How to pave your path to lasting happiness

Last August, Janet Thurston climbed an astounding 3,350 metres up the glaciated side of a volcano, until she began to shake violently and had trouble speaking. After several months of intensive workouts and thousands of dollars invested in guides, it was not making the next 900 metres to the summit of Mount Rainier in Washington that she was suddenly worried about. It was being unable to get back down. Janet had an advanced case of hypothermia.

But the 49-year-old Winnipeg-based visual artist and breast cancer survivor is not one to succumb to fear. Janet summoned her last ounce of energy and descended the volcano, although to this day she doesn't know how she did it. Afterward, she was able to see the bright side of what could be considered a disappointing adventure. "I learned a lot about myself and about courage," Janet says, and without skipping a beat, she adds, "and the mountain will still be there if I want to try again."

Fighting fear
Janet doesn't claim to be perpetually sunny. Yet her ability to face fear, derive meaning from hardships and see the silver lining in difficult circumstances has endowed her with a deep satisfaction with life.

While fear can have a positive aspect, as is the case with Janet, it can often make us miserable -- but not just in the way we might think, says Dan Baker, a noted medical psychologist based in the United States. In nearly three decades of treating everyone from cardiac patients to those with eating disorders, Baker has come to believe that fear run amok is the greatest enemy of happiness. In his popular book What Happy People Know (Rodale; co-authored with Cameron Stauth), Baker argues that fear of never having enough and never being enough insidiously govern people's lives, keeping us generally unfulfilled and unhappy. The good news is that by focusing on the positive things in your life -- or what you have rather than what you don't have -- you can triumph over fear, creating a happier you.

Positive psychology
"There's a powerful message in the thinking of positive psychology," says Robert J. Flynn, a professor of psychology at the University of Ottawa. "What it says is we will not ignore people's limitations or weaknesses nor the tried-and-true methods for dealing with them, but we will also give equal time to developing their strengths and character. We're not all born optimists but we can learn to be that way."

Happy people create a backup stash of positive feelings by regularly appreciating the people, things and memories they love, for example, feelings that help put the neocortex in the driver's seat, building an immunity for emotional health. The more you practise something -- positive responses to life's setbacks -- the better you are at it so old fears have less power. Happy people instinctively exercise choice and build on their personal power rather than feeling victimized. They speak constructively about their lives and spend their energy building upon their personal strengths to create more meaning and purpose in life.

As a result of this analysis of what happy people know, Baker has identified six happiness tools: practising appreciation, exercising choice, building personal power, leading with your strengths, using positive language and framing, and aiming for multidimensional or balanced living. Like all good tools, they come with an explanation and guidelines for use.

Appreciation
At age 92, Jessie Norton Beck has a knack for looking on the bright side of things. She lives alone in Charlottetown where she is busy working on a history book of island churches. If she reflects on the death of her husband, Preston, several years ago, she recalls mainly that 500 people came to his funeral to pay tribute to his life. When she thinks about her daughter who died of breast cancer, she considers the legacy of health and charity she left behind as a doctor in Antigua. And sometimes for a lift, she opens a Mother's Day present she received three years ago from another of her five children, a book filled with handwritten notes about how she was a wonderful parent. "It gives me a lot of happiness," says Jessie.

Psychologist Barbara Frederickson's research at the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Laboratory at the University of Michigan has demonstrated that such daily acts of appreciation and gratitude buffer people against future depression, return their anxiety-spiked heart rates to normal after a negative event and create an upward spiral of positive mental effects that increase their ability to solve problems. Baker's guideline: focus on something that makes or has made you happy and appreciate it anew three times a day, up to five minutes each time. It can be your children, chocolate chip cookies or your first kiss, he writes.

Choice
When Janet Thurston was diagnosed with breast cancer seven years ago, she worried the disease would consume her identity while she underwent lumpectomy and radiation treatments. So she fought back. Janet kept active, rode her bicycle to almost every radiation treatment and usually met with her oncologist wearing Lycra.

By exercising small daily choices, such as what to wear to a doctor's appointment, you gain a sense of triumph over fear, which leads to being able to make bigger choices. Choice is at the heart of psychological health, writes Baker. In situations where we feel helpless, the brain becomes hijacked by fear and we often cannot see the options.

Personal power
Baker has an acronym for the foes of personal power: VERBs. I've been Victimized. I'm Entitled to more. I'll be Rescued. Someone else is to Blame. Gaining personal power means taking responsibility, taking action and practising optimism. "When I'm really stressed out, the house is spotless," says Carol Husband. "I focus on the smallest action I can do and I do it. You can't delete the bad things that happen from your mind, but you can displace them with good things."

Language and stories
Everyone can control the language she uses to describe herself or her life, says Baker, citing another happiness tool. For instance, Jessie Norton Beck could have told her story like this: "I worked hard all my life and look what happened: I lost a precious daughter at an unfair early age. My husband died and I am all alone. Why me?" Instead she says, "I am really grateful for my own happy childhood, my children, 58 years of marriage and my interest in church work."

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These two dramatically different takes illustrate Baker's belief that using constructive language when we tell our own stories -- to ourselves and to others -- gives us the power to make our lives positive. When we have faith in ourselves to find the good aspect of life's ups and downs we feel more secure and resilient and are able to cope with whatever the future holds.

Personal strengths
Discovering your inner Pollyanna is a lot easier if you have a fix on your personal strengths, rather than a fixation with your weaknesses. When a troubled woman suffering from burnout with three young children recently came to the office of Tom Gardner, a Montreal psychologist, he listened beyond her problems for clues to her strengths. "When you work from the viewpoint of people's strengths, you don't deny their problems, but you are always attuned to the positive possibilities within them," he says.

After a few sessions, it was clear to Gardner that his patient was a dynamo in her work life, where she made executive decisions, juggled many projects and handled people effectively. Over time, he helped her recognize these strengths and find ways to draw on them in her personal life. For instance, by applying her organizational ability to her children's bedtime -- a daily source of stress -- she staggered their turning-in times so she could spend half an hour getting each of them ready. She walked away from therapy with a better sense of herself and a more manageable home life. 

In his book Authentic Happiness (Simon & Schuster, 2002), Martin Seligman lists 24 basic strengths arising from simple human virtues such as courage, creativity and kindness, and supplies tests to help people identify the five signature strengths that will see them through tough bad times and give them a template to build their lives around. The 240-plus questions ask you to rank how closely certain statements -- such as "I have taken frequent stands in the face of opposition" or "I love to learn new things" -- resonate. (The tests are available at authentichappiness.org.)

Multidimensional living
When Janet Thurston finished her breast cancer treatment six years ago she started 7 Points of Light, a campaign to raise money and raise cancer awareness by climbing seven volcanoes in the Pacific Rim. This initiative integrated the best things about Janet's life -- her vigorous health, a sense of purpose and her dedication to other people. Others achieve balance by focusing on their health or people who are important to them, and they include more gratifying tasks and good deeds in their busy schedules. What happy people like Janet know is that fears pop up every day, but facing them with the best part of yourself makes life more meaningful.

Recently, Janet learned she had a second chance to climb Mount Rainier, this August. "I'm so happy, I'm vibrating!" she exclaims.

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