Lyubomirsky Quotes

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.

According to Lyubomirsky, the three factors that seem to have the greatest influence on increasing our happiness are our ability to reframe our situation more positively, our ability to experience gratitude, and our choice to be kind and generous.

[Optimism] is not about providing a recipe for self-deception. The world can be a horrible, cruel place, and at the same time it can be wonderful and abundant. These are both truths. There is not a halfway point; there is only choosing which truth to put in your personal foreground.

Happiness is not out there for us to find. The reason that it’s not out there is that it’s inside us.

Gratitude is an antidote to negative emotions, a neutralizer of envy, hostility, worry, and irritation. It is savoring; it is not taking things for granted; it is present oriented.

happiness, more than anything, is a state of mind, a way of perceiving and approaching ourselves and the world in which we reside.

I use the term happiness to refer to the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.

according to Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness, fifty percent of our happiness is determined by genetics, forty percent by internal factors, and only ten percent by external factors. These external factors include such things as whether we’re single or married, rich or poor, and similar social influences.

It is equally important to investigate wellness as it is to study misery.

Forgiving people are less likely to be hateful, depressed, hostile, anxious, angry, and neurotic.

people who regularly practice appreciation or gratitude—who, for example, “count their blessings” once a week over the course of one to twelve consecutive weeks or pen appreciation letters to people who’ve been kind and meaningful—become reliably happier and healthier, and remain happier for as long as six months after the experiment is over.

It may be obvious that to achieve anything substantial in life—learn a profession, master a sport, raise a child—a good deal of effort is required.

happiness level is entirely in your hands, that your “unhappy genes” do not doom you to unhappiness or, worse, to depression.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

So go for it. Smile, laugh, stand tall, act lively, and give hugs. Act as if you were confident, optimistic, and outgoing. You’ll manage adversity, rise to the occasion, create instant connections, make friends and influence people, and become a happier person.

You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.

Sometimes when I’m facing a horrendous week or am upset over a perceived slight, I remind myself that I won’t remember it (much less care about it) one month, six months, or a year from now. (The more extreme version of this strategy is to use the deathbed criterion: Will it matter when you’re on your deathbed?)

The face of happiness may be someone who is intensely curious and enthusiastic about learning; it may be someone who is engrossed in plans for his next five years; it may be someone who can distinguish between the things that matter and the things that don’t; it may be someone who looks forward each night to reading to her child. Some happy people may appear outwardly cheerful or transparently serene, and others are simply busy. In other words, we all have the potential to be happy, each in our own way.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

we habitually fail to enjoy, savor, and live in the present, as our minds are often someplace else. However, when you think about it, the present moment is all we are really guaranteed.

Three psychologists, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ken Sheldon, and David Schkade, reviewed the available evidence and realized that there are two fundamentally different kinds of externals: the conditions of your life and the voluntary activities that you undertake.33 Conditions include facts about your life that you can’t change (race, sex, age, disability) as well as things that you can (wealth, marital status, where you live). Conditions are constant over time, at least during a period in your life, and so they are the sorts of things that you are likely to adapt to. Voluntary activities, on the other hand, are the things that you choose to do, such as meditation, exercise, learning a new skill, or taking a vacation. Because such activities must be chosen, and because most of them take effort and attention, they can’t just disappear from your awareness the way conditions can. Voluntary activities, therefore, offer much greater promise for increasing happiness while avoiding adaptation effects.

Thus the key to happiness lies not in changing our genetic makeup (which is impossible) and not in changing our circumstances (i.e., seeking wealth or attractiveness or better colleagues, which is usually impractical), but in our daily intentional activities.

This is why Sonja Lyubomirsky, a leader in the scientific study of well-being, has written that she prefers the phrase “creation or construction of happiness” to the more popular “pursuit,” since “research shows that it’s in our power to fashion it for ourselves.”13

Lyubomirsky finds that several key factors make a difference in terms of maximizing happiness. Some of the most important are being grateful for what you have, looking at the bright side of difficult situations, not comparing yourself to others, practicing acts of kindness, being mindful, and savoring joy.

D. A., and Kahneman, D. (1998). Does living in California make people happy?: A focusing illusion in judgments of life satisfaction. Psychological Science, 9: 340–46.

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.

Depression is an illness, not a failing. It’s what psychologists call a syndrome—that is, a group of signs and symptoms that form a pattern.

Renew your commitment every day. Not only the strategy but the very act of recommitment will become easier and more automatic with time.

Don’t be the person who is waiting for this, that, or the other thing to happen before she can be happy.

Frank Lloyd Wright observed: “Many wealthy people are little more than the janitors of their possessions.

Indeed, frequent positive emotions—feelings of joy, delight, contentment, serenity, curiosity, interest, vitality, enthusiasm, vigor, thrill, and pride—are the very hallmark of happiness.

One way to practice empathy in your daily life is to notice every time someone does something that you do not understand. Try to work out such a person’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions.

Most people recognize, however, that relief of symptoms is not the depressed person’s ultimate objective. If you are depressed, your goal is not just not to be depressed; your goal is to be happy.

We found that the happiest people take pleasure in other people’s successes and show concern in the face of others’ failures. A completely different portrait, however, has emerged of a typical unhappy person—namely, as someone who is deflated rather than delighted about his peers’ accomplishments and triumphs and who is relieved rather than sympathetic in the face of his peers’ failures and undoings.

our expectations about what our lives should be like are greater than ever before; we believe that we can do anything, and we are profoundly disappointed when reality doesn’t meet or even come close to perfection.

You must resolve to undertake a program to become happier. You must learn what you need to do. You must put weekly or even daily effort into it. You must commit to the goal for a long period of time, possibly for the rest of your life.

The second reason to seek help for your depression is that it can wreak lasting damage on your life. Research shows that the toll depression takes is as great as that of a chronic physical disorder like diabetes, arthritis, or high blood pressure

a shift in thinking’ toward someone who has wronged you, ‘such that your desire to harm that person has decreased and your desire to do him good (or to benefit your relationship) has increased.’ Forgiveness, at a minimum, is a decision to let go of the desire for revenge and ill-will toward the person who wronged you. It may also include feelings of goodwill toward the other person. Forgiveness is also a natural resolution of the grief process, which is the necessary acknowledgment of pain and loss.

Like interpersonal therapists, marital and family therapists recognize that depressed individuals often have problems with family relationships. Indeed, if you are married and depressed, you are very likely to be experiencing distress in your marriage.

To be sure, depression has been described as a syndrome distinguished by a deficit of positive emotions: a lack of joy, curiosity, contentment, enthusiasm—that is, an empty cup.4 Indeed, inability to take pleasure in joyful events is a hallmark of depression.

The label comes from the conviction that empowering people to develop a positive state of mind—to live the most rewarding and happiest lives they can—is just as important as psychology’s traditional focus on repairing their weaknesses and healing their pathologies.

If we observe genuinely happy people, we shall find that they do not just sit around being contented. They make things happen. They pursue new understandings, seek new achievements, and control their thoughts and feelings. In sum, our intentional, effortful activities have a powerful effect on how happy we are, over and above the effects of our set points and the circumstances in which we find themselves. If an unhappy person wants to experience interest, enthusiasm, contentment, peace, and joy, he or she can make it happen by learning the habits of a happy person.

Finally, if you resolve that the trouble you're enduring now is indeed significant and will matter in a year, then consider what the experience can teach you. Focusing on the lessons you can learn from a stress, irritant, or ordeal will help soften its blow. The lessons that those realities impart could be patience, perseverance, loyalty, or courage. Or perhaps you're learning open-mindedness, forgiveness, generosity, or self-control. Psychologists call this posttraumatic growth, and it's one of the vital tools used by happy, resilient people in facing the inevitable perils and hardships of life.

I meditate every morning for twenty minutes. It is a sacred time that I protect from all intrusions or commitments, and for the rest of the day I am more centered and open-minded, not as sensitive or irritable or tense. I feel a sense of well-being that lasts all day. A day that I miss doing it is not the same, somehow wrecked.

There are questions of faith, such as “Does God exist?” There are questions of opinion, such as “Who is the greatest baseball player of all time?” There are debate questions, such as “Should abortion be legal?” And then there are questions that can be answered to a degree of certainty by the application of the scientific method, which are called empirical questions—in other words, those that can be largely settled by the evidence.

So, if you suddenly experienced a financial windfall, you would ultimately be much happier if you spent the money on numerous pleasant, mood-boosting things occurring on a day-to-day or weekly basis—a daily lunch of expensive sushi, a weekly massage, a regular delivery of fresh flowers, or Sunday-morning calls to your best friend in Europe—rather than spend it all on a single big-ticket item that you believe you would really love, like a new top-of-the-line Jaguar or the remodeling of a bathroom with hand-painted tile.

Still others assert that they have grown enormously as a result of their traumatic experience, discovering a maturity and strength of character that they didn’t know they had—for example, reporting having found “a growth and a freedom to…give fuller expression to my feelings or to assert myself.” A new and more positive perspective is a common theme among those enduring traumas or loss, a renewed appreciation of the preciousness of life and a sense that one must live more fully in the present. For example, one bereaved person rediscovered that “having your health and living life to the fullest is a real blessing. I appreciate my family, friends, nature, life in general. I see a goodness in people.”12 A woman survivor of a traumatic plane crash described her experience afterward: “When I got home, the sky was brighter. I paid attention to the texture of sidewalks. It was like being in a movie.”13 Construing benefit in negative events can influence your physical health as well as your happiness, a remarkable demonstration of the power of mind over body. For example, in one study researchers interviewed men who had had heart attacks between the ages of thirty and sixty.14 Those who perceived benefits in the event seven weeks after it happened—for example, believing that they had grown and matured as a result, or revalued home life, or resolved to create less hectic schedules for themselves—were less likely to have recurrences and more likely to be healthy eight years later. In contrast, those who blamed their heart attacks on other people or on their own emotions (e.g., having been too stressed) were now in poorer health.

An impressive body of research now shows that trying to be happy by changing our life situations ultimately will not work.

Sonja Lyubomirsky published in the Journal of Career Assessment, success does not lead to happiness as often as happiness leads to success

Major depression, which involves one or more episodes (or periods of time) during which the depression is intense and you suffer a large number of symptoms. These symptoms interfere with your work and your relationships, in addition to disturbing your sleeping, eating, and enjoyment of once pleasurable activities

Behavioral marital therapy is a relatively brief treatment in which the therapist meets regularly with the depressed person and his or her partner. In the first phase of treatment, the therapist tackles the biggest strains on the relationship and helps the couple have more positive interactions. The couple may be given a homework assignment to figure out what activity they have enjoyed doing together in the past and then going ahead and doing it. When this phase is successful, the depressed person is already feeling brighter and both partners are expressing positive feelings toward each other. This boost serves as the foundation for the second phase, whose aim it is to restructure the relationship—for example, to improve the way that the couple communicates, handles problems, and interacts on a daily basis. Sometimes this is done by having the couple write a behavioral “contract,” agreeing to change aspects of their behavior. When successful, this phase will leave the couple feeling more supportive and sensitive to each other’s needs, more intimate, and better able to cope with future difficulties. Finally, in the third phase, the therapist helps the two partners prepare for stressful situations that might come to pass and encourages them to attribute their improvement in therapy to their love and caring for each other. Interestingly, behavioral marital therapy has been found to be at least as effective as individual therapy at lifting depression. However, it has the additional benefit of bolstering marital satisfaction. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that the boost in marital happiness (or favorable changes in the marriage related to that boost) is in fact the reason that the marital therapy works.

According to Lyubomirsky, the three factors that seem to have the greatest influence on increasing our happiness are our ability to reframe our situation more positively, our ability to experience gratitude, and our choice to be kind and generous

Many studies have found that people suffering from depression show unique symptoms in their bodies.9 These symptoms include too low amounts of various brain chemicals (norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine), a too high amount of a stress hormone (cortisol), and disturbance of deep dream-related (REM) sleep. Furthermore, new technologies allowing researchers to image the brain have revealed that severely depressed patients have abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex (the region of the brain responsible for thinking and managing emotions) as well as in the limbic regions (i.e., areas involved in sleep, eating, sex, motivation, memory, and responses to stress), including the mysterious-sounding Area 25.10 In sum, there is now a great deal of evidence that depression is partly rooted in those parts of our physical bodies over which we have minimal control.

Sad mood for most of the day: feeling down, anxious, or “empty,” though some of you may feel tense or irritable instead Being less interested and finding less pleasure in almost all hobbies or activities that you used to enjoy (including sex) Feeling excessively guilty, worthless, or helpless Having little energy and feeling fatigued much of the time Having a hard time concentrating, remembering, or making decisions Having trouble sleeping: experiencing insomnia, early-morning awakening, or oversleeping Having trouble eating: overeating and gaining weight or losing your appetite and losing weight Feeling either agitated or slowed down Having thoughts of death or suicide, making suicide attempts

Indeed, a parent, child, or sibling of someone with depression has a two to four times higher probability of becoming depressed than the average person.

Alternatively, some researchers focus on bad experiences in childhood as the stressors that trigger depression in adulthood. Indeed, many different kinds of poor parenting, including whether your mother was depressed or anxious while pregnant,

What else can cause or activate a depression? Many tomes have been written on this subject, and I shall only mention the two theories backed, in my judgment, by the most scientific evidence. The first is Aaron Beck’s cognitive theory of depression, which forms the basis for the most commonly used psychotherapy for this illness, cognitive-behavioral therapy. Beck is a psychiatrist who argues that some people have dysfunctional attitudes that make them vulnerable to becoming depressed in the face of a negative event. These maladaptive attitudes often involve the notion that our happiness and self-worth depend on our being perfect or hinge on other people’s approval. For example, we might think, “My teacher’s critical comment means that I’m a total failure” or “If my girlfriend doesn’t love me, then I am nothing.” If we share these beliefs, then when something truly bad happens, we tend to have automatic negative thoughts about (1) ourselves (e.g., “I’m not lovable”), (2) our present experiences (e.g., “My boss always prefers my coworkers”), and (3) our futures (e.g., “I’ll never outgrow my shyness”). Beck calls these types of thought a negative cognitive triad.

A related explanation for depression, called hopelessness theory, came out of the work of Martin Seligman and his students. According to this theory, having expectations that bad things will happen to us and that really good things will not happen, and that we cannot do anything to improve the situation, can cause depression. Thus hopelessness is thought to lie at the root of a depression

Both hopelessness theory and Beck’s cognitive theory assume that people who become depressed have a cognitive vulnerability—that is, a dysfunctional way of thinking about negative life events that makes it more likely that they’ll become depressed. Simply put, how we interpret our life experiences (e.g., current problems in a relationship) influences our feelings about those experiences (e.g., feeling hopeless and inadequate versus confident and optimistic), which ultimately lead to distress and even full-fledged depression.

A risk factor is something that makes depression more likely, without necessarily causing it. There is now a great deal of scientific support for three risk factors for depression: Poor social skills Shyness or withdrawal Excessive dependency on others

Second, if you are the type of person who avoids social situations or is excessively shy, you may be predisposed to experience depression. This is probably because in the face of stress or negative events, shy or inhibited people avoid the very things that can protect them from falling into a negative spiral—namely, companionship and social support.

Finally, if you constantly seek reassurance from other people about your worth and lovability or if you are extremely needy of others’ acceptance and support, then you may be characterized by so-called excessive interpersonal dependency. As with the other risk factors, having this characteristic makes you vulnerable to becoming depressed. Again, excessive dependency should be worked out in a therapeutic context.

For the next four days, I would like for you to write about your very deepest thoughts and feelings about the most traumatic experience of your entire life. In your writing, I’d like you to really let go and explore your very deepest emotions and thoughts. You might tie your topic to your relationships with others, including parents, lovers, friends, or relatives, to your past, your present, or your future, or to who you have been, who you would like to be, or who you are now. You may write about the same general issues or experiences on all days of writing or on different traumas each day.

Apparently Clinton once asked Nelson Mandela how he was able to bring himself to forgive his jailers. “And Mandela said, ‘When I walked out of the gate I knew that if I continued to hate these people I was still in prison.

Not only can you survive, not only can you recover, but you can flourish.

Approximately one-third of all homes in 1940 did not have running water, indoor toilets, or bathtub/showers, and more than half had no central heating. If you were twenty-five years or older in 1940, you would have stood only a 40 percent chance of having completed the eighth grade, a 25 percent chance of having graduated from high school, and only a 5 percent chance of having finished college.

Sonja Lyubomirsky, autora de Los mitos de la felicidad entre otros. Para empezar, defienden que nos aporta un mayor valor a lo largo del tiempo invertir en experiencias que en objetos

No Ordinary Time, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s fine book about the Roosevelts,

Studies by Sonya Lyubomirsky and her colleagues have shown the power of our thoughts and actions on how we feel.

Sonja Lyubomirsky’s book The How of Happiness.

Seth Margolis and Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside, have found that asking people simply to act like an extrovert for one week appreciably increased their well-being.

In fact, according to Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness, fifty percent of our happiness is determined by genetics, forty percent by internal factors, and only ten percent by external factors.

Society has embraced a few standard “examples of happiness” that suggest the ways that we should live our lives: Get a stable job, get married, start a family, have two or three kids. Enjoy your grandchildren. That’s widely accepted as a happy life, and most of us (at one point or another) believe we’ll be happy as long as we’re able to achieve those things. Positive psychology, a branch of psychology aimed at studying satisfaction and fulfillment, reveals a completely different model for happiness. Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky says that 50 percent of our happiness is genetically determined, 10 percent by life circumstances and situations, and the remaining 40 percent by our daily actions. “Life circumstances and situations” includes various factors, such as where we live, whether we’re rich or poor, healthy or ill, married or divorced, and so forth.

according to Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness, fifty percent of our happiness is determined by genetics, forty percent by internal factors, and only ten percent by external factors.

Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky says that 50 percent of our happiness is genetically determined, 10 percent by life circumstances, and the remaining 40 percent by our daily actions. "Life circumstances and situations" includes various factors, such as where we live, whether we're rich or poor, healthy or ill, married or divorced, and so forth.

The regret we experience for not doing something leaves a much stronger impression on us than the regret we may have for doing something. Gratitude is the only thing that can prevent the cycle of familiarity leading to boredom. Gratitude allows us to see our everyday life with a fresh perspective. Happiness is basically something that each of us can measure only by declaring our own sense of contentment ourselves. Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirski says that 50% of our happiness is genetically determined, 10% by life circumstances and situations and the remaining 40% by our daily actions.

A compelling case can be made that the level of material comfort (or lack thereof) you are experiencing today is equivalent to how the top 5 percent lived a half century ago!

hedonic adaptation.

suggest that the short allele variant of the 5-HTTLPR gene is activated by an environmental trigger—namely, stress. Similarly, the long “good” allele appears to protect us from responding to a stressful experience by becoming depressed—that is, by making us resilient. The fact that many of us

According to Sonya Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness, fifty percent of our happiness is determined by genetics, forty percent by internal factors and only ten percent by external factors.

We strongly resist the breakup or dissolution of relationships and friendships, and without a sense of belongingness, we suffer numerous negative consequences for our physical and mental health.

Finally, those who see their work as a calling report enjoying working and find what they do to be fulfilling and socially useful. They work not for the financial rewards or for advancement but because they want to; it is inseparable from the rest of their lives.

One of my favorite definitions of happiness comes from Sonja Lyubomirsky, a researcher whose team devotes their time to studying human happiness. Sonja says happiness is “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive wellbeing, combined with the sense that one's life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.

Lyubomirsky considera que existen varios factores fundamentales que maximizan la felicidad.2 Algunos de los más importantes son agradecer lo que se tiene, ver el lado bueno de las situaciones difíciles, no compararse con los demás, practicar actos de bondad, ser consciente del aquí y el ahora y saborear la alegría.

How we spend our time plays an important role in our happiness. As we saw in chapter 1, happiness researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky suggests that engaging in experiential activities with family members accounts for approximately 50 percent of our well-being.

recent research by psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky suggests that perhaps only 50 percent of our happiness is determined by immutable factors like our genes or temperament, our “set point.” The other half is determined by a combination of our circumstances, over which we may have limited control, and our attitudes and actions, over which we have a great deal of control. According to Lyubomirsky, the three factors that seem to have the greatest influence on increasing our happiness are our ability to reframe our situation more positively, our ability to experience gratitude, and our choice to be kind and generous

By the time we are aware we feel anxious, our thinking center is already engaged. Once that happens, we have access to more than just our habitual responses. We have access to choice. This is the start of control and change. Not just the perceptual kind, but the hardwired kind. Researchers have even put a number on how much control we actually have: 40 percent. According to data compiled by positive psychologist, Sonja Lyubomirsky and detailed in The How of Happiness, approximately 50 percent of variance in happiness is determined by genes, 10 percent of variance in happiness is determined by circumstance, and the rest of our happiness is determined by our actions.33 This is powerful information. “To understand that 40 percent of our happiness is determined by intentional activity,” Lyubomirsky writes, “is to appreciate the promise of the great impact that you can make on your own life through intentional strategies that you can implement to remake yourself as a happier person

According to Lyubomirsky, the three factors that seem to have the greatest influence on increasing our happiness are our ability to reframe our situation more positively, out ability to experience gratitude, and our choice to be kind and generous. These were exactly the attitudes and actions that the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop had already mentioned and to which they would return as central pillars of joy.

After exhausting this list of four, use the grid below to help you find additional helpful happiness activities. IF YOU BENEFIT FROM THIS ACTIVITY YOU MAY WANT TO TRY THIS ONE OR THIS ONE Expressing gratitude (Happiness Activity No. 1) Practicing acts of kindness (Happiness Activity No. 4) Learning to forgive (Happiness Activity No. 7) Cultivating optimism (Happiness Activity No. 2) Savoring life’s joys (Happiness Activity No. 9) Learning to forgive (Happiness Activity No. 7) Avoiding overthinking and social comparison (Happiness Activity No. 3) Developing strategies for coping (Happiness Activity No. 6) Committing to your goals (Happiness Activity No. 10) Practicing acts of kindness (Happiness Activity No. 4) Savoring life’s joys (Happiness Activity No. 9) Increasing flow experiences (Happiness Activity No. 8) Nurturing relationships (Happiness Activity No. 5) Practicing acts of kindness (Happiness Activity No. 4) Taking care of your body (Happiness Activity No. 12) Developing strategies for coping (Happiness Activity No. 6) Committing to your goals (Happiness Activity No. 10) Learning to forgive (Happiness Activity No. 7) Learning to forgive (Happiness Activity No. 7) Developing strategies for coping (Happiness Activity No. 6) Cultivating optimism (Happiness Activity No. 2) Increasing flow experiences (Happiness Activity No. 8) Savoring life’s joys (Happiness Activity No. 9) Committing to your goals (Happiness Activity No. 10) Savoring life’s joys (Happiness Activity No. 9) Increasing flow experiences (Happiness Activity No. 8) Committing to your goals (Happiness Activity No. 10) Committing to your goals (Happiness Activity No. 10) Savoring life’s joys (Happiness Activity No. 9) Developing strategies for coping (Happiness Activity No. 6) Practicing religion and spirituality (Happiness Activity No. 11) Taking care of your body (Happiness Activity No. 12) Developing strategies for coping (Happiness Activity No. 6) Taking care of your body (Happiness Activity No. 12) Committing to your goals (Happiness Activity No. 10) Savoring life’s joys (Happiness Activity No. 9) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Somewhere in the foreword I wrote that the star of this book is science.

In other words, we exaggerate the effect a life change will have upon our happiness because we cannot foresee that we won’t always be thinking about it.

Even—or perhaps especially—in the face of stressful events, smiling and laughter can help “undo” negative emotions, distract, and bring about feelings of peace, amusement, or even joy.

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.”18

Those skilled at capturing the joy of the present moment—hanging on to good feelings, appreciating good things—are less likely to experience depression, stress, guilt, and shame. People prone to joyful anticipation, skilled at obtaining pleasure from looking forward and imagining future happy events, are especially likely to be optimistic and to experience intense emotions. In contrast, those proficient at reminiscing about the past—looking back on happy times, rekindling joy from happy memories—are best able to buffer stress.

all our life experiences are bittersweet ones. All good things (and bad things) come to an end, and the acknowledgment of this truth can prompt you to stop and smell the roses.