Men have long been silent and stoic about their inner lives, but there’s every reason for them to open up emotionally-and their partners are helping. One of the best kept secrets of happiness is to love and take care of others. All of us have an intense desire to be loved and nurtured. The need to be loved, porn as experiments by Bowlby and others have shown, could be considered one of our most basic and fundamental needs. One of the forms that this need takes is contact comfort-the desire to be held and touched. Findings show that babies who are deprived contact comfort, particularly during the first six months after they are born, grow up to be psychologically damaged. Given the importance of the need to be loved, it isn’t surprising that most of us believe that a significant determinant of our happiness is whether we feel loved and cared for. In our pursuit of the need to be loved, however, most of us fail to recognize that we have a parallel need: the need to love and care for others.
This desire, it turns out, is just as strong as the need to be loved and nurtured. It is the desire to love and take care of others that underlies the phenomenon of "cute aggression." Cute aggression refers to the tendency to pinch, hug, or otherwise express love for others-particularly cute babies, kittens or puppies-in ways that mildly hurt or cause discomfort to the object of our affection. We know that the desire to love and care for others is a hard-wired and deep-seated because the fulfillment of this desire enhances our happiness levels. Expressing love or compassion for others benefits not just the recipient of affection, but also the person who delivers it. And what’s more, it appears that even small acts of kindness generate just as much happiness as do lofty acts. In an interesting set of studies, participants were either given $5 or $20 as part of an experiment.
Participants in both groups were then asked to either spend the money on themselves or on others. Those who spent the money on others, sex it turned out, grew happier than those who spent it on themselves. More interestingly, the amount of money spent on others didn’t make a difference to happiness levels: those who spent $5 derived just as much happiness as those who spent $20. Michael Norton, one of the study co-authors summarizes the deep-seated and universal nature of the need to love in his excellent TED talk. If the need to love is hardwired and universal and is also a powerful determinant of happiness, why aren't many of us aware of it? Take the question: "What would make you most happy? " We do not answer with "serving others" or "showering love on someone." But rather with "money" or "being loved"? Maybe the answer has to do with the messages we are routinely exposed to, from our care-takers and the media. Post has been created by G SA Content Generator D em ov ersion !
These messages suggest that our happiness lies in being the recipient of others’ attention, freelegal.ch love (t.antj.link), and respect, rather than in being the donors of attention, love, and respect. For example, most of us are explicitly or implicitly told that happiness lies in achieving self-enhancing goals such as career success, wealth, fame, or power. The need to love and care for others, in contrast, is rarely emphasized, except perhaps in the arts. What should a happiness maximizer do? The happiness maximizer would be well advised to follow the Dalai Lama’s dictum: Be Selfish, Be Generous. There are at least three reasons why those who practice generosity experience a boost in happiness levels. First, because people have an inherent propensity to be fair to others, recipients of generosity feel pressured to reciprocate it. Thus, when you are generous to others, you attract generous behaviors from them in return. What goes around, comes around.