Reading Jonathan Haidt’s just-released book, The Anxious Generation, caused me to read his first book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, which was published in 2006. Jonathan Haidt’s field of research psychology. He also teaches this subject at the University of Virginia. As is demonstrated in Braiding Sweetgrass, traditional wisdom has a great deal to offer for us to ponder. The term psychology is relatively new, but psychology has been practiced since humans evolved to have emotions, memories, communication, and the ability to plan ahead. May you find the following to be salient and helpful.
Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brains work so well that our reasoning can work at all. Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior, but emotion does most of the work.
Most mental processes happen automatically, without the need for conscious attention or control. Controlled processing is limited – we can think consciously about one thing at a time only – but automatic processes run in parallel and can handle many tasks at once.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and regulate one’s own feelings and desires.
Lasting change can come only by retraining the subconscious, and that’s hard to do.
We have evolved to have a negativity bias. We react more strongly to loss and fear than to gain and good fortune. This has aided our survival but skews the news to attract our attention and enforces our fears disproportionately.
There is a two-way street between emotions and conscious thoughts. Thoughts can cause emotions (as when you reflect on a foolish thing you said), but emotions can also cause thoughts, primarily by raising mental filters that bias subsequent information exchange.
Our genes, in combination with our experiences, play a large role in our happiness setpoint. Happiness is one of the most highly heritably aspects of personality.
Three of the best methods for changing our minds are meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac.
Just as gaining an education means struggling for twelve to twenty years to develop one’s intellectual potential, character development ought to involve a lifelong struggle to develop one’s moral potential.
One of the most universal pieces of advice from across cultures is that we are all hypocrites, and in our condemnation of others’ hypocrisy we only compound our own.
From the person who cuts you off on the highway all the way to the Nazis who ran the concentration camps, most people think they are good people and that their actions are motivated by good reasons. You can’t change your mental filters by willpower alone, you have to engage in activities such as meditation or cognitive therapy that have the potential to train the subconscious.
The consistent finding of psychological research is that we are fairly accurate in our perceptions of others. It is our self-perceptions that are distorted because we look at ourselves in a rose-colored mirror.
Due to “naïve realism”, we think we see the world directly as it really is. If I could nominate one candidate for “biggest obstacle to world peace and social harmony”, it would be naïve realism because it is so easily ratcheted up from the individual to the group level. (Author’s statement)
When it comes to happiness, research confirms what most people have experienced. People need obligations and constraints to provide structure and meaning to their lives. Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life (more than does quitting smoking), speeds recovery from surgery, and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders. Caring for others is often more beneficial than receiving help. The benefits of volunteer work for the elderly are so large that they even show up in improved health and longer life.
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