Good Life Tip: Pursue Happiness

Happiness is healthy. Research shows that happy people live better lives than unhappy people, enjoying better relationships and even longer lives.

Is life a series of tragedies, at best broken up by short periods of pleasure or the absence of pain? Or is it naturally an experience of happiness and pleasure, disrupted at times by unfortunate events?

Research shows that it is in your best interest to believe or tend to believe the latter, that life is naturally a positive experience.

When compared to un-happy people, happy people almost always are more successful at school and at work, have better relationships, and even live longer. Happy people are also more flexible and creative.

Freud, the psychologist who has been a significant influence on the practice of psychology, believed in the tragic nature of life and that anything positive or happy is a defense mechanism, at best a sublimation and at worst a delusion. The research of Positive Psychology is proving Freud wrong on this count.

The Good Life, a life of well-being and happiness, though punctuated with negative events, is attainable by each of us by practicing ways of thinking and behaving that are available and easily implemented.

Source: A Primer in Positive Psychology, Christopher Peterson.