positivity

Even if you are presently satisfied with your life, and most people say they are, you probably would like to be more than just satisfied. One of the challenges of both staying happy and becoming happier, though, is the hedonic treadmill. Michael Cohn, Barbara Fredrickson, and colleagues found that loving kindness meditation can undo hedonic adaptation and that the effects accumulate and persist.

How does happiness “work?” Here are three quick stories from my own life that have given me a hint about how happiness might create good things in life.

Dear Student,
Don’t worry when people tell you it will be hard to find a job. What the doom-and-gloom folks don’t understand is that they have something as contagious as the H1N1 virus– anxiety. Like the flu, they are probably “carriers” without even realizing it. You can innoculate yourself.

Detecting Icebergs Recently, I was teaching “Detecting Icebergs”, one of the resilience skills described in The Resilience Factor.  The participants had practiced the skills themselves, and we were talking about…