Make Room for Happiness

If anyone can tell you something about life after death, it might be Dan Baker. When his infant son, Ryan, died from a lung disorder, Baker felt so emotionally crippled he was inconsolable. He was sinking in the quicksand of his own despair.

"I felt overwhelmed with grief," recalls Baker, PhD, now a medical psychologist at Canyon Ranch in Tucson, Ariz. "I wanted to wrestle with God and rewrite history."

But after a lengthy healing process, Baker emerged from that grief eventually to find a renewed life and a sense of an enduring legacy of love for his son. Today, he is a leading authority on a rather unlikely subject -- happiness.

"Happy people are hugely resilient on the whole," says Baker, who personally knows a lot about resilience and has written a book titled What Happy People Know. "One thing happy people know is that they don't get to be happy all the time. They can appreciate the moments, the little victories, the small miracles, and the relationships with one another."

Nature or Nurture?

The Declaration of Independence describes one of our inalienable rights as "the pursuit of happiness." But for millions of people, happiness has remained rather elusive. They've tried to buy happiness. They've tried to force it. They've sought it through pleasurable activities. But nothing has seemed to work for them.

Researchers now believe that our brains are hard-wired in ways that, at least to some degree, determine just how happy we're going to be. In short, it's in the genes.

At the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin, scientists have used advanced imaging technology to pinpoint the area of the brain -- specifically, the left prefrontal cortex -- that serves as the center for positive, optimistic, and happy feelings. When people naturally have higher than normal activity in this brain region, they are more likely to feel positive moods, and they'll tend to start each day ready to take on the world.

As powerful as these genetic predispositions may be, happiness is still partly within your control, says David Myers, PhD, the John Dirk Werkman Professor of Psychology at Hope College in Holland, Mich. "It's rather like our cholesterol level -- genetically influenced, yet also influenced by our habits and attitudes."

To help bring more happiness into your own life, here are some strategies to try:

• Nurture your relationships. Maintaining healthy love relationships and friendships can be a challenge. But those challenges, and the emotional development that inevitably come with them, can promote happiness.
  
  
• Join the "movement" movement. Studies show that aerobic exercise is an antidote for mild depression and anxiety. "Happy minds reside in sound bodies," says Myers.
  
  
• Act happy. A recent study at Wake Forest University showed that when people simply acted extroverted, they felt happier than when they acted introverted. Even introverts, said the researchers, can act extroverted and feel happier.
  
  
• Nurture your spiritual side. Faith not only provides valuable support, but it's a way to focus on something other than yourself. "Study after study finds that actively religious people are happier, and that they cope better with crises," says Myers.