Happiness 101: a How-To Guide in Positive Psychology for People Who Are Depressed, Languishing, or Flourishing. the Facilitator's Manual.: A How-To Guide in Positive Psychology for People Who Are Depressed, Languishing, or Flourishing. the Facilitator's Manual.

By Louise Lambert R. Pysch.

Happiness 101: A how-to guide in positive psychology for people who are depressed, languishing, or flourishing, The Facilitator’s Manual provides research about the latest findings in positive psychology that are instrumental in helping individuals achieve a state of happiness. The manual offers up to nine group session plans with interventions for participants to complete. It can be used like a textbook as it amasses the latest research all in one place, saving you the time of finding the information and preparing it, allowing you to focus on clients instead. It comes with a complete list of references to find the original sources easily.

Combined with Happiness 101: A how-to guide in positive psychology for people who are depressed, languishing, or flourishing, The Participant’s Manual, you are well on your way to running your own group on happiness! The participant´s manual is also available on this website.

Modules include:
1. Myths and Beliefs about Happiness
2. The benefits of happiness
3. Adaptation, genetics, and circumstances
4. Intervention principles: Effort, fit, variety, timing.
5. Positive emotions
6. Theory of Authentic Happiness (Seligman, 2002)
7. Flow
8. Physical activity and exercise
9. Positive interventions

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 16, 2009
• ISBN: 9781664179950

Louise Lambert R. Pysch.

Louise Lambert is a Registered Psychologist in Alberta, Canada. She has traveled, studied, and worked extensively in South Africa, France, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen among other places. She has worked in family violence, HIV/AIDS, counselor training, community development, education, and is currently working in mental health. Regardless of the target population or setting, her main interest is helping people live their best lives. She has published in the Journal of Health Policy and Planning, Canadian Journal of Counselling, BMJ (Online version), and was featured in Intercultures Magazine. She is an avid marathon runner, enjoys reading, learning new languages, and catching up with friends across the globe. Soon, she will be moving to Australia to begin yet another chapter of her life.

Book preview

Care has been taken to ensure that proper credit is given to all referenced materials in

this manual; however, the author will welcome any information that enables any required

rectifications to be made.

To conduct your group, you may purchase multiple copies of the Participant Manual at www.xlibris.com by searching for Happiness 101: A how-to guide in positive psychology for people

who are depressed, languishing, or flourishing. The Participant Manual.

Copyright © 2009 by Louise Lambert. 584492

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic

or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without

permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

Rev. date: 06/09/2021

CONTENTS

Introduction

Program objectives

Happiness 101 Program Description

Week 1: Myths About Happiness

Week 2: Why Be Happy?

Week 3: Heroism And Doing (Franco & Zimbardo, 2007)

Week 4: Broaden & Build Theory(Fredrickson, 2006)

Week 5: Theory Of Well-Being (Seligman, 2011)

Week 6: Exercise, Vitality, and Flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Ratey, 2008)

Week 7: Follow-up Ideas

References

Introduction

This is a tool to teach individuals how to be happy. I will not pretend to have invented anything in this manual. I give full credit to the ‘greats’ of the field, like Drs. Martin Seligman, Sonya Lyubomirsky, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Barbara Fredrickson, and the many others referenced in this manual. I’ve only made it workable. This program is for professionals employed in mental health, psychology, social work, and other like-minded fields who want to give clients a better shot at happiness.

The idea of the program came about after a few years of working in mental health. I felt particularly discouraged by the scores of depressed individuals coming through the door and felt I was accomplishing little. I ended up taking a course in positive psychology and carried on using multiple concepts and ideas from the field in my doctoral dissertation. Beyond its clinical applications, I saw the changes that occurred in my own life and determined there was potential in this positive stuff.

Thus, this group is for individuals who want more happiness in life. It is a psycho-educational group offering discussion topics, interventions, and homework questions. I also point to online video clips you can use during the lessons. The program can be presented in many formats, and I have left it non-directional so that you can present the concepts in ways that best suit you and your organization. Doing the six weekly lessons and following up with a potluck in week seven works particularly well as it gives individuals time to practice the interventions. A two-hour session should suffice. Given that it is a class and not a therapy group, group size can go as high as 20, but no less than six preferably.

The book you are now reading is the facilitator’s manual and includes information about positive psychology. You can obtain copies of the participant manual from the www.Xlibris.com website.

You should read the entire manual first to familiarize yourself with the material. You can paraphrase the information and present it in your own style. Encourage participants to take notes and share the information with others, and feel free to use the material for your own benefit. Nothing will fill up a group better than a role model and leader who can ‘walk the talk.’

Program objectives

Participants will understand that long-term sustainable happiness takes deliberate effort and personal commitment. Happiness is a state of mind, and must be chosen and reinforced with action. Participants will learn empirical concepts about happiness and how to strategically use these to their advantage.

Happiness depends upon ourselves.

Aristotle

What is positive psychology? (and how does it relate to depression)?

Depression is the fourth largest disease burden (Hyman, Chisholm, Kessler, Patel, & Whiteford, 2006) given that the costs relating to treatment, impaired health and chronic disease, lost employment, disability, and family strain are among the most costly in the world (World Health Organization, 2008). In fact, major depression is set to become the largest contributor to the disease burden of high income nations by 2030 (Mathers & Loncar, 2006). Because of the stigma associated with obtaining help for what is considered a mental disorder, a new approach to providing services is needed given that only about half the individuals who need assistance receive it (Cheung & Dewa, 2007; Rhodes, Bethel, & Bondy, 2006). This begs the question: What would happen if we focused on happiness instead?

Mainstream psychology’s attention has historically been directed to where needs were highest and most critical resulting in the successful treatment of several mental disorders (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Yet, most individuals are neither ill nor diagnosable, and are thus neglected by mainstream psychology (Seligman, Parks & Steen, 2005) under the belief that an absence of disorder translates into happiness (Diener & Lucas, 2000). Having little to offer individuals who present without illness, positive psychology redresses this imbalanced focus and addresses those whose mental health has not traditionally been a concern, as well as those where there is customary cause. As such, traditional psychology’s focus on disorder and distress led to an incomplete view of the human experience (Gillham & Seligman, 1999; Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000).

An early goal of mainstream psychology was to promote the good life, yet this was quickly forgotten as progress in diagnosis and treatment advanced (Gable & Haidt, 2005; Linley, Joseph, Harrington, & Wood, 2006; Seligman, 2009). Resurrected from forgotten mission statements and the margins of scientific research, a renewed focus on positivity was born. Positive psychology therefore completes the continuum of experience and includes the positive. Thus, positive psychology has drastically changed the research landscape and the dominant paradigms from which individuals are viewed. The field focuses on the constitution of happiness with more than a decade of organization and progress from established philosophies and emerging inquiries and explores what is scientifically useful in making lives worth living (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). It endorses no single theory or framework and is perhaps best described as an ideology (Leontiev, 2006), or paradigm (Csikszentmihalyi, 2006; Peterson, 2006) through which the contributors to flourishing can be determined (Csikszentmihalyi, 2009a; Gable & Haidt, 2005; Keyes, 2005; Linley et al., 2006).

Positive psychology considers multiple populations. Apart from those who struggle with depression, languishing individuals do not qualify with a mental illness or sufficient distress to warrant mainstream psychology’s attention, nor are they considered to be flourishing either. The languishing (Keyes, 2005) are individuals who are not unwell, but, run the risk of slipping into being unwell over time (Keyes, 2010; Keyes, Dhingra, & Simoes, 2010). In contrast, flourishing (Keyes, 2005, 2010) individuals exhibit greater psychosocial adaptation, work productivity, and physical health conditions at all ages, as well as fewer limitations in daily living, and less prescription medication and health care use (Chida & Steptoe, 2008; Keyes, 2005). In fact, individuals who decline to moderate mental health are four times more likely to have a mental illness than those who remain in a state of flourishing (Keyes, 2010; Keyes et al., 2010). Thus, the absence of flourishing mental health increases the odds of mental illness, while gains in mental health decrease the same odds. Thus, in keeping with the spirit of positive psychology, this group excludes no one and is open to participants who are languishing, depressed, and flourishing.

A note on terminology

Happiness as a concept and scientific term does not exist. It has neither operational definition, nor theoretical place in any conceptual structure to date (Duckworth, Steen, & Seligman, 2005). Seligman (2002) considers it a clumsy concept and uses alternative concepts instead. Happiness refers to what positive psychology aims to understand and the term is used interchangeably with well-being, vitality, thriving, flourishing, life satisfaction, etc. Happiness does not belong to only one theory either. The theory of well-being (Seligman, 2011), presented in week five, is one of many selected out of interest. Another way of conceptualizing happiness is to define it as a collection of positive emotions and experiences (Fredrickson, 2006). As we go through the program, you will no doubt see that your own understanding of happiness will change.

A note on empiricism

The role of empiricism in positive psychology is well esteemed. Dr. Seligman (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) has vehemently defended an empirical, science-only approach to research. To protect the field from dismissive naysayers unconvinced that happiness is worthwhile science, Seligman defends positive psychology’s empiricism, as this is what differentiates it from popular non-scientific approaches. All of the research presented here is taken from this quantitative research pool from 2000 to the Second World Congress on Positive Psychology held in Philadelphia in July 2011. The references are at the back of the book for your own consideration. I invite you to read more about the topics that interest you.

A special note on depression, therapy, and suicide.

You might ask yourself, If this is a group for depression, how come we don’t talk about it directly? To date, attention to mental health has involved the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness rather than to its promotion (Hershberger, 2005; Insel & Scolnick, 2006; Keyes, 2010). Increasingly, evidence shows that interventions which remove mental illness do not promote mental health, and further, much of what passes as treatment is purely palliative, insufficient, and does not rely on evidence (Fleddurus, Bohlmeijer, Smit, & Westerhof, 2010; Insel & Scolnick, 2006). Although there is a shift in thinking, too many therapists still believe that removing depression or focusing on the negatives results in happier individuals. In my humble experience, having done psychology as usual for several years and more recently shifted to positive psychology, the