Cultivating Happiness

If I tell you that there is a secret recipe with five ingredients, as long as you make sure in your dish, there is a good amount of each ingredient and they co-exist in harmony, you can cook sustained happiness, would you want to believe me? Don’t take my word for it, the founding father of Positive Psychology Dr. Martin Seligman had discovered this framework for authentic happiness called PERMA.

• P (Positive Emotions): The good feelings such as joy, pride, awe, inspiration etc.
• E (Engagement or Flow): The activities that you are so engrossed in and make you lose track of time
• R (Relationship): The people who love, support and care about you and help you feel good
• M (Meaning): What drives and motivates you?
• A (Achievement or Accomplishment): The goals, big or small, that you have achieved and things you have accomplished

Now, do a self-assessment to see whether you have indeed maintained a good balance of all five ingredients? Speaking from my personal experience, when I was going through my struggles and felt an extreme sense of loneliness and sometimes apathy, all five of my ingredients were at a historic low and especially the ingredient of R (Relationship) was actually at freezing point.

The result of this self-assessment took me by surprise because I have always been a warm and outgoing person; I am married and have two beautiful children; I have good relationship with my parents and have many people who I would call friends. However, I neglected to realize that since the start of the pandemic, I had been mostly retreated from the society back home. My team got converted into a fully remote working mode; before my young children were able to get vaccinated, they attended online classes and we stayed socially isolated; my parents live in another country which prevented foreigners to visit for three years since COVID started. Outside of our small unit of four, I maintained all my other relationships via virtual means. Though the kids returned to school in January 2022, out of habit, I never reached out to friends and neighbors nearby but rather continued with my cave-person style.

Well, now I know better, a major theme of Positive Psychology is called “Other People Matter”. In stressful times, we tend to retreat and look inward. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, and sometimes a necessity, a prolonged period of social isolation is not healthy to any human being regardless of their personality. From hunter-gather times, human beings learnt that being alone meant danger and likely demise. So we are hard wired to be social animals who need to maintain a reasonable level of social interaction to stay well.

I understand that my case may be quite extreme, but still very telling, validation of the PERMA framework.

Are you ready to cook happiness? Let’s start today! Wish you all well!