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Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Jan. 12, 2007 / 22 Teves, 5767

Happiness may be closer than you think

By Betsy Hart


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Is happiness all in your head?


No. But we may be able to influence our own happiness more than we, well, think.


I first came across the academic study of "happiness research" when reading "The Progress Paradox," a book by Gregg Easterbrook. The paradox, he writes, is that in the West we have ease of life, health, prosperity and leisure time unimaginable to previous generations. Yet our depression rate had gone up by 10 times since the 1950s.


Yes, a good deal of this is due to better reporting, better recognition and less social stigma surrounding depression. But most experts believe there also has been a significant increase in actual cases of depression during the last 50 years.


What's going on? Easterbrook looked at the work of Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has pioneered the new interest in happiness research, in his 2003 book. He says Seligman believes that reasons for our rising depression rates include our country's rampant individualism (if our setbacks become all about us, they take on huge significance), an overemphasis on self-esteem (there must be something wrong with me if I'm not happy at this moment), the teaching of "victimology and helplessness," and runaway consumerism.


Well, Seligman and his colleagues were back in The New York Times magazine this week in a spread entitled "Happiness 101," by D.T. Max, who is writing about the increased interest in positive psychology — particularly on college campuses.


Max describes research into the "hedonic treadmill," the situation in which feeling good only creates a hunger for more pleasure, whereas doing good, presumably then being "other" focused, is what can lead to lasting satisfaction. He recounts a class on positive psychology taught at George Mason University in Virginia. The students were first asked to do something they themselves found pleasurable. Then they were asked to do "good." They gave blood, collected clothes for a battered woman's shelter and so on, and generally reported more long-term satisfaction with the latter course of action. The professor then went on to focus on gratitude and forgiveness, close relationships and love.


Such courses are being replicated around the country. "Positive psychology brings the same attention to positive emotions (happiness, pleasure, well-being) that clinical psychology always has paid to negative ones (depression , anger, resentment)," wrote Max.


Can such an emphasis lead to more personal happiness? Certainly common sense, as well as the early research, seems to say "yes." Neuroscientist Jeffrey Schwartz shows in his 2002 book, "The Mind and the Brain," that while it's long been known that what we do can physically affect our brains, new research is actually showing that what we choose to think about can affect the physical wiring of our brains, too.


So, for instance, Schwartz found that people who only thought about carefully playing a piece of music on the piano over time had the exact same physical changes in their brains, as measured by CT scans, as people who physically practiced the same piano piece over time. Schwartz determined with similar studies that we can sometimes choose to think differently about things, change the physical wiring of our brain and, in doing so create, a kind of "upward spiral" for ourselves.


None of this is to minimize the seriousness of depression, by the way, or to suggest that there aren't real physical causes of it that often need to be addressed. But it does seem our creative human fullness may be more at play in determining our own happiness than we thought. As the article in the Times suggested, the growing study of human happiness is suggests it is appropriate for us to deliberately focus our thoughts on what broadens us, elevates us and connects us to others. And the result may be that focus helps bring us the greatest satisfaction and happiness.

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