来源：《新科学家》
原文见刊日期：2022年1月22日
We know how to behave to increase the chances of a long, healthy life. If you drink alcohol in moderation, don’t smoke, follow a good diet with plenty of vegetables, take half an hour of exercise a day and aim to have 8 hours of sleep a night, you are more likely to live into your 80s.
我们知道怎样做来增加健康长寿的几率。如果你适量饮酒，不吸烟，保持良好的饮食习惯，多吃蔬菜，每天锻炼半小时，每晚保证8小时睡眠，那么你更有可能活到80多岁。
But is it possible to prescribe a happy lifestyle too? Over the past two decades, scientists studying “positive psychology” have identified many techniques to raise our happiness from its current baseline. These methods cannot work miracles. “Things like poverty or trauma are obviously going to affect your well-being,” says Laurie Santos at Yale University. “But for many of us, our happiness is much more under our control than we think.”
但是，是否有可能开出一种快乐生活方式的处方呢？在过去的二十年里，研究“积极心理学”的科学家发现了许多提高我们幸福感的方法。这些方法不能创造奇迹。耶鲁大学的劳瑞·桑托斯说：“像贫困或创伤这样的事情显然会影响你的幸福。但对我们中的许多人来说，幸福比我们想象的更容易控制。”
Santos would know. Her free online course, The Science of Well-being, offers lessons on the mental habits that damage our happiness.
桑托斯知道这样的处方。她的免费在线课程《幸福科学》提供了有关损害我们幸福的心理习惯的内容。
For a taste of what it involves, consider our tendency to compare ourselves negatively with the people around us, which is now known to be one of the most common causes of dissatisfaction with our lives. By recognising when those thoughts have started to arise, we can consciously shift the reference point to something more neutral. If you start to feel dissatisfied with your current salary and keep on thinking that you would be even happier with your boss’s income, you might try to remember your financial situation before you got your most recent raise. What kinds of things can you buy now, that you couldn’t before? With this kind of counterfactual thinking, you may start to feel more content.
为了了解课程所涉及的内容，请考虑一下我们倾向于将自己与周围的人进行消极比较，这是现在已知的对生活不满意的最常见原因之一。通过意识到这些想法何时开始出现，我们可以有意识地将参照标准转向更中性的东西。如果你开始对目前的薪水不满意，并一直认为有老板那样的收入会让你更开心，你可以试着回想一下最近一次加薪前你的财务状况。哪些东西你现在能买，而以前不能买？有了这种反事实的思维，你可能会开始感到更满足。
The use of gratitude journals, where you regularly count your blessings, work on a similar basis, says Santos. We have a tendency for “hedonic adaptation”, essentially getting used to the good things in our life over time, and taking them for granted, so they no longer bring us the same joy. By making a conscious effort to recognise those things – and even imagine what our life would be like without them – we stall that process.
桑托斯说，使用感恩日记，那是你经常知足的地方，也可以起到类似的作用。我们有一种“享乐适应”的倾向，随着时间的推移，基本上习惯了生活中的美好事物，把它们视为理所当然，所以它们不再给我们带来同样的快乐。通过有意识地认识到这些东西——甚至想象一下如果没有它们，我们的生活会是什么样子——我们能够延缓“享乐适应”这个过程。
Other lessons in Santos’s course include the benefits of mindfulness and the value of small acts of kindness. Studies show that making the effort to talk to strangers, for example – be it someone in the park – can increase your sense of social connection, which is known to have a positive effect on your mood.
桑托斯课程上的其他内容包括正念的好处和小善举的价值。研究表明，努力与陌生人交谈，例如，公园里的人，可以增加你的社会联系感，这对你的情绪有积极的影响。