Learn To Be Happier Than Ever Before

What happens when you look at the happiest people and scientifically analyze what they have in common? Researchers did just that. There was a clear answer to what differentiated these people from everyone else -- and it wasn’t money, smarts, age, gender or race. It was strong social relationships.
Via The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work: Turns out, there was one -- and only one -- characteristic that distinguished the happiest 10 percent from everybody else: the strength of their social relationships. My empirical study of well-being among 1,600 Harvard undergraduates found a similar result -- social support was a far greater predictor of happiness than any other factor, more than GPA, family income, SAT scores, age, gender or race. In fact, the correlation between social support and happiness was 0.7. This may not sound like a big number, but for researchers it’s huge -- most psychology findings are considered significant when they hit 0.3. The point is, the more social support you have, the happier you are.
The Grant Study (which followed a group of men for their entire lives) found that “the capacity to love and be loved was the single strength most clearly associated with subjective well-being at age eighty.”
Via Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being: Vaillant’s [who directed the study for more than three decades] insight came from his seminal work on the Grant Study, an almost 70-year (and ongoing) longitudinal investigation of the developmental trajectories of Harvard College graduates. (This study is also referred to as the Harvard Study.) In a study led by Derek Isaacowitz, we found that the capacity to love and be loved was the single strength most clearly associated with subjective well-being at age 80.
If you do one thing today to be happier, spend time with friends.
Not spending more time with people we love is something we regret the most.
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