND authors.

Planning your summer calendar? There are four conferences occurring in June and July that dovetail with Positive Psychology. From a focus on meaning in Toronto to workplace well-being in Chicago to fitness and wellness in San Diego.

Curtains up! Light the lights! July 20-21 and the Canadian Positive Psychology Conference will soon be upon us! The conference will feature highlights of current research in the field, but we will also be hearing from practitioners who have successfully applied positive psychology in their practices. We are anticipating a rich dialogue between research and practice.

With increasing demands in the workplace and a greater need for knowledge-based work, innovation, and creativity, organizations need to find ways to enable their employees to do and be their best. Positive psychology can show those in management roles how to use and develop human capital. It can also guide organizational policy and enable workers to make their best contributions. Positive psychology has been, and will continue to be, a boon to the workplace.

In various models of well-being, positive emotions seem to have less gravitas than other factors. One reason may be that they are often equated with hedonic pleasure. So it was with great curiosity that I stumbled across a philosophical approach to pleasure that suggests that there is more to the hedonic life than initially meets the eye.

On the night of February 4th, at Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks had lost 11 of the past 13 games, and was now trailing behind the visiting New Jersey Nets. Coach Mike D’Antoni knew the biggest weakness of his team was the point guard. His starting point guard was injured, and his backup couldn’t deliver. He turned to the third-string point guard, an Asian American player named Jeremy Lin.

Positive psychology movies are not only the lighthearted films that inspire and elevate us, but also the movies that teach us something about the human condition, help us face suffering, and shine a light on pain and tragedy. You’ll see a mixture of both types of films in my offering of the Positive Psychology Movie Awards for 2011. This is part 1. Come back tomorrow for the awards for character strengths—and the best picture award.

The holiday season and the New Year can be pretty stressful, but this time of year provides us with some ideal opportunities for savoring – noticing, appreciating, and enhancing the things which are already positive in our lives – and there is nothing easier to do. The rules of savoring are simple to follow, and you don’t need any special skills or equipment. In fact anyone, young or old, rich or poor, can learn how to savor and reap the benefits.

Sometimes I feel as if the entire field of positive psychology is embroiled in a massive, one-sided debate. I hear many psychologists arguing vehemently for the importance of not turning our back on the negative. But who’s on the other side?

A few months ago I wrote about the British government’s intention to measure national well-being. This project came about because of the obvious failing of GDP (gross domestic product) to capture all the nuances of social and economic progress (and lack of it). I promised to update you on this project’s progress, and at the end of July 2011, a series of reports was issued by the Office for National Statistics.

As I pondered the topic for this article, I intended to focus on the purely euphoric experience of surfing, and the myriad ways in which it fulfilled a Positive Psychology purpose for me: flow, positive affect, flourishing through physical activity, and more. Just as positive psychology seeks not to reject the notion that life has its dark spaces, but to place more emphasis on the light spaces, I would not be telling the full story if I didn’t divulge an intense craving for what I felt out there on the water, and the truth of how I was contemplating very seriously moving to Hawaii and living out my days in a bikini.

With a wellspring of research suggesting that children do not increase levels of happiness, why do some people choose to have kids? They choose based on more than a desire to maximize happiness. They choose based on meaning. Despite the decline in happiness, meaningfulness rises among couples choosing to have children.

New research by psychologist Iris Mauss and colleagues suggests that valuing happiness itself could be self-defeating and actually lead to disappointment. They conducted two studies, one a correlational study and another that manipulated how much people valued happiness.

Martin Seligman presents his new model for well-being under the codename PERMA, an acronym for the five pillars of well-being that he identified after decades of research. But what about physical health? Movement, exercise, fitness, mobility, touch, and so on are all physical aspects of life that are critical to well-being, and yet they seem to be left out of the PERMA model. Did Seligman allow his psychologist experience to narrow his field of vision to only the psychological domain?