Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
The Happiness Advantage - Shawn Achor
You are what you see, since what you surround yourself with will ultimately color how you think. Is the world a good or bad place? Are we in a land of opportunity or danger?
Shawn Achor walks us through how we're being duped into thinking things are worse than they are.
Depression rates are 10x what they were in the '60s, but when psychology has raised several generations of researchers focused on how we're not right instead of how we are, who gives a shit. As of 2000, for every study on happiness, there were 17 on mental disorders. Behavioral science has helped mold our collective negative perception of our surroundings.
Research itself is about finding a trend, statisticians are taught to remove outliers, and that's totally valid when identifying trends. Thing is, when all trends do is identify averages, we stay stuck in the cult of the ordinary.
Positivity dials up feel-good dopamine and serotonin, sure, but those chemicals also seed our learning centers to better organize new information and enable us to sustain more neural connections, meaning they allow us to think more creativity and juice up our problem solving skills.
Positive thinking reshapes the brain through a mechanism similar to mirror neurons. Thinking the positive things lights up the areas of the brain those positive things are associated with, strengthening those neural connections each time.
When we hear something new then start to see it pop up everywhere afterwards is called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, which is just selective attention plus confirmation bias, but we do this with our outlook on the world too through a similar concept called the Tetris Effect. If we think positive things, seek out positive media, we will go out into the world starting to see things more positively.
This book can be looked at as a pacifier to cull a disgruntled workforce, but the applications for personal use are limitless. The placeholder placebo positive psychology creates is temporary. Over a short period of time that pacifier causes real physiological changes that can improve all aspects of life. Happiness is as happiness does.