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Nathan Ruan - Unit 4 KWL - Student Template*

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This story tells you about the struggles of a man living in San Francisco being kicked out of his apartment with his only son. His journey in the Pursuit of Happiness shows what it takes to live a happy and successful life

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According to this article the biggest factor of happiness is where you live

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When my husband and I moved from Los Angeles to Washington for his job, I saw only the cons in our new city: overcast skies, solemn monuments and women wearing an accessory I'd forgotten about from junior high dances: pantyhose. The humidity was oppressive, the gray a wet blanket.

I wanted to move back to Los Angeles, where the sun gave a warm welcome, the open sky made me feel free and purple flowers hung like grape clusters from the jacaranda trees.

Ron wanted to stay put. Facing off, we planted our feet and tried to pull one another in opposite directions, a tug-o-war.

We weren't dealing with mere whims. Where we live is a matter of medical interest. Geospatial medicine, sometimes called geomedicine, studies how location affects our health and well-being. Just as a person has a genetic DNA, a person has an environmental DNA, says biologist and geographer Amy Blatt, author of "Health, Science, and Place." "I don't think people take into account how importantly a place impacts their health until it's too late," Blatt says.

In "The Blue Zones of Happiness," Dan Buettner wrote about pockets of the world where people live longer, happier, healthier lives: enclaves that tend to have abundant sunshine, green spaces, an emphasis on fitness and access to whole foods. "Where a person lives determines their level of happiness more than any other factor," Buettner says.

I grew up in Ohio, near dreary Lake Erie. Once, after a blizzard, my dad placed my two younger brothers and me on a toboggan and tied the rope around his waist. We cheered with delight as he ran across the back yard, whisking us through a winter wonderland. Exhausted, he dropped the rope, and I volunteered to take over.

I slipped the loop around my puffy coat, lifted my foot and - splat! - face-planted in the snow. The toboggan hadn't budged. As a child, I wasn't strong enough to move my brothers.

As an adult, my strength was no match for Ron's, either. He was older, wiser and made more money. With all my might, I tried to drag him back across the country. Like my brothers, he didn't give way.

The average American may move almost a dozen times in a lifetime, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Americans move for all sorts of reasons: jobs, bigger houses, retirement, family or - as was the case in my early 20s when I packed my Jeep and headed to California - because we think it'll make us happier.

I still remember standing on a coastal bluff the first day I arrived. The air smelled like jasmine and honeysuckle. Sunlight sparkled like glitter on the Pacific. I tugged off my wool sweater, raised my arms to the heavens and decided on the spot I'd stay until I died.

Despite my mental-health boost, the move may have increased my risk of early death. According to the American Lung Association, 70 percent of California residents live in an area with unhealthy air. The jasmine-infused breeze I adored was contaminated with pollutants that have been linked to cancer, asthma, heart attack and stroke.

An article published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that when it comes to premature death, genetics has only a 30 percent influence; the other 70 percent is attributed to nongenetic factors such as environment, access to health care and individual behaviors.

Although the article separated environment and individual behaviors, research suggests the two are linked. In a recent British study that examined data on more than 400,000 men and women, those who lived near gyms, pools and sport fields weighed less than the others, as did those who lived farther away from fast-food joints.

"To help people achieve good health outcomes, we have to take into consideration where they live, work and play," says Marie Lynn Miranda, head of the National Center for Geospatial Medicine at Rice University. Indeed, geography may soon be routinely included in electronic medical records.

"The next generation of health-care providers will be well versed in geospatial medicine," Blatt says. "Just as you get tested for cholesterol or glucose levels, doctors will ask your place history - all the places where you have lived."

In a 2009 TEDMED Talk, "Your Health Depends on Where You Live," health and human services expert Bill Davenhall said such an assessment will allow physicians to determine which environmental toxins and stressors a person has been exposed to and for how long.

Online tools can help reveal health risks of geographic locations: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maps chronic-disease risk factors for 500 American cities; the University of Cincinnati has a Web page about the quality of drinking water for major metropolitan areas; the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index ranks the happiest areas of the country; and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation website shows life expectancy by Zip code.

But the best tool may be Google Maps or real estate websites such as Zillow's, says Blatt. The zoom feature allows you to evaluate whether a neighborhood is set up to help you make healthy choices. When relocating, "think about how your health vulnerabilities match up against potential exposures and triggers," Miranda advises.

All this research might suggest it would be a good idea to pack up and move somewhere with parks, clean water and fresh mountain air. Yet that's precisely where the link between geography, health and happiness begins to tangle in its own roots.

Relocating is considered a type of loss - like death, divorce or a job layoff - because it disrupts social ties.

Stephan Goetz, a professor of agricultural and regional economics at Penn State, published a study that showed suburban residents were happier than rural or metro folks. Interestingly, people who hadn't moved at all in the past five years also reported being happier. "This may be related to not having to find new friends and social networks," Goetz says.

Another study shows that close friendships, even more than family attachments, are key to health and happiness, especially as we age.

Moving has been associated with adverse outcomes on the young, too, according to findings published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. The study tracked more than 1.4 million Danes from age 15 to their early 40s. Researchers had a record of all the residents' moves from birth to age 14. A 14-year-old who moved even once had double the risk of abusing drugs or developing certain mental disorders by midlife compared with those who did not move at all; those risks increased with multiple moves.

When I was a teenager, my family relocated frequently for my dad's job. As an introvert, I preferred a good book to slumber parties, and the moves hit me hard. Home was my sanctuary, my safe place. Meaningful friendships came slowly. Every time we uprooted, those hard-won social networks were torn away, and I silently swore I'd never become a trailing spouse.

Over a sushi dinner a decade into my life in Los Angeles and 2 ¹/ 2 years into my marriage, Ron told me he wanted to take a job in D.C.

I pointed my chopsticks at the palm trees. "We're eating outside in February."

Despite the refrain that lapped inside me like ocean waves - don't move; don't move; don't move - we moved.

When we arrived in our new city, I wheeled my beach cruiser into the garage and parked it next to my inline skates. I missed my best friend, my book club, my favorite coffeehouse. I wrinkled my nose at the heavy colonial decor and longed for stucco. My area code, now 301 instead of 310, caused confusion among the California-based clients with whom I still worked, but mostly those two transposed numbers summed up how I felt: rearranged.

Susan Miller, who moved 14 times in 25 years while her husband was in the prime of his hotel corporate management career, founded the faith-based nonprofit Just Moved Ministry to help people cope with letting go of an old place and starting over in a new one. I took Miller's class at a church in McLean even though, by then, I'd been around six years.

"Cherish, don't cling," the leader said, speaking to the danger of clutching to the past. The next day, I looked around. Could I learn to love this city? The Washington Monument stuck straight up in the air and taunted me like a middle finger.

My outlook finally changed when Ron took me to Los Angeles for my birthday. One morning I met a friend for coffee at Shutters on the Beach. She told me she was divorcing. The tension in her marriage had torn it apart.

As the plane approached Reagan National on the flight home, I wondered: Maybe loving Washington didn't mean I had to wear Nats swag, become a political junkie or even stop pining for the mountains, sun and sea. Despite the links among geography, health and happiness, maybe the most important components were attitude and a willingness to adapt.

To love a city is to care for the people who live there. Ron loves Washington, and I love Ron. Real love means letting go of my own preferences to honor his. For years I'd been unable to embrace D.C. and its people because my hands were tied. In that moment on the plane from Los Angeles, I knew what to do: I laid down my rope.

health-science@washpost.com
Read more Americans still move around more than anyone else in the world Teens who spend less time in front of screens are happier - up to a point Not only are Americans becoming less happy, we're experiencing more pain

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Perspective | Where you live has a bigger impact on happiness and health than you might imagine

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When my husband and I moved from Los Angeles to Washington for his job, I saw only the cons in our new city: overcast skies, solemn monuments and women wearing an accessory I'd forgotten about from junior high dances: pantyhose. The humidity was oppressive, the gray a wet blanket.

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The happiness of people increased when they were in their young adulthood because of a growth of emotional maturity.

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"Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn't know you left open." - John Barrymore

We all want to be happy. "The pursuit of happiness" is one of the fundamental rights demanded in the Declaration of Independence, right along with life and liberty. Staying happy tends to be difficult as we grow older, however, and we find ourselves immersed in the complex daily problems we face. With all the hassles, job pressures, financial woes, and aches and pains that come with being human, happiness can tend to elude us.

Even defining what we mean by happiness can be tricky. Depending on the moment, "happiness" can range from simple contentment to the kind of joy that only occurs at key moments in our lives. If we simply define happiness in terms of the amount of positive emotion we happen to be feeling at any given time, research suggests that happiness actually tends to increase over time, unless serious health problems develop. As we grow older, we (usually) become better at regulating our emotions and also acquire more memories of positive moments in our lives.

At what stage in life are people most likely to be happy?

Research looking at how happiness grows and changes across the lifespan presents conflicting conclusions: Cross-sectional studies comparing adults in different age groups suggests that happiness is highest in late adolescence or early adulthood. Longitudinal research suggests, on the other hand, that happiness is greatest in seniors. One study using longitudinal data from the " Midlife in the United Status" research project found that positive affect was relatively stable across adults in their mid-20s to late 30s; declined during the 40s; and then slowly rose to reach a peak from 60 to 69. All of which suggests that those proclaiming 60 to be the new 40 may be more true than many realize.

Granted, we all experience tragedy and heartbreak-and we develop more health problems as we age. Depending on how satisfied we are with our lives, though, there generally does appear to be an upswing of positive emotion over time. A new research study published in the journal Developmental Psychology looks at how happiness changes over time in two samples-high school seniors followed from age 18 to age 43; and university seniors followed from age 23 to age 37.

A team of researchers from the University of Alberta and Brandeis University used data from the Edmonton Transitions Study (ETS) as well as mail surveys for the adult participants. The Edmonton Transitions Study is a 25-year research project following Grade 12 students over 25 years to see how their lives change over time. It measures factors such as self-esteem, marital status, employment, physical health, and parents' level of education. The university graduates in the second sample were followed in six waves over 14 years to collect data equivalent to the ETS and to measure their general shift in happiness over time.

Overall, for the high schoolers, happiness rose sharply from age 18 to 25 and leveled off slightly around the age of 32. By the age of 35 or 36, happiness begins to dip slightly as participants approached age 43. For the university sample, happiness increased in a straight line from 23 to 37-a fairly robust effect that held up even after the researchers controlled for factors such as gender, parental education, academic status, and perceived self-esteem.

Basically, these results show that happiness generally increases in young adulthood, as people become more emotionally mature. Still, maturity brings new obligations that can have a profound impact on personal happiness. Marriage, new family responsibilities, career changes, and financial worries all contribute to one's overall level of happiness. Also, young adulthood tends to be the period in our lives when we are least likely to worry about health problems, which can increase later in life.

The researchers also reported some important trends: Women tended to be generally happier than men, though the overall difference was fairly small. Not surprisingly, self-esteem and happiness were strongly linked, for both samples, as were health and employment status. Marital status typically offered a happiness boost, something consistently reported by other studies as well.

Though their results are intriguing, the researchers acknowledge that their findings are probably not universal. People from different cultures and backgrounds may not share this same general upward trend in happiness from early adulthood to midlife. Still, the study of happiness is likely to rely more and more on these kind of longitudinal studies to show how happiness grows and changes across the lifespan.

It isn't just psychologists who have an interest in happiness research: Governments around the world are relying more on social indicator studies that use subjective concepts such as happiness to measure how effective social programs and policies are in improving the lives of citizens. This includes indicators such as the Better Life Index developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development-designed to compare level of well-being for different countries-and the World Happiness Report published by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Understanding happiness and well-being have become more important than ever. As lead researcher Nancy Galambos of the University of Alberta points out, "There's a need for long-term, broad views of people's lives to understand the pathways to happiness and successful life outcomes." Happy people are less likely to develop mental health problems and generally lead more satisfying lives, something we can all appreciate.

So how happy are you feeling today?

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At What Age Will You Really Be Happiest?

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A new research study published in the journal Developmental Psychology looks at how happiness changes over time. Results show that happiness generally increases in young adulthood as people become more emotionally mature. Happy people are less likely to develop mental health problems and generally lead more satisfying lives.

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Studies show that women in the age range of 15 are usually unhappier and have a decline in their well being.

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Belgian and Polish adolescents are among the least happy in Europe, more than half the teenagers in Greenland smoke, and Eastern European boys are far more likely than girls to have had sex, according to a report from the World Health Organization. But over all, the report found, 15-year-old girls were perhaps the worst off of any group surveyed.

The report on adolescent health and happiness was based on surveys of more than 200,000 young people in 42 countries in Europe and North America. Conducted mainly between September 2013 and June 2014, it was released on Tuesday. (American teenagers did not participate.)

Partly titled "Growing Up Unequal," the report found that 15-year-old Polish, British and French girls were among those expressing the least satisfaction with their lives. They were the most likely to report a decline in their well-being, and on average, one in five reported poor or fair health. They also displayed an increased dissatisfaction with their bodies, "particularly in western and central European countries, despite actual levels of overweight and obesity remaining stable," the report said.

W.H.O.'s regional director for Europe, Zsuzsanna Jakab, wrote, "Despite the considerable advances made in the W.H.O. European Region over the decades in improving the health and well-being of young people and recent actions to reduce the health inequalities many of them face, some remain disadvantaged from birth by virtue of their gender."

Boys reported higher life satisfaction over all. But the report highlighted some elevated risk factors for male adolescents. It found that boys were more likely to engage in physical fights and to experience injury. They smoked tobacco and drank alcohol more often, though in some countries, gender differences in those behaviors were narrowing "as girls adopt behaviors typically regarded as masculine."

Early tobacco use has declined significantly since 2010, the last time the study was conducted. In many countries, fewer than 20 percent of 15-year-olds reported smoking at least once a week. But in Greenland, 53 percent of girls and 51 percent of boys said they smoked at least weekly.

Drinking was heavily skewed by gender in many countries, with 15-year-old boys in Croatia, Malta, Bulgaria and Italy reporting some of the highest incidences of alcohol use. On average, 16 percent of 15-year-old boys drink alcohol at least once a week; the number for girls is 9 percent.

Frequent marijuana use was also divided along gender lines -in some countries, boys used the drug more than girls - though that factor seemed to matter less where it was most popular. French and Canadian 15-year-olds were among the most enamored of marijuana, with boys and girls similarly reporting they had used it in the previous 30 days. Over all, 15 percent of those surveyed had used.

Boys were more likely than girls to have had sexual intercourse in about half the countries and regions surveyed, particularly in Eastern Europe. Forty percent of male 15-year-olds surveyed in Bulgaria said they had had sex, compared with 21 percent of female Bulgarians of the same age. The numbers were even more skewed in Albania, where 39 percent of boys there said that they had had sex, while 2 percent of girls the same age reported such behavior. Over all, 21 percent of the 15-year-olds surveyed reported having sex.

Apart from surveying the habits and health practices of young people, the latest report added new questions to track the health risks posed to the thousands of young migrants uprooted from their homes, and warned that new communications technology could prove a double-edged sword, particularly when it comes to young people bullying their peers over social media.

"Technology is unquestionably a positive presence in all our lives, but we must remain vigilant to the threats it poses to children and young people," Jo Inchley and Dorothy Currie, two executives who helped coordinate the study, wrote in its preface.

The report concluded that policy makers must strive to recognize girls' unhappiness and find structural solutions, and called for efforts to address the "clear gender-difference issue."

will have with us always, along for the ride, all of us doing our best.
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Study of Teenagers Asks: Who's Happier, Boys or Girls?

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Belgian and Polish adolescents are among the least happy in Europe, more than half the teenagers in Greenland smoke, and Eastern European boys are far more likely than girls to have had sex, according to a report from the World Health Organization.

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The rich contribute less than the poor when asked to donate money for a cause.

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This Is Why Rich People Aren't Always Happy

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A number of research studies suggest welath doesn't always bring happiness.

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Having a better education, being more accomplished, or being richer doesn't really predict if someone will be happy with what they are doing

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It's a paradox: Shouldn't the most accomplished be well equipped to make choices that maximize life satisfaction?

There are three things, once one's basic needs are satisfied, that academic literature points to as the ingredients for happiness: having meaningful social relationships, being good at whatever it is one spends one's days doing, and having the freedom to make life decisions independently.

But research into happiness has also yielded something a little less obvious: Being better educated, richer, or more accomplished doesn't do much to predict whether someone will be happy. In fact, it might mean someone is less likely to be satisfied with life.

That second finding is the puzzle that Raj Raghunathan, a professor of marketing at The University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business, tries to make sense of in his recent book, If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy? Raghunathan's writing does fall under the category of self-help (with all of the pep talks and progress worksheets that that entails), but his commitment to scientific research serves as ballast for the genre's glib tendencies.

I recently spoke to Raghunathan about his book. The interview that follows has been edited and condensed for the sake of clarity.

Joe Pinsker: One of the premises of your book is that people may have a sense of what will make them happy, but they approach those things in ways that don't maximize happiness. Could you provide an example of that disconnect?

Raj Raghunathan: If you take the need for mastery-the need for competence-there are two broad approaches that one can take to becoming very good at something. One approach is to engage in what people call social comparisons. That is, wanting to be the best at doing something: "I want to be the best professor there is," or something like that.

There are many problems with that, but one big problem with that is that it's very difficult to assess. What are the yardsticks for judging somebody on a particular dimension? What are the yardsticks for being the best professor? Is it about research, teaching? Even if you take only teaching, is it the ratings you get from students, or is it the content that you deliver in class, or the number of students who pass an exam or take a test and do really well in it? So it gets very difficult to judge, because these yardsticks become increasingly ambiguous as a field becomes narrower or more technical.

So what happens in general is that people tend to gravitate toward less ambiguous-even if they're not so relevant-yardsticks. People judge the best professors by the number of awards they get, or the salary that they get, or the kind of school that they are in, which might on the face of it seem like it's a good yardstick for judging how good somebody is, but at the same time it's not really relevant to the particular field.

And those yardsticks are ones that we adapt to really quickly. So if you get a huge raise this month, you might be happy for a month, two months, maybe six months. But after that, you're going to get used to it and you're going to want another big bump. And you'll want to keep getting those in order to sustain your happiness levels. In most people, you can see that that's not a very sustainable source of happiness.

Pinsker: What's the other mindset?

Raghunathan: What I recommend is an alternative approach, which is to become a little more aware of what it is that you're really good at, and what you enjoy doing. When you don't need to compare yourself to other people, you gravitate toward things that you instinctively enjoy doing, and you're good at, and if you just focus on that for a long enough time, then chances are very, very high that you're going to progress toward mastery anyway, and the fame and the power and the money and everything will come as a byproduct, rather than something that you chase directly in trying to be superior to other people.

If you were to go back to the three things that people need-mastery, belonging, and autonomy-I'd add a fourth, after basic necessities have been met. It's the attitude or the worldview that you bring to life. And that worldview can be characterized, just for simplicity, in one of two fashions: One extreme is a kind of scarcity-minded approach, that my win is going to come at somebody else's loss, which makes you engage in social comparisons. And the other view is what I would call a more abundance-oriented approach, that there's room for everybody to grow.

Pinsker: I was really interested by the line you were drawing in the book between abundance and scarcity, because instantly that makes me think of economics: Economics is, in many ways, the study of things that are scarce. Can you talk about the mental processes that are at play when people are thinking in terms of scarcity?

Raghunathan: I'm not trying to argue in the book that the scarcity mindset is either shallow or completely useless. If you're caught in a warzone, if you're in a poverty-stricken area, if you're fighting for your survival, if you're in a competitive sport like boxing, the scarcity mindset does play a very important role.

Most of us are the products of people who survived in what was for a very, very long time, in our evolution as a species, a scarcity-oriented universe. Food was scarce, resources were scarce, fertile land was scarce, and so on. So we do have a very hardwired tendency to be scarcity-oriented. But I think what has happened over time is we don't have to literally fight for our survival every day.

I think that as intelligent beings we need to recognize that some of the vestiges of our evolutionary tendencies might be holding us back. If I'm at an advertising agency, for example, or in software design, those are the kinds of fields where it is now being shown in quite a lot of studies that you actually perform better if you don't put yourself under the scarcity mindset, if you don't worry about the outcomes and enjoy the process of doing something, rather than the goal.

Pinsker: Since we're hardwired to think in terms of scarcity, I'm very interested in what can be done to prod someone into a different mindset. One experiment you talked about in the book found that workers who received a daily email to remind them to make decisions that maximize happiness reported being markedly happier than those who didn't get the email. Is it really as simple as that sort of thing?

Raghunathan: On the one hand, we are hardwired to focus more on negative things. But at the same time, we are also all hardwired to be seeking a sense of happiness and the desire to flourish, and to be the best we can be. Ultimately, what we need in order to be happy is at some level pretty simple. It requires doing something that you find meaningful, that you can kind of get lost in on a daily basis.

When you observe children, they are very good at this. They don't get distracted by all those extrinsic yardsticks. They go for things that really bring them a lot of enjoyment. In my book I talk about when we got my son a little mechanical car when he was about 3 years old, because he saw a neighbor get that car. He was into the car for about three days. After that, he wanted to play with the box in which the car came. It was just a box. He didn't have any idea that the car cost more, or was more valuable, or more technologically advanced. He was into the box because he saw a character on a TV show called Hamilton the pig, who lives inside a box. He wanted to replicate that life for himself.

What we were trying to do in that particular study is bring that focus back into people's attention. For example, rather than sitting in front of the TV, a father might decide to play a little game of baseball with his son. What people might do varies, but when there's a reminder, what we discover is that-and these are studies conducted with Fortune 500 employees, undergraduate students-they make seemingly small, you might even call them trivial, decisions, but they add up to a happier life overall. This simple reminder on an everyday basis is a kind of reality check, which puts things in perspective for people.

Pinsker: What do you think it is about the messages people receive about what it takes to be successful in business that runs counter to this mindset? In other words, do you think that working your way up any professional ladder requires not thinking in terms of abundance?

Raghunathan: Daniel Pink, in his book Drive, talks about how what used to be used as motivators to employees-what he calls the carrots and sticks approach-are now being replaced by what he calls "Motivation 2.0," which is more trying to figure out what is it that people are really passionate about. Google is a famous big company that tries to practice this, and Whole Foods is another.

I do think that we carry lots of baggage from how businesses used to operate. Simon Sinek, in one of his books, makes the argument that businesses and the rules by which businesses operate are structured along the lines of how the military used to operate-very hierarchical and scarcity-oriented. But he talks about how, actually, if you look a little bit deeper into the best leaders in the military, they tend not to be that way. So there's been a mistaken adoption of a certain set of ideas based on how things used to operate in the past, but in fact, what's now emerging as a much more successful approach to doing business and to being successful is having a more abundance-oriented approach.

In the big picture, the business world's messages are a little jumbled. In business schools, I see that there's a huge push toward corporate social responsibility and finding a passion, but at the same time, if you look at the kinds of people who get invited to come give keynote addresses, or what it is that we focus on to improve our Businessweek rankings, it's things that are extrinsic. We invite people who made a million bucks, and we look at incoming MBA students and their outgoing salaries.

Pinsker: You mentioned earlier how easily people adapt to positive changes in their lives, and I'm familiar with the research showing that lottery winners are no happier, a year later, than even people who just as recently suffered serious injuries. That resonates with me: If you told me back in high school that I was going to be writing for a magazine, I'd have been overjoyed. And right now, I am happy in many ways, but I still have a lot of the same old insecurities and worries about the future. I assume it's something a lot of others experience too. Can you talk about what's necessary to steer yourself away from that mindset?

Raghunathan: That's the plight of most people in the world, I would say. There are expectations that if you achieve some given thing, you're going to be happy. But it turns out that's not true. And a large part of that is due to adaptation, but a large part of it also is that you see this mountain in front of you and you want to climb over it. And when you do, it turns out there are more mountains to climb.

The one thing that has really, really helped me in this regard is a concept that I call "the dispassionate pursuit of passion" in the book, and basically the concept boils down to not tethering your happiness to the achievement of outcomes. The reason why it's important to not tie happiness to outcomes is that outcomes by themselves don't really have an unambiguously positive or negative effect on your happiness. Yes, there are some outcomes-you get a terminal disease, or your child dies-that are pretty extreme, but let's leave those out. But if you think about it, the breakup that you had with your childhood girlfriend, or you broke an arm and were in a hospital bed for two months, when they occurred, you might have felt, "Oh my goodness, this is the end of the world! I'm never going to recover from it." But it turns out we're very good at recovering from those, and not just that, but those very events that we thought were really extremely negative were in fact pivotal in making us grow and learn.

Everybody's got some kind of a belief about whether good things are going to happen or bad things are going to happen. There's no way to scientifically prove that one of these beliefs is more accurate than another. But if you believe life is benign, you're going to see lots of evidence for it. If you think life is malign, you're going to see lots of evidence for it. It's kind of like a placebo effect. Given that all of these beliefs are all equally valid, why not adopt the belief that is going to be more useful to you in your life as you go along?

Pinsker: It's become clear to me after reading your book and talking to you that American culture, and maybe even capitalism in general, doesn't do very much to encourage the abundance approach over the scarcity approach. Are there any societies or cultures that in your mind have figured this out, or is it the case that society will almost always send certain messages, and it's up to individuals to have their own counterprogramming?

Raghunathan: On the face of it, it might look like I'm saying that capitalism in general is not very good at promoting an abundance mindset. But I don't think that that is entirely accurate. If you were to break capitalism down into two very important tenets, one is the freedom of movement of people, thought, and goods, and the freedom of choice. The second aspect is a distribution of resources according to people's abilities rather than according to people's needs.

That first tenet of capitalism, I think, is beautiful, and I wouldn't let go of it. And if that ideology comes with the baggage of distribution of resources according to abilities, then I take that package, rather than a package where you restrict people's freedom of thought and what kinds of choices they can make, even if it's combined with a distribution of resources according to people's needs.

Ultimately, you can't force people to adopt an abundance mindset. They're going to have to select it themselves, through self-exploration and soul-searching, and looking at the science. Then, some people consciously arrive at a more socialistic way of living, by choice. That's the way in which I think this is going to work out best-for capitalism to kind of flip itself on its head to arrive at that.

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It's a paradox: Shouldn't the most accomplished be well equipped to make choices that maximize life satisfaction?

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This quote/picture definitely represents what happiness might mean to most. Finding happiness in what you do is definetly a good step into having a good and enjoyable life.

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This quote/picture really represents what the definition of happiness might mean. The quest for happiness is not just a set destination but an elaborate journey to find what makes you happy.

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Holden Caulfield and his pursuit for happiness 

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Holden Caulfield and his pursuit for happiness 

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Holden Caulfield has been struggling to find what he really wants in his life. He experiences many feelings of happiness, sadness, and grief

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Though related, self-acceptance is not the same as self-esteem. Whereas self-esteem refers specifically to how valuable, or worthwhile, we see ourselves, self-acceptance alludes to a far more global affirmation of self. When we're self-accepting, we're able to embrace all facets of ourselves--not just the positive, more "esteem-able" parts. As such, self-acceptance is unconditional, free of any qualification. We can recognize our weaknesses, limitations, and foibles, but this awareness in no way interferes with our ability to fully accept ourselves.

I regularly tell my therapy clients that if they genuinely want to improve their self-esteem, they need to explore what parts of themselves they're not yet able to accept. For, ultimately, liking ourselves more (or getting on better terms with ourselves) has mostly to do with self-acceptance. And it's only when we stop judging ourselves that we can secure a more positive sense of who we are. Which is why I believe self-esteem rises naturally as soon as we cease being so hard on ourselves. And it's precisely because self-acceptance involves far more than self-esteem that I see it as crucial to our happiness and state of well-being.

What Determines Our Self-Acceptance (or Lack of Same) in the First Place?
In general, similar to self-esteem, as children we're able to accept ourselves only to the degree we feel accepted by our parents. Research has demonstrated that before the age of eight, we lack the ability to formulate a clear, separate sense of self--that is, other than that which has been transmitted to us by our caretakers. So if our parents were unable, or unwilling, to communicate the message that we were totally okay and acceptable--independent, that is, of our hard-to-control, sometimes errant behaviors--we were primed to view ourselves ambivalently. The positive regard we received from our parents may have depended almost totally on how we acted, and unfortunately we learned that many of our behaviors weren't acceptable to them. So, identifying ourselves with these objectionable behaviors, we inevitably came to see ourselves as in many ways inadequate.

Additionally, adverse parental evaluation can, and frequently does, go far beyond disapproving specific behaviors. For example, parents may transmit to us the overall message that we're selfish--or not attractive enough, smart enough, good or "nice" enough . . . and so on. As a result of what most mental health professionals would agree reflects a subtle form of emotional abuse, almost all of us come to regard ourselves as only conditionally acceptable. In consequence, we learn to regard many aspects of our self negatively, painfully internalizing feelings of rejection we too often experienced at the hands of overly critical parents. And this tendency toward self-criticism is at the heart of most of the problems that, as adults, we unwittingly create for ourselves.
. . . So How Do We Become More Self-Accepting? Cultivating Self-Compassion, Letting Go of Guilt, and Learning to Forgive Ourselves
In other words, given how the human psyche operates, it's almost impossible not to parent ourselves similarly to how we were parented originally. If our caretakers dealt with us in a hurtful manner, as adults we'll find all kinds of ways to perpetuate that unresolved pain onto ourselves. If we were frequently ignored, berated, blamed, chastised, or physically punished, we'll somehow contrive to continue this self-indignity. So when (figuratively, at least) we "beat ourselves up," we're typically just following our parents' lead. Having to depend so much on them when we were young--and thus experiencing little authority to actually question their mixed verdict on us--we felt pretty much obliged to accept their negative appraisals as valid. This is hardly to say that they constantly put us down. But, historically, it's well-known that parents are far more likely to let us know when we do something that bothers them than to acknowledge us for our more positive, pro-social behaviors.

In fully comprehending our current reservations about ourselves, we also need to add the disapproval and criticism we may have been received from siblings, other relatives, teachers--and, especially, our peers, who (struggling with their own self-doubts) could hardly resist making fun of our frailties whenever we innocently "exposed" them. At any rate, it's safe to assume that almost all of us enter adulthood afflicted with a certain negative bias. We share a common tendency to blame ourselves, or to see ourselves as in some way defective. It's as though we all, to whatever degree, suffer from the same chronic "virus" of self-doubt.

Accepting ourselves unconditionally (despite our deficiencies) would have been almost automatic had our parents conveyed a predominantly positive message about us--and, additionally, we grew up in a generally supportive environment. But if that really wasn't the case, we need on our own to learn how to "certify" ourselves, to validate our essential ok-ness. And I'm hardly suggesting that independently confirming ourselves has anything to do with becoming complacent--only that we get over our habit of constantly judging ourselves. If deep within us we're ever to experience, as our normal state of being, personal fulfillment and peace of mind, we must first rise to the challenge of complete, unqualified self-acceptance.

As Robert Holden puts it in his book Happiness Now! "Happiness and self-acceptance go hand in hand. In fact, your level of self-acceptance determines your level of happiness. The more self-acceptance you have, the more happiness you'll allow yourself to accept, receive and enjoy. In other words, you enjoy as much happiness as you believe you're worthy of [emphasis added]."

Perhaps more than anything else, cultivating self-acceptance requires that we develop more self-compassion. Only when we can better understand and pardon ourselves for things that earlier we assumed must be all our fault can we secure the relationship to self that till now has eluded us.

To adopt a more loving stance toward ourselves--the key prerequisite for self-acceptance--we must come to realize that till now we've pretty much felt obliged to demonstrate our worth to others, just as initially we concluded that we had to submit to the judgmental authority of our caretakers. Our approval-seeking behaviors since then (misguided or not) have simply reflected the legacy of our parents' conditional love.

Undertaking such a heartfelt exploration of what I'd call our well-nigh "universal plight" almost inevitably generates increased self-compassion. And it's through this compassion that we can learn to like ourselves more, and to view ourselves as deserving of love and respect by very "virtue" of our willingness to confront (and struggle against) what previously we've found so difficult to accept about ourselves.

In a sense, we all bear "conditional-love scars" from the past. We're all among the ranks of the "walking wounded." And this recognition of our common humanity can help inspire in us not only feelings of habitually-withheld kindness and goodwill toward ourselves but toward others as well.

To become more self-accepting, we must start by telling ourselves (repeatedly and-- hopefully--with ever-increasing conviction) that given all of our negatively biased self-referencing beliefs, we've done the best we possibly could. In this light, we need to re-examine residual feelings of guilt, as well as our many self-criticisms and put-downs. We must ask ourselves specifically what it is we don't accept about ourselves and, as agents of our own healing, bring compassion and understanding to each aspect of self-rejection or -denial. By doing so, we can begin to dissolve exaggerated feelings of guilt and shame based on standards that simply didn't mirror what could realistically be expected of us at the time.

The famous French expression, "Tout comprendre, c'est tout excuser" (literally, "to understand all is to pardon all") is a dictum that we ought to apply at least as much to ourselves as to others. For the more we can grasp just why in the past we were compelled to act in a particular way, the more likely we'll be able both to excuse ourselves for this behavior and avoid repeating it in the future.

Becoming more self-accepting necessitates that we begin to appreciate that, ultimately, we're not really to blame for anything--whether it's our looks, intelligence, or any of our more questionable behaviors. Our actions have all been compelled by some combination of background and biology. Going forward, we certainly can--and in most cases, should--take responsibility for ways we've hurt or mistreated others. But if we're to productively work on becoming more self-accepting, we must do so with compassion and forgiveness in our hearts. We need to realize that, given our internal programming up to that point, we could hardly have behaved differently.

To take ourselves off the hook and gradually evolve to a state of unconditional self-acceptance, it's crucial that we adopt an attitude of "self-pardon" for our transgressions (whether actual or perceived). In the end, we may even come to realize that there's nothing to forgive. For regardless of what we may have concluded earlier, we were, in a sense, always innocent--doing the best we could, given (1) what was innate (or hard-wired) in us, (2) how compelling our needs (and feelings) were at the time, and (3) what, back then, we believed about ourselves.

Embracing Our Shadow Self
That which, finally, determines most problematic behavior is linked to common psychological defenses. And it almost borders on the cruel for us to blame ourselves--or hold ourselves in contempt--for acting in ways that at the time we thought we had to in order to protect ourselves from anxiety, shame, or emotional distress generally.

As a kind of P.S. to the above, self-acceptance also involves our willingness to recognize and make peace with parts of the self that till now may have been denied, shunned, or repudiated. I'm referring here to our illicit or anti-social impulses--our shadow self, which may have spooked or sabotaged us in the past. Still, it represents an essential part of our nature and must be functionally integrated if we are to become whole. As long as we refuse to accept--or in some way accommodate--split-off segments of self, full and unconditional self-acceptance will remain forever out of reach.

Self-Acceptance vs. Self-Improvement
When we're able to sympathetically understand the origin of these darker, recessive fragments in us, any self-evaluation rooted in them begins to feel not only uncharitable but unjust as well. The fact is that virtually everybody harbors forbidden (and quite possibly, outrageous) impulses and fantasies--whether they entail brutally injuring someone we find obnoxious, exercising unbridled power over others, or (indeed!) running naked in the streets. And when we're able to recognize this, we're also well on the way to accepting ourselves without conditions. Appreciating that, however bizarre or egregious, most of our " evil imaginings," are probably little more than fantasized compensations for indignities, hurts, or deprivations we experienced in the past, we can now reconceive our "aberrations" as, well, rather normal.

Further, even as we come to accept our shadow side we can still maintain voluntary control over how these parts of us are expressed--that is, in ways that can ensure safety both to ourselves and others. For as long as we've been able to re-connect to our deepest, truest self, we'll be coming from a place of love and caring. As such, it really isn't in us to do anything that would violate our natural tendencies toward compassion and identification with all humanity. Owning and integrating our various facets is a transcendent experience. And when we--or really, our egos--no longer feel separate from others, any sinister motive to do them harm literally disappears.

It should be apparent at this point that self-acceptance has nothing to do with self-improvement as such. For it really isn't about "fixing" anything in ourselves.With self-acceptance we're just--non-judgmentally-- affirming who we are, with whatever strengths--and weaknesses--we possess in the moment.

The problem with any focus on self-improvement is that such an orientation inevitably makes self-acceptance conditional. After all, we can't ever feel totally secure or good enough so long as our self-regard depends on constantly bettering ourselves. Self-acceptance is here-and-now oriented--not future oriented, as in: "I'll be okay when . . ." or "As soon as I accomplish . . . I'll be okay." Self-acceptance is about already being okay, with no qualifications--period. It's not that we ignore or deny our faults or frailties, just that we view them as irrelevant to our basic acceptability.

Finally, it's we--and we alone--that set the standards for our self-acceptance. And once we decide to stop grading ourselves, or "keeping score with" ourselves, we can adopt an attitude of non-evaluative forgiveness. In fact, once we refrain from our lifelong habit of assessing, and reassessing, ourselves--striving rather to compassionately understand our past behaviors--we'll find that there's really nothing to forgive (remember, "Tout comprendre. . ." ). Certainly, we can vow to do better in the future, but we can nonetheless accept ourselves precisely as we are today, regardless of our shortcomings.

And here I can't emphasize enough that it's possible to accept and love ourselves and still be committed to a lifetime of personal growth. Accepting ourselves as we are today doesn't mean we'll be without the motivation to make changes or improvements that will make us more effective, or that will enrich our (and likely others') lives. It's simply that this self-acceptance is in no way tied to such alterations. We don't have to actually do anything to secure our self-acceptance: we have only to change the way we look at ourselves. So changing our behaviors becomes solely a matter of personal preference--not a prerequisite for greater self-regard.

It's really about coming from a radically different place. If self-acceptance is to be "earned," a result of working hard on ourselves, then it's conditional--always at risk. The ongoing "job" of accepting ourselves can never be completed. Even scoring an A+ in whatever endeavor we're using to rate ourselves can offer us only temporary respite from our strivings. For the message we're giving ourselves is that we're only as worthwhile as our latest achievement. We can never finally "arrive" at a position of self-acceptance because we've inadvertently defined our quest for such acceptance as everlasting.

In holding ourselves to such perfectionistic standards, however, we may inadvertently be validating how our own conditionally-loving parents dealt with us. But we're certainly not validating ourselves--or treating ourselves with the kindness and consideration our parents failed adequately to provide for us.

To conclude, only when we're able to give ourselves unqualified approval--by developing greater self-compassion and focusing much more on our positives than negatives--can we at last forgive ourselves for our faults, as well as relinquish our need for others' approval. No doubt we've made mistakes. But then, so has everybody else. And in any case our identity is hardly equal to our mistakes (for such a linkage would represent a bad case of "mistaken identity"!)

Finally, there's no reason we can't decide right now to transform our fundamental sense of who we are. And we may need to remind ourselves that our various weaknesses are part of what makes us human. If all our faults and failings were suddenly to disappear, my pet theory is that we'd instantly turn into white light and disappear from the face of this planet. So in the pursuit of unconditional self-acceptance, we might even want to take a certain pride in our imperfections. After all, were we beyond criticism in the first place, we'd never have the opportunity to rise to this uniquely human challenge.

Note:If you found this piece useful and believe others might as well, please consider sending them the link. Additionally, if you'd like to explore other self-help articles I've written for Psychology Today, please click here.

© 2011 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

---- I invite readers to join me on Facebook , and to follow my psychological/philosophical musings on Twitter.

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The Path to Unconditional Self-Acceptance

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Though related, self-acceptance is not the same as self-esteem. Whereas self-esteem refers specifically to how valuable, or worthwhile, we see ourselves, self-acceptance alludes to a far more global affirmation of self. When we're self-accepting, we're able to embrace all facets of ourselves--not just the positive, more "esteem-able" parts.

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If you're a human being, I suspect you want to be happy. What is happiness for you? Happiness for me is reminiscing about good times with a friend while I indulge in some Nando's chicken, or receiving a standing ovation at the end of a theatre performance. My versions of happiness may not be your cup of tea, but the stimulus for happiness is subjective and thus hard to measure objectively.

"Happiness" is not only hard to measure, but it is also difficult to singularly define. You can't define happiness without using a synonym for happiness, and you can't interpret it to everyone's satisfaction. Oxford dictionaries' Captain Obvious definition for happiness is "the feeling of being happy".

So if the feeling of happiness is hard to define, then what? The solution to understanding feelings like happiness is through examination and experimentation, and by that I mean science.

Compared with misery, happiness has come out virtually unscathed in the study of social science. A quick Wiley Online Library search reveals 50,522 results for the word "happiness", compared with 409,708 for the word "depression".

However, over the past decade, the science of happiness has received a fair bit of attention, because, of course, everyone would like to be happier, and probably more now than ever because studies show modern living is depressing.

The progressive nature of humans to distort nature has had some dire consequences for the human brain. Let's be honest here, our barely evolved brains are struggling to handle the modern world properly. What should have taken hundreds of thousands of years to adapt to a digital environment through the process of evolution, has taken merely decades.

When the brain comes into contact with technology, it can become extremely addicted to it and reliant on it. This can lead to negative effects such as anxiety, stress, loneliness and depression. Severe mental illnesses have dramatically increased in the US, "The tally of those who are so disabled by mental disorders that they qualify for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) increased nearly two and a half times between 1987 and 2007 - from one in 184 Americans to one in 76. For children, the rise is even more startling - a thirty-five-fold increase in the same two decades," writes physician Marcia Angell in the New York Times Book Review.

Since the days of Aristotle, happiness was thought to have at least two aspects: hedonia (pleasure) and eudaimonia (a life well lived). In contemporary psychology, happiness is referred to as simply pleasure and meaning. Positive psychologists such as Dr Martin Seligman have recently added one more distinct component to the definition of happiness: engagement. Engagement refers to living a "good life" of work, family friends and hobbies.

Using these three aspects, psychologists have come up with a scientific term for happiness called "subjective-well being (SWB)", which is defined as a person's cognitive and affective evaluations of his or her life. According to a 2012 paper on SWB, these evaluations include emotional responses to stimuli as well as cognitive judgements on what is satisfying and fulfilling. So SWB is a combination of life satisfaction and feelings of fulfilment.

In identifying SWB across people in the real world, it was found that roughly 50 per cent of our happiness is determined by our genes, 40 per cent by our daily activities and the remaining 10 per cent by our circumstances - so what you choose to do with the 40 per cent is entirely up to you.

Happiness is intangible; you can't put it in your pocket and save it for later. So can it really be measured and studied scientifically? Yes. Researchers believe it's through an honest self-report of our own state of happiness. So do you feel happier or less happy when you're presented with X stimulus?

A 2015 study published in the Asian Journal of Psychiatry measured students' happiness and psychological well-being status in a sample of 403 high school students. The students' general health status, happiness, self-efficacy, perceived stress, hopefulness and life satisfaction were measured using self-reported written questionnaires.

It was concluded that there was a significant relation between happiness and psychological well-being. From the paper, "Those students with good relationship and those who had reported to enjoy attending social events indicated better mental health status."

In a talk, psychologist Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University compares happiness to optometry in terms of subjectivity: "Optometry is another one of those sciences that is built entirely on people's reports of subjective experience. The one and only way for an optometrist to know what your visual experience is like is to ask you, 'Does it look clearer like this or (click click) like this?'"

In the late Thirties and early Forties, researchers at the Harvard Study of Adult Development began studying the health and well-being of 268 seemingly promising male students from Harvard University. Under the direction of Dr George Vaillant, these men, some now in their 90s, are still being studied today.

Called the "Grant Study", the study examines the lives of these men through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood and old age. Some of the study's archived content is published in The Atlantic (the study is in Vaillant's book Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study).

A newer and similar social study is the BBC documentary Child of our Time. The documentary is presented by Professor Robert Winston and plans to examine the first 20 years of the lives of 25 British children born in 1999/2000.

So, by using Seligman's definition of happiness (pleasure, meaning and engagement), subjective well-being and self-reports on happiness, researchers are continuing to learn more about who is happy, what makes them happy, and why.

This infographic by nicely sums up some of the studies on the science of happiness so far:

How is happiness linked with depression?

You can't talk about happiness without relating it to depression. I ask Shawn Achor, author of the New York Times bestselling book The Happiness Advantage (2010), and founder of the Institute of Positive Research and GoodThinkInc., how happiness is linked with depression:

I went through two years of depression while at Harvard. The opposite of happiness is not unhappiness. Unhappiness serves a valuable purpose. The opposite of happiness is apathy, which is the loss of joy we feel moving toward our potential.

I also ask why there is a stigma associated with depression:

There is a stigma associated with depression because people mistakenly believe that if you were tough enough, negative feelings would not get you down. The toughest CEOs, Navy SEALS, Harvard professors, and NFL players I know have gone through depression. Sometimes, trying to be tough by ignoring emotions backfires and makes us weaker. The key to a good emotional immune system is being aware of your emotions and channeling the energy they provide toward constructive ends.

Watch segments of Achor's recent two-hour interview with Oprah Winfrey:

What can I do with the 40 per cent?

I presume you read this piece hoping I would live up to my end of the bargain by revealing the secrets to happiness. Well, I can't, I'm sorry. As happiness is subjective, the stimuli needed to be happy are also subjective. It's up to you to find out what makes you happy, whether that be getting a dream job, finding love or picking up a hobby. If it's any consolation, The Huffington Post lists the habits of extremely happy people that you can introduce into your everyday life that might make your life that bit more blissful.

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The pursuit of happiness: what is happiness, and how can we make ourselves happier?

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If you're a human being, I suspect you want to be happy. What is happiness for you? Happiness for me is reminiscing about good times with a friend while I indulge in some Nando's chicken, or receiving a standing ovation at the end of a theatre performance.

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What's your definition of happiness? Research in the field of positive psychology often defines a happy person as someone who experiences frequent positive emotions, such as joy, interest, and pride, and infrequent (though not absent) negative emotions, such as sadness, anxiety, and anger (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005). Happiness has also been said to relate to life satisfaction, appreciation of life, and moments of pleasure, but overall it has to do with the positive experience of emotions.

The key to these definitions is that positive emotions do not indicate the absence of negative emotions. A "happy person" experiences the spectrum of emotions just like anybody else, but the frequency with which they experience the negative ones may differ. It could be that "happy people" don't experience as much negative emotion because they process it differently or they may find meaning in a way others have not. In fact, using the phrase "happy person" is probably misleading because it implies that certain people are naturally happy or that positive things happen to them more often. Nobody is immune to life's stressors. The question is whether you see those stressors as moments of opposition or moments of opportunity.

Regardless of where you are on the happiness spectrum, each person has their own way of defining happiness. Philosophers, actors, politicians, and everybody in between have weighed in on their own view of happiness. Read some of our favorite definitions below and let us know what resonated with you.

Shirley MacLaine, Academy Award winner, said:

"To be happy, you have to be willing to be compliant with not knowing."

Michael J. Fox said:

"My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations."

Mastin Kipp, the founder of Daily Love, said:

"I don't expect to always be happy, I simply accept what is. And that acceptance is key. This is what self-love is all about, really, acceptance and the ability to love yourself right where you are."

Aristotle said:

"Happiness is a state of activity."

Dr. Shefali Tsabary, psychologist and author, said:

"Only when we fill our own need and feel satiated from within can we truly be fulfilled and happy."

Eleanor Roosevelt said:

"Someone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer was: A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others."

What's great about all these definitions is that commonalities start emerging. Shirley MacLaine and Michael J. Fox tell us to accept life's situations and to accept uncertainty as a natural part of life. Mastin Kipp tells us it's OK to not strive to be happy, but accept whatever we're feeling. He hints at an important concept, which is that we so often try to fix things and to be "happy" or "at peace" or "over a situation," but sometimes we need to acknowledge what we're feeling (whatever that is). What you often find is that acknowledgment will allow you to move into the "happy space" more quickly because your emotions aren't trying to get your attention. Your emotions aren't screaming at you, telling you that you're sad or angry. You've already begun the work of processing it.

Lastly, Aristotle shares a crucial part of happiness, which is staying active. How many "happy" people do you know who sit at home all day, every day? They might be content, but are they truly thriving? Happiness is often found in the doing of what you're passionate about and in building connections that are meaningful to you. Research has supported this with findings showing that strong social support is correlated with a number of positive outcomes. You might be in a rut now and you might have moments where you lose your connection to life, but you always have the opportunity to rebuild that connection.

So now it's your turn to begin finding the happiness in you. What brings you joy? Maybe it's a night in watching TV. Maybe it's a night out at a new restaurant in town. Maybe it's staying up late with your significant other. Maybe it depends on your mood. Wherever your happiness resides, go enjoy it. And tell us which of these definitions of happiness resonated with you most. Leave a comment and let us know how you define happiness.

Dr. Rubin Khoddam is a Clinical Psychologist currently working in private practice in Los Angeles, CA as well as at the West Los Angeles VA as the Team Lead in the residential rehabilitation program for individuals dealing with issues related to substance use and homelessness. Dr. Khoddam currently provides individual, couples and family therapy, as well as group therapy. He also runs the IMPROVE: Outpatient Substance Use Treatment Program, a low-demand, harm reduction substance use treatment program for individuals hoping to decrease their substance use or examine the impact of their substance use in their life. For more information, visit his site www.DrRubinKhoddam.com and follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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What's your definition of happiness? Research in the field of positive psychology often defines a happy person as someone who experiences frequent positive emotions, such as joy, interest, and pride, and infrequent (though not absent) negative emotions, such as sadness, anxiety, and anger (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005).