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About Positive Psychology and Happiness

Positive psychology is a recent branch of psychology that focus on strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. This new branch was developed by Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1998 and even though it is a new field of psychology, it is based on scientific methods.
It emerged as an alternative to 'negative psychology', which main concern has been negative emotions and pathologies and emphasizes negativity, misfortune and the corrosion of the self. According to the fathers of positive psychology, psychology up to this point, has been disappointing. Doctors wait in their practice for sick people, nothing has been done in terms of prevention and promotion, which should really be the main concern of a science that has as its aim, health. Positive psychology is centered on building on strengths rather than fixing what is wrong as it is rather a complement to traditional psychotherapy.
Central concerns of positive psychology:
• Quality of life: By having a healthy lifestyle, the chances of being healthy physically and emotionally are greater. Positive psychology provides people with strategies to regulate their behaviors. The core skill is self-control, which allows people to dismiss self-destructive attitudes.
• Forgiveness: In order to be happy, it is necessary to have positive emotions and attitudes towards the past, the present and the future. Forgiveness is an attitude towards the past that gives peace. To forgive is to change the perception of what happened, to take into account that people make mistakes and that does not makes them bad persons. Resentment is a poison and forgiveness is a gift to themselves not to other people.
• Resilience: It means individual´s capacity to cope with stress and adversity and to get through a difficult situation and come out of it stronger. Resilience is not a trait, it is a process that has to be fostered.
• Positive emotions: In the same way as forgiveness, positive emotions are fostered towards the past, the present and the future. This is fundamental to improve quality of life. Emotions towards the past are geared to gratefulness, calmness and satisfaction. These emotions make people feel happy and in peace with what they have experienced in their life. Emotions geared to the present are joy and love, which are benifical for health. Emotions geared to the future are trust, safeness, hope and optimism, which allow people to look into the future positively.
• Good mood: Most people that are usually in a good mood tend to feel better and those around them feel better as well. A good mood is like an antidote. People can look at the bright side of a difficult situation and do not take life too seriously.
• Optimism: There is no such thing as luck. With a positive attitude towards life and a belief that things can work out just fine, anybody can be 'lucky'. And also by seeing an opportunity behind a difficult situation.
• Self-steem: High self-steem is a sign of a happy life and a person that sees themselves as valuable. By contrast, a person with low self-steem is prone to depression; that is why, positive psychology fosters self-steem in prevention programs. Nothing is more important than loving oneself.
• Motivation: Motivation is connected with what people like and want, not what they should do, it is related to feeling pleasure by doing something. As it comes from within, it is intrinsic, it can lead to optimism and hope, which means that if any difficulty arises, people are likely to keep going, focused on their goals.