There is a general lay sense that all adversity is bad. And the scientific research does not really support that. One of the key ingredients to happiness is being able to recover from adversity more quickly. So it's not that the people who are happy don't respond to adversity. They do. They show an appropriate response to adversity. But they come back down to baseline quickly. (Richard J. Davidson)
There is no such thing as pleasure without pain of whatever sort emotional or otherwise. Physical or otherwise. Your nervous system is a differential engine. It looks at differences. It looks at contrasts. That's all it cares about. It integrates information by integrating a bunch of little differences in things. (P. Read Montague)
We are told in our society that the way to be a competent person, the way to be a good person is to make a lot of money. In the last 50 years, economic growth has gone up a lot, but happiness has remains stagnant.(Tim Kasser)
Hedonic adaptation: Whatever level of wealth of material goods you have, you adapt to it and you'll always want more.
We make a distinction between two main kind of goals:
intrinsic goals (like personal growth, close relations, community feeling)
extrinsic goals (focused externally like money, image, status etc)
People who have more extrinsic goals were reprting less satisfaction with their lives. They were more dipressed, more anxious, less energy.
Intrinsic people were more happy and have less anxiety.
http://www.businessinsider.com/extrinsic-goals-are-an-obstacle-to-happiness-2014-7
Gratitude, compassion, caring, love - these are to me what I would call spiritual emotions, and they make you think of things bigger than yourself. If you only seek your own happiness, it can be kind of a selfish thing. But once you move to the spiritual emotions and worry about the well-being of the world, your life grows. You care about something bigger than yourself. You, in a way, can transcend your own life, your own death, by caring these things bigger than yourself.
From Movie 'I AM':
The medical paradigm of our last 30 years has been the body's there to carry the brain around and the brain's in control of everything. Really not that way. 90% to 95% of the nerves are carrying information from the body to the brain and not the brain to the body. So, in reality, the heart send far more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.
In a sense, the heart is the boss of us. And they have discovered if you take readings of the interstitial beats of the heart, the pause can tell us what the emotional state a person is in. If the heart is sending stressful or a negative emotion or pattern, that literally inhibits our brain. We can't think clearly. We function better in a state of empathy and compassion and love, than we do in a state of separation. - Rollin McCraty (HearthMath)
The heart when it beats, it generates a large measurable electromagnetic field and radiates external to the body. We are like a television station and a television set all the same time. We are sending and receiving information every moment. And hearth math now believes that the human heart may be able to predict the future.
