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My dad shared how he loves his car and why he loves his car. He loves it so much because that is his one hobby that he is best at. It makes him feel proud to be able to have that certain skill. The purpose of having hobbies are to be unique and to relax and relieve stress. Santiago prefers to fish everyday, because that's what he does best! Most people should accept that their favorite hobbies will change and they will have new interest too.

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When one finds love or passion in someone or something, it provides a feeling of comfort and ease. Being able to trust another and have someone there for you is a powerful thing to have. I think the awareness that someone is interested in you and truly is fond about you makes you feel way more confident and happy. Each person has a different way on how they love and what or who they love. But all of them result in mostly happiness and content. Gatsby is a happier man when he reconnects with Daisy. Also, Santiago is a better person when he is able to go fishing everyday.

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hap·py

ˈhapē/

adjective

1. feeling or showing pleasure or contentment.

2. fortunate and convenient.

(dictionary.com)

Many people have a different perspective of what makes them happy, but all of those things bring a good feeling to the person.

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Winning is such a great and satisfying experience. What makes it the best is to know that all your hard work has paid off and it hasn't been a waste of time. Sometimes you don't even need to win and have a reward to be happy. The hard work someone puts in, may make them feel happier. The Old Man for The Old Man and the Sea, cherished the time and hard work that he experienced trying to catch the fish more then complaining that he couldn't bring it back alive. Contrast to the Old Man, Jay Gatsby wasn't ever satisfied until he got the physical thing he wanted.

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I feel like making rules on the do's and don'ts of being happy will result in never being satisfactory with anything. Having high standards will just make things more stressful. I know that when I get assignments and read the do's and don'ts parts, it makes me more stressed for making the project exceeding and perfect for class.

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During the holidays it makes me happy because it brings my family together and we do a bunch of traditions. As I grow older I still like the holidays because I get to spend time with most of my family and it gives me a little break from school. I feel like the holidays are great ways to rekindle family and friends together. Also the holidays can be stressful for some and they may dread the time of the year. It is different for every family, which is special.

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Bob McFerrin says, "In every life we have some trouble, When you worry you make it double." I really agree with this statement. When you dwell on the bad things in life, you will never have the capacity to bring happiness into your life. This why some people have trouble finding happiness. It is good to thing more optimistic in life because you will find yourself being more successful. This can compare to Gatsby because the fact that he wasn't good enough for being with Daisy, he found himself doing things that didn't make him happy like throwing the parties. He would've been a far more happy person if he tried not to be someone he wasn't and won her over by being himself.

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Bobby McFerrin - Don't Worry Be Happy (Official Music Video)

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According to Jessica Orwig, "Researchers at the University of Vermont found that even just 20 minutes of exercise can give you those mood-boosting benefits for up to 12 hours afterward!" Even though everyone loathes exercising and prefers to stay home and relax, exercising has many benefits. "Exercise is proven to increase feel-good chemicals in the brain, reduce stress hormones, and relieve depression and anxiety according to Happify." For me, after I workout I feel stronger and toned. It makes me feel better about my physical and outer view view of myself. The feeling after a good workout also makes me feel accomplished and successful. But in other cases, some people may seem like they are overweight and pick out all there flaws making them less motivated or even to an unhealthy stage. There are different views about exercising, but taking advantage of the benefits will make one confident about themselves.

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Feeling stressed, anxious or depressed?

Exercise is proven to increase feel-good chemicals in the brain, reduce stress hormones, and relieve depression and anxiety according to Happify, a website and app that offers psychology-based games to increase your happiness.

And you can achieve these positive changes in just a few short minutes. Researchers at the University of Vermont found that even just 20 minutes of exercise can give you those mood-boosting benefits for up to 12 hours afterward! Moreover, people who are active are happier and more satisfied with their lives.

The duration and location of your workout also affects how happy you feel afterward. So, check out how to achieve your maximum happiness sweet spot.

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Exercise Can Make You Happier - Here's How

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Feeling stressed, anxious or depressed? Exercise is proven to increase feel-good chemicals in the brain, reduce stress hormones, and relieve depression and anxiety according to Happify, a website and app that offers psychology-based games to increase your happiness. And you can achieve these positive changes in just a few short minutes.

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I thought it was just me but according to this, weather can affect your mood. It is called Seasonal Effective disorder, which usually is found between the months October to April. Due to the lack of sun, your body produces melatonin. Melatonin is the hormone that makes you feel sleepier. I have definitely experienced the sleepiness affect of melatonin throughout these past months. Now that the seasons and weather is changing, I feel that my mood has changed. Seeing sunlight and being exposed to it makes me feel more of a happier person. I am more motivated to do a lot with my day instead of take naps. I would like to compare this disorder to a bear hibernating in the winter! Many people are out and able to do more things than be stuck inside. When it's nice outside, Gatsby throws parties and everyone has the greatest times. This can also compare to The Old Man and the Sea, when he had good experiences with fishing and was less stressed when the weather was nice and good for fishing. More people are able to do the things they love when the weather is nice.

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According to DNews, "Listening to moving music causes the brain to release dopamine, a feel-good chemical." In my opinion, listening to my favorite songs have a really big impact on my mood. Listening to upbeat music makes me feel more energetic and motivated while slow music may make me feel sad or slower. Many people workout listening to music because it motivates and entertains them. I also feel like when I listen to music I feel more satisfied on how I used my time. I get something accomplished that is boring and I don't prefer to do, but music makes me feel happier and successful on how I utilized my time.

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People love music for much the same reason they're drawn to sex, drugs, gambling and delicious food, according to new research. When you listen to tunes that move you, the study found, your brain releases dopamine, a chemical involved in both motivation and addiction.

Even just anticipating the sounds of a composition like Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" or Phish's "You Enjoy Myself" can get the feel-good chemical flowing, found the study, which was the first to make a concrete link between dopamine release and musical pleasure.

The findings offer a biological explanation for why music has been such a major part of major emotional events in cultures around the world since the beginning of human history. Through music, the study also offers new insights into how the human pleasure system works.

"You're following these tunes and anticipating what's going to come next and whether it's going to confirm or surprise you, and all of these little cognitive nuances are what's giving you this amazing pleasure," said Valorie Salimpoor, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal. "The reinforcement or reward happens almost entirely because of dopamine."

"This basically explains why music has been around for so long," she added. "The intense pleasure we get from it is actually biologically reinforcing in the brain, and now here's proof for it."

In a previous study, Salimpoor and colleagues linked music-induced pleasure with a surge in intense emotional arousal, including changes in heart rate, pulse, breathing rate and other measurements. Along with these physical changes, people often report feelings of shivers or chills. When that happens during a listening experience, Salimpoor's group and others have found evidence that blood flows to regions in the brain involved in dopamine release.

To solidify the dopamine link, the researchers recruited eight music-lovers, who brought to the lab samples of music that gave them chills of pleasure. Most picks were classical, with some jazz, rock and popular music mixed in, including Led Zeppelin and Dave Matthews Band. The most popular selection was Barbar's Adagio for Strings.

After 15 minutes of listening, scientists injected participants with a radioactive substance that binds to dopamine receptors. With a machine called a PET scanner, the scientists were then able to see if that substance simply circulated through listeners' blood, which would indicate that they had already released a lot of dopamine, and that the dopamine was tying up all available receptors.

If most of their dopamine receptors were free, on the other hand, the radioactive substance would bind to them.

The technique showed, definitively for the first time, that people's brains released large amounts of dopamine when they listened to music that gave them chills, the researchers reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience. When the same people listened to less moving music the next day, their dopamine receptors remained wide open.

Once the researchers knew for sure that dopamine was behind the pleasure of music, they put participants in an fMRI machine and played the moving music for them again. In this part of the experiment, the scanners showed that the brain pumped out dopamine both during the phase of musical anticipation and at the moment when chills hit in full force. The two surges happened in different areas of the brain.

"It is amazing that we can release dopamine in anticipation of something abstract, complex and not concrete," Salimpoor said. "This is the first study to show that dopamine can be released in response to an aesthetic stimulus."

The findings suggest that, like sex and drugs, music may be mildly addictive, said David Huron, a music cognition researcher at Ohio State University, Columbus.

Dopamine is an adaptive reward-inducing molecule that makes animals want to look for food before they're hungry. It's what makes it impossible for some people to pass by the neighborhood bakery without going in to buy a tart. And it provides a rush for heroin addicts when they see blood enter the needle -- before the drug even gets into their veins.

In its groundbreaking combination of techniques, Huron said, the study also offers a new way to study the relationship between dopamine and feelings of motivation, reward and pleasure. Brain scanners are notoriously expensive for scientists and claustrophobic for participants, with no room for people to do things like eat in them.

Music, on the other hand, can be pumped right in to the machine, and scientists can then look at pleasure responses on a note-by-note basis.

"Music is going to be a useful tool in trying to explain all sorts of aspects of pleasure, addiction and maladaptive behaviors," Huron said. "It's a technical tour de force what they've done. I just think it's a really wonderful piece of work."

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People love music for much the same reason they're drawn to sex, drugs, gambling and delicious food, according to new research. When you listen to tunes that move you, the study found, your brain releases dopamine, a chemical involved in both motivation and addiction.

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According to "The Journal of Happiness Studies." fast food makes a child less unhappy and rather happier, even though it is not beneficial for their health. The reason to this is mostly that this type of food tastes better. It's important for parents to keep in mind that they shouldn't ban these foods completely and "lighten up." Although it is recommended to find other ways to make your child happier than just food, so they are taught to maintain a healthy lifestyle. I know that whenever I get fast food, it is usually a reward or treat for doing something. But for other people, fast food is a habit and makes them more unhealthy or self conscious about what they eat. It is hard for them to stop eating it because eating fast food can form into a habit.

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Fat and sugar makes children overweight, yes, but they also make children happier. Or, technically, less unhappy.

Those are the conclusions of two nutrition researchers published this month in the Journal of Happiness Studies. The authors, Hung-Hao Chang of National Taiwan University and Rodolfo Nayga, of the University of Arkansas, used data collected from 2,366 Taiwanese children in 2001, and looked at the relationship between how much fast food (defined as French fries, pizza and hamburgers) and soft drinks (defined as beverages containing sugar) the children consumed and their psychological health.

Their central finding was that while children who ate more of the above were more likely to be overweight, they were also less likely to report being unhappy.

So what are parents supposed to do with this information?

It's not like we didn't already know this. Our children have made it clear, what with their clamoring for chocolate and McDonald's. That's because fat and sugar taste good. "How do they know they like the French Fries better than the broccoli?" I mused to a friend while we lunched with our toddlers one day. "Because they're not stupid," she answered. "The French fries ARE better."

And in spite of knowing this, we think it's good parenting to limit unhealthy foods. Nayga, himself the father of a 13-year-old, still thinks that's a good idea; his data has not changed his long-standing policy of "moderation" and "balance" at his house, as opposed to "extremes," he told me in an e-mail interview.

The lesson of the data, he says, is, in effect, "lighten up." Once in a while is more effective than an outright ban, he suggests, and our parental attempts to control a child's diet - by limiting fast foods, and encouraging healthful ones - might be more successful if we recognize the link between food and happiness, and find ways to create that "happiness" in less caloric ways. With non-food treats, perhaps, or meal time traditions, or whatever works for your particular child.

There are different facets of well-being, the authors write in their journal article: "objective (i.e. obesity)" and "subjective (i.e. unhappiness)," and "policies and programs that aim to improve children's overall health should take these effects on children's objective and subjective well-being into account to facilitate the reduction in childhood obesity without sacrificing children's degree of happiness."

In other words, have a few French fries with that broccoli and everyone will be happier. Or, at least, a little less unhappy.
Update from Lisa Belkin: A few of the comments have noted that the study was of Taiwanese children, and wondered whether the results tell us much about American kids. The researchers have the same questions. Says Nayga: "I do believe that cultural norms could lead to different results in the US. However, food preferences especially among the young seem to be converging across cultures due to various reasons. Hence, it is possible that what we found using Taiwanese data could also be true in many other countries such as the US."
This study, he says, is not prescriptive so much as informative. An added data point to the discussion about food choices, and a hint that the equation has emotional as well as nutritional components.

I see it not as definitive so much as "food for thought." Like so many of the posts I write here, the point is the conversation that follows, the way an idea resonates, or doesn't, with parents.

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Fat and sugar makes children overweight, yes, but they also make children happier. Or, technically, less unhappy. Those are the conclusions of two nutrition researchers published this month in the Journal of Happiness Studies.

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Social media has become a big part of everyone's life. The question is whether it makes us happy or not. Social media has become an addiction throughout many people around the world. It can be bad towards your emotions and feelings or eve good. Some people value themselves over "likes" or "comments." Even though we all know that it shouldn't matter, it is just a human instinct. Another human instinct is one-upping each other. And according to Todd Leopold, one-upping has become a great, big competition over social media. How you use and what you take advantage of in social media will mostly determine on how it makes you feel, happy or sad.

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Have we mentioned that social media can drive you crazy? Well, maybe not, but it probably drives researchers crazy.

The thing is, social media isn't some separate entity apart from human beings. Social media IS human beings, and therefore, social media is what you make of it. It's something to keep in mind, because even though the modern forms are new and shiny -- Facebook was founded in 2004, Twitter in 2006 -- the concept is as old as human relationships.

For example, if you view Facebook through a half-empty glass, it may feel like an endless land of one-upmanship where everybody is doing better than you. On the other hand, if you look at it as a tool for building supportive relationships, it's a great place to find sympathy, encouragement and connection.

And it is a tool, says Margaret Duffy, a communications professor at the University of Missouri who oversaw a study of college students and Facebook engagement. (Facebook was chosen because "about 100% of college students" are on the platform, Duffy says with a chuckle.)

"Just being a heavy user of social media, like Facebook, doesn't mean you're likely more vulnerable to depression," she says.

Social media can have effects on mental health. Studies have shown that getting "likes" for Facebook posts actually results in a release of dopamine, a brain chemical associated with pleasure. Moreover, sad or moving posts can promote release of oxytocin, the "love hormone," which makes us feel protected.

Even the way we use it makes a difference.

In Duffy's study, "surveillance use" of Facebook -- that is, lurking and deliberately seeking out posts that may feed insecurity -- "was a significant indicator of the potential for depression," says Duffy of her study.

So how can social media make you happy? Here are some recommendations:

1. Don't let the Internet get you down.

Easier said than done, we know. Social media is everywhere, almost everyone is on it, and if you want to make yourself unhappy, simply imagine that the rest of the Internet is having a better time in your absence.

"Social media is almost like a game," writes Adrienne Erin on Socialnomics. "We are all at war with one another for likes and favorites and we compete by posting pictures of our expensive dinners, vacations and social interactions."

But if you're going to be on social media, there are ways to improve your mood.

Erin recommends a site called Happier.com, dedicated to "celebrating the good around you." Tumblr has a "positivity" page. The Nicest Place on the Internet offers virtual hugs.

Happiness, one study says, can be viral.

And when you just need to hit a reset button, try Make Everything OK.

2. Data is your friend.

Our virtual lives often seem separate from our actual lives, but every little bit of ourselves we put out there actually provides indicators on how we're feeling, both physically and mentally.

Adam Sadilek, a computer scientist at the University of Rochester, has helped create a model that can show the spread of disease by scanning Twitter data.

"Our model then predicts if and when an individual will fall ill with high accuracy, thereby improving our understanding of the emergence of global epidemics from people's day-to-day interactions," he writes.

Doesn't sound cheerful? How about this: Scientists also used Twitter to determine when we were happy. (Moods are lowest first thing in the morning.)

The upshot is that the huge amount of data we're creating on social networks can help us become healthier -- or allow others to intercede if we're not.

3. Put the phone down. And especially put your children's phones down.

For all the connection social media can provide, it can't replace simple face-to-face contact -- even these days, when video messaging is as convenient as, well, clicking a phone.

(And we know how anxious you get when you're away from your phone.)

But it can really take a toll on youngsters. In a study from Stanford on girls age 8-12, "those who say they spend considerable amounts of time using multimedia describe themselves in ways that suggest they are less happy and less socially comfortable than peers who say they spend less time on screens," The New York Times observed.

The study is by no means conclusive, but it does offer food for thought, Lyn Mikel Brown, an education professor, told the newspaper.

"The clear message is also how important it is for parents to create opportunities for girls to unplug, to live a balanced life, and increase quality face-to-face time with the people important to them," said Mikel Brown.

It all sounds like common sense -- but then, so does most advice on social well-being. Which is why some of the shrewdest words on the subject have nothing to do with social media at all.

"Don't waste your time on jealousy," wrote Mary Schmich in a famous Chicago Tribune column that became the song "Everybody's Free (to Wear Sunscreen)." "Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself."

And when you're in doubt, there are always dog videos, cat videos and dancing videos.

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Have we mentioned that social media can drive you crazy? Well, maybe not, but it probably drives researchers crazy. The thing is, social media isn't some separate entity apart from human beings. Social media IS human beings, and therefore, social media is what you make of it.

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Keyana Gloeckle - Unit 4 KWL - Student Template*