Positive Interventions: Happiness Attained from Acts of Kindness and Gratitude

The benefits of generosity for both our physical and mental health are outstanding. generosity reduces stress, supports one’s physical health, enhances one’s sense of purpose, and helps fight depression, it has also been shown to increase one’s lifespan because all the health benefits of not being stressed. You may think you are being selfless, but you are also benefiting yourself in a way you did not know about. Developing compassion increases our happiness. In an experiment published in Science by Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton, they gave money to; two sets of groups, one that spent money on themselves and the other spent it on other people. It was found that the people who bought presents for others showed an increase in happiness, this was even the case with children giving treats to others. We are using an unselfish event and making for an ego boost. However, by doing so we need to become conscious of the world around us.

The third route to increasing happiness comes through meaning which is comprised mainly of the four basic values of faith, family, community, and work. (The NY Times) This avenue boosts happiness through a sense of being part of a higher thing that ourselves.

In “Happiness 101,” Harvard professor Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar presents his ideas pertaining to the achievability of happiness. He begins by discussing how individuals must give themselves permission to be human, so that they can feel the negative feelings before they reach the positive feelings. If negative feelings are held back without release, then they only intensify eventually blocking out the positive feelings. Ben-Shahar continues his presentation to the topic of managing stress on the micro, mezza, and macro levels. These levels include the ideas of meditation, sleep, taking time off, vacations, and the “three deep breaths.” Simplifying agendas and practicing quality over quantity has a positive effect on stress levels as well. At the conclusion of his presentation, Ben-Shahar discusses the positive effect of practicing gratitude on health, happiness, and well-being. After listening to Tal Ben-Shahar’s presentation, I completely agree with every point that Ben-Shahar uses over the topics of giving permission to be human, stress management, and practicing gratitude covered throughout his presentation over happiness.

If you would like to live a happy and more so, successful life, it is vital that you learn to express gratitude wherever you go. In order to reach where you would like to be in life, everyone should concentrate on their goals and objectives. Through expressing gratitude, people can learn to show good deeds, and hence be able to receive the same goodness, in return. (Radwan, Msc.) Gratitude refers to the act of being thankful, noticing simple pleasures, counting every little blessing, and acknowledging every good done unto you. In other terms, it can be described as living life as if everything happening in it is a miracle, and being able to continuously acknowledge every much you receive. On the other hand, when people decide to concentrate a lot of energy on bad things in life, it will make them remain in the state of conflict. But by developing gratitude, it will allow someone to focus on positivity and the good things in life. It must be understood that this will allow an individual to always remain optimistic, and with enthusiasm much success can be achieved.

We are using local colleges for this study, because this sample is achievable with our available resources. One factor that we focus on in the study is to see if religious affiliation has an impact on happiness. Abilene, Texas is predominately Christian affiliated; therefore, the significance of the universities chosen will help us obtain reoccurring result. Hardin-Simmons University is predominately Baptist, Abilene Christian University is Church of Christ, McMurry University is Methodist, and Cisco Community College is nondenominational. Apart from Cisco; Hardin-Simmons, Abilene Christian, and McMurry are all denominations of Christianity. Having different denominations, the interest of the study rises. The interest rises because they all fall under one affiliation. There are very little current studies done on differences of denominations and happiness. For this study, we will be building from current resources and sample subjects that we can obtain. The age range that will be used in the experiment is eighteen to twenty-six. Demographic questions will be asked in a survey prior to the happiness inventory questionnaire. The purpose of this is seeing if different race and ethnicity, and different religion affiliations can be grouped properly. Having different groupings, we should be able to get a more accurate rating on happiness levels and its’ factors to perform a

Following Malcolm Gladwell’s idea on “the story of success”, Sonja Lyubomirsky put happiness to the test. Happiness has many great advantages that some may not think about. Studies shown happiness leads to stronger relationships, higher work performance, and even living longer with many health benefits.

No one question the positive effect of feeling good, but are there any benefits from unpleasant emotions? It seems that people has been chasing for good mood in the last 2 decades, but there are several people trying to find positive influences for feeling bad underneath. In the Psychology Today article “Beyond Happiness: The Upside of Feeling Down” (2015), Hutson focuses his attention on the how human beings benefit themselves from negative emotions. Hutson has some strong point that there are many positive effects from negative emotions, which are expressing anger is good in negotiation, guilt can motivate individuals to fix the mistake, and envy is one of the motivation to drive people to success.

The journal that I had selected deals with the relationship between health behaviors and happiness. Through the use of cross-sectional survey of 800 randomly selected university students, researchers were able to analyze what it takes for students to remain happy when undergoing many life struggles.

These changes, in turn, were expected to result in reductions in negative affect and depressive symptoms. Additionally, although not specifically stated in the prompt(s) given to the subjects, the authors expected EDW to address more negative emotions. It was also hypothesized by the authors that GFW would lead to increases in subjective happiness and trait gratitude. These changes, in turn, were expected to result in improvements in positive affect and life satisfaction. They also expected GFW to include more positive feelings because it specified positive emotional experiences.

Expressing gratitude helps individuals have an healthy life by creating an physique healthy. By having the time to developing healthy you are in about how grateful, we create a sense of change of , which lead you to be more grateful person . In “31 Gratitude Exercise That Will Boost Your Happiness,’’ Courtney Ackerman  writes, “gratitude has been shown to Improve physical health. People who show gratitude report fewer aches and pains, a general feeling of health, more regular exercise, and more frequent checkups with their doctor than those who don’t”. People who attain Gratitude have been known to be  improve in health and also experience more positive outcome during health improvement, because it is a great attitude to keep the doctor away.

Thus, all three studies showed that the gratitude condition not only raised daily positive affect, but also, reduced daily negative affect, during the 21-day study period. In addition, the experimentation based on gratitude caused improvement people’s amount of sleep and the quality of that sleep. Furthermore, the effects on well-being (positive affect and life satisfaction) were quite obvious to the participants (Emmons & McCullough,

This book is unusually short because it simply provides activities you can do today, proven by scientific research to increase your happiness. Inspirational videos are included to give you added motivation. References are included if you want to verify the proven research. However, the best way to verify the research is to try the activities and see if they work for you. Not every activity will work for every person.

Research in SWB has provided a foundation for its application in the form of evidence-based interventions to increase SWB. A growing literature has emerged demonstrating how brief experimental manipulations of a number of different activities can increase SWB (Parks & Schueller, 2014; Quoidbach, Mikolajcak, & Gross, 2015). For example, cultivating and expressing gratitude through counting one’s blessings (Emmons & McCullough, 2003; Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade, 2005; Seligman, Steen, Park, & Peterson, 2005) or writing and sharing letters of gratitude (Boehm, Lyubomirsky, & Sheldon, 2011; Lyubomirsky, Dickerhoof, Boehm, & Sheldon, 2011; Seligman et al., 2005) has been shown to increase SWB. Performing acts of kindness fosters similar effects (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade, 2005; Sheldon, Boehm, & Lyubomirsky, 2012).

In a research done by Casaundra and Michael (2014), it was proposed that the happiness level of an individual increases when he practice gratitude. Total participants recruited for this study were 164 undergraduates from a large Midwestern university. The scales used for this research were Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS) (Lyubomirsky & Lepper, 1999) and Gratitude questionnaire-6 (GQ-6) (McCullough, Emmons, & Tsang, 2002). An ANOVA test was done which showed significant results among both scales (F (2, 159)=15.75, p<0.01). The author has suggested form his research that exercising gratitude can effectively enhance happiness (Harbaugh & Vasey,

Students did not say they felt “elevated” during their family trips, but they shared memorable moments of happiness, benevolence, and gratification. Algoe and Haidit introduced traditional and recent empirical research on the effects and benefits of gratitude, which provides commentary on the students’ memories with their families. “Recent evidence suggests that gratitude often serves a broader social function, namely, promoting relationships with responsive ones,” (p. 3). “We recently demonstrated that the two most robust predictors of gratitude were the perception that the benefactor was being responsive to the needs and wishes of the recipient (i.e. thoughtful), and liking the benefit,” (3). Again, this goes back to being mindful and practicing mindfulness. Positive psychology focus on positive emotions that included a wide