Positive psychology and eudamonia

by Matrin Seligman

• In order to answer the question of what I want to do and what my ambitions are, it's worth surveying what psychology has done and what psychology can be proud of. The domain of psychology that I come from — clinical psychology, social psychology — has one major medal on its chest: psychology and psychiatry can make miserable people less miserable. That's great. I'm all for it.
• But there were three costs of becoming part of the disease model: The first one was moral, that we became victimologists and pathologizers. Our view of human nature was that mental illness fell on you like a ton of bricks, and we forgot about notions like choice, responsibility, preference, will, character, and the like. The second cost was that by working only on mental illness we forgot about making the lives of relatively untroubled people happier, more productive, and more fulfilling. And we completely forgot about genius, which became a dirty word. The third cost was that because we were trying to undo pathology we didn't develop interventions to make people happier; we developed interventions to make people less miserable.
• That's the background. What's missing is the question of whether psychologists can make people lastingly happier. That is, can we apply the same kind of scientific method to get cumulative, replicable interventions? My great ambition for psychology, and I hope to play a role in it, is that in the next 10 to 15 years we will be able to make the parallel claim about happiness; that is, in the same way I can claim unblushingly that psychology and psychiatry have decreased the tonnage of suffering in the world, my aim is that psychology and maybe psychiatry will increase the tonnage of happiness in the world.

  ---

• Happiness is hopelessly vague shorthand for other things, so when I began to work in positive psychology my first task was a wheat/chaff task to try to say what the measurable components of what people mean by happiness are. What are the workable pieces of it? The word happiness, like the word cognition, plays no role in cognitive theory. Cognition is about memory, perception, etc. The field of happiness is about other things. The word happiness plays only a role for labeling what we're doing.
• What's workable within happiness are three different kinds of lives: The first is the pleasant life, which consists of having as many of the positive emotions as you can, and learning the skills that amplify them. But, one might ask, isn't that where positive psychology ends? Isn't pleasure all there is to the positive side of life? You only have to look superficially back to the history of philosophy to find out that from Aristotle through Seneca through Wittgenstein the notion of pleasure was thought of as vulgar. There's very good intellectual provenance for two other kinds of happy lives, which in the Hollywood/American conception have gone by the boards. Part of my job is to resurrect them.
• The second one is eudaemonia, the good life, which is what Thomas Jefferson and Aristotle meant by the pursuit of happiness. They did not mean smiling a lot and giggling. Aristotle talks about the pleasures of contemplation and the pleasures of good conversation. Aristotle is not talking about raw feeling, about thrills, about orgasms. Aristotle is talking about what Mike Csikszentmihalyi works on, and that is, when one has a good conversation, when one contemplates well. When one is in eudaemonia, time stops. You feel completely at home. Self-consciousness is blocked. You're one with the music.
• So just to review so far, there is the pleasant life — having as many of the pleasures as you can and the skills to amplify them — and the good life — knowing what your signature strengths are and recrafting everything you do to use them a much as possible. But there's a third form of life, and if you're a bridge player like me, or a stamp collector, you can have eudaemonia; that is, you can be in flow. But everyone finds that as they grow older and look in the mirror they worry that they're fidgeting until they die. That's because there's a third form of happiness that is ineluctably pursued by humans, and that's the pursuit of meaning. There is one thing we know about meaning: that meaning consists in attachment to something bigger than you are. The self is not a very good site for meaning, and the larger the thing that you can credibly attach yourself to, the more meaning you get out of life.
• Notice, this isn't a distinction between good and evil. That's not part of this. This isn't a theory of everything. This is a theory of meaning, and the theory says, joining and serving in things larger than you that you believe in while using your highest strengths is a recipe for meaning. One of the things people don't like about my theory is that suicide bombers and the firemen who saved lives and lost their lives both had meaningful lives. I would condemn one as evil and the other as good, but not on the grounds of meaning.

  ---

• The job of the positive psychologist is to find out what's really right with you — something you may not be aware of — and to get you to use it more and more.
• If you consider Est, or Tony Robbins, or the Maharishi, these are not dumb people. They've invented a lot of interventions. Tony Robbins has people doing fire walks, Est, I gather, has people not going to the bathroom for 24 hours, and the like. Some of these actually work, and some don't. The challenge is to subject them to the nasty thumb of science. A great deal of my work now is to take all of these interventions, manualize them, randomly assign people to them, and then look to see if in the long run these make people lastingly happier. My ambition and my optimism for psychology over the next 15 years is that we will actually have a set of interventions which will reliably make people happier, and many of which you can do yourself. You won't need to go to therapists to do it. The method for finding out what works is the same old method; that is, the random assignment placebo controlled study that we did with misery. It's exactly the same question for making people happier.
• I'm not going to give away a placebo, but let me just say a couple of things about it. It turns out we've already found out that several of the things that have been proposed — from the Buddha to Tony Robbins — don't work. We've got them up there on the website, people do them, and we find that there's no lasting change in either lowering depression or raising the level of happiness. But they're plausible; they're things that you or I would think would work, but because some of your viewers are now going to jump to authentichappiness.org and get into the placebo I don't want to give away what the placebos are. The interesting thing is that some of these things actually lastingly make people happier, and others don't. The aim of science is to find out what the active ingredients are.

  ---

• I spent the first 30 years of my career working on misery. The first thing I worked on was learned helplessness. I found helpless dogs, helpless rats, and helpless people, and I began to ask, almost 40 years ago now, how do you break it up? What's the neuroscience of it? What drugs work? While working on helplessness there was a finding I was always brushing under the rug, which was that with people and with animals, when we gave them uncontrollable events, only five out of eight became helpless. About a third of them we couldn't make helpless. And about a tenth of them were helpless to begin with and we didn't have to do anything.
• About 25 years ago I began to ask the question, who never gets helpless? That is, who resists collapsing? And the reverse question is, who becomes helpless at the drop of a hat? I got interested in optimism because I found out that the people who didn't become helpless were people who when they encountered events in which nothing they did mattered, thought about those events as being temporary, controllable, local, and not their fault; whereas people who collapsed in a heap immediately upon becoming helpless were people who saw the bad event as being permanent, uncontrollable, pervasive, and their fault. 25 years ago I started working on optimism versus pessimism, and I found that optimistic people got depressed at half the rate of pessimistic people, that optimistic people succeeded better in all professions that we measured except one, that optimistic people had better, feistier, immune systems, and probably lived longer than pessimistic people. We also created interventions that reliably changed pessimists into optimists.
• That's what I did up until about six years ago. Six or seven years ago I had an epiphany. It changed my life, and I hope it's changed the course of psychology. <I had conversation with my daughter – Nicky->In that moment, three things happened to me. The first was I realized that Nicky was right about me, that I had spent more than 50 years being a nimbus cloud and I didn't have a theory about why it's good to be a grouch. Some people talk about depressive realism, the idea that depressed people see reality better, but it occurred to me that maybe any success I'd had in life was in spite of being a grouch, not because of being a grouch, so I resolved to change. You haven't known me long enough, but people who have known me for that span of time know that I'm a sunnier person and deploy my critical intelligence less. I'm better able to see what's right, and I'm better at suppressing my falcon-like vigilance for what's wrong.
• The second part of the epiphany was that I realized was that with any program whose aim is to correct what's wrong, even if it's asymptotically successful, the best it can ever get to is zero. And yet when you lie in bed at night you're not thinking about how to go from -5 to -2; you're generally thinking about how to go from +2 to +6 in life. It was interesting to me that there was no science for that. All of the science was remedial, correcting the negatives.
• That led to the third, final, and most important part of the epiphany: I realized that my profession in social science generally was half-baked. The part that was baked was about victims, suffering and trauma, depression, anxiety, anger, and on and on. I'd spent my life on that and we knew a lot about it. That's what I meant by saying that the medal on our chest is that we can make miserable people less miserable. But the part that was unbaked was about what makes life worth living? What is happiness? What is virtue? What is meaning? What is strength? How are these things built? It became my mission in life, from that moment in the garden, to help to create a positive psychology whose mission would be the understanding and building of positive emotion, of strength and virtue, and of positive institutions.

• First, it's important to know that in general there are two kinds of medications. There are palliatives,  which suppress the symptoms for as long as you take them. Then there are curative drugs, like antibiotics for bacterial infection. When you stop taking those the bacteria are dead and don't recur.
• The dirty little secret of biological psychiatry is that every single drug in the psychopharmacopia is palliative. That is, skilled clinicians often tell me that they've worked to bring out people's strengths, but never learned how to do it in graduate school. Part of what I'm training people to do is how to systematically test for the strengths, build them, and use them as buffers.
• What are the "therapeutic" and drug prospects for positive psychology? Pleasant life, pleasures; good life, flow; meaningful life. And each of these I think has different possibilities. There are psychological interventions that I believe are effective for all three of those — indeed, that's what I meant by the random assignment placebo control endeavor. The question is, are we likely to find drugs that work on the pleasant life, the good life, and the meaningful life?
• The answer is probably yes for the pleasant life. That is, there's a neuroscience that's relevant to the positive emotions, and people like Richard Davidson are beginning to pin down some localization within the brain. There are shortcuts to pleasure, and if you play with the relevant neural circuits, those are shortcuts.
• Flow, however, doesn't have shortcuts. We have to indulge in our highest strengths in order to get eudaemonia. So can there be a shortcut? Can there be a pharmacology of it? I doubt it.
• The third form of happiness, which is meaning, is again knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There's no shortcut to that. That's what life is about. There will likely be a pharmacology of pleasure, and there may be a pharmacology of positive emotion generally, but it's unlikely there'll be an interesting pharmacology of flow. And it's impossible that there'll be a pharmacology of meaning.

Based on: