A review by librarypatronus
The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky

2.0

I don’t think there was anything particularly wrong with this. There was nothing I could point out as different from other self help I’ve read in tone or content, but I found it kind of off-putting. I struggled with the idea that we can make ourselves happier and see all these examples of worse off people doing it. It just made me feel weird and icky, I am going to attempt some of the tasks suggested, but I don’t feel like it told me much I didn’t already know and I didn’t enjoy the reading experience. The religion suggestions, especially, rubbed me wrong as it only focused on the self-reporting of happiness and health in religious people and not that there is plenty of religious trauma out there and religion may make many people unhappy - if you’re already religious, absolutely make an effort to practice more, but if you’re not, it doesn’t seem like a simple habit to just pick up and seems to assume a high percentage of religiosity in the population - she claims only 6 percent never pray. To whom? The universe? A specific God? Any God(s)? That is a very odd statistic to me. I do see that there’s a footnote but I was listening at that point and the references were not in the audio. The audio was well done, but it was hard to do the evaluation portions while listening and I switched to the ebook for those.