can you build / manat only in your own life but for large groups we'll start
with p so p is life satisfaction content mean subjective well-being positive
emotion and the like so let me just take a one bit of science and then 11 bit of
intervention that's been discovered about how to have more of that in your
own life so the question is what's a healthy ratio of positive to negative
thoughts so for the next week right before you go to sleep write down three
things that went well today they don't have to be big things and why they went
well so it turns out when you do a serious testing of this six months later
people who do this have less depression and a higher life satisfaction than
appropriate controls and importantly it's addicting I've been a
psychotherapist all my life oh my adult life the dirty little secret of
psychotherapy and psychopharmacology is that its effects or temporary that once
you stop therapy or stop the drug it melts and effectiveness equals how long
it takes before it melts back to zero the nice thing about the positive
psychology techniques is there self-maintaining so it turns out when
you start doing three good things every night you just keep doing it because you
sleep better and the light so that's p.e engagement so interesting fact about
engagement this is what my cheeks any high calls flow we're interested under
what conditions can you have more flow in life but what are your five highest
strengths and what we find is that when people use their highest strengths to
meet the challenges that come their way that they go into flow they're more
engaged engagement are real Nation ships marriage counseling is the
most dismal form of therapy people are lying to you they're lying to each other
sometimes they agree on hating you and then things go a little better so that's
not quite a positive psychology aim the question is how you can actually make a
better marriage so about eight years ago a Shelly gable and her marital
counseling friends from UCLA said let's not look at how people fight let's look
at how they celebrate together so they asked the question what do you say to
your spouse when she comes home with been promoted at work was so how do you
what are you saying a turn so imagine active passive constructive destructive
by the way this doesn't come naturally at all so what I used to do until i read
this literature was passive constructive which is congratulations dear you
deserve it that has no effect on relationships the drill sergeants that I
work with do active destructive you know what tax bracket that's going to put us
into and passive destructive is something like you know what's for
dinner ah that's number three our number four meaning meaning for me is fairly
simple minded it's belonging to and serving something you believe is bigger
than you are in life I've worked in suicide most of my life and suicide is a
complete mess and the reason it's a complete mess no one ever had a large
number of suicides all of whom took the same test before we had 84 people who
killed themselves in the army last year all of whom took our test of
psychological strengths so we were able to ask the perma question can you
predict suicide and the answer is it turns out you can and it surprised me
because the theory is a suicide is about hopelessness turns out if you're in the
bottom one percent of no meaning in life and my work in the Army has no purpose
roughly half those people killed themselves so is a red flag for
suicide and has to do with the complete absence of meaning in life and a
achievement and this is what government usually measures and since since the
Industrial Revolution GDP and the like but no this is the question of achieving
goals so Angela Duckworth my colleague and I are interested in the question of
who never gives up and self-discipline and we try to predict academic
achievement from IQ and from grit and in general when we look at success in
academia grit that is this never giving up in South discipline accounts for
about twice as much of the variance as IQ America has spelling bees a million
children enter these things in which you have to spell autochthonous and hard
words like that and so two years running Angela took the two hundred twice the
hundred and seventy two finalists measured their IQ and measured grit and
found that both times Griff but night IQ predicted the final the final for two
years running I've said that well being for me consists in perma positive
emotion engagement relationships meaning and accomplishment and I said that we
know something about how to build that there's actually random assignment
placebo-controlled studies with individuals