Eight Ways to Banish Misery
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To achieve greater well-being, you have two tasks. The first is to increase your level of happiness; the second is to manage your unhappiness. To know which side of the ledger to start on, some self-evaluation can be useful. One tool to help with that is known as the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) test, which rates your natural levels of happy and unhappy affect—or, in lay terms, mood—compared with those of other people. In my teaching and writing, I have found PANAS to be one of the most useful and reliable tests for self-understanding, because it separates your total well-being into discrete emotional channels.
Even without a PANAS test, you might have a pretty good idea of whether happiness or unhappiness presents the greater challenge in your life. One person who certainly did was the eminent 20th-century British thinker Bertrand Russell, who was not only a philosopher, mathematician, and logician but also a Nobel laureate in literature.
