The Happiness Advantage
This book is a multivitamin for the soul.
We all know people who seem to be making it through life even though they only sleep 4 hours per night, have a disproportionate water to caffeine ratio, don’t wash their produce, spend more time in their car than at home, and are passionately opposed to multivitamins. I would know. I’m a recovering college student. Even while intimately understanding most of my bad college habits, the one I look back on with confusion is the disdain for multivitamins. Like, seriously, g? It’s a SINGLE morsel of sustenance. It takes ONE bite to eat! They even make yummy flintstone shaped gummy ones! I can’t explain it but for some reason, taking a one-bite multivitamin felt like cheating.
“If I’m meant to eat the alphabet, you better believe it’s gonna to take me at least 26 bites!”
(hahhahahahaha, get it? Because A,1, B, 2, C, 3, D…. yeah yeah, you get it.)
As many former college students can attest , the habits of my past came back to bite me in the as*… I mean butt. I am now realizing that:
Cultivating a better, healthier life is allowed to be simple
One bite isn’t cheating
Simple doesn’t equal easy
In The Happiness Advantage, author Shawn Achor basically offers the multivitamin for a better, healthier, happier life. He provides a plethora of simple tools that can be used once a day, but aren’t always easy. Sharing this book with you, reader, is my attempt to share lessons learned from my past mistakes. Instead of avoiding this multivitamin like the plague (ironic!), I am welcoming it into my life with great gratitude. I hope you will too.
A zippy 210 pages will educate, inspire, and hopefully encourage you to start prioritizing positivity. At first, I was skeptical of this concept called “positive psychology.” It seemed like a convenient justification for people who want to ignore the very real struggles of life. How ignorant of me. That is not at all the case! Shawn directs the reader towards the true definition of this psychological principle. One that is rooted in something surprising:
Hard Work
He says that “happiness is not just a mood– it’s a work ethic.” That is why, I believe, that the happiness advantage is accessible to everyone. How do you work towards happiness? I’m so glad you asked! According to Shawn, there are 7 principles that lead to a more fulfilling personal & professional state of being. Each actionable concept builds towards the ultimate goal of a life, not free of negativity, but primed towards positivity. Being “primed towards positivity” plays on that thing you might have learned about in an intro level psychology class called confirmation bias. Long story short: if you have a generally negative mindset, you will notice more negativity in the world around you. The same (but opposite) is true for positivity!
“Repeated studies have shown that two people can view the same situation and actually see different things, depending on what they are expecting to see.”
Reading this book will teach you how to expect the good in life! Writing that literally just made me smile :) This, the idea of cultivating a positive confirmation bias, is deeply personal for me. I have been both praised and ridiculed for my view of the world. I can’t help it– I see the good. My glass is half full. My rose colored glasses ARE ON (que Ryan Gosling). Those were all acceptable qualities until I crossed the threshold of adult-hood. On this side of the void, more people prefer an empty glass. Being an optimist might very well get you aggressive eye rolls. Smiling too much could be described as your “achilles heel”… I’m not even making that one up. These interactions are what have conditioned me to be skeptical of a concept called “positive psychology.” But reading this book felt like coming home. It felt like reading a letter written by my younger self. A letter from lil g combined with hard science and some serious psychological voodoo.
So, here we go: Would I recommend this book? Abso-freakin-lutely! Every human should pick up a copy at some point in their life. Blissfully ignorant optimists and Debby Downers alike can all glean some useful insights from author Shawn Achor’s writing. He combines humor, life experience, neuroscience, and psychology in a way that brings gravity to abstract concepts. After reading The Happiness Advantage, the concept of happiness will feel concrete.
I hope you enjoy the read.
xoxo,
g
