What Makes Us Happy? – A Formula for Happiness

Armed with this knowledge and a few simple rules, we can improve our lives and the lives of those around us.

HAPPINESS has traditionally been considered an elusive and evanescent thing. To some, even trying to achieve it is an exercise in futility. It has been said that "happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."

By ARTHUR C. BROOKS

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/opinion/sunday/a-formula-for-happiness.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0

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What Makes Us Happy?

Is there a formula–some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation–for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition–and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.

Joshua Wolf Shenk

Full Story: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/06/what-makes-us-happy/307439/

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Men at 65: New Findings On Well-Being

THE secret of emotional health among older men is not a successful career, a happy marriage or a stable childhood, new findings suggest. It lies instead in an ability to handle life’s blows without passivity, blame or bitterness.

The findings, which contradict widely held theories about the importance of early life for emotional well-being in adulthood, are among recent conclusions of a study of 173 men who have been scrutinized at five-year intervals since they graduated from Harvard in the early 1940’s.

Daniel Goleman

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/16/science/men-at-65-new-findings-on-well-being.html?fta=y&pagewanted=print