Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life
Paul Dolan
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: B00JJA5DTA
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
As a Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics, Dolan conducts original research into the measurement of happiness and its causes and consequences, including the effects of our behaviour. Here he creates a new outlook on the pursuit of happiness - it's not just how you feel, it's how you act. Happiness by Design shows that being happier requires us to actively re-design our immediate environment. Enough has been written on how to think happy. Happiness by Design is about how to behave happy and how to incorporate the most recent research findings into our everyday lives.
ten times as much of an impact on our happiness as the former.35 Things don’t get much better if we ask only those with experience of the specific health problems. People with problems walking who are asked to imagine having their walking restrictions alleviated will inevitably imagine actively paying lots of attention to walking freely, which they will eventually take for granted.36 So, in appraising the impact of health and other policy interventions, I think it would be much better to look
other words, overall happiness comes from all the sentiments you experience as a result of it. The takeaway from this is that the duration of an event might be less important than how the event ended if the ending plays a prominent part in your future recollections of the event. Some of the best nights out may have been short but ended very sweetly, and these may be the ones you recall most later on. So how the event ended might be more important than how long the event lasted if you draw more
are doubtless made less happy if your mental escape from your current experience is to somewhere worse than where you are now, such as if you start worrying about your blood test results in the middle of a meeting you cannot leave. But it seems that you might also be made less happy if your intrusive thoughts are positive; that is, even if you mentally escape to somewhere better, like your next holiday, in the middle of that meeting.52 But context matters. I have an electric toothbrush that whirs
_______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ Done it? I suspect that at least one item on that list has something to do with texts, tweets, e-mails, or the Internet. A wandering mouse We’ve all heard about attention deficit disorder but the modern world is making us all victims of “attention distraction disorder.” It is important to note here that I am making a deliberate and important distinction between the two. The former is
influence recovery from surgery. Science 1984; 224: 420–21. 12. Park SH, Mattson RH, Kim E. Pain tolerance effects of ornamental plants in a simulated hospital patient room. In: Relf D, ed. XXVI International Horticultural Congress: Expanding Roles for Horticulture in Improving Human Well-Being and Life Quality 639, 2002: 241–47; Katcher A, Segal H, Beck A. Comparison of contemplation and hypnosis for the reduction of anxiety and discomfort during dental surgery. American Journal of Clinical