Flourish (Martin Seligman)

OVERVIEW

Martin Seligman is a key founder of positive psychology, the branch of scientific study that focuses on positive emotions and well-being, rather than on mental illness, negative emotions, and maladaptive behaviour. Positive psychology used to be all about happiness, but now it’s more broadly applied as the scientific study of human flourishing.

In Seligman’s 2002 book Authentic Happiness, he posited that there were three elements to authentic happiness: positive emotion (pleasure, comfort, warmth), engagement (flow), and meaning (belonging to and serving something greater than yourself). In his new book, Flourishing, he adds two additional elements: positive relationships (love, social support) and accomplishment (success). Seligman also upgraded the measure of well-being from simple life satisfaction to a combined measure of those five individual elements, which sum to human flourishing. Well-being is, therefore, a construct; PERMA for short:

·         Positive emotion is hedemonia, feeling good, being in a pleasant mood. You can increase your positive emotions through gratitude, savoring, mindfulness, and forgiveness, and through cultivating hope and optimism.

·         Engagement is all about flow, fully deploying your skills and attention to complete a challenging task. Flow is immersion in an activity, often accompanied by a loss of time and self.

·         Relationships are vital to humans; we are an ultra-social species. Think of the last time you felt indescribable joy, that you felt proud of an accomplishment, that you laughed until your face hurt? It almost certainly happened around other people. Seligman says very little that is positive is solitary.

·         Meaning is simply belonging to and/or serving something beyond yourself. A social or political cause, a family unit, your community, your work, a sports team, a hobby group, etc.

·         Accomplishment is achievement and success. It’s mastery and competence pursued for its own sake.

Throw some optimism, self-esteem, self-determination, and resilience into the mix, and you’ll boost your ability to flourish even further. Underpinning the above PERMA elements, Seligman encourages us to deploy our signature strengths, our top 5 in a list of 24 character elements like humor, curiosity, gratitude, fairness, perseverance, humility, honesty, kindness, etc. You can learn more and take the quiz at: https://www.viacharacter.org/character-strengths-and-virtues

What I’ve summarized above (and below) are the first two of ten chapters in Flourish, but they are the ones that most interest me and are most relevant to the blog. Later chapters look at how to teach positive psychology, the benefits of grit and self-control, how positive psychology can help soldiers and those with PTSD, how optimism is good for health, and a new model beyond GDP for measuring a country’s success.

WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)

Here are some exercises from Flourish:

Kindness Exercise: do a kind thing completely unexpectedly. Notice what it does to your mood.

Gratitude Visit: write a letter of gratitude to someone. Deliver it in person.

Three Blessings: for one night each week, take 10 minutes and write down 3 things that went well and why they went well. Then ask: why did this happen?

Signature Strengths in Action: Discover your signature strengths. Take time each week to flex them. Write about how you felt before, during, and after the activity.

Active & Constructive Responding: For one week, pay attention anytime someone tells you something good. Then, go out of your way to respond enthusiastically, ask them to relive the event for you. Record your interactions (the event, what you said, and what their response was).

This last one is not an exercise, but more an invitation to ponder. A few times in the book, Seligman asks us to consider the economics of flourishing. For him, he wants us to decide what the goal of wealth should be. Capitalism and economists will answer that the goal of wealth is to increase wealth (to build more wealth, on and on forever). But perhaps the goal of wealth for you should be to engender flourishing. How would your life change if you thought about money this way instead? If money wasn’t the means and the end, but just the means?

IN SUM:

Is this book entirely secular? No.

If I had to describe the book in one sentence? A guide to human flourishing and its applications.

Who should read this book? Those looking for actionable ways to increase well-being.