Three different happy lives: How many are you living?

Renowned author and psychologist Martin Seligman, a leading architect of the positive psychology movement, parses the “happy life” into three distinct elements, maintaining that “the full life” is when “you’ve got all three.”

In a stirring TED Talk, Seligman, author of more than 20 books, maintains that “psychology should be just as concerned with human strength as it is with weakness.” To that end, he encourages us to identify our five greatest strengths, and then to recraft our life “to use them as much as you possibly can. Re-crafting your work, your love, your play, your friendship, your parenting.” The three lives:

The Pleasant Life

The pleasant life “is having as many of the pleasures as you can, as much positive emotion as you can and learning the skills – savoring, mindfulness – that amplify them, that stretch them over time and space.” But there are drawbacks, says Seligman: 1. Positive emotion is “50 percent heritable, and therefore not highly modifiable.” And 2. Positive emotion “habituates,” that is, it’s fleeting (Seligman likens it to eating your favorite ice cream: “the first taste is 100 percent, by the time you’re down to the sixth taste, it’s gone”).

To help people create more pleasure in their life, Seligman recommends building your mindfulness and savoring skills, then sitting down “next Saturday, set a day aside and design yourself a beautiful day, [using] savoring and mindfulness to enhance those pleasures.”

The Engagement Life

Seligman likens it to “flow,” the notion popularized by psychologist and author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to describe those moments when humans are fully engaged in life activities, be they work, leisure, hobbies or relationships. In his talk, Seligman describes a close friend, wildly successful in life, but not love. “Is Len unhappy?” asks Seligman. Not the case. He explains: “Contrary to what psychology told us about the bottom 50 percent of the human race in positive affectivity, I think Len is one of the happiest people I know. He’s not consigned to the hell of unhappiness, and that’s because Len, like most of you, is enormously capable of flow.”

Continues Seligman: flow is “distinct from pleasure in a very important way: pleasure has raw feel – you know it’s happening; it’s thought and feeling. But what Mike [Csikszentmihalyi] told you yesterday — during flow . . . you can’t feel anything. You’re one with the music. Time stops. You have intense concentration. And this is indeed the characteristic of what we think of as the good life.”

The Meaningful Life

“Meaning,” says Seligman, “consists of knowing what your highest strengths are, and using them to belong to and in the service of something larger than you are.” He adds: “When you do something philanthropic to help another person, it lasts and it lasts.” He offers two simple examples: a gratitude visit and a strengths date. A word about both:

Gratitude visit: Seligman to his audience: “Close your eyes. I’d like you to remember someone who did something enormously important that changed your life in a good direction, and who you never properly thanked. The person has to be alive. Now, OK, you can open your eyes. I hope all of you have such a person. Your assignment . . . is to write a 300-word testimonial to that person, call them on the phone in Phoenix, ask if you can visit, don’t tell them why. Show up at their door, you read the testimonial — everyone weeps when this happens. And what happens is, when we test people one week later, a month later, three months later, they’re both happier and less depressed.”

Strengths date: This involves having couples first “identify their highest strengths on the strengths test,” and then having them “design an evening in which they both use their strengths. We find this is a strengthener of relationships. And fun versus philanthropy.”

Life Satisfaction

A final word from Seligman on life satisfaction: “[We’ve] asked…thousands of people: To what extent does the pursuit of pleasure, the pursuit of positive emotion, the pleasant life, the pursuit of engagement, time stopping for you, and the pursuit of meaning contribute to life satisfaction? And our results surprised us; they were backward of what we thought. It turns out the pursuit of pleasure has almost no contribution to life satisfaction. The pursuit of meaning is the strongest. The pursuit of engagement is also very strong. Where pleasure matters is if you have both engagement and you have meaning, then pleasure’s the whipped cream and the cherry. Which is to say, the full life — the sum is greater than the parts, if you’ve got all three.”

For more on Seligman’s teachings, visit authentichappiness.org.

How do extremely happy people differ?
Explains psychologist Martin Seligman, summarizing years of research: “. . . they’re not more religious, they’re not in better shape, they don’t have more money, they’re not better looking, they don’t have more good events and fewer bad events. The one way in which they differ: they’re extremely social.”