The Keys to Happiness 🔐

Alright, folks, here we are for yet again, another live stream. I'm Evan, I'm your resident mental health and addiction therapist and I am super excited to talk about this topic. I think it's so important. So let's wait just maybe a little bit. See, as the beacon goes out, we'll see if we can get some people hopping on. See how this is looking. So the beacon is out. We'll see if anybody hops on. But anyways, today's topic is all about happiness and that's what we're all striving for, right? And I think it's interesting because as a therapist, I mean, that is our goal, really, to decrease any negative adverse of things in one's life that is causing them pain and suffering.

That may be a mental health disorder, that may be certain circumstances they need to work through, but essentially to make them happier. Yet the only thing is, like in therapy school, in our therapy boot camp masters training, we're not necessarily taught, here's what actually makes people happy. And that's why I added that word actually, even though my grammar app dings me. So you don't need to say actually, but no, you actually do. Because we have ideas in our mind of what makes us happy, but we're not always right.

Because as human beings in our psychology, we don't always know what's in our best interests. And we chase certain things that we think will make us happy, but they often don't. And there's some confusion there because, like I said in the description, we talk about things like money doesn't buy happiness, but does it? Is that actually true? Because we certainly chase it a lot. But that's what I want to do here is I want to go over the research and what's, to the best of our knowledge, of what actually makes people happy, but also sharing a little bit of my experience and if that aligns with my experience as a therapist, because a lot of it I do agree with.

So with that being said, should we jump into it? And we're going to go over into some of the variables that are most associated, and I'm going to pull a lot of these off of one very interesting study, and that would be one from a man named Robert Waldinger. So I have some of this up here. He is a psychiatrist and researcher at Harvard, known for his study on adult development. Now, he kind of took over the study and it's been going on for 80 years. So that's why this study is so interesting. It's been following two groups of people for 80 years.

Now. There are some limitations to the study, as you'll see. Like every study has limitations, but I think it offers very interesting insights. And if you look at other similar studies, they find very similar results that as human beings often, you know, there are differences. And wherever we land on the intersectionality scale, but there's some experience, experiences that are pretty human and that certain variables are things that make us happy as human beings and who live in a society, even though our societies may be different.

So let's see. Let's jump into that. Let's check on this slide. So we talked about the research. So two groups of men, and so they followed their lives. One was from Harvard College and the other from one of the poorest neighborhoods in Boston. So there's some intersectionality differences. These are all men, I believe most, if not all, are caucasian. But it looked at, you know, at least separating by, by that value to see what are some of the variables despite their circumstances. All right, so let's start with.

Bounce around a little bit. So let's start with this one. So this one, as a therapist, is obviously going to be of interest to me. But he found that one of the variables of people who are reporting the highest levels of happiness, and this also includes health, because we know that physical health, mental health are so intertwined. So let's take a look here. And that is emotional regulation. And so people who can manage their emotions effectively tend to be happier and healthier. This includes being able to handle stress, anxiety, other negative emotions in a healthy way.

And that's one of the things we do as therapists, is how do we have a better relationship with our automatic thoughts and emotions that come up, whether that's just how we are naturally built or how we are shaped through our environment. Either way, if we're better able to have a relationship with ourselves, with our thoughts, with our emotions, it's going to make us happier, because as I talked about in one of my previous lives, as far as frequency, duration and intensity, right? How frequent am I experiencing these negative emotions or mental health symptoms?

How long do they last and how intense are they? We are able to do work on those things in therapy. So we'll plug for therapy. We're able to do work on these things. So it's less and less and has a less negative and intrusive factor in your life. So that one makes a lot of sense to me. With that, there's another one, I think relay, which is resilience. So being able to bounce back from setbacks and challenges is important for happiness and longevity. Waldinger found that people who are resilient and able to cope with stress and adversity tend to be happier and again, healthier.

So that's an interesting one, too. And that's something that you can build and work on in therapy. You know, everyone is just like any other personality, character, physical trait is going to be. We're going to be better at some things and not as good as others. And so some people are naturally more resilient, but that is something you can work on. And with that similar engagement and working on emotional regulation, some of those same things could help you be more resilient. The next is healthy behaviors.

So people who engage in healthy behaviors, such as regular exercise, healthy diet, and getting enough sleep, tend to be happier and live longer. And that's a huge one, right? Sleep, diet, and exercise. And I think this one's interesting. When you look at. I always find this fascinating when you look at the regions known as the blue zones, which are areas in the world that have the highest number of people who live to 100. Right. What do they have in common? That's something we could learn about.

If I want to live to 100, I should probably look at the people who do live to 100 and see what they have in common. And there are some variables that are actually pretty consistent with some of these other ones that I'm sharing. So let's see here. So the blue zone, some examples of that would be Okinawa, Japan, Sardinia in Italy, the 7th day Adventists community in California. All right, I'm going to just.