It's official - I'm a miserable git

[robinturner]

I recently read an interview with Martin Seligman (happiness researcher and head of the APA) in which put forward the idea that happiness has three components. The first and most obvious is having pleasant experiences. The second, he terms eudaimonia, though he uses this word rather loosely compared to Aristotle: for Seligman, eudaimonia is simply the exercise of your characteristic skills. He gives a nice example of a lizard that was pining and refusing food until seeing a copy of a newspaper which had been placed over a ham sandwich - it jumped up, shredded the newspaper and ate the sandwich. The final component, according to Seligman, is meaning, which he defines as a sense of being connected to something greater than oneself. Interestingly, unlike many advocates of meaningful existence, he sees this as morally neutral: a suicide bomber has a meaningful life (albeit rather a short one).

All this struck me as fairly close to my own opinions, so I wandered over to Seligman's website authentichappiness.org and took several of the battery of happiness tests there (those familiar with the literature will recognise most of them). In just about all of them I scored somewhere in the bottom third - not clinically depressed, but seriously pissed off with life. When it comes to melancholia, it looks like I might be a good room-mate for John Dowland.

Now if Seligman's theory of happiness is correct, this shouldn't happen. I have a reasonable number of pleasant experiences in my day-to-day existence. I also have a lifestyle in which I exercise my characteristic skills: teaching, writing, diddling with computers, and so on. Meaning was one of the few things I scored fairly high on. So why do I come out as such a sourpuss?

Comments

[blorky.livejournal.com]

Are you familiar w/ Seligman's work on depression/pessimism?

I think that the 3P model of pessimism is the underpinning for his current work, but the recent interviews haven't really been explicit in describing those links.

M

[vret.livejournal.com]

There are all sorts of possibilities. Are you bored, feeling unchallenged? Do you get enough sunlight? Do you need a jam?

Most likely you are just reading too much Heidegger. Read some Wodehouse and try the test again.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Hah - the Heidegger might have taken its toll.

I don't know about feeling unchallenged, but I'm definitely feeling stuck in a rut. My life is OK, as lives go, but I don't feel enthusiastic about it in the way that I did back in the 80s. There again, being in my forties rather than my twenties may have something to do with this.

[blorky.livejournal.com]

MS is reticent in his interview, but what he's not accenting is that *he* was one of the leaders in establishing the medical model for psychiatric care - that there are chemical components to depression, bipolar, etc...

Seligman is an excellent scientist, far more so than Myss and Weil, and his Positive Psychology is essentially CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) with a heavy accent on MS's optimism/pessimism model for behavior.

There's an immense body of material demonstrating talk therapy revising both neurochemical profiles, and somewhat less on changes in biostructural components. Neurotransmitter.net is a good place to start, but a google search should find you plenty.

[blorky.livejournal.com]

I haven't read that particular volume, but AE codified the basis of most of the flavors of CBT that people are having success with presently.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Yes, REBT is essentially a variety of CBT.

[vret.livejournal.com]

Does talk modify brain chemistry directly, or does it do it by modifying behaviour?

[blorky.livejournal.com]

If I knew that, I'd be shortlisted for the Nobel...

Not trying to blow you off there, but it's really hard to tease apart what the components of "therapy" are. If the talking therapy (or a meditation teacher) teaches me to not dwell on past failures so as not to get depressed, is that behavior modification? I'll submit yes.

lazy thoughts on a day off

[maggie-lucy.livejournal.com]

I really must develop an extended theory of Practical Hedonism, my current philosophical stance.

Re: lazy thoughts on a day off

[solri.livejournal.com]

I'd noticed your posts showing a decidedly hedonistic stance!