Her First Splendid Truth: “To be happier, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.”

And her Fourth Splendid Truth is “You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy. corollary: You’re happy if you think you’re happy.”

Part of Drew Barrymore‘s charm is her willingness to be playful, even goofy – and conscious about her mood.

In his interview article The Truth Behind The Smile, Kevin Sessums asked her: “There seems to be a willfulness to your happiness.”

“I so appreciate your saying that,” Barrymore responded, “because that is exactly what it feels like to me. It feels as if I’m willing myself to be happy.

“I do feel as if I am thrusting myself forward all the time. Nancy, who runs my company and is my favorite person I’ve met in my life so far, had on her refrigerator the sign HAPPINESS IS A CHOICE.

“When I first saw it, I thought, ‘That is so simple and yet complex and wise.’ As you can see, I get verklempt just talking about it,” she says, using the Yiddish word for “emotional.” Her eyes well up.

Barrymore mentions other signs of being intense and highly sensitive.

“I don’t know if I’m completely comfortable ever,” she says. “Sometimes I can totally let go with complete abandon—sing and dance and run around and not care what people think about me. Still, there seems to be this ball of stress inside me that I can’t get rid of.”

She refers to her directorial debut movie, Whip It – an exciting and moving drama about women’s roller derby, with dynamic actors including Barrymore, Ellen Page, Marcia Gay Harden, Kristen Wiig and Juliette Lewis.

“I’ve stopped believing in happy endings,” Barrymore says.

“I’ve started believing in good days. At the end of my movie, there’s honesty. There’s truth. There’s peace.

“What tomorrow will bring is still in question. There is a joy that’s earned by failure or triumph. All those things add up to teach us, if we are open to it.”

Another quote of hers (undated) is: “As much light as I have inside me, there’s just as much darkness, I’m afraid. There’s a polarity, and I still have demons to work out.”

A transition from self-ruination

Valery Satterwhite – “Inner Wealth Coach and Personal Growth Expert” – writes: “How did Drew make the transition from a has-been washed out child-star following a path of self ruination to an award winning highly recognized power in Hollywood?

“Drew discovered that life experiences are not events that happen ‘to you’, they are the direct result of choices made. Drew moved from being a victim of circumstance, a child born into a dysfunctional yet famous Hollywood Family recreating the same destructive life for herself that her Mother experienced to taking deliberate charge of her personal and professional choices.”

From her post (on the excellent Creativity Portal site) Drew Barrymore’s Secret to Success: Parent Your Self.

Her book: You Suck!: How To Turn Your Fraidy-Cat Inner Critic Into A Confident, Courageous Fan.

~ ~ ~

So what do you think? How much of our happiness is up to our choices of thinking and behavior?

Related:

Positive Psychology quotes, books
Buddhist psychology
Highly Sensitive site
~ ~

happiness research, authentic happiness, positive psychology, emotional intelligence, positive emotion, happiness books

Does happiness always enhance creativity?

A study by June Gruber of Yale University and others (“A Dark Side of Happiness? How, When, and Why Happiness Is Not Always Good”), notes “Emotional states exert significant effects on memory, judgment, decision-making, and creativity.”

Her study also reports that “moderate levels of positive emotions engender more creativity, but high levels of positive emotions do not.

“Furthermore, when experiencing very high degrees of positive emotion, some individuals are inclined to engage in riskier behaviors, such as alcohol consumption, binge eating, and drug use.”

The research is summarized in a press release: Happiness Has a Dark Side.

“We’re taught to be ashamed of confusion, anger, fear and sadness, and to me they’re of equal value as happiness, excitement and inspiration.” Alanis Morissette

To live a full life, we need to deal with extreme and self-limiting levels of feelings like anger, anxiety and depression.

But too often, people run away from or try to suppress emotions that help make us human – and creative.

Below is a brief clip from one of psychologist Michael Britt’s outstanding PsychFiles podcasts.

In this episode – Thinking Positively – or Running Away from Your Feelings? – he talks about the article Happiness: Enough Already, by Sharon Begley.

The value of sadness

“The push for ever-greater well-being is facing a backlash, fueled by research on the value of sadness,” Begley declares.

Begley (and Britt) refer to the book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy by Eric Wilson.

She writes, “Wilson trots out criticisms of the mindless pursuit of contentment that philosophers and artists have raised throughout history—including that, as Flaubert said, to be chronically happy one must also be stupid.

“Less snarkily, Wilson argues that only by experiencing sadness can we experience the fullness of the human condition.

“While careful not to extol depression—which is marked not only by chronic sadness but also by apathy, lethargy and an increased risk of suicide—he praises melancholia for generating ‘a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing.’

A more ‘negative’ mood can be more creative

“This is not romantic claptrap,” she continues, and quotes University of Illinois psychologist Ed Diener: “Studies show that when you are in a negative mood, you become more analytical, more critical and more innovative. You need negative emotions, including sadness, to direct your thinking.”

(One of Diener’s books is Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth.)

Begley points out, “Abraham Lincoln was not hobbled by his dark moods bordering on depression, and Beethoven composed his later works in a melancholic funk. Vincent van Gogh, Emily Dickinson and other artistic geniuses saw the world through a glass darkly.

“The creator of ‘Peanuts,’ Charles M. Schulz, was known for his gloom, while Woody Allen plumbs existential melancholia for his films, and Patti Smith and Fiona Apple do so for their music.”

From Happiness: Enough Already, Newsweek Feb 11, 2008

[Image from post Paul Pearsall on Beethoven and thriving – finding courage and resilience.]

Dealing with depression is a way to stay healthy

A “dark mood” may be natural at times for most people – or more often, for those of us who are melancholic of temperament or have episodes of clinical depression. Staying in that kind or level of mood disorder is not healthy, nor is it a way to enhance creativity.

One way I deal with my tendency to be depressed (most of my life) is to use St. John’s Wort daily, and other herbal preparations for occasional anxiety – PureCalm or Kava Kava.

Especially with all the advertising that promotes “effective cures” for depression or “the blues” and other “unacceptable” moods, many people may be running too fast and far from emotions that can enrich their lives.

In his article The Art of Seeing Depression, Tom Wootton (author of the books The Bipolar Advantage, and The Depression Advantage)
says, “When I went into depression the first time all I saw was darkness and pain. At the time I thought it was unbearable, but looking back and comparing it to some of the far deeper states I have been to since, it was really nothing.

“As my perception has grown I am beginning to ‘see’ things I never knew were there. In ‘seeing’ them more clearly, I notice that they don’t affect me so negatively any more either.”

Alicia Keys has commented about being overwhelmed by her dark moods: “I was feeling so sad all the time, and I couldn’t shake it. I started burying my feelings, and it got to a point where I couldn’t even tell my family or my friends, ‘I’m twisted,’ or ‘I’m exhausted,’ or ‘I’m so angry.’ I became a master of putting up the wall so that I was unreadable.”

From my post Working with depression

Maybe it’s a matter of continually exploring the balance of feeling the depths without being swept into an emotionally destructive pit – and at the same time finding real pleasure and happiness in our lives.

Related posts:
Too much pursuit of happiness? (part 1)
Creativity and madness – Rollo May and Emily Dickinson on mental health and creative people

happiness research, authentic happiness, positive psychology, emotional intelligence, positive emotion, happiness books

In his new book, Flourish, positive-psychology guru Martin Seligman looks beyond happiness and asks: How can we create a rich, fulfilling, meaningful life? We spoke with him about what it means to flourish.

What’s the difference between flourishing and simply being happy?

To have a good life—to flourish—it’s not enough to just be happy.

My research has found that there are four other factors that foster well-being: having good relationships with others, being engaged in what you’re doing, having a sense of meaning or larger purpose in your life, and feeling that you are achieving your goals.

And these aren’t just traits or skills we’re born with?

Absolutely not. For example, a very easy way to improve your relationships is to use the Losada ratio with people you care about: That’s making five positive statements for every negative statement.

I used to be terrible at this, especially with my grad students. I’d cover their term papers in red ink, but I rarely said things like, “That’s a beautiful sentence.”

Once I started making an effort to change my ratio, my students not only liked me better, they were more responsive to my critiques and their writing improved.

You have seven children. How can parents raise their kids to flourish?

One of the best ways to ensure well-being is to develop and use your “signature strengths”—things that you’re good at and that you enjoy doing.

Every kid is better than 10,000 other kids at at least one thing. Instead of focusing on our kids’ misbehaviors, we as teachers and parents need to find that one thing, and then encourage them to lead their lives around that strength.

> Source: The Good Life, Parade.com

Book: Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being, by Martin Seligman.

“People may be taking advantage of the latest psychological science — putting themselves in a good mood so they can think more creatively.

“Generally, positive mood has been found to enhance creative problem solving and flexible yet careful thinking,” said Ruby Nadler, a graduate student at the University of Western Ontario.

[See more in my post Go ahead – watch funny videos.]

In her article Mood Swing: How feelings help and hurt, Kaja Perina [Psychology Today] reports on another study, at Washington University (WU) in St. Louis, in which “subjects viewed pleasant, neutral or anxiety-inducing video clips, then performed cognitive tasks while their brain activity was monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging.”

One of the research study co-authors, Jeremy Gray, Ph.D., noted “It’s not simply that emotion ‘hijacks’ cognition but that emotions both enhance and impair higher cognition in very specific ways.”

Results indicated that anxiety enhances visual and spatial performance, and subjects who viewed a horror movie clip scored better on tests of face recognition than subjects who watched comedies. But watching comedies led to an improvement in verbal performance.

Perina also notes that the book Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot: Unleashing Your Brain’s Potential by neuropsychiatrist Richard Restak, M.D. “provides 28 tips on strengthening mental acuity and, when necessary, turning emotion to one’s advantage.”

So what are emotions and moods?

In his article Why Do We Have Moods?, Morty Lefkoe writes, “This mental state first became an issue in my occurring courses where the participants and I were trying to identify all the factors that seemed to influence how reality ‘occurred’ for us, in other words, what determined the meaning we gave events as we experienced them, moment by moment?

“We realized that probably the major source of our occurrings was our beliefs and conditionings.  Other relevant sources included our physical condition and our ‘moods.’  But when we tried to state specifically what we meant by a mood and where our moods came from, we were stumped.”

But, he adds, “After a lot of thinking and a bunch of research, I came up with a few ideas, which I’d like to share with you… Moods seem to be like emotions in some respects and different in other respects. They both can be positive or negative. Moods tend to last longer than emotions.

“Usually emotions are set off by a specific stimulus (in the case of stimulus conditionings) or by the meaning we give specific events at the time.”

His Lefkoe Belief Method is acclaimed by many personal development leaders including Jack Canfield, as a program to overcome the most common limiting beliefs and conditionings.

For more info, see Lefkoe’s site ReCreate Your Life.

~ ~

Faces image related to the emotional recognition work of Paul Ekman.

Also see post: Dacher Keltner on positive emotion and living a good life. Keltner (PhD in Social Psychology, Stanford University) has worked with Paul Ekman, and is a professor in U.C. Berkeley’s Psychology Department.

~ ~

How much of our happiness and satisfaction in life is due to circumstance or other people, and how much is it a matter of conscious choice?

In the new movie The Adjustment Bureau (written and directed by George Nolfi, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick), the lives of the main characters, “fated” lovers played by Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, are manipulated by a team of celestial “adjusters” – as film critic Roger Ebert says, “They’re like undercover agents for the higher power of your choice.”

Anthony Mackie, one of the adjusters (he was also a powerful character in The Hurt Locker) was asked in an interview: What do you think of the idea of there being a greater power that knows better than we do and keeps bad things from happening?

His response:

I think the idea of there being a greater power that knows better is completely different than the idea of there being a greater power helping you to find better.

You would be hard pressed to find 10 people in your life right now that are truly happy. Like dip shit happy!

I know two people, I’ve been thinking about it for a week! I know two people. One of them is cuckoo and Cuban. (laughs) And the other one is a school teacher friend of mine, who had an amazing job and was making like seven figures a year and quit to become a school teacher.

Boom! She got a dog, got a house, taught kids. That’s it. And she’s happy. She likes the headaches that these kids put her through.

My other friend, it’s like he’s living the life, he has a girlfriend he has a 76 Cadillac and he has a tattoo now and a job, he’s happy!

But, everybody else I know is just desperately unhappy in one way or another. I think that is because we place too much on faith and not enough on free will. As human beings we have the ability to change any aspect of our lives that we want to, any aspect.

That’s just the way I was raised, I mean my daddy was like if you ain’t happy don’t do it. Every time I go into a governmental office like the Post Office or the DMV, I’m like I hate everybody in here because everybody in there is working to make your life a living hell. Sorry, I went to the DMV this week.

So with that being said I think we place too much power on the unknown and not enough power on the active known right now.

[From The Adjusted Power Of Anthony Mackie, GlobalGrind.]

Also see my Inner Actor post: Emily Blunt on fate and stammering and acting.

~ ~

Author Gretchen Rubin has also commented, “To be happier, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.”

Spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti wrote, “Only the mind which has no walls, no foothold, no barrier, no resting place, which is moving completely with life, timelessly pushing on, exploring, exploding – only such a mind can be happy, eternally new, because it is creative in itself.”

From his book: Think on These Things.

See more quotes by Rubin in my post: Drew Barrymore and Gretchen Rubin on authentic happiness as a choice.

Rubin is author of The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.

From Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, via

People who watch funny videos on the internet at work aren’t necessarily wasting time.

They may be taking advantage of the latest psychological science — putting themselves in a good mood so they can think more creatively.

“Generally, positive mood has been found to enhance creative problem solving and flexible yet careful thinking,” says Ruby Nadler, a graduate student at the University of Western Ontario.

She and colleagues Rahel Rabi and John Paul Minda carried out a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

For this study, Nadler and her colleagues looked at a particular kind of learning that is improved by creative thinking.

Students who took part in the study were put into different moods and then given a category learning task to do (they learned to classify sets of pictures with visually complex patterns).

The researchers manipulated mood with help from music clips and video clips; first, they tried several out to find out what made people happiest and saddest.

The happiest music was a peppy Mozart piece, and the happiest video was of a laughing baby. The researchers then used these in the experiment, along with sad music and video (a piece of music from Schindler’s List and a news report about an earthquake) and a piece of music and a video that didn’t affect mood.

After listening to the music and watching the video, people had to try to learn to recognize a pattern.

Happy volunteers were better at learning a rule to classify the patterns than sad or neutral volunteers.

“If you have a project where you want to think innovatively, or you have a problem to carefully consider, being in a positive mood can help you to do that,” Nadler says. And music is an easy way to get into a good mood.

Everyone has a different type of music that works for them — don’t feel like you have to switch to Mozart, she says.

Nadler also thinks this may be a reason why people like to watch funny videos at work. “I think people are unconsciously trying to put themselves in a positive mood” — so that apparent time-wasting may actually be good news for employers.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff. Story from materials provided by Association for Psychological Science.

Journal Reference:
1. Ruby T. Nadler, Rahel Rabi, John Paul Minda. Better Mood and Better Performance: Learning Rule Described Categories Is Enhanced by Positive Mood. Psychological Science, 2010; 21: 1770-1776

ScienceDaily (Dec. 15, 2010)

~~~

Here is a video related to the season, which I just added to my TalentDevelop channel favorites list (most of which are serious):

TheOnion Newsroom / Sony Releases Stupid Piece Of Sh*t That Doesn’t F*ing Work (about 4 million views)

I could write a few novels with the material from my romantic and work relationships.

Lots of drama and disappointment, and loads of self-recrimination.

How does giftedness figure into the patterns of our connections with others?

In this excerpt from his article, Solutions for the Problems of Giftedness, Richard O’Connor, Ph.D., gives some interesting answers.

The Big Problem: Looking for love in all the wrong places, and being fierce in disappointment

We began the group with the hypothesis that perhaps there was something about the nature of giftedness itself that led to grief for our members; and though we did find that qualities like being highly intellectualized or “too intense” (see below) contributed to members’ difficulties, in the end we believe that it was not giftedness itself that was the chief source of unhappiness.

Instead, we realized (as we should have known all along, since all the members suffered from depression and shaky self-esteem) that the problem was, for each individual member, that the pursuit of or expression of talents was being used in an attempt to relieve a sense of personal unlovability, inadequacy, or alienation.

This attempt was doomed from the outset for two reasons.

First, and most important, accomplishments, relationships, or recognition never heal deep-seated doubts about the self; rather, like an addiction, they provide temporary satisfaction but leave the individual craving more.

Second, the attempt to heal the self through external validation is inevitably self-defeating because the relentless pursuit of accomplishments, relationships, or recognition makes the individual unreliable and unsuccessful as a partner, friend, or employee.

He swings between extremes of being overly enthusiastic, anxious to please or show off or otherwise win the desired validation, and being depressed, withdrawn, bitter, and self-centered when the validation isn’t forthcoming or is inadequate (as it ultimately must be) to heal the self.

We felt that each member was living out a version of the same basic narrative.

Each had been raised by parents who were critical, remote, or abusive.

Each had discovered that expression of their individual talents was a way of temporarily gaining parental approval, or at least that in school, being bright, cooperative, or inquisitive won interest and approval from teachers.

Each more or less settled early on this as a life scriptÑto be smart and talented, to achieve success or recognition academically (and later, by extension, through financial or social accomplishment) became the primary strategy for relieving doubts about the self.

But early experience of inadequate or destructive parenting had left weaknesses in the foundation of the self that could not be repaired no matter what the adult self accomplished.

[We] felt that the real problem was that members had been looking for love in all the wrong places: looking outside, to success, accomplishments, or to other people, when they had to begin to look inside and learn to love themselves.

Richard O’Connor, Ph.D., is the author of the books:

Undoing Depression: What Therapy Doesn’t Teach You and Medication Can’t Give You

Active Treatment of Depression

Undoing Perpetual Stress.

Happy At Last: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Finding Joy

~~

Related

Site: High Ability

Articles: High Ability – gifted/talented

Pages:

Giftedness characteristics

Self-tests: giftedness / high ability

Books:

Mary-Elaine Jacobsen. The Gifted Adult

Marylou Kelly Streznewski. Gifted Grownups: The Mixed Blessings of Extraordinary Potential.

~~

gifted adult books, gifted relationships, giftednesss and job satisfaction, giftednesss and loneliness

People are waking up to the realization that – to the extent you are living your passion you’re happy and successful.

I’m talking about being happy and successful in a balanced way.

There are lots of so-called “successful” people who are not happy. They might be financially successful, and that’s all they’re able to focus on. The rest of their life drops away. To me that’s not real success.

> From article Janet Attwood on Finding Your Passion.

Janet Attwood is the co-author of the New York Times Bestseller, “The Passion Test- The Effortless Path To Discovering Your Life Purpose.”

• Learn more about her new Passionate Life Secrets program
• Also, take the FREE Passion Test Profile

find your purpose, meaningful life, life purpose, work and meaning, life meaning problems

“But what exactly is Emotional Intelligence (EI)? If we lack it, can we learn it? And how do we know if our EI is high or low? Is it only high if we’re really, really nice?

“Three scholarly researchers – including University of Cincinnati Psychology Professor Gerry Matthews – delved into the science of EI and published What We Know About Emotional Intelligence: How it Affects Learning, Work, Relationships, and Our Mental Health.

“Matthews’ research interests have explored how stress, mood and coping ability can affect performance on tests, in the workplace and on the highway. He adds that amid the grim economy, even the people who have jobs are feeling high levels of stress in the workplace and are feeling more challenged by workplace demands and concerns about job security.”

> Continued in article The Science Of Emotional Intelligence.

emotional balance, emotional intelligence development, emotional intelligence training, emotional intelligence articles, personality and emotion

“Acting is what I love to do. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I don’t think of it as work. It’s really fun for me.”

Dakota Fanning has also said, “It’s fun to know what I want to do – you know, when I grow up. I have friends who say, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll be an astronaut or whatever.’ But it’s cool to want to do this forever. I knew from my first commercial that I wanted to be an actress.” [imdb.com]

So is this just about fun – or something deeper?

In his Technorati article What is Happiness? Dr Russell Razzaque, a UK Psychiatrist, notes “There are two general theories as to what happiness means.

“One is the hedonic theory. This suggests that happiness – or well-being – is entirely about the attainment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. The more pleasure you have and the less pain you experience, the happier you are and the greater your well being. Simple.

“On the other side is the Eudaimonic theory. This focuses on meaning, and defines well-being in terms of self realization, i.e. the extent to which we are fulfilling our potential in life.

“The Eudaimonic view counts among its supporters, not just philosophers and psychologists but visionaries including spiritual and religious teachers from both East and West.

“Aristotle believed that true happiness was to be found in the expression of virtue – i.e. in doing that which was worth doing. More recently [psychologist Erich] Fromm  described true happiness as deriving, not from momentary pleasure, but from human growth.

“He attached greater value to pursuits that were of importance to humanity as a whole, rather than the individual’s own pleasure alone. This is a more holistic view, seeing the individual as part of a wider organism and defining happiness as that point at which your own fulfillment coincides with that of wider society.

“This is when you live in accordance with your ‘daimon’ i.e. ‘true self.’

For more on the concept of the daimon see post Do we all have genius? Does it get drummed out of us?

It seems to me that Fanning was expressing something of both ideas: pleasure and having fun, and also fulfilling her potential.

Many other actors talk about finding satisfaction in helping both themselves and audiences better understand the complexities of being human.

Juliette Binoche thinks, “As actors, I think we are responsible for making people more aware of their inner world.”

And acting coach Larry Moss once noted, “Acting is about showing people what it is to be human, both the beauty and the ugliness.”

[From my post Entertainment psychology – Making people more aware of their inner world.]

The Eudaimonic concept also includes the idea of meaning – both for ourselves and others. See the post What’s a meaningful life? Eric Maisel and tips for making meaning.

Happiness is a choice?

Gretchen Rubin (author of the book The Happiness Project) thinks “You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy.” And Drew Barrymore says, “It feels as if I’m willing myself to be happy. I do feel as if I am thrusting myself forward all the time.”

From my post Drew Barrymore and Gretchen Rubin on authentic happiness as a choice.

Eudaimonia, happiness research, authentic happiness, positive psychology, emotional intelligence, positive emotion, happiness books