Introduction

This book is about your happiness: how to understand it, how to cultivate it, and how to achieve it in your life.

I wrote this book because I am an expert on what depression and sadness feel like. You may be, too; you may feel overwhelmed or helpless, and you may have no one to turn to who understands your suffering.

Then I wrote this book for you. I’ve learned some amazing things about happiness that I want to share with you.

If you’re not depressed, but you’re just interested in the idea of being happier, I wrote this book for you, too.

The world is filled with narratives of personal depression. Many of these books have a common theme: depression really, really hurts. And there are countless books on happiness, too. But in this book I’m going to focus specifically on what you can do to reduce your sadness and/or depression and increase your happiness over the long term—based on my experience, based on the greatest wisdom of the ages, and based on the latest, most exciting medical and scientific breakthroughs.

In researching this book, my coauthor, Bill Doyle, and I reviewed three thousand years of human thought on human happiness, including the ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, Hebrew, Hindu, and Buddhist texts, the New Testament, the Koran, and the writings of the great minds of literature and psychology.

We reached out and picked the brains of some of the greatest research scientists, medical doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists in the world today, including experts working in two exciting new fields: “happiness research” and “positive psychology.” We read hundreds of their most fascinating research reports and we discussed their findings with them.

And I have some wonderful news for you.

There are paths that you and I can take that can bring us through the forest of depression and sadness, and lead us toward the sunlit fields of emotional well-being, happiness, and joy.

I will take you on a journey to the brightest and darkest places of my life, and my experiences with happiness, anger, achievements, crises, depression, drugs, and therapy.

I will take you on a Journey of the Mind, a tour of the Emotional State of the Union today: America’s happiness, depression, medication, therapies, and trends, the big issues and controversies, and the best medical and scientific expert opinions.

I will take you on a Journey of the Body: the quest for emotional wellness through physical joy and the exciting new developments suggesting how exercise and diet can affect and improve emotional well-being, by elevating mood; by reducing stress, anxiety, and depression; and by increasing physical and emotional happiness.

And I will take you on a Journey of the Soul: the quest for spiritual happiness and how spiritual religious well-being is intertwined with emotional health.

Finally, I will tie it all together with the Living Well Emotionally Well-Being Program, a comprehensive program of insights, options, exercises, and ideas for achieving true joy and lasting emotional health.

In the course of my life, I have learned seven interrelated insights that changed my life for the better, and I believe they can change yours, too:

1. You own the definition of you, and you control the power of your own happiness. You are who you think you are, and you are as happy as you think you can be.
2. The power to conquer sadness and depression, and achieve happiness, lies inside you. Therapists and medications and external forces can make a difference, but the ultimate power belongs to you, nobody else. You are the master of your emotional destiny.
3. Roughly 50 percent of your happiness is genetic and 10 percent is based on your life circumstances, but you can use simple techniques to boost the whopping 40 percent that lies in your direct control, and thereby achieve significant increases in your emotional well-being.
4. Just as your perceptions of events can trigger downward spirals into depression, you can use positive emotions to ignite magnificent upward spirals of happiness, to heights of emotional thriving and flourishing.
5. The way you treat your body with your diet and exercise can have a sharp positive impact on your happiness.
6. The way you treat your soul with your spiritual journeys can have a sharp positive impact on your happiness.
7. With the proper understanding, tools, and practice in your daily life, you can achieve lasting increases in your happiness.

You and I deserve a life of true happiness and lasting joy.

There are doorways of happiness that lie within your grasp everywhere, every day, every second of your life.

Let’s open them up together—right now.