Teachers aren't very happy these days.  This is partly due to some changes in the nature of the work, and—if it's any comfort—also partly due to the fact that everyone's less happy.  For teachers in particular, there are many aspects of the profession that have grown more hard to take.  I find on the web a survey from the NEA describing positive and negative aspects of the work over the last forty years.  In the 1960s, factors like "positive attitude of pupils and parents" and "pupil progress and ability" had a significant impact on job satisfaction.  After the 60s, those factors just disappear from the survey.  In the most recent year of the survey, difficulties with administrators was a bigger source of job dissatisfaction than difficulties with students.  And this is what I hear from my patients who are teachers—less and less of a sense of being part of a team on a mission and more and more a sense of every man for himself.  You can see the idealism of the sixties being replaced by the bureaucracy required by federal guidelines, advocacy groups, and the politics of school administration.

            This comes in the midst of a worldwide problem with attaining happiness.  In the USA and Europe, over the fifty years since scientists started measuring personal happiness reliably, people report that they are less and less happy every year.  As other nations become more Westernized happiness declines as well.  At the same time, psychology has for the first time begun to look into what really does make us happy.  Unfortunately for teachers, the news is not all good.  There's a lot that accompanies the work that science can now prove will add unnecessary misery; but now we're beginning to understand what we can do about that.

            You have to start with the recognition that happiness isn't normal.  Humans aren't wired for it. one to maintain happiness. We can get happy when good things happen, but it's very difficult to maintain that feeling.  Humans are wired to be able to feel good when good things happen, but the feeling never lasts.  That process is in our brains where our genetic heritage put it.  The cavemen who liked to linger contentedly around the fire were more likely to get eaten, and thus were not around to be our ancestors.  Instead, our ancestors were alert, competitive, never satisfied, always on the move—and we've got their genes.  Your brain really doesn't care whether you're happy or not, as long as you survive.

            Then there's what some call the Hedonic Treadmill.  The greatest myth of human life is the belief that I'll be happy if I get what I want.  All the research shows that as soon as we get what we want, we'll just want something else—but we seem doomed to keep forgetting this.  This is another evolutionary gotcha; our brains trick us into doing what's good for species survival by making us believe it will make us happy.  The baser things we crave—-money, power, success, beauty—-in the old days would have put us in a better position to pass on our genes; in fact, they still do a little.  They don't make us any happier, but we have real trouble learning that, because our genetic heritage, expressed in the unconscious, is so powerful. How do you manage to stay happy with a brain like this?  Most teachers have never been in it for the money, but they would like a little more respect; instead they often get their own self-respect nibbled away at every day.

            Staying happy is also more of a problem these days because our society has broken up our most of our means of security—meaningful work, close-knit families, a supportive community, a sense of religious belonging.  It's replaced them with more of the same fruitless values we just discussed—money, power, etc.—but at the same time made those things harder to reach.  Despite the growth in overall wealth, most Americans today are working 25 percent more hours than they were 25 years ago simply to stay in place economically.  Hard to be happy if you're only treading water with no land in sight.

            Teachers may have an especially tough time because their idealism has been eroded by working conditions.  Most people enter the profession because of a desire to work with young people (per the NEA), but half of newcomers leave within five years.  Of those who stay, many cite "having too much invested to leave now" as their biggest reason for staying.  What a dismal prospect!  While that attitude probably reflects a realistic stocktaking of their careers, it suggests that many teachers are feeling chained to the job, only counting the days until retirement.

            Then there is the problem of being overworked.  In the US as a whole, working hours have increased while take-home pay has stagnated or declined, and the teaching profession is no exception.  More and more paperwork to do outside of class time, more and more "voluntary" activities teachers are expected to participate in after hours.  If the most rewarding aspect of teaching is actually being in the classroom with the kids, it's hard to be happy if that time is constantly interrupted.

            Yet there is good news for teachers in the latest research about happiness:  We can change our own brains to make happiness easier.  You may feel overworked, burned out, and have a dim view of your prospects but to a certain extent that's the way your brain has been conditioned to feel, and you can learn to change that.  The new neuroscience is teaching us very concrete methods we can use to overcome the bad mental habits we've developed.  We can do a great deal to make us more receptive to happiness (but it takes longer than we want it to).  Some researchers recently taught a group of college students to juggle and, using the latest high-tech neuro-imaging equipment, observed their brains as they learned.  After three months of daily practice the researchers could identify measurable growth in gray matter in certain areas of their subjects' brains; after three months of no practice the growth disappeared.  Life experience changes the structure of the brain itself.  Just like juggling, happiness is a set of skills you can learn; and, just like juggling, learning to be happy is work that requires dedication and practice.  We know now that the ways of acting, thinking, feeling, and relating that lead to lasting happiness do not come naturally to most people.  It takes conscious, sustained effort to overcome the habits that keep us unhappy and learn new habits to replace them.  But after you've done that work, actually being happy is not much work at all.  Once you've learned to ride a bicycle, or type, or juggle, or acquired some of the happiness skills we're going to talk about—it doesn't take much conscious effort to maintain your ability.  If you practice regularly, your brain will incorporate your new skills so that it gets to be easier and easier to be happy.  Three months is longer than we want to stick to any reform plan; but if you appreciate that your brain is changing a little every day, it may be easier to maintain your commitment.

            Here are three more specific skills to practice to raise your happiness level: reducing unnecessary misery by learning mindfulness, experiencing more joy, and finding greater life satisfaction through strategic goal setting.

Learn to be more mindful

            Much unnecessary misery comes from mindlessness: the frantic, hypervigilant frame of mind that has us always rushing to cross to-dos off our lists, in a hurry, not listening, not concentrating, distracted, not fully present.  Greater mindfulness will reduce that misery.  There are two components to mindfulness.  First of all, there is mindful living, which means deliberately cultivating a new attitude toward your thoughts, feelings, and experience—an attitude of openness, compassion, and objectivity; a deliberate effort not to be guided by old habits of thinking and behaving but to see each experience in its uniqueness.  Then there is mindfulness meditation, which is a specific kind of meditation practice, used both as a means of achieving mindful living and for other benefits. 

            Mindful living helps you see that all the thoughts and feelings in your mind are to some extent just a passing parade, which you can observe from a little distance, without getting caught up in.  You develop a part of your mind that doesn't get swept away by the urgency, that hangs back and keeps the larger picture of yourself, your goals and values, in mind.  As you grow more and more mindful, you'll find that the burden of unnecessary misery in your life is greatly reduced.  You will have an easier time not acting on impulse or being tricked by your brain.  So you don't get as angry, hurt, or depressed as you used to.  Your analytical skills will be much more effective because you're no longer judging automatically and seeing the world as only a series of stereotypes.  You get better at looking underneath the surface and seeing things as they truly are.  You start to make decisions that are based on your rational thinking and your intuition.  These are wiser decisions, that will help you stay out of trouble and lead to greater self-esteem, better relationships, and more happiness.

            Mindfulness is developed through practice.  When you feel yourself rushed, slow down; when you feel anxious, take a minute to calm down; when you're about to say or do something impulsively, just stop, take a few deep breaths, and do something else.  It sounds like inane advice; it sounds so easy to say, but it's difficult to do.  That's why you have to practice.  Each time you practice, you're breaking an old link between nerve cells in your brain and building a new one.  You will get discouraged, you will feel like you're not getting anywhere.  But I guarantee that if you give this an honest effort every day for three months, just like the jugglers you will change your brain so that staying mindful will be easier.

            For those who can take mindfulness a step further and practice regular meditation, the news about mindfulness potentially goes far beyond the obvious benefits of clear thinking, wise decision-making, and emotional centeredness.  New research is showing that mindfulness meditation practice actually rewires our brains and builds new neural pathways.  It promises to heal the damage of stress so that we are able to experience a greater degree of pleasure.  Mindful meditation practice affects how the brain deals with emotions, leading to an increase in activity in the area where the brain processes positive feelings and controls negative feelings, an increase that lasts even when we're not meditating.  It seems that the more we practice this effect, the easier it gets; we learn to control disturbing emotions like we learn to ride a bike; after a while we don't have to think about it, it just happens.

            Some teachers are now bringing mindfulness principles into the classroom, and finding surprising success with it.  Younger children learn to enjoy calming exercises.  And since it can be presented as a science that helps with anxiety and self-control, rather than as an external control, even high school students can buy into it.  You get students who are more self-disciplined and productive, and feel better about themselves as well, and the classroom atmosphere becomes very different.

Pay attention to joy

            Joy, the immediate and spontaneous experience of pleasure, requires special attention because there is so much going on in today's world that interferes with our ability to be attentive to how we feel right now—and if you can't do that, you miss a lot of happiness.  The simplest, but most important, message about happiness is this:  WAKE UP!  There is spectacular beauty all around you.  Miracles are happening right under your nose.  Compared to our ancestors and most of the people in the world today, we live a very comfortable, pleasant existence with great freedom and many opportunities.  Don't let it all slip by unnoticed.

            One reason why we miss out on so much possible joy is that we rely too much on short-cut thinking, an inevitable result of today's hurry-up world.  Whenever we see a familiar object, like a flower, there are actually two processes going on in the mind at the same time.  Our eyes perceive an object of a certain color, size, and shape, and transmit that information to the brain, where the higher cortical layers get busy trying to identify the object.  We know what a flower looks like from all of our previous experiences with flowers.  The higher layers send a message down to the senses saying essentially I got it.  This is a flower.  You don't have to pay attention any more.  That's fine if we're weeding the garden; our minds can skip over all the details of the flowers because our purpose is to find weeds.  But if you want to experience more joy, you have to break that habit and pay attention to the glorious detail of our experience.  The problem is that 21^st century life has us so busy that we're always in weeding mode.  Got to rush through the garden like every other task we have.  You can lose the ability to see students as individuals, who have reasons for their interruptions, and see them only as obstacles to getting through the lesson plan.  We have to slow down and pay some attention to the sensory part of the brain—Look at that flower!  What colors!  What beautiful complexity inside!  Smell it, touch it, taste it!

            When we're stuck in an overstressed state, all we're likely to see of life are those shortcuts—including those of our children, our lovers, our bosses.  Instead of seeing complex individuals with all their own feelings, we see only our stereotypes of them.  Instead of appreciating the senses, we dismiss them as nuisances.  Wonderful things in life zip by like cars on the Interstate.  We have to learn to relax and slow down so that we are able to see beyond categories into the true novelty of our friend on this day, at this age, with this expression on his face, with this concern.

            We dismiss things as small or everyday when, if we focused, we might find ourselves in a state of intense pleasure.  One good friend of mine puts sitting in the sun with her dog in her top ten pleasures in life.  Another likes a really good grilled cheese sandwich.  Why don't you make a list of the top ten things that make you feel really good?—and then spend more time at them, savoring the experience.

Set realistic goals

            Having realistic, concrete, and achievable goals that still challenge us to do our best may be the single best avenue toward greater life satisfaction.  Research shows us that the mere act of setting reasonable and concrete goals seems to improve both our experience and our performance.  For instance, if you have a major project to do, you'll do much better if you can break it down into pieces and organize a timetable.  You'll feel much better as you attain those little goals than if you just work on this piece or that when you feel like it.  Making a commitment focuses our attention on the target and helps us think more intently about how to get there.  There is a lot of research to suggest that we feel happier as we are progressing toward our goals; we have a sense of purposeful involvement, we give ourselves mental pats on the back for being so good and industrious, our self-esteem is enhanced.  And being such adaptable creatures as humans are, we can even fail to meet a goal and still benefit greatly from having pursued it, and get over our disappointment rather quickly.

            Having goals frees us to enjoy the here and now.  If we set out on a journey without purpose or direction, every fork in the road becomes another decision to make, another point where our ambivalence and anxiety can overtake us.  Will the scenery be better this way, or that way?  Have we gone too far?  What if there are no motel rooms?  Should we stop at this battlefield, or that old cavern, or the antique center?  But if we know where we're going, our minds are saved all this hassle and we sit back and enjoy the ride.  Same thing if you have a major project at work, or are writing or creating, or are learning something.  Many of your daily decisions are taken care of because you know what your priorities are.

            The happiest teachers I've known are the ones who've been able to use the knowledge and skills they've developed to contribute to a second career for themselves.  The physics teacher who has a little lab and fix-it business at home; the English teacher who contributes essays to the local newspaper.  Their teaching jobs have stayed interesting to them because they see themselves working toward a satisfying future. 

            People who make realistic plans, who save for the future, who pursue tangible and concrete goals, who use practical methods for attaining their goals, who build productive and supportive relationships, are obviously at an advantage compared to those who are pursuing impossible dreams or following the whims of the moment.  Their lives will turn out better, and they'll be happier.  They'll also grow in feelings of autonomy and mastery.  You'll be more successful, on your own terms, and you'll keep growing in competence and self-esteem.

From Richard O'Connor, author of Happy at Last, due out Oct. 27 from St. Martin's Press.

Published November 5, 2008