What Happy People Know: How the New Science of Happiness Can Change Your Life for the Better - Hardcover

Baker, Dan; Stauth, Cameron

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1579546021 ISBN 13: 9781579546021

Publisher: Rodale Pr, 2003

Synopsis

Profiles unhappiness as a chemical brain response that helped early humans to survive, offering advice on how to achieve happiness by retraining brain activity, accepting a painful past, and designing a future. 100,000 first printing. First serial, Prevention.

About this title

About the Author

Dan Baker, Ph.D., was one of the original developers of Canyon Ranch and has been director of the award-winning Life Enhancement Program for 15 years. He was founding director of the behavioral medicine department at Canyon Ranch.

Cameron Stauth is the author of 14 books, including several bestsellers, and has been published in nine languages.

From the Back Cover

"Everyone wants to be happy. So much suffering and illness occur when we look for happiness in the wrong places. In What Happy People Know, Dan Baker distills the best of science and spirituality, sharing with deep and profound wisdom how we can learn to be happy and let go of suffering. Highly recommended."--Dean Ornish, M.D., founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute, clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco; ad author of Love and Survival and Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease

"Dr. Dan Baker has created a book that we all have been waiting for. It is a significant, practical, insightful, easy-to-read book filled with nuggets that lead us to the road of happiness."--Gerald G. Jampolsky, M.D., author of Love is Letting Go of Fear

Contrary to popular belief, we're not born happy and then taken down a peg or two by the circumstances of our lives. In fact, science has shown that the root of unhappiness lies in archaic brain impulses that serve no purpose in modern-day life.

Fortunately, we've also evolved a portion of the brain capable of higher, rational thoughts that can enable us to recognize these impulses. Understanding this and learning how to avoid these happiness traps are the first steps in retraining our reactions and, eventually, our actual brain chemistry. Dan Baker, Ph.D., director of the Life Enhancement Program at Canyon Ranch, teaches you the happiness tools that thousands of his clients and patients have used to successfully avoid these traps and actually learn to be happy.

Identifying the sources of your unhappiness or neurosis can be a good start, but it can't really help you resolve the issues themselves. What Happy People Know takes you to the next step: accepting the past, actively moving toward a future of your own design, and mastering the skills you need to feel the happiness that your life already offers you!

From the Inside Flap

"This wonderfully helpful book is sure to increase the number of happy people with its wisdom."--Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People

What Happy People Know

Dr. Dan Baker, director of the Life Enhancement Program at Canyon Ranch, has devoted his life to teaching people how to be happy. And apparently, most of us could use a little tutoring.

Research has shown that the root of unhappiness--fear--lies in the oldest, reptilian part of our brains, and negative reactions are often dictated by primal instincts. We're literally "hardwired for hard times."

In What Happy People Know, Dr. Baker uses evidence from the new science of happiness to show us how we can overcome this genetic predisposition toward negative reactions and lead a truly rich, happy, and healthy life.

Maybe you're wishing for more--more money, more friends, more status--thinking that "more" itself will insulate you from fear, making you feel safer and therefore happier. But Dr. Baker's clinics have been filled with VIPs who are just as unhappy as the next guy--some even more so.

In What Happy People Know, Dr. Baker shares the program that has revolutionized the lives of countless unhappy people, VIPs and regular Joes and Janes alike. First, you'll learn the only two issues that ever cause unhappiness and devise your plan to overcome both of them. Then, Dr. Baker teaches you how to spot the happiness traps, the five doomed ways we try to make ourselves happy, only to dig ourselves further into misery. Finally, he shares his happiness tools, the six simple skills that, when practiced consistently, will inevitably lead to greater optimism, courage, good humor, and fulfillment--in short, to happiness.

Edition details

• Publisher: Rodale Pr
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1579546021
• ISBN 13: 9781579546021
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256