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By Jeyling Chou
Staff Writer

“As a psychoanalyst, people always ask me why I have a couch, and I don’t tell them that it puts out healing rays, but I always want to say that,” Dr. Martin Horowitz said before the official start of his lecture, A Course in Happiness, on February 12.

He continued as lecture attendees steadily filed in, preferring to choose seats towards the back of the auditorium and at the edge of the rows. “I put out happiness rays, so I think you should move in closer if you want to benefit from that.” At that, several obedient souls moved to the second row.

“I encourage you to eat. Just don’t suck lemons,” he went on. And we unwrapped the foil from our burritos provided by the Student Activity Center and anticipated a lesson in happiness.

Horowitz is a professor of psychiatry in the UCSF School of Medicine and Director of the Center on Stress and Healing at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital and Clinics. Also a graduate of the UCSF medical school, he has quite literally written the book on happiness.

“Happiness is a fairly long-term kind of contentment in the way I am approaching it,” he said.

“When we think of the current economic worldwide disasters and its cascading events, we’re all facing very new circumstances. Happiness includes being able to metabolize those circumstances and to be able to change our narrative structure of who we are in the world.”

Inherent in the pursuit of happiness, Horowitz said, is a groundedness in self and identity – only when we are comfortable with ourselves can we go out into the world and create the meaningful relationships that nourish happiness.

Horowitz’s most recent book, and the inspiration for the lecture, is structured as a course in happiness (coincidentally also the book’s title), which includes lessons and homework.

“I call the book a ‘course’ because I meant that there were lessons to take, but I also called it a course because, as a person whose hobby is sailing, it’s important to know what your compass bearing is and where you’re heading so you don’t drift aimlessly about,” Horowitz said. “I’m talking about a life course.”

Horowitz explained how the nature of psychological research has changed in the last 20 years. A paradigm shift occurred moving away from a focus on the symptoms, diagnosis and pathologies that might make people unhappy towards a positive psychology.

At the foundation of happiness, Horowitz said, is not a dizzying sense of euphoria, but rather rationality: Lasting happiness and an understanding of what makes you happy requires reason, planning and intention.

In the course of the lecture, Horowitz enumerated the top ten research proven keys to happiness. Drumroll please:

10) The gratification of senses and appetite.
9) Group membership. “The disruptive obstacle to group membership is expecting it to be wonderful and ideal,” Horowitz said as he explained how this could be found in unlikely places with a shift in perspective. “Even if you’re sitting in Starbucks and don’t know anyone, you’re not in there just to have your coffee. You’re in there to be a member of the coffee shop community.”
8) Embracement of diversity
7) Calm solitude—a rare luxury in the modern world, Horowitz admitted. Not only is this limited by time constraint, but finding pleasure solitude is often blockaded by invading feelings of boredom, restlessness or loneliness. The ability to enjoy one’s own undistracted company, however, is imperative to happiness.
“We don’t let our med students get this at all if we can help it,” he said. “As we reduce things to the 80 hour work week from the 120 hour work week, we should go down to the 60 hour work week and give people time for this type of satisfaction. They’ll make fewer mistakes.”
6) Appreciation (as opposed to jealousy and envy) of the achievements of other people
5) Appreciation of your own achievements
4) Excitation and mastery. This, Horowitz explained, is attained by trying new things and having adventures. Happiness can be found anywhere along the spectrum of sky diving and bungee jumping to traveling to a foreign country and helping with the health problems there.
3) Soul and spirit. “These speak for themselves,” Horowitz said.
2) Changing the world for the better
1) Enjoying the flow of generations. This somewhat enigmatic number one is actually engrained in the human experience. This, he said, is enjoying ones parents and a sense of ancestry and previous generations.

“This is enjoying your own children, but not just that,” Horowitz said. A flowing generation also includes “people you’re teaching, people you’re supervising, people you’re leaving a legacy for in terms of the work you do,” he said.