Productive solitude

It consists of 3 parts: positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction.

Positive affect and negative affect are basically your emotions and moods, and life satisfaction refers to the evaluation of your life as a whole (how satisfied you are with your life, what you would change etc).

Tracking your own subjective well-being can be very powerful if you keep alongside a journal of your life's events. 

Keep it up for some time and you will see trends emerge. You'll also be able to adjust your activities in order to maximize positive affect and life satisfaction and minimize negative affect.

Being open to emotional experiences and being able to tolerate discomfort can allow us to move towards a more meaningful existence.

The way we respond to the circumstances of our lives has more influence on our happiness than the events themselves.

• Hedonistic: in order to live a happy life we must maximize pleasure and avoid pain. This view is often short-lived.

• Eudaimonic approach: it takes the long view and argues that we should live authentically and for the greater good. We should pursue meaning and potential through kindness, justice, honesty, and courage.

• They surround themselves with other happy people.
• They cultivate resilience.
• They appreciate simple pleasures.
• They devote some of their time to giving.
• They get immersed in activities that bring joy.
• They nix the small talk for deeper conversations. 
• They make a point to listen. 
• They look on the bright side.
• They make exercise a priority.
• They listen to good music.
• They spend time in nature.
• They laugh a lot.

To address the disconnect between happiness and deeper levels of satisfaction, researches proposed a model that characterizes people as falling into one of four well-being types.

1. Optimizing one’s positive emotions, and denying the reality of their negative experiences.
2. Feeling unhappy seeing the complexity of the world around them, and neglecting the positive aspects.
3. Having a generally negative view of themselves and the world.
4. Having a generally positive and empathetic view of the world.

Being happy means more than feeling good. True happiness comes from handling challenging and adverse situations, while collaborating and building lifelong bonds with the people in our lives.

A collective thinking process, where the good of all is considered leads to a level of happiness that cannot be attained by being selfish or self-concerned.

• People who win the lottery are likely to revert to their original levels of happiness after the novelty of the win has worn off.
• It is also true for those who are in major accidents. People generally tend to return to their pre-accident levels of happiness after a period.
• Research has found that the first bite of something delicious is experienced as more pleasurable than the subsequent bites.

Researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky has examined this set-point:

A full 50 percent of our happiness set-point is due to genetics. 10 percent is affected primarily by circumstances like where we were born and to whom. 40 percent is subject to our influence.

Happiness has always been difficult to quantify because it is subjective, depending on if you have a short- or a long-term outlook on life. Recently, researchers have started to distinguish between two types of happiness: 

• Hedonic happiness that provides a mental high;
• Eudaimonic happiness, a sense of well-being which involves a life well-lived.

People will always be happy when they see their children prosper when they feel loved, secure, and well-fed.

But, this formula for happiness is so obvious that most people dismiss it. They would rather look for a secret ingredient. The answer is that there is no secret.

• Some therapists are just there to listen and provide a backdrop.
• Even the silence that they exhibit seems to kindle the patients into divulging more of their most uncomfortable truths.
• Others keep the sequence of assignments and tests lined up, never pausing.
• Therapists play varied roles to get some valuable information out of the patient and make him better.

No particular form of therapy is proven to be better or more effective than others.

Different people prefer or respond to different forms of therapy.

Not all NDEs are positive - some can be frightening, with intense terror, anguish, loneliness, and despair. Distressing NDEs are underreported because of shame, social stigma, and pressure to conform to the positive NDEs.

A close encounter with death reminds us of the fragility of life and can reveal the layers of psychological suppression that prevents us from these uncomfortable thoughts.

A 2017 study found that NDEs were recalled with greater clarity and detail than either real or imagined situations were. In other words, NDEs were remembered as being more real than life itself.

NDEs are no more likely to occur in devout believers than in secular or nonpracticing subjects.

The ability to voluntarily bring back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will. 

Structure and routine are important, but in excess, they may stop you from growing. Taking certain risks can be healthy and rewarding.

Challenge yourself to take a risk each day, do something new or differently, anything that pushes you out of your comfort zone.

Mental health tends to deteriorate when we obsess over past happenings instead of taking responsibility in what we’re doing or creating in the now.

Live in the present without hyper-focusing on the future or the past.