Happiness Is: Unexpected Answers to Practical Questions in Curious Times - Hardcover

Shea, Shawn Christopher

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0757300669 ISBN 13: 9780757300660

Publisher: Hci, 2004

Synopsis

Happiness is more of an attitude than a feeling, an idea examined through an exploration of the very nature of happiness, with the help of a vast array of famous thinkers, philosophers, and icons, from Albert Einstein to Oprah Winfrey. 100,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Shawn Christopher Shea is an internationally acclaimed speaker and innovator in the field of suicide prevention. He speaks at nearly 100 workshops per year across all mental health disciplines, and he has been a guest lecturer at many prestigious medical centers including Harvard, McGill University, and the Mayo Clinic. His two previous professional books are classics in their fields, with Psychiatric Interviewing: the Art of Understanding 2nd Edition being chosen by the Medical Library Association for the Brandon/ Hill List as one of the 16 most important books in the field of psychiatry. Dr. Shea is currently the Director of the Training Institute for Suicide Assessment & Clinical Interviewing (TISA), on Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Dartmouth School of Medicine, and in private practice. He lives in New Hampshire.

From the Inside Flap

"A bold, dazzling, and wonderfully fresh antidote to the simplistic platitudes so common in the self-help books of today! Shawn Christopher Shea pulls on everything from his clinical practice to arcane philosophy to pop culture as he poignantly answers a most modern question: If we re so successful, why aren t we happier? The end result is deeply affecting, often funny, and always instructive. Destined to inspire an entire generation with the excitement and happiness to be found in the nurturance of compassion and the quest for meaning."
Paul Farmer, M.D., Ph.D., Harvard Medical School, Author of The Uses of Haiti and Founding Director of Partners in Health

Reviews

Alas, there are no unexpected answers in clinical psychiatrist Shea's attempt to define and help us find happiness. A clinician who teaches at the Dartmouth School of Medicine, Shea begins with an extended ramble featuring an eclectic assortment of sages—from John Merrick, aka the Elephant Man, to champion figure skater Michelle Kwan—culminating in Shea's definition of happiness as an attitude and a feeling. Explaining the title, he writes, "Happiness is. It lies hidden in each and every moment. It is not made, captured or bought. It is simply uncovered." But how? Shea goes on to provide a rather more complex picture of happiness as "a human matrix" composed of five constantly shifting and interacting processes: biology, psychology, interpersonal relationships, environmental factors and spirituality. From there, he focuses on how we can tinker with each element of the matrix to make our "happiness machine" function optimally. For example, someone with seasonal affective disorder experiences a problem in the environmental and biological wings of the matrix that can be set right with light therapy. While Shea presents a different twist on how to perceive happiness, his constructs are awkward and theoretical; his chatty style and weak case studies don't give readers many practical tools.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Part I
Defining the Goal of the Quest: The Meaning of Happiness

"The purpose of our lives is to be happy."
-The 14th Dalai Lama

"Happiness is like a sunbeam, which the least shadow intercepts."
-Chinese Proverb

“Will Mulder find happiness? No. That’s not for him. He’s a questing hero.”
-A fan’s comment from a Web site on The X-Files

The Nature of the Beast
We are questing beasts. Our lives are frequently a delightful, and sometimes not so delightful, series of quests. Indeed, our lives are not so much a neat series of well delineated quests as they are, more often, a tangled mass of conflicting quests that simultaneously demand our attentions.

Our quests are sometimes ordinary and downright primitive in nature. We search for food, shelter, safety, and sex. Our quests are sometimes elevated and important in nature. We tirelessly work to become school teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, and homemakers. Our quests are sometimes viewed as trivial in nature—but this does not change how hard we pursue them. We relentlessly search for the golf swing of Tiger Woods, a set of abs like the ones on those annoyingly handsome men smiling astride their Bowflexes, or a wrinkle-free forehead thanks to the wonders of Botox. Our quests are sometimes interpersonal. We look for a good set of friends, colleagues we like and partners to cherish. Finally, our quests are sometimes grand and spiritual in nature. We pray to be compassionate, find the right religion or touch the face of god.

Put all these pressing pursuits together, and it is no wonder that we are frequently tired and just a bit out of sorts. We’re pooped. Moreover, by simultaneously pursuing too many of these goals it is easy for any given human being to sabotage his or her ability to successfully pursue one of the most basic yet critical of all the quests—the quest for happiness.

Whether we are working eighty hours a week to get the money to secure our child the best college education that money can buy or relentlessly hunting down a Beanie Baby whose soaring value will undoubtedly secure that very same education, we are preoccupied with a massive set of quests. Not all of these pursuits support each other nor are they necessarily good for ourselves or other creatures on this planet. And, compared to the other creatures on the planet, we seem to spend an inordinate amount of time discussing, prioritizing and, ultimately, picking our quests.

Having practiced clinical psychiatry for over twenty years, I have come to believe that this “questing business” has a good deal to do with our eventual happiness or unhappiness. Indeed, when people enter my office, although they seldom use the word quest, their pains are almost always rooted in this “questing business.” They are unhappy about what quests they are on, what quests others have foisted upon them, the fact that they are failing with their quests, the fact that others feel they are failing with their quests, the fact that they are afraid that others will feel they are failing with their quests, the fact that they can’t pick the right quests, the fact that they have become boxed into pursuing the wrong quests, or the fact that they have picked too many quests. And the most common bottom line is often a simple one: The quest for happiness has eluded them.

Mulder’s Dilemma, Spirit’s Secret and Happiness Machines
In the historical sense, it is our questing nature that has driven us to achieve some of the most marvelous feats of civilization such as building the Cathedral of Notre Dame, discovering the atom, landing on the Moon, preventing polio, elucidating the concept of democracy, and, of course, creating The Simpsons. But, as we have already hinted, there is a dark side to all this questing business. It is this dark side that brings people into my office. If we want to understand the nature of finding happiness, it is worth our while to explore this dark side in a little more detail.

The dark side of our quests emerges when they become our fixations or our obsessions, when we spend so much time in pursuit of one of them (or several of them) that the most important ones are left starving for our attention. Even noble quests—religion, gold medals, careers, love—can become dangerous if they become a fanatic focus that leads us away from what really matters—God, self-respect, productive work, family, friends and compassion.

It is at such times that we risk becoming like Mulder of The X-Files, who as our perceptive fan cogently stated in the opening epigraph of our chapter, will never be happy, because he is just too ferociously preoccupied with this alien thing. In some respects we are all Mulders. Our culture floods us not with aliens but with pressures to tackle an enormous number of quests, some of which may be alien to our own natures and skills. We frantically—one might say fanatically—try to cram them all into one lifetime. The advertising industry aids this nasty process by transforming simple desires into pressing needs. Before one knows it, life is no longer a quest for happiness; it is a mass of unhappy quests.

So where does all this leave us? It leaves us with the knowledge that questing is pivotal to human nature, which can be both good and bad. Good—if our quests are wisely chosen, manageable and obtainable. Bad if our quests are poorly chosen, unmanageable, and unobtainable. It also leaves us with the reassuring knowledge that, if falling prey to our own quests leads to unhappiness, it also follows that the ability to more wisely choose our quests may lead to happiness. Truth be told, because we have the ability to choose our personal quests and how much time we allot to each of them, we have the ability to determine - to a surprisingly large degree - the extent of our own happiness.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hci
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0757300669
• ISBN 13: 9780757300660
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 340