08 Apr How Choice Can Lead To Happiness
I’ve been saying for several decades now that happiness is something you choose.
By this, I mean it’s about taking responsibility, and doing what you can.
But also, in my statement is an acronym, where CHOOSE stands for 6 key happiness strategies, supported by the science, and tried and tested by many over many years.
You can find a summary HERE
Taking a slightly different approach, but still emphasising choice as a means to happiness, Mark Travers recently wrote this article for Forbes …
A new study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology explains how creating and experiencing autonomy may be the most important ingredient that influences day-to-day happiness.
“Simply put, autonomy is the sense of wanting to take action instead of being coerced to do so,” says psychologist Atsushi Kukita from Claremont Graduate University and co-author of the new study. “I believe that the sense of autonomy is something we intuitively value in society.”
To examine the connection between autonomy and happiness, Kukita and his team leveraged an Experience Sampling Method (ESM) — a methodology in which participants receive notifications at randomly programmed times throughout the day over the course of multiple days (six times a day for seven days in this study) via their smartphones.
Upon receiving a notification, participants were instructed to answer a short questionnaire that measured what they were doing (e.g., working, playing, resting, studying, etc.) and how they were feeling at that present moment.
The researchers found that it mattered less what people were doing and more about whether people were engaging in an activity of their own volition in terms of predicting how happy they were in that present moment.
“Autonomy was consistently found to override activity type in predicting well-being,” say the researchers…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE