The effects are real

Solvitur ambulando et scripturam, it is solved by walking and writing. That was Diogenes' least cynical observation.

It's always nice to have your personal predilections validated by science. But I'll keep on walking and writing whatever the peer-reviewed research says. My own private study is confirmation enough for me.

To combat afternoon slumps in enthusiasm and focus, take a walk during the lunch hour.

A new study finds that even gentle lunchtime strolls can perceptibly — and immediately — buoy people’s moods and ability to handle stress at work.

It is not news, of course, that walking is healthy and that people who walk or otherwise exercise regularly tend to be more calm, alert and happy than people who are inactive.

But many past studies of the effects of walking and other exercise on mood have focused on somewhat long-term, gradual outcomes, looking at how weeks or months of exercise change people emotionally.

Fewer studies have examined more-abrupt, day-to-day and even hour-by-hour changes in people’s moods, depending on whether they exercise, and even fewer have focused on these effects while people are at work, even though most of us spend a majority of our waking hours in an office.

So, for the new study, which was published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports this month, researchers at the University of Birmingham and other universities began by recruiting sedentary office workers at the university...

 The responses, as it turned out, were substantially different when people had walked. On the afternoons after a lunchtime stroll, walkers said they felt considerably more enthusiastic, less tense, and generally more relaxed and able to cope than on afternoons when they hadn’t walked and even compared with their own moods from a morning before a walk... "The Benefits of a Lunch Hour Walk," nyt

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The scientific research on the benefits of so-called expressive writing is surprisingly vast. Studies have shown that writing about oneself and personal experiences can improve mood disorders, help reduce symptoms among cancer patients, improve a person’s health after a heart attack, reduce doctor visits and even boost memory.

Now researchers are studying whether the power of writing — and then rewriting — your personal story can lead to behavioral changes and improve happiness.The concept is based on the idea that we all have a personal narrative that shapes our view of the world and ourselves. But sometimes our inner voice doesn’t get it completely right. Some researchers believe that by writing and then editing our own stories, we can change our perceptions of ourselves and identify obstacles that stand in the way of better health.

It may sound like self-help nonsense, but research suggests the effects are real... "Writing Your Way to Happiness"

Experience suggests the same.

Grayling on Russell's Conquest

Is Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness still as relevant today? Read an extract What Makes People Unhappy? here, and our Q&A with philosopher A. C. Grayling below. - Routledge

The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell: A Q&A with A. C. Grayling

Q: Since Russell wrote The Conquest of Happiness there has been a boom in the publishing of books about happiness. What makes Russell's book distinctive and why should it be read today?

A: Most of today's books on happiness are of the pop-psychological kind, offering quick and easy nostrums for combating the stresses and low-level depression and anxiety that we are told attends modern life. Russell had a unique combination of brilliance and common-sense, and was able to express what are oftentimes sharp insights in a very clear and simple-seeming way. In writing The Conquest of Happiness he drew on a deep well of personal experience and thought; he lived his own advice, and was not offering mere third-hand theory in giving it.

Q: Russell regards self-absorption as a chief cause of unhappiness. What does he mean by this and is he correct?

A: It was I think Ruskin who said 'a man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel.' Russell rightly recognized that dwelling on oneself overmuch was a sure route to depression and disfunctionality. He advised looking outwards, having interests beyond oneself, as a way to live flourishingly. He is right.

Q: Russell writes that drunkenness is 'temporary suicide'. Does he really mean one can never be drunk and happy?

A: Getting drunk is a very temporary form of happiness - if happiness it is: it can exacerbate mournfulness too if an excess of alcohol is consumed when you're already down! - and of course it is a form of self-oblivion because the effect of alcohol is to depress inhibitions and makes one careless. I don’t think Russell disapproved of alcohol, but taken in excess it certainly involves a loss of self along with a loss of self-control, and it is an ephemeral thing, not a route to genuine flourishing in life.

Q: Russell writes that 'The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.' (p.109 of the Routledge Classics edition). Why does Russell value having a wide set of interests so highly?

A: Having an alert interest in the world around one, and a positive attitude to others, is a sure way of living with freshness and pleasure, because there is so much to see, know, do and learn in the multiplicity of experiences that the world offers. Dwelling on oneself and one's regrets and resentments is an equally sure way to a dismal and acidulous quasi-existence, narrow and dark. So much is obvious: and this is what Russell was insisting upon. Some people can have a single all-absorbing interest, an obsession or great passion, and find the kind of happiness that comes from complete self-forgetfulness; but that is comparatively rare, and a wide range of interests brings the enjoyment of variety and fascination with it that keeps one wide awake in life.

Q: There have been many empirical studies of happiness since Russell's book was first published. What would Russell make of the quest for a 'science' of happiness?

A: My guess is that Russell would think that an intelligent survey of human experience and character would give us a good general appreciation of the sorts of things that conduce to happiness and its opposite, and that a 'science' of happiness - the idea that it can be socially or for that matter medically engineered - takes away from the greater good that arises from making our own happiness autonomously, as a result of thought and choice.

Q: In the final chapter, Russell writes that 'the happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life.' Yet while Oskar Schindler might be said to have lived a good life, it was arguably not a happy one. Are the good life and the happy life the same thing?

A: I am confident that Russell would accept that there are good lives that are not happy, and would certainly accept that there are happy lives that are not good and their happiness is directly connected to their not being good (especially on moralistic definitions of 'good'!). But he is right to say that to a very large extent happy lives are good - in the sense of being worthwhile, flourishing, satisfying, productive lives: not necessarily moralistically 'good' - because it is in being worthwhile, satisfying, etc. that their happiness consists. In fact, there is a proper sense of 'happy' which precisely means 'worthwhile, satisfying' etc. - this is the sense on the American Declaration's 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' - the word does not simply mean 'a pleasant smiley feeling' (the sense we too oftentimes restrict it to now) but denotes a condition of being.

Q: In your preface to the Routledge Classics edition of Russell's The Conquest of Happiness you mention that you read Russell's book as a teenager. What useful advice do you think it offers teenagers today?

A: The teenage years can be difficult ones, too oftentimes blighted by the irksome feeling of restriction that comes from wanting to be independent and to experiment with life, but being limited by having too little money, opportunity and freedom. One typical result is a degree of self-absorption, difficulties with confidence, resentment at the rules that chafe and bind, conflicts with parents, insecurities and fears and occasional rashness and regrets. It is a matter of neurological and physiological fact about adolescence that brains are rewiring and hormones are highly active, with the consequence that everything can seem confusing and demanding to a painful degree. Russell's advice to look outwards, to focus on interests and people for their own sakes, to grasp the marvellously liberating opportunity to realize that the only person really bothered by your zits and lack of a certain brand of apparel that everyone else seems to be wearing is you, and that the world is infinitely exhilarating and fascinating - and indeed has real problems in it that one can help in trying to counter. That is what he meant by being outgoing and interested, and it is a sure-fire help in the difficult time when one feels like an adult and yet is being treated like a child.

Routledge

Meaningfulness, happiness, and secular values

What does David Brooks mean, when he talks about what "we" mean by meaning? He says we've turned it into a useless, relativistic, sappy bit of sentiment. And despite his nod to secular meaningfulness, I think he means to reject it for his own brand of Platonism while sideswiping and misconceiving happiness. Wrongheaded, but (like so many of his wrongheaded columns) still interesting to think about.

...what do we mean when we use the word meaning?

The first thing we mean is that life should be about more than material success. The person leading a meaningful life has found some way of serving others that leads to a feeling of significance.

Second, a meaningful life is more satisfying than a merely happy life. Happiness is about enjoying the present; meaning is about dedicating oneself to the future. Happiness is about receiving; meaningfulness is about giving. Happiness is about upbeat moods and nice experiences. People leading meaningful lives experience a deeper sense of satisfaction.

In this way, meaning is an uplifting state of consciousness. It’s what you feel when you’re serving things beyond self.

Yet it has to be said, as commonly used today, the word is flabby and vacuous, the product of a culture that has grown inarticulate about inner life.

Let me put it this way: If we look at the people in history who achieved great things — like Nelson Mandela or Albert Schweitzer or Abraham Lincoln — it wasn’t because they wanted to bathe luxuriously in their own sense of meaningfulness. They had objective and eternally true standards of justice and injustice. They were indignant when those eternal standards were violated. They subscribed to moral systems — whether secular or religious — that recommended specific ways of being, and had specific structures of what is right and wrong, and had specific disciplines about how you might get better over time... 

(continues)