Introductory Chapter of the book: A Little Essay on Mental Wellness
How to Be - and Stay - Happy - 1
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Happiness is composed of avoided misfortunes.

Alphonse Karr

This book is entirely devoted to a question which closely interests all of us: how can we improve the general conditions of our life? We frequently overreact to events simply because we do not understand them and, furthermore, because we do not know how to cope with them in a suitable way. However, our harmful reactions inevitably make us unhappy.

We are more educated than ever, but this progress remains limited and does not concern certain significant aspects of human life. We consider that the abilities to read, to write and to count are essential to accomplish our daily activities. These skills, that we progressively learned, give us undeniable advantages. Nevertheless, we leave to chance the responsibility to teach us how to respect others, how to correct our erroneous interpretations and to discover sources of conflicts and misunderstandings.

Thus, we get older and nobody ever explains to us how our psychological processes work. Yet, those processes govern our everyday life; they allow us to perceive the world, to interpret it, to maintain good relationships, in short, to achieve all of what to live implies!

Human being and life: no directions for use

Many experiences shape our existence. Unfortunately, education systems do not teach most significant abilities which help our daily life, as knowing how to develop effectual interpretations of reality, how to manage emotions or how to develop positive relationships.

Although it seems less practical than the abilities to read or to count, a better understanding of our psychological processes provides undeniable advantages that we could benefit from every day. This understanding leads to greater motivation, more harmonious relationships, and allow us to view events and react to them in a more moderated way. But, especially, it improves our capacity to make judgments, which is extremely advantageous when time to make crucial decisions in our life comes.

In this book, I invite you to carry out an enthralling quest which will lead you to discover who you really are, to understand how you reason, how you interpret events in your everyday life and how you manage your relationships. By examining those various dimensions, we will see how it is possible to rise up in oneself a lifelong happiness.

The aim of this book could be summarized as follows: let us see how well-being can grow in ourselves, in our relationships, and how we can better understand our entire life through the way we understand it. Those three keys will open the doors of a true improvement that will be felt even in the smallest details of your daily life. Through a popularized synthesis of recent scientific research on the subject, I will explain to you all these absolutely fundamental “instructions” we can benefit from in our life. ...

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