Enjoyment, Satisfaction, and Purpose

Arthur C. Brooks: There are three macronutrients to happiness. They are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. People who are truly happy about their lives, they have all three. And they have them in abundance, and they have them in balance. And people who are out of balance [with] enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose tend to define themselves as unhappy. They know that something is wrong with their happiness. So that’s where I want to start. And I want to start with the first of those, whi...

 Exercise Meaningful in Having Good Mental Health

In this cross-sectional study, we analysed data from 1 237 194 people aged 18 years or older in the USA from the 2011, 2013, and 2015 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System survey. We compared the number of days of bad self-reported mental health between individuals who exercised and those who did not, using an exact non-parametric matching procedure to balance the two groups in terms of age, race, gender, marital status, income, education l...

 Thin Slices of Joy

“Right now, I’m a little thirsty, so I will drink a bit of water. And when I do that, I experience a thin slice of joy both in space and time,” he told CBC News. “It’s not like ‘Yay!”” he notes in Joy on Demand. “It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s kind of nice.’” Usually these events are unremarkable: a bite of food, the sensation of stepping from a hot room to an air-conditioned room, the moment of connection in receiving a text from an old friend. Although they last two or th...

 PERMA: Five Elements for Well-Being.

Well-being is about what individuals and societies choose for its own sake, that which is north of indifference. The elements of well-being must be exclusive, measurable independently of one another, and—ideally—exhaustive. I believe there are five such elements, and they have a handy acronym, PERMA: P   Positive Emotion E   Engagement R   Positive Relationships M   Meaning and Purpose A   Accomplishment