Can we agree on dictionary.com?
It looks like both definitions are inculded.
The “OMG OMG I just won the lottery” could be joyful or ecstatic. I don’t agree that saying “happy” for an “overwhelming feeling of contentment” is incorrect.
I was just reading about studies this weekend that demonstrate that being happy all the time is bad for you. For instance, people who are happy are more likely to be deceived than someone who is in a neutral mood. I think I read one that even mentioned negative affects on physical health Sure, happiness is more pleasant than not being happy, but there’s other things going on with your emotions besides feeling good. The purpose of mental health isn’t to feel good, it’s to be healthy. And being healthy doesn’t always mean feeling good, it means being able to do the things we need to do and being able to cope when bad stuff happens .
I think the analogy with physical health is very apt. I’m in excellent physical health, but I don’t necessarily feel great all the time. In fact, I feel pretty neutral physically. However, I’m able to exert myself and do things that I couldn’t do if I were in less health, and when I do get sick or injured, I recover more quickly than if I were less healthy. That’s exactly how I look at my mental health. It’s not all that often that I get overwhelmed by stress or my emotions start interfering with my life, but when bad things do happen, I can generally work through my issues.
So for psychologists, expecting that they are going to be happy people seems to be misunderstanding what they do. As others said, I would tend to think the mental health field will tend to self-select people who are looking for help for their own issues. Thus, they may tend to have more tools to be healthy, but if they’re also more likely to be unhealthy, that may not be enough.
Further, I would also tend to think that people in the field are more likely to be more empathetic than the general population, otherwise why would they be in a field trying to help people? I know for me, even if I’m in a good mood, if I’m talking to a friend or aquaintance and they’re telling me about their troubles, it will have a tendency to drag my mood down a bit too. If I were doing that as a career, I’d probably have that much more difficulty with keeping my emotional balance. Returning to the physical health analogy, that’s not really any different than being in good physical health but doing hard physical labor and just wearing yourself out or just being more likely to injure yourself or being around a lot of people all day and being more likely to catch an infection. In either case, even if you’re generally in great shape, you’ll be worse off than that might otherwise predict.
Do you have some links that I could read?
Thank you. I will get to that in a bit.
Could you please point to me where in that article it says being happy will make you unhappier? I read it, and I see two major points:
- Being happy makes you easier to deceive. Ok, that could make you unhappy, but that’s a result of being stupidly happy, I guess, not just being happy.
- Setting your expectations too high to be happy will make you not be happy. Well, of course - you can’t chase the elusive beast of happiness. It must come to you.
The ultimate point seems to be “What’s bad is when people make happiness their explicit goal all the time.”
Yes, and that’s a really important point. The article points out that you’re best off just accepting the world the way it is. In the moment.
It’s like trying to catch a cat. The more you chase it, the more it runs away. If you sit and ignore it – hey, free lap kitty!
He never stated that. He just said being happy all the time is bad for you.
Unhappy =/= bad, essentially. Heck, perhaps unhappiness is a necessary trait from time to time to keep us more leveled with our thinking.
Dr. Phil seems to be happy all the time.
Sometimes I just want to knock the happiness right out of him. Seriously happy people pluck my nerves.
I’m reading Authentic Happiness by Dr. Martin Seligman, and in Chapter 3 he cites some studies that show depressed people are more accurate judges of themselves, whereas happy people tend to overestimate their job performance, driving ability, that seem to conclude that depressed people are more realistic. He then continues with saying this is contentious, and that Lisa Aspinwall gathered evidence showing that in important real-life decisions happy people may do better. So there seems to be debate.
I should note that it also discusses that happiness equal longer, healthier living.
Cites:
Nuns who display positive emotion in the autobiographical sketches live longer and are healthier over the next seventy years. Danner, D., Snowdon, D., and Friesen, W. (2001). Positive emotions in early life and longevity: Findings from the nun study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 804– 813.
Positive emotion also protects: Ostir, G., Markides, K., Black, S., and Goodwin, J. (2000). Emotional well-being predicts subsequent functional independence and survival. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 48, 473– 478.
You will recall: Danner, D., and Snowdon, D. (2001). Positive emotion in early life and longevity: Findings from the nun study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 804– 813; Maruta, T., Colligan, R., Malinchoc, M., and Offord, K. (2000); Optimists vs pessimists: Survival rate among
medical patients over a 30-year period. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 75, 140– 143.
Seligman, Martin E. P. (2002-10-02). Authentic Happiness (Kindle Locations 4664-4665). Simon & Schuster, Inc… Kindle Edition.