Those with a positive attitude to life may lower their anxiety levels by avoiding arguments
People who have a rosy outlook on the world may live healthier, longer lives because they have fewer stressful events to cope with, new research suggests.
Scientists found that while optimists reacted to, and recovered from, stressful situations in much the same way as pessimists, the optimists fared better emotionally because they had fewer stressful events in their daily lives.
Continue reading...Positive thinking and visualising success can be counterproductive – happily, other strategies for fulfilment are available
Like many teenagers, I was once plagued with angst and dissatisfaction – feelings that my parents often met with bemusement rather than sympathy. They were already in their 50s, and, having grown up in postwar Britain, they struggled to understand the sources of my discontentment at the turn of the 21st century.
“The problem with your generation is that you always expect to be happy,” my mother once said. I was baffled. Surely happiness was the purpose of living, and we should strive to achieve it at every opportunity? I simply wasn’t prepared to accept my melancholy as something that was beyond my control.
Continue reading...More than a third of UK 15-year-olds scored low in the annual Good Childhood Report
Children in the UK have the lowest levels of life satisfaction across Europe, with “a particularly British fear of failure” partly to blame, according to a major report into childhood happiness.
More than a third of UK 15-year-olds scored low on life satisfaction, the annual Good Childhood Report from the Children’s Society found. They also fared badly across happiness measurements including satisfaction with schools, friends and sense of purpose compared to children in other European countries.
Continue reading...Behavioural scientist Paul Dolan says traditional markers of success no longer apply
We may have suspected it already, but now the science backs it up: unmarried and childless women are the happiest sub-group in the population. And they are more likely to live longer than their married and child-rearing peers, according to a leading expert in happiness.
Speaking at the Hay festival on Saturday, Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, said the latest evidence showed that the traditional markers used to measure success did not correlate with happiness – particularly marriage and raising children.
Continue reading...Scotland and north of England dominate top five as measured by housing, crime and schools
Orkney is the best place to live in the UK, with cheap houses, low crime, good schools and a population who are among the happiest and healthiest in the country, according to the annual Halifax quality of life survey.
The survey found that all the top five best places to live in the UK were in Scotland or the north of England. Richmondshire in the north of the Yorkshire Dales came second, while the appropriately named Eden district in Cumbria was third.
Continue reading...The ‘success’ narrative is at the heart of our idea of wellbeing, but the evidence tells a different tale, argues behavioural scientist Paul Dolan in this extract from his new book
There are countless stories about how we ought to live our lives. We are expected to be ambitious; to want to be wealthy, successful and well educated; to get married, be monogamous and have kids. These social narratives can make our lives easier, by providing guidelines for behaviour, and they might sometimes make us happier, too. But they are, at their heart, stories – and ones that may not have originated with present-day people in mind. As such, many of these stories end up creating a kind of social dissonance whereby, perversely, they cause more harm than good.
Since we’re talking about stories, let’s start with an experience of mine. It’s about a working-class kid who becomes a university professor and who is expected to change his behaviour in accordance with a (harmful) narrative about how academics ought to behave. A couple of years ago, I took part in an interesting panel discussion on “emotion versus reason” at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in Hay-on-Wye. Walking across the field to get some food, I was approached by a man in his 50s. Our interaction started with him saying how much he liked my first book, Happiness By Design. Then he asked, pointedly: “But why do you have to play the working-class hero? You do it in your book and, look at you, you’re doing it now.”
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