If we can accept as true that life circumstances are not the keys to happiness, we'll be greatly empowered to pursue happiness for ourselves.
Sonja LyubomirskyRead
The combination of rumination and negative mood is toxic. Research shows that people who ruminate while sad or distraught are likely to feel besieged, powerless, self-critical, pessimistic, and generally negatively biased.
Interpretation
Focusing on negative thoughts while in a low mood can worsen emotional distress.
This quote emphasizes the detrimental effects of combining rumination, or repetitive negative thinking, with a negative mood. Research suggests that individuals who engage in this type of thinking while feeling sad or distressed experience intensified feelings of helplessness and self-criticism, leading to a more pessimistic outlook on life. Essentially, this combination perpetuates a cycle of negativity that can severely impact mental health.
In practice
During a workshop on mental wellness, discussing how to overcome negative thought patterns.
If we can accept as true that life circumstances are not the keys to happiness, we'll be greatly empowered to pursue happiness for ourselves.
It is equally important to investigate wellness as it is to study misery.
Happiness is not out there for us to find. The reason that it's not out there is that it's inside us.
People prone to joyful anticipation, skilled at obtaining pleasure from looking forward and imagining future happy events, are especially likely to be optimistic and to experience intense emotions.
Thus the key to happiness lies not in changing our genetic makeup (which is impossible) and not in changing our circumstances (i.e., seeking wealth or attractiveness or better colleagues, which is usually impractical), but in our daily intentional activities.
I prefer to think of the creation or construction of happiness, because research shows that it's in our power to fashion it for ourselves.
They don’t need walls and water to keep the prisoners in, not when they’re trapped inside their own heads, incapable of a single cheerful thought. Most go mad within weeks - Lupin
The 'self-image' is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior.
People have a range of capacities to deal with overwhelming experience. Some people, some kids particularly, are able to disappear into a fantasy world, to dissociate, to pretend like it isnt happening, and are able to go on with their lives. And sometimes it comes back to haunt them.
Since [narcissists] deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil, on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others.
I can't help it when people are frightened," says Merricat. "I always want to frighten them more.
A hurt is at the center of all addictive behaviors. . . . The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain
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