Happiness Week 3: To Be Loved vs To Love

This fourth post in my series on happiness sums up week 3 of the study course I am following on http://www.coursera.org called A Life of Happiness and Fulfillment:  https://www.coursera.org/learn/happiness
To see all the posts in this series go to http://lublenok.blogspot.com/search/label/ALHF

This third week of the happiness course is about:

Deadly sin: the need to be loved or go it alone
Happiness habit: the need to love and give
Exercise: creative altruism

To be happy it's crucially important to have the feeling of belonging, of being loved.

Harlow's experiments with monkeys have shown, that need for love can even be more important than need for food. When the need for love is not provided, we tend to be psychologically damaged.

Another series of experiments shows that agreement with others makes us feel that we have a better chance of connecting with them.

Loneliness increases the chance of not only psychological problems, but also physical illnesses.

Being needy for love, however, is not good for happiness, for these reasons:

1. It makes you less attractive to others
2. It makes you less respected by others
3. It gets you into the wrong kind of relationships
4. You lose respect for yourself.

Being avoidant sounds alluring in theory:

1. It makes us feel independent and free
2. It sounds like the kind of thing a mentally strong person would do

Being avoidant isn't good for happiness either:

1. It goes against our (social) nature
2. Avoidants get less cooperation from other people 
3. Avoidants are less satisfied with the help they get from others
4. They have the lowest level of job satisfaction
5. They feel lonely and alienated

The right way to be is secure attachment (which is the middle ground between neediness and avoidance):

People become needy or avoidance because of the lack of love and attention as children, particularly in their first 1.5 years of life. But this can be changed! 

I, myself, am rather avoidant in many situations.

What you can do:

1. Practice self-compassion: being kind towards yourself, particularly when feeling unhappy
2. Practice gratitude: improving the quality of relationships that you have
3. Practice kindness and generosity, and thereby strengthen the need to love (and give)

Spending money on others makes us happier!

Wow, what a finding! I always tend to feel otherwise :)

Those donating to charity were are happier people.

Why being generous makes us happy?

1. We are hard-wired to be kind, loving and giving
2. It makes us feel more confident and capable
3. Reciprocity: when we are generous, others are likely to be generous in return

Ways to be kind and generous:

1. Being grateful
2. Doing good to others

Kind and generous people are more likely to succeed in their professions!

You want to be an "otherish" giver.

Reciprocity styles:

1. Giver: what do I have to offer?
2. Taker: what do you have to offer me?
3. Matcher: seeking justice, fairness and equity

Givers are more likely to succeed! Givers are able to harness a lot of extra resources! But they are also found a lot at the bottom (self-secrificing, burnouts, etc.)

Successful and unsuccessful givers are differentiated by the ability to attend not only to the needs of others but also to their own needs. Successful people are "otherish" givers:

1. They contain the cost of giving
1. Am I the right person?
2. Help multiple people at the same time
2. Value extending strategies
1. Allow themselves to feel gratitude, pride, etc.
2. Say No at times
3. See impact of your generosity
4. Have fun being generous

Creative altruism exercise:

The idea is to do something kind to somebody, which involves some cost to yourself, is fun for both parties, and then watch their reaction.

1. What was your idea/plan?

Give flowers to my wife.

2. How did you execute the idea? Did you stick to the "3 rules for giving" (contain cost of giving, have fun, and register impact)? If not, why not?

I went to the market, bought flowers for my wife, gave the flowers to her and watched her reaction.

3. What did the recipient feel? In answering this question focus on what the recipient said/did when he/she experienced your act.

She really loved it, she said so and gave me a big hug and kiss

4. How did it make you feel? What effect did the entire exercise have on you?

It made me feel very happy!

My current happiness level is 21 out of 35 :)