Official Review: The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor

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After returning a book called Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard back to the library, my librarian Grace suggested I read The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor.

This book helps people find meaning in their work and in their personal lives, while sharing psychological studies about happiness and how to get there. The Happiness Advantage is taught at Harvard’s Happiness Course and to companies everywhere, and I think we’ll start to see this ideology pop up more frequently.

Achor starts with the premise that happiness breeds success, not vice versa. Simply put, the happier people are, the more productive and engaged they are and how that can drastically affect the bottom line (and vice versa). So the question for companies is, how do you get happy employees so that everyone prospers?

As Achor says, “people primed to feel happy outperform their neutral peers. Our brains are hardwired to perform at their best not when they are negative or even neutral, but when they are positive.”

So I’ve started following this by looking at how to increase my own happiness. Here are some of Achor’s ways:
- meditate
- find something to look forward to
- commit conscious acts of kindness
- infuse positivity into your surroundings (get a breath of fresh air, show photos of loved ones, keep negative emotions at bay [watch less TV])
- spend money (but not on stuff). on experiences and other people.
- exercise

Luckily, recent researchers have found out that the neuroplasticity in our brains is malleable, which means we can change our mindset at any time in our life. Psychological studies have shown that if you take 75-yr-old men back in time 20 years, they gain three more years of their lives; if you let housemaids know how many calories they burn cleaning rooms, they actually lose more weight.

“Happiness is not the belief that we don’t need to change; it is the realization that we can.”

For me, I work in a highly political, constantly-changing environment that can be unbelievably frustrating at times. The higher-ups don’t understand this happiness concept, and I’m constantly trying to figure out ways to change my mindset/attitude to be more successful in my job.

Luckily, this is the one book that understands this, and provides ways to look inward, the differences you can personally make to affect the rest of the team and organization. It breaks down your work as whether you view it as a Job, a Career, or a Calling, and how those simple words can determine your work performance. Some exercises around this include: writing out the underlying meanings in menial tasks, taking each day to write down at least 3 things you’re grateful for, identifying the areas where efforts have a real impact and focusing your energy more accordingly, writing out stresses and daily challenges to decipher what you can change and what you can’t, how to build strong social capital.

Achor says that being happy takes practice, practice, practice. The recommendation of this book couldn’t have come along at better timing either, because I am currently involved in a Happify iPhone track based off of some of Achor’s exercises in this book.Happiness tracks created by leading happiness experts in Happify help me take this advice and actually put it into practice. I’ve recently started sharing The Happiness Advantage and Happify with friends, co-workers and family, because I’ve noticed it start to work.

I rate this book 4 out of 4 stars because this “self-help” book doesn’t want anything more from you than for you to be happy.