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Lust4Life: feeling good, looking good

Change your mind

Find real happiness

The keys to happiness

• Find a reason for living that's bigger than you are, and that gives your life meaning: love of a partner, child or friend; spiritual faith; helping others.
• Gather supportive friends, neighbours and colleagues.
• Start pursuing at least one passionate interest outside work.
• Aim for enough money, but give up hankering after riches. Research shows that, once reasonably comfortable, most people aren't made any happier by having more cash.
• Identify your signature strengths. There's a test on the Authentic Happiness website which lets you do this for free. Typical strengths include spirituality; perseverance and leadership; kindness and generosity; love of learning. Once you know what yours are, start giving yourself small but frequent opportunities to use them in your daily life. The happiness and fulfilment this will bring is a great way to maintain a warm glow of satisfaction with life.
• Learn to think optimistically. Consciously spend more time mulling over what's gone right, and less time re-running the story of things that went wrong. Seligman's book Learned Optimism has useful suggestions on how to do this.
• Identify the things you love to do – the activities that give you deepest satisfaction – and do more of them. This enhances the amount of 'flow' in your life.

What is 'flow'?

How often does your day whizz by, filled with anxiety and pressure of work, while the evening passes in a state of passive boredom? Happiness hardly features at all. Psychologist Professor Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi studied thousands of people, trying to answer the question, 'When are people most happy?'. He discovered that, for many, it was when they were in a state that he dubbed 'flow', absorbed in challenging tasks that engaged their skills so deeply they were unaware of anything else. In flow, worries evaporate, time stands still, you just stop thinking, and 'do'.

You can experience flow by choosing pastimes that need your skill and commitment, where you are active, rather than passive. Look for activities that include clear and attainable goals, and give immediate feedback. In playing tennis, for instance, the goal is to get the ball over the net, and you can make the task more challenging by the way you play. Feedback is instant: either the ball goes over the net or it doesn't. Skimming through a newspaper, on the other hand, provides neither goals nor feedback, so you lose any chance of feeling stimulated and satisfied in the same way.

You can transform routine tasks so that they create flow by taking a different approach. For instance, instead of cutting corners to make your work easier, find ways to challenge yourself by investing more, rather than less energy into mundane jobs. Not only will you start to enjoy work more, you'll also become more productive.

Csikszentmihalyi found that flow had an addictive quality, and that once a person has started to absorb more knowledge and refine their skills, life without flow feels static, boring and meaningless. The more flow you experience, the more your sense of having a meaningful life increases. That in itself creates feelings of purpose and self-knowledge, which in turn lead to happiness.

For further reading and weblinks on finding real happiness go to Help and info.

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