I’m not referring here to the joy (hopefully) that you are going to experience when you open your Christmas presents tomorrow… rather Martin Seligman’s categorisation of Happiness in the Present into two distinct kinds of things – Pleasures and Gratifications.
We’re almost at the end of this series of posts which have explored and unpicked Seligman’s Happiness equation: H = S + C + V. In this penultimate posting, I am going to start investigating the effect of the present on our happiness… and will do so by delving into what Pleasures are out there for us to enjoy in our world today.
Firstly I should start by differentiating between Pleasures and Gratifications. Seligman defines Pleasures as happy things that have ‘clear sensory and strong emotional component’. Thus if any individual drew up a list of pleasures, it might include laughter, good food, comfort, delight, sexual pleasure, ecstacy etc.. Pleasures are transitory and short-lived, and involve little, if any, conscious thought.
Gratifications, by way of contrast, are defined as activites that we enjoy doing ‘but that are not necessarily associated with feelings or emotions’. Some of you may be aware of the positive psychology expression of ‘being in flow’. I recall that the concept was originated by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced: “cheek-sent-me-high-ee”). I also remember spending hours learning to spell his name for my psychology exams…
Anyway Gratifications are very much the same as ‘being in flow’, and by way of an example let’s take gardening. When I’m gardening I’ll often become totally immersed and absorbed in what I’m doing and lose self-consciousness. Time seems to stand still. Gardening is an activity that I love, that I’m relatively good at (ahem!) and so when I’m gardening my strengths are in use and I’m in touch with my strengths. It feels good, and the feeling lasts a long time. I can lose all sense of time if my task is particularly absorbing and hours can pass before I become aware of time. And often gardening takes quite a lot of thinking and decision-making (is that a weed?).
So I’m going to focus on the Pleasures then for the remainder of this posting, and leave Gratifications for another time.
I don’t need to tell you what you find pleasure in. I’ll leave that up to you and as long as it’s pretty much legal and you’re not hurting anyone then I’m happy with that. But what I can perhaps help with is to describe how you can make the most of your Pleasures i.e. how can you leverage and enhance these Pleasures to end up as happy as possible. Positive psychologists have come up with three concepts to increase the amount of momentary happiness in our lives.
Habituation: the trouble with most thrill-inducing or excitement-raising stimuli is that once they are over, they’re over… and the positive emotions subside quite quickly. Like a lot of melting snowman out there today. Rapidly repeating the indulgence sort of works, but you never get the same exquisite pleasure from the second spoonful of triple chocolate fudge icecream as with the first. The nervous system will fire eagerly on the first trigger, but it is designed to react less on subsequent triggers of the same stimulus, otherwise we would be moving around our world in a constantly wired state. Which could be fun or exhausting depending on your viewpoint!
The brain is wired to notice new novel exciting events and to filter out the familiar. So pleasures fade quickly and sometimes your mood can dip down to an even lower lever from where you started out.
The answer is very simply to spread out your Pleasures – have lots of things in your life that give you pleasure, but ration the frequency and mix them up. Experiment to identify the optimum interval for one particular Pleasure that keeps the positive sensation alive. Little things, spaced out and as impromptu as possible is the key – so setting up a timetable in Excel is perhaps not the best approach!
Savouring: life today is pretty hectic. We rarely take the time to stop and reflect and notice what is going on right now! Technological advancement has fuelled this; what we might called ‘progress’ has cruelly impoverished our very experience of being alive.
Bryant and Veroff developed five techniques to promote healthy savouring. Sharing with others (e.g. find someone to share that sunset with and tell them how happy it makes you feel); Memory-Building (e.g. take mental photographs or a physical souvenir like a shell from the beach, and keep it on your office desk or show it to someone and talk about where it came from); Self-congratulation (e.g. if you’ve done a good job, remind yourself how much time and effort you put in to achieve that outcome and congratulate yourself); Sharpening perceptions (e.g. when faced with a beautiful view, focus in on one area in particular and draw a rough sketch in a notebook); Absorption (e.g. be in the moment, try not to think, get totally immersed, reject all thoughts about what comes next or what you should be doing instead of savouring the moment).
Mindfulness: there’s a lot being written and spoken about Mindfulness these days, accompanied by a surge in interest and activity in coaching circles. Most of us these days are pretty unobservant. We operate unconscicously, going about our daily rituals and routines in a dreamworld. How many of us have arrived at our destination only to realise that we can’t remember much of the journey? We were probably absorbed in our own thoughts, anticipating the presentation we would be doing at 11am, worrying about the dripping shower and whether to call the plumber in, and noting with annoyance that we got our packed lunch out of the fridge only to leave it on the side.
Mindful attention to what is going on right now around you is much easier when your mind is still. The practice of meditation is one way to slow down a racing brain and to alleviate anxiety. If you are aware of a personal need to slow down and still your mind, then it might be worth exploring meditation as a mindfulness technique.
On a final note then, given it is Christmas Day tomorrow, I wish you all a very Merry, Thrilling, Delightful, Exuberant, Comforting, Joyous and Fun Christmas and here’s to a Healthy, Happy, Vigorous, Blissful and Peaceful start to the next decade!
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