Want To Boost Your Wellbeing In 2022? Here ’s What The Research Says

By Emma Young It’s natural to start a new year with plans to make this one better than the last. But if you are thinking about how to boost your wellbeing, it’s worth knowing that some “good” ways of living have dark sides, too… Happiness People who are happy — who enjoy “hedonistic wellbeing” — experience plenty of positive emotions and are generally pretty satisfied with life. If this sounds like something worth aiming for, then a word of caution: there’s plenty of evidence that striving to be happier can backfire. The authors of an influential review article published in Perspectives on Psychological Science back in 2011 concluded that while some of the strategies recommended for boosting happiness — such as taking time in the day to reflect on what you are grateful for — are far from bad in themselves, if you expect that they will make you feel noticeably happier, but find that they don’t, you can be left worse off than when you started. More recently, Aekyoung Kim and Sam Maglio from Rutgers concluded that people who pursue happiness can end up feeling that the time in the day to do what’s needed to achieve this is vanishing — which makes them more unhappy. Two of the lessons from research in this area: don’t start out with high expectations of how much happier you might become, and don’t feel that you should be devoting a lot of time to becoming happier. You might also want to look beyond happinessâ€...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotion Feature Positive psychology Source Type: blogs