Happy Life​

1- If you want to live a long, rich life, one of the best things you can do is to fill your life with happy feelings. Barbara Fredrickson, a University of Michigan psychologist, studied the causes of happy people’s longer lives.

2- A few months before the September 11 terrorist attacks, Fredrickson studied a group of students to determine how quickly they reacted to stress. After two weeks of the attacks, she contacted them. She discovered that the students who showed more resilience had fewer signs of depression.

3- Fredrickson also found that it is possible to accelerate the recovery of emotionally negative people by training them to view the experiment as a challenge and not as something negative. She believes it is not just removing the negative thoughts: it’s reorienting them to the positive. If she has to walk around the campus, she could view that negatively, as a waste of time, or positively, as a chance to enjoy the outdoors and to do some exercise.

Adapted from a text by Richard Lovett