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Is positive psychology all it's cracked up to be?
Concerns with positive psychology
- There are worries about its replicability and unreliable self-reports.
- Promoting material achievement as part of happiness can make well-being seem out of reach.
- Positive psychology gives the impression you can be happy by thinking the right thoughts.
- At its core, positive psychology promotes the idea that we can achieve well-being by our own efforts, not considering physical illness and undeserved tragedy.
- Positive psychology has become a commodity and has been cheapened by the thousands of coaches, consultants, and therapists who benefit from using wild claims for their lucrative products.
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Concerns with positive psychology
- There are worries about its replicability and unreliable self-reports.
- Promoting material achievement as part of happiness can make well-being seem out of reach.
- Positive psychology gives the impression you can be happy by thinking the right thoughts.
- At its core, positive psychology promotes the idea that we can achieve well-being by our own efforts, not considering physical illness and undeserved tragedy.
- Positive psychology has become a commodity and has been cheapened by the thousands of coaches, consultants, and therapists who benefit from using wild claims for their lucrative products.
Reasons for popularity
There is no major conclusion in positive psychology that has not been challenged, modified or even rejected.
Yet the fact that positive psychology is becoming more popular means that it gives hope, optimism and perhaps happiness to millions of its consumers.
The beginning of positive psychology
The story of positive psychology started just 20 years ago with Martin Seligman, head of the American Psychological Association. The idea he considered was: What if every person was encouraged to nurture his or her character strengths, rather than being scolded into fixing their shortcomings?
He reorientated the entire discipline of psychology away from mostly treating mental illness and toward human flourishing, then used his authority to promote it.
Personal transformation
The term “positive psychology" was coined by Abraham Maslow in 1954. Martin Seligman used this term to promote personal change through the redemptive power of devotional practices like counting your blessings, gratitude, forgiveness, and meditation.
It is expressly designed to build moral character by cultivating the six virtues of wisdom, courage, justice, humanity, temperance, and transcendence.
Not a science
Martin Seligman insists on the value-neutral purity of the research on positive psychology. Yet even its fans say it seems to have some of the characteristics of a religion.
Philosophers such as Mike W. Martin say positive psychology has left the field of science and entered the realm of ethics. Science is a factual enterprise, not promoting particular values.
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Two categories of happiness
- The level of positive emotions. This includes pride, joy, contentment, and curiosity we experience on a day-to-day basis. How happy you are on an immediate basis fluctuates by the day or even the hour.
- The overarching sense of contentment. How happy you are overall, generally remains the same. When you rate your happiness on a 10-point scale, if you are a seven kind of person, you will often stay around seven.
Buy time
Buying time by outsourcing unpleasant or disliked tasks can benefit our well-being.
Unfortunately, we're not great at valuing time over money. To change our spending habits, it helps to value time more than money. It could mean that we seek a job for its flexibility rather than the salary and prestige.
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True happiness
It isn’t about being happy all the time.
Striving for a happy life is one thing, but striving to be happy all the time is unrealistic.
Psychological flexibility
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.
The 2 philosophical paths to happiness
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.
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- Due to its fleeting and fickle nature, our levels of happiness cannot be gauged, measured or rated accurately.
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Four Types of Well-Being
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.
- Optimizing one’s positive emotions, and denying the reality of their negative experiences.
- Feeling unhappy seeing the complexity of the world around them, and neglecting the positive aspects.
- Having a generally negative view of themselves and the world.
- Having a generally positive and empathetic view of the world.
The Real Meaning Of Happiness
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.