Three Kinds of Happiness and the Engaged Life

Posted on Aug 20, 2024 in Psychology and Sociology

3 Factor Flourishing Inventory

We get a profile which maps onto chapter 1
Good students will put in 2 hours of studying
Mark is determined by quality time on task
Time on task requires motivation
- The strength of your desire to learn will boost or lower average mark

Joy
Positive mood seen by others
Gratitude
This is a subjective sense of happiness
There is experience of happiness (joy) and the expression of happiness (positive mood)
Certain types of happiness affect different parts of life
Happiness has ripple effects, positive consequences

Awareness/knowing one’s talents
Pursuing talent activities
Talent based problem solving
These things are your talents
The engaged life is making use of your talents
The more engagement in activities in your talent the more engaged you are
Different kind of happiness
FLOW (being in the ‘zone’, sports analogy. i.e. basketball hoop seems 8 feet wide, total concentration, focused, high performance)
Feeling in total control when in FLOW

Impacting others
Sense of connection/closeness
Sense of meaningful purpose
Having a sense of significant goals in your life
- Relationship goals
- Secular goals
- Sacred goals
All about having important goals that give you a reason to keep on keeping on
Resilience, overcoming and bouncing back

Some of us might have had difficulty addressing talents
Everyone is a mixture of weaknesses and strengths, society emphasizes weaknesses
Many of us are unaware of strengths and talents

You need to be able to put your feet in other people’s shoes
A non phony smile: Duchenne smile
- Looking back on yearbook pictures
- Some people look like they have a genuine smile
- Test done on yearbook pictures
  - Health affects
The pleasant life
The expression of genuine emotion, possibly contributes to medical health
- The fountain of youth

This question is hard to answer if you don’t know what your strengths are
Values in Actions Test
The more often you can capitalize on strengths the more likely you are to live a better life
This is about the engaged life

Sense of closeness
Whether you are a stranger to others
Opposite: alienation
Self Determination Theory
In the same way your body has a need for nutrition, you need psychological needs
Meaningful life

Important goals
Finding solutions to goals or strengths
Living the engaged life
There is satisfaction from achieving goals
- Goals that have been blocked
- Finding a pathway to go around
Positive Psychology Coaching
- Teaching people how to use their strengths

Some people’s lives are filled with trivia
- Meaningless
- Wasting life away
Opposite side: chipping away one step at a time to achieve a purpose
- Religious purpose
- Social purpose
- Career/financial goals
Existential vacuum
Concentration camp guy: (Frankl)
- His purpose was to write a book about how to find your purpose
- Coined term existential vacuum (void of any meaning, emptiness, nothing is important)
If you can acquire things that capture your interest, then this will sustain you through tough times
- Your purpose
- Mothers: children are their purpose

How able are you to concentrate and focus?
All about learning how to let go of distracting thoughts
- Meditation
Is your mind in the present moment?
When you’re reading a book and you can’t remember the first thing
- You are giving into all these wandering thoughts
- You can learn how to focus
In FLOW there are no other distractions

Engaged life
There is a distortion
When you are doing something you’re good at
- You might be doing something for hours
- And forget to have lunch
FLOW
You want more flow
When you apply your talents
Losing sense of time during sex

True intimacy
- Parts of you that only certain people know
- Loved ones
The meaningful life
- A sense that our life is worth living by feeling close to others
The human condition: one of virtues and one of flaws and they are mixed together
- “People are like a god who shits” – Ernest Becker