This week, I was invited to a special screening of the documentary Happy, along with a question and answer session with Therese Borchard, author of Beyond Blue: Surviving Depression and Anxiety and Beating Bad Genes (and guest at our upcoming Annual Conference!). Before the screening, I was only vaguely aware of the documentary, but I’m glad I saw it.
Happy discusses what it means to be truly “happy.” How do societies define it? How do individuals attain it? The answers vary as much as the people interviewed for the movie do, but some broad themes seem to reoccur all over the world. Connection to your family, friends and community is key, as is believing in something bigger than ourselves (whether it be religion, spirituality or something more Earthbound). Gratitude is a large part of a person’s happiness as well. The documentary takes us through the importance of these traits in an individual’s lives through stories as varied as a former debutant in America to the Sang Bush people of Africa, from the island of Okinawa, Japan to the country of Bhutan. It also discusses the new field of positive psychology.
The documentary pointed out one thing that gets overlooked a lot, especially in this country. Happiness looks different to different people. The themes might be the same, but how they are influenced by their culture is just as important. Community is defined as the family for the Sang people of Africa, and the entire cohabitation housing community in Denmark. Gratitude within the yoga community is part of the practice, but in other organized religions, it is not focused on the same degree. The Blanchard family in the Louisiana bayou gets together once a week; the old women in Okinawa keep the spirits of their husbands who died in WWII close to them. By putting all of these varied stories together, Happy does a wonderful job of highlighting how similar all of these people, families and communities all over the world are, and how humans define happiness.
In addition, the discussion of positive psychology is interesting. The narrative stories are intercut with psychologists discussing the definitions of happiness, and how science is working to measure it quantitatively. The science is cutting edge, with MRI scans of a yogi’s brain during meditation being a highlight, but completely accessible to the average person. Knowing that cooperating with a group has the same effect on the brain as drugs is a breakthrough in understanding how the brain works, and why people respond to drugs as they do. Seeing how scientists understand what happiness does to the body and seeing how they measure what effects happiness is fascinating. Juxtaposing that with the stories of happiness in action is a hands-on way to understand the world.
Happy is an enlightening way to look at something we take for granted. I always thought that either you were happy or you weren’t. The emotion is much more complicated than that, and its effect on the body is profound. The ways to create happiness are simple to a degree, but as one scientist says, “happiness is a skill, like playing the violin.” It seems that there is hope for us all.
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