So What Do You Have To Do To Find Happiness? (or should we even expect to be happy?)

Here's a good article to start the quest for relief from some of our midlife angst. So What Do You Have To Do To Find Happiness?

In essence, what the biology lesson tells us is that negative emotions are fundamental to the human condition, and it's no wonder they are difficult to eradicate. At the same time, by a trick of nature, our brains are designed to crave but never really achieve lasting happiness.

Psychologists such as Seligman are convinced you can train yourself to be happier. His teams are developing new positive interventions (treatments) to counteract the brain's nagging insistence on seeking out bad news. The treatments work by boosting positive emotion about the past, by teaching people to savour the present, and by increasing the amount of engagement and meaning in their lives.

The focus of most psychotherapy is on decreasing negative emotion. The aim of Seligman's therapy is to increase positive emotion (positive and negative emotions are not polar opposites and can co-exist: women have more of both than men). From the time of Buddha to the self-improvement industry of today, more than 100 "interventions" have been tried in the attempt to build happiness. Forty of these are being tested in randomised placebo-controlled trials by Seligman and his colleagues.