As a psychologist specializing in complex and challenging mental health difficulties, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to help people reduce suffering. Reducing suffering, of course, is a necessary and important goal to work on. I would say that the majority of people who come to see a psychologist would basically like to feel less bad. Negative experiences and emotions go along with so many of the psychological problems people struggle with, from excess anxiety and fear, sadness, to emptiness and depression, to anger and major life stress, to chronic physical pain. It makes a lot of sense that a primary motivation to seek help is to somehow reduce or get rid of these experiences.
At the same time, however, there’s a whole other branch of psychology focused not on reducing symptoms or negative emotions, but instead, on how to enhance happiness and well-being. And, there’s some evidence that strategies to enhance happiness and well-being have a lot of promise in the treatment of mental health problems such as depression. The idea is that there are things that we can do to systematically increase our happiness; doing these things (without necessarily focusing on our symptoms or reducing our suffering) can also effectively reduce mental health problems.
The definition of happiness has been a subject of great debate and confusion for eons, but Dr. Martin Seligman and colleagues have suggested that happiness has three primary aspects: (a) a pleasant life maximizing positive emotions and events, and minimizing pain and negative emotions, (b) an engaged life involving the use of positive individual characteristics (such as kindness, leadership, wisdom, etc.), and (c) a meaningful life involving involvement and service to positive groups, such as family or community organizations. The idea is that happiness doesn’t just involve feeling good. Instead, happiness has a lot to do with what we do. On the one hand, this may seem unfortunate if you were hoping that happiness might just wash over you and stick around for a while. On the other hand, the good news is that there are things we can actually do to enhance our happiness and well-being. Next time, I’ll write about some strategies to do just that. – Alexander L. Chapman, Ph.D., R.Psych.