Well-being

Flow, "in the zone", "peak experiences" etc.

The flip side of the steroid scandal in baseball is last week's announcement of the first cloned dog. Ballplayers are punished for using pharmaceutical technologies to improve their physical abilities, while scientists are rewarded for pushing toward a similar goal — in the words of artificial intelligence techno-visionary Ray Kurzweil, "reverse engineering our biology and then reprogramming it."

Biological engineering is not just about curing disease anymore. The incentives and profits are moving toward drugs, gene therapies and other technologies to enhance human performance — memory, creativity, concentration, strength, endurance, longevity. Asking athletes not to partake of these advances is not just hypocritical, it's likely to be increasingly futile.

A new class of drug may increase alertness without any of the jitteriness of over-stimulation, suggest the results of a small clinical trial released this week.

A compound dubbed CX717, a member of the new class called ampakines, significantly improved performance on tests of memory, attention, alertness, reaction time and problem solving in healthy men deprived of sleep.

The study was carried out by Julia Boyle at the Sleep Research Centre at the University of Surrey, UK, and her colleagues on behalf of Cortex Pharmaceuticals Inc., based in Irvine, California, US.

"Pleasure, love and grace are not man's to control. They come from identifying with life, and rejoicing in its splendor, vitality, and beauty. Although pleasure, love and grace are ephemeral, trust them and follow them, for they contain the meaning of life." – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A team of psychologists and economists is reporting today what many Americans know but do not always admit, especially to social scientists: that watching television by oneself is a very enjoyable way to pass the time, and that taking care of children - bless their little hearts - is often about as much fun as housework.

Those findings, published in the journal Science, run contrary to previous research about what makes people happy and why.

The study also suggests that the fundamental realities of marriage and job security have far less to do with daily moods than factors like deadlines on the job and quality of sleep.

There are substantial differences between nations in reported subjective well-being (SWB). Although surveys of subjective well-being face methodological challenges, the existing data suggest that the measures have a degree of validity and that the between-nation differences are substantive. People in wealthy nations tend to report greater SWB than people in poor nations. The causal factors relating wealth to well-being, however, are not yet understood. The wealth of nations strongly correlates with human rights, equality between people, the fulfillment of basic biological needs, and individualism. Because of the high intercorrelations between these predictor variables and wealth, their separate effects on SWB have not yet been isolated. Another variable that correlates with higher SWB in nations is political stability and a related variable, interpersonal trust.

Individualism is a cultural variable that correlates across nations with both higher reported SWB and also with higher suicide rates. Possible reasons that individualism leads to these divergent outcomes are discussed. Individualists believe that happiness is more important than do collectivists, who emphasize other values such as "harmony" and "respect." Furthermore, reports of SWB are highest in those nations where it is thought to be important. Interestingly, when making life satisfaction judgments, individualists are more likely to weight their moods and emotions, and are less likely than collectivists to consult norms about how appropriate it is to be satisfied. Furthermore, people in Latin cultures prize pleasant affect and denigrate unpleasant affect, whereas people in Confucian cultures in the Pacific Rim appear to place less emphasis on pleasant affect and are more accepting of unpleasant emotions.

The major approaches to the psychological understanding of the differences in SWB between societies are the innate needs approach, the theory of goal striving, models of emotion socialization, and genetic explanations. Policy implications of the national differences in SWB are discussed briefly.

On New Year's Day, depressed by yet another article on Britain's 'happiness crisis', I took a sheet of paper, ruled it in two, and in the left-hand column began listing all the things that were getting me down. This is what I wrote: 'My grey hairs... my impending tax bill... my failure to write a bestseller... the commute to King's Cross on the Hammersmith and City Line.' (The list was actually much longer than this, but you get the gist.) Then I turned to the right-hand column and began listing all the things that were a source of happiness in my life: 'My good health... my wife and children... my friends... playing tennis (when I win).'

To my surprise, this exercise immediately lifted my spirits, and before I knew it the items in the right-hand column outnumbered those in the left. Then I got to thinking some more. Were there other approaches I could adopt, other attitudes or ways of thinking about my life that would also be likely to increase my total sum of happiness? In search of an answer, I immersed myself in the works of Plato, Aristotle and other great philosophers. I also began reading as many self-help books as I could lay my hands on: books like the Dalai Lama's The Art of Happiness and Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking - of which the cover of the UK paperback edition boasts 'over 15m copies sold'. But while these experts had many useful insights (the Dalai Lama suggested I cultivate a spirit of compassion, while Peale advised that happiness was a matter of being more optimistic), none of them spoke directly to my own experience.

Then I heard about Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. In his book, Seligman describes how every New Year he takes a sheet of paper, just as I did, and draws up an inventory of his life. The difference is that instead of listing the things that are making him happy or unhappy, he writes down his key life 'domains' (love, profession, friends, play) and assigns them a rating on a scale of one to 10. Having performed this exercise every year for the past decade, Seligman says he can now see at a glance whether his happiness 'trajectory' is on the up or going down, and where there is room for improvement. 'I recommend this procedure to you,' he writes. 'It pins you down, leaves little room for self- deception, and tells you when to act.'

As a guru of the new positive psychology movement - dedicated to the optimisation of 'positive emotions' - Seligman argues that there are no short cuts to happiness. Enhancing joy, rapture and contentment depends on our cultivating optimistic personality traits and Aristotelian virtues such as wisdom, justice, love and humanity. 'Positive emotion alienated from the exercise of character leads to emptiness, to inauthenticity, to depression and, as we age, to the gnawing realisation that we are fidgeting until we die,' he warns.

"The third form of happiness, which is meaning, is again knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There's no shortcut to that. That's what life is about. There will likely be a pharmacology of pleasure, and there may be a pharmacology of positive emotion generally, but it's unlikely there'll be an interesting pharmacology of flow. And it's impossible that there'll be a pharmacology of meaning."
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"The good life consists of the roots that lead to flow. It consists of first knowing what your signature strengths are and then recrafting your life to use them more — recrafting your work, your romance, your friendships, your leisure, and your parenting to deploy the things you're best at. What you get out of that is not the propensity to giggle a lot; what you get is flow, and the more you deploy your highest strengths the more flow you get in life."

Fredric Schiffer has invented glasses that let him look into some people's minds. Through using them, he has shown that some patients with depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome see the world differently, depending on whether they look at it through the outer half of their left or right eye. The Harvard Medical School psychiatrist has helped many such patients with the aid of goggles that block either the right or left visual field.

'I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words:'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills, 'accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.'
- Einstein, 'My Credo'