By By Dane Roberts Wans On Bookreview
What would it take to make you happy? More money? A house? A better job? Peace in the world? We all want to be happy. I doubt there is any one who sets out not to be happy.
Is it possible to be happy a good amount of the time despite what is going on around you?
It has been said that happiness resides in activity. Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, would agree with that.
She says it is not only possible but you are in control of it. She, in the forward states, “Happiness, in my humble opinion, is the Holy Grail.”
She uses a system she calls positive psychology to present her thesis. Basically, do positive things and happiness should be the result.
There are two fill-in quizzes that open the book and from there you are directed to one of 12 activities to pursue to help bring about happiness.
For example, on the depression scale you have 20 statements that you rate from 0 to 3 as to how you have felt or behaved in the past week.
She provides a formula to calculate your score which you can trace over three different periods of time. In another area you rate your activity level from 1 to 7 on 12 happiness activities. Professor Lyubomirsky has the reader link activities in a group of four. These are the ones you work on first.
Using the illustration of a pie chart cut up into three sections, she gives 50 percent as a set point. This is a given. You can’t change this. It depends on your personal style.
She dedicates 10 percent of the chart to circumstances. She indicates that 40 percent is under your control.
These are your intentional activities. This is the area she works on in presenting 12 different areas.
Some areas are expressing gratitude, cultivating optimism, practicing acts of kindness and nurturing social relationships.
It is an easy book to read. It could have been presented as a scholarly text but then the general public, which seems to be the group she aims to reach, would not read it. It is in the self help genre.
Her end notes at the back show that she has backing in her conclusions and that research continues to be done on her work.
“Happiness activities boost emotions, but researchers have also shown that positive feelings can foil the effects of negative feelings,” In the forward she tells what she is aiming for with this publication. “In this book, I have assembled and interpreted the discoveries about how to become happier, using them as jumping-off points to teach skills that people can use to shift to a higher and sustainable level of well-being.”
The best kind of happiness is a behavior that becomes a habit. This book could help you establish new healthy habits. It is within our power to achieve this real and lasting change.
DANE ROBERT SWANSON wants you to be happy and productive. Contact him at
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 25, 2008. Read the original PDF.