Happiness

Some old-age truths about happiness — Kua Ee Heok

September 12, 2012

SEPT 12 — Six months ago, I was referred a 67-year-old doctor who was profoundly depressed after suffering a heart attack. His cardiologist requested an urgent psychiatric consultation because he was suicidal.

A general practitioner, he had always wanted to own an elegant house in Queen Astrid Park. In his pursuit of happiness, he worked assiduously, took a large bank loan and was planning the renovation of the bungalow when he collapsed in his clinic after experiencing an acute chest pain. While recuperating, he wondered whether he could work again and worried about the financial burden.

During our psychological therapy session, he confided about having been preoccupied for many years with the “dream house” since visiting a patient living in that prestigious part of Singapore.

He writhed in mental anguish — his happiness had been shattered.

Happiness and depression are on the two ends of the emotion spectrum. Recently, there has been a surge in research into this bipolarity of emotion, with the advent of new brain scanning techniques.

As neuroscientists ponder the convoluted brain neurotransmitter systems of dopamine and serotonin regulating our emotions, we know that happiness is personal and intrapsychic — a psychological term referring to the internal psychological processes of the individual.

People externalise their happiness by sharing with friends, giving to the less fortunate or helping neighbours.

Happiness is a topical issue not only in the heartland kopitiam but, also, the hallowed halls of the United Nations in New York. Many countries, including Bhutan and Britain, have constructed their own Happiness Index. In the homes of many elderly Chinese are three deities — Fu, Lu and Shou — who personify their aspirations of wealth, happiness and longevity.

As you listen to the Singapore national conversation over the next few months, a central theme I suspect will be “happiness”, or the lack of it, and it will pervade the issues of jobs, housing, public transport and foreigners.

Factors associated with happiness and satisfaction in late life have also intrigued many researchers in the field of gerontology. A few years ago, the Department of Psychological Medicine of the National University Health System conducted a study of elderly people living in the Chinatown and Toa Payoh districts.

About 72 per cent of the Chinatown elderly and 69 per cent of the Toa Payoh elderly indicated that they were happy and satisfied with life. However, their reasons for life satisfaction were quite different.

The Chinatown elderly lived in smaller HDB flats and preferred to meet friends in community centres or the void decks; their main reasons for life satisfaction were family or social relationships and good health.

The Toa Payoh elderly were living in bigger flats and their main reasons for life satisfaction were the comfortable homes and good health. When we assessed the rate of depression in both groups, the prevalence was 5 per cent in the Chinatown elderly and 9 per cent in the Toa Payoh elderly.

There was more social interaction among the Chinatown elderly who tended to congregate at public places to chat, watch television, read the papers or play mahjong. The Toa Payoh elderly did not interact as much with neighbours and seemed more isolated and lonely. In short, the Chinatown elderly, although poorer, were happier with lower prevalence of depressive disorder.

You may wonder how many of the Chinatown elderly will participate or are even cognisant of the imminent national conversation. With their long years and wisdom, they can tell us something about happiness, if we have time to listen and understand their dialects.

Because of the change in family structure, more Singapore elderly will be living alone in future and cannot expect much support from close relatives. Living alone and loneliness were issues explored in a recent study in the Jurong district by our research team. We found that a sense of loneliness, and not living alone, was a risk factor for depression which could lead to suicidal ideation.

Many people lament the passing of the kampong or village socio-ecological community of interdependence. In the past, living in a village allowed people to interact and cooperate in caring for their neighbours. With modernity, the ethos of the kampung spirit is lost.

It may be possible to resurrect the same community spirit within blocks of flats by identifying, within each block, the frail and the able-bodied elderly. If the latter can become informal carers of the former, a future tradition could grow within the precinct. And this is the challenge — to build not just a cohesive and inclusive but also caring community, which is the soul of the nation.

As for the doctor, I reviewed him last month and he had improved after four months of psychological therapy. No longer depressed or suicidal, he had begun to recalibrate his priorities in life and felt the “dream house” was no longer at the top of the list.

He decided to work part-time and looked forward to thrice-a-week morning walks at the Botanic Gardens, Labrador Park and MacRitchie Reservoir with his friends from church. His joie de vivre now was admiring the beauty of nature, and spending more time with family and friends.

In fact, his wife persuaded him to stay in their present apartment and sell the bungalow, which should fetch a princely sum today. He is a case study to repudiate the myth that suicide is not preventable.

Before he left my clinic, he reflected on the dark days when he wanted to take his life and, with a wry smile, quipped: “Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody … nobody really wants to die.”

I agreed. — Today

* Dr Kua Ee Heok is a professor in the Department of Psychological Medicine, National University of Singapore, and senior consultant psychiatrist in the National University Health System.

Earl Nightingale (Happiness)

Happiness is a by-product of learning who you are, living from that insight, and striving for a goal with which you resonate. And that's how you become wealthy. Go out to acquire wealth and you may do so. However, the price may be more than the money is worth. Conversely, know who you are and find something you love to do and the money, like happiness, will come as by-product of a fulfilling and successful life

Can money buy happiness?

Can money buy happiness?
Yes, if you re poor.

Money is better than poverty, Woody Allen quipped, if only for financial reasons. If we re starving or homeless, money can bring a better life.

But beyond a certain point ” a surprisingly low point ” more money doesn t deliver more happiness.

A study of tens of thousands of people in 29 countries compared average life satisfaction in each country with average purchasing power (see Figure 9).^[1]It showed that in poor countries, purchasing power and life satisfaction are clearlyrelated. Yet once countries are half as rich as America, there is absolutely no relationship between money and happiness.

Figure 9: Life satisfaction and purchasing power in 29 countries

Looking within individual countries bears this out. Very poor Americans are less happy, but otherwise money does not affect happiness. Being one of the 100 richest Americans adds only a smidgeon to happiness.

Or consider a study of 22 lottery jackpot winners, who showed initial euphoria. It didn t last. Within a year, the winners were no happier than before.

More evidence: real purchasing power in three rich countries doubled between 1950 and 2000, yet happiness levels didn t rise at all. As countries become wealthier, depression soars, with victims also suffering at a much younger age.

The evidence is overwhelming. Being moderately well off means that you are happier than if you were very poor. But once you are well fed, clothed, and housed, getting wealthier probably won t make you happier.

In the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill gave one excellent reason for this being true ” we don t want to be rich, we just want to be richer than other people. When our living standard improves but everyone else s does too, we don t feel better off. We forget that our cars and houses are better than before, because our friends all drive similar cars and have just as pleasant homes.

Right now, I m living in South Africa. Here, I feel rich. In Europe or America, I don t. My feeling has nothing to do with how well off I am and everything to do with how well off other people are. Living standards are much lower in South Africa, so I feel wealthy.

There s also the pain and hassle of making money. On April 8, 1991, Time magazine s cover story highlighted the price paid for successful careers:

• 61 percent of 500 professionals said that earning a living today requires so much effort that it s difficult to find time to enjoy life.
• 38 percent said that they were cutting back on sleep to earn more money.
• 69 percent said they d like to slow down and live a more relaxed life ; only 19 percent wanted a more exciting, faster paced life.
• 56 percent wanted to find more time for personal interests and hobbies, and 89 percent said it was important to them to spend more time with their families, something that their careers made difficult.

How are we doing now? Have many of us fled the rat race? Nah. We re still chasing more money for more time. The average working American now works 2,000 hours a year. That s two weeks more than in 1980! And the average middle-income couple with children now work 3,918 hours between them ” seven weeks more than just 10 years ago.

More money can be a trap, leading to more spending, more commitments, more worry, more complexity, more time on administering money, more desires, more time at work, less choice about how we spend our time, and degradation of our independence and life energy. Our lifestyle locks us into our workstyle.

How many houses or cars do we need to compensate for heart attacks or depression?

^[1]See Martin E P Seligman (2003) Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Deep Fulfillment, London: Nicholas Brealey.

http://flylib.com/books/en/1.522.1.36/1/

Happiness the key to success

October 25, 2010

Being happy doesn't just make you feel good, it can also make you more successful, according to a Harvard University lecturer.

Shawn Achor, whose book The Happiness Advantage will be published in Australia next month, says, positive thinkers have a biological advantage over people who are are neutral or negative.

The good news is that being happy is a skill we can all learn, Achor says.

Here are some tips from his book on how to retrain your brain to capitalise on positivity and improve your productivity and performance.

- Meditate - research shows that regular meditation can permanently rewire the brain to raise levels of happiness, lower stress and even improve immune function.

- Find something to look forward to - often the most enjoyable part of an activity is the anticipation. If you can't take time out for a holiday now or a night out with friends, put something on the calendar. Anticipating future rewards can actually light up the pleasure centres in your brain.

- Be kind: research has found that giving to friends and strangers decreases stress and contributes to enhanced mental health.

- Infuse positivity in your surroundings - people who put pictures of their loved ones on their desk at work aren't just decorating; they are ensuring a positive hit of emotion each time they glance at them.

- Exercise: it is not just a powerful mood lifter but also a long lasting one. Run, walk, ride, play, stretch, skip or jump around on a pogo stick, it doesn't matter so long as you get moving.

- Spend money, but not on stuff. Spend it on experiences like concerts or a night out with friends. This produces more long lasting positive emotion than buying things. Spending money on other people, such as family and friends, also makes us happy.

- Exercise your strengths; to learn what your top strengths are (you can do this for free at www.viasurvey.org) pick one of your signature strengths and use it in a different way each day. Studies have shown that the more you use your signature strengths in daily life, the happier you become.

The Happiness Advantage (Virgin Books) by Shawn Achor is out in November, $35.

AAP

http://www.theage.com.au/executive-style/management/happiness-the-key-to-success-20101025-170mp.html

Wealth and happiness from the power of 10

Wealth and happiness from the power of 10

Marcus Padley
June 19, 2010 - 3:00AM

You don't have to be a genius to work out that if only we could avoid the losses, we would all be winners. The first rule of making it is not losing it. So here are my top 10 tips on not losing money.

1 Inside information. A colleague has professionally traded all his life. It's what he does. He says: ''If I had never been given any inside information … I would be a million pounds better off than I am today.''

2 IPOs. The golden rule of IPOs is that if it's any good, it won't be offered to you. If you get offered it … then you don't want it.

3 Pretending to be Warren Buffett. The concept that Buffett can be emulated has cost investors more than it has ever made them. No one has ever managed to replicate his performance. The idea that you can is the biggest drawcard the equity market has and it is a lie. We all keep buying the dream.

4 Gurus. Go to any rainforest, discover any tribe and you will find them huddling under some concept of god and creed. It is a human need to be able to answer the unanswerable questions and we do it by deifying someone or something. In our search for answers to the stockmarket's unanswerable questions, we credit our commentators with vastly more powers than they could possibly deserve or possess. And dangerously, he who guesses the boldest guesses the longest.

5 Greed. The biggest killer of them all. Approaching the stockmarket with greed is like running onto a battlefield in bright orange. We'll get you.

6 Leverage. The mechanism of greed. Leverage is marketed one way, but it works both ways. You lose much faster as well. That means it only works for some of the time and not all of the time.

It only works when you are right. And with average equity returns after interest, transaction costs, inflation and tax of less than zero, man, you had better be right, and right at the right time. You cannot habitually use leverage to ''invest''. Only trade and trade at the right time, not all the time. That's a big ask for someone with a day job.

7 Confidence. What's the core skill of the finance industry?

I'll tell you: it's marketing. And oh, do we have some material to work with. The finance industry is never short of a success story to free your wallet from your pocket. But we cannot all be successful, and of course we aren't. But the concept of success from mere participation in the financial markets is sold and endures because of one convenient fact of life. Crappy cars and small houses don't attract attention. The winners stay, and we raise them up. The losers, conveniently, go away. Thank goodness for that. Imagine how much product we'd sell if we raised them up.

8 Expectations. The root of all happiness. The root of all unhappiness. Expect the unexpectable and expect the inevitable. Best you expect the expectable.

9 Laziness. The nucleus of many of the stockmarket's very large and public losses. There has been more money lost through laziness than through effort - in particular, from putting your future in the hands of financial products you haven't taken the time to understand (Opes Prime, Storm Financial), from ''investing'' without investigating (otherwise known as gambling), from relying on someone else's grand declaration rather than taking responsibility yourself. Let's get this straight. There is no easy route to riches in the stockmarket and there is no free lunch, so participation without effort is not enough.

10 Life. My mum used to say there are three foundations for spiritual and financial happiness and success: your relationship, your job and where you live. Get one of those wrong, and all three will go wrong. Note there's no mention of the stockmarket in there. The stockmarket is not life. It is a side issue. The biggest financial decisions you will make in your life have nothing to do with the stockmarket - such as getting married, getting divorced, having kids, investing in your home, committing to your career or your business. These are the biggest financial decisions you'll ever make. Focus on them. The stockmarket is not a priority.

Marcus Padley is a stockbroker with Patersons Securities and the author of the daily stockmarket newsletter Marcus Today.



This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/business/wealth-and-happiness-from-the-power-of-10-20100618-ymsd.html