Why Attitude Is More Important Than IQ

When it comes to success, it’s easy to think that people blessed with brains are inevitably going to leave the rest of us in the dust. But new research from Stanford University will change your mind (and your attitude).

Psychologist Carol Dweck has spent her entire career studying attitude and performance, and her latest study shows that your attitude is a better predictor of your success than your IQ.

Dweck found that people’s core attitudes fall into one of two categories: a fixed mindset or a growth mindset.

With a fixed mindset, you believe you are who you are and you cannot change. This creates problems when you’re challenged because anything that appears to be more than you can handle is bound to make you feel hopeless and overwhelmed.

People with a growth mindset believe that they can improve with effort. They outperform those with a fixed mindset, even when they have a lower IQ, because they embrace challenges, treating them as opportunities to learn something new.

Common sense would suggest that having ability, like being smart, inspires confidence. It does, but only while the going is easy. The deciding factor in life is how you handle setbacks and challenges. People with a growth mindset welcome setbacks with open arms.

According to Dweck, success in life is all about how you deal with failure. She describes the approach to failure of people with the growth mindset this way,

“Failure is information — we label it failure, but it’s more like, ‘This didn’t work, and I’m a problem solver, so I’ll try something else.’”

Regardless of which side of the chart you fall on, you can make changes and develop a growth mindset. What follows are some strategies that will fine-tune your mindset and help you make certain it’s as growth oriented as possible.

Don’t stay helpless. We all hit moments when we feel helpless. The test is how we react to that feeling. We can either learn from it and move forward or let it drag us down. There are countless successful people who would have never made it if they had succumbed to feelings of helplessness: Walt Disney was fired from the Kansas City Star because he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas,” Oprah Winfrey was fired from her job as a TV anchor in Baltimore for being “too emotionally invested in her stories,” Henry Ford had two failed car companies prior to succeeding with Ford, and Steven Spielberg was rejected by USC’s Cinematic Arts School multiple times. Imagine what would have happened if any of these people had a fixed mindset. They would have succumbed to the rejection and given up hope. People with a growth mindset don’t feel helpless because they know that in order to be successful, you need to be willing to fail hard and then bounce right back.

Be passionate. Empowered people pursue their passions relentlessly. There’s always going to be someone who’s more naturally talented than you are, but what you lack in talent, you can make up for in passion. Empowered people’s passion is what drives their unrelenting pursuit of excellence. Warren Buffet recommends finding your truest passions using, what he calls, the 5/25 technique: Write down the 25 things that you care about the most. Then, cross out the bottom 20. The remaining 5 are your true passions. Everything else is merely a distraction.

Take action. It’s not that people with a growth mindset are able to overcome their fears because they are braver than the rest of us; it’s just that they know fear and anxiety are paralyzing emotions and that the best way to overcome this paralysis is to take action. People with a growth mindset are empowered, and empowered people know that there’s no such thing as a truly perfect moment to move forward. So why wait for one? Taking action turns all your worry and concern about failure into positive, focused energy.

Then go the extra mile (or two). Empowered people give it their all, even on their worst days. They’re always pushing themselves to go the extra mile. One of Bruce Lee’s pupils ran three miles every day with him. One day, they were about to hit the three-mile mark when Bruce said, “Let’s do two more.” His pupil was tired and said, “I’ll die if I run two more.” Bruce’s response? “Then do it.” His pupil became so angry that he finished the full five miles. Exhausted and furious, he confronted Bruce about his comment, and Bruce explained it this way: “Quit and you might as well be dead. If you always put limits on what you can do, physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life. It’ll spread into your work, into your morality, into your entire being. There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there; you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.”

If you aren’t getting a little bit better each day, then you’re most likely getting a little worse—and what kind of life is that?

Expect results. People with a growth mindset know that they’re going to fail from time to time, but they never let that keep them from expecting results. Expecting results keeps you motivated and feeds the cycle of empowerment. After all, if you don’t think you’re going to succeed, then why bother?

Be flexible. Everyone encounters unanticipated adversity. People with an empowered, growth-oriented mindset embrace adversity as a means for improvement, as opposed to something that holds them back. When an unexpected situation challenges an empowered person, they flex until they get results.

Don’t complain when things don’t go your way. Complaining is an obvious sign of a fixed mindset. A growth mindset looks for opportunity in everything, so there’s no room for complaints.

Bringing It All Together

By keeping track of how you respond to the little things, you can work every day to keep yourself on the right side of the chart above.

Do you have a growth mindset? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

By Dr Travis Bradbury

Hospice is concerned with life and living and that includes dying

We have little control over the fact that we are going to die, buts we can control how we live, 

Anyone could face a diagnosis of a fatal illness, so to those close to us, if we say thank you, I'm sorry, and I love you, we have said it all.

HE word hospice is one that possesses a unique capacity to evoke powerful and often conflicting emotions. It is a word full of inherent contradictions and stark contrasts. Historically, hospice represented a place of death — a home for the ‘incurables’. Not surprisingly therefore, hospice continues to generate enormous fear, apprehension and aversion.

In Cork, senior citizens often describe the experience of being urged by their parents to cover their mouths with a handkerchief and to run as quickly as possible past the formidable gates and high walls of the old hospice at St Patrick’s Hospital on Wellington Rd. In later years, these same adults report instinctively blessing themselves as they drive past the hospice as a form of silent prayer invoking the Lord to protect them from ever needing such care. We are never very far from our past. We are never very far from our fears.

For those who experience hospice care, a different narrative emerges. Words such as care, comfort, love, and security are frequently used to describe the modern hospice experience.

Hospice is primarily concerned with life and living, not death and dying. It has at its core a singular resolve to enable and support each individual person to live the life they choose to live, in the manner and setting of their choice, for the duration of their natural life.

This is achieved by means of good pain and symptom control combined with a holistic focus on the needs of the individual. In hospice, we are not treating disease, we are treating the person. In medicine, it is far more important to know the person who has the disease, than the disease the person has.

Hospice is life-enriching, life- enabling, life-sustaining, life-prolonging, and life-affirming.

Hospice is concerned with life and living and that includes dying, for dying is an integral part of life. For the purposes of this article, the words living and dying are used interchangeably only because they are one and the same thing.

People die (and live) in hospice and people die (and live) outside of hospice. We have little control over the fact that we are going to die, but we can control how we live, and we can live until we die. Death comes to 100% of the population — how more ‘normal’ can any phenomenon be?

The commonly held misconception that all death is avoidable or at least may be postponed indefinitely has clearly no basis in fact. Take a look at the penultimate page of this newspaper and you will see what I mean.

Medicine has much to offer and has made enormous strides. Yet, if modern medicine cannot always add days to our lives, it can at least add life to our days. That is the story of hospice.

A diagnosis of a life-limiting or life-threatening disease is a devastating experience for patient and family. It is always a shock and a most unwelcome and obscene violation of our sense of integrity and wholeness. Nature is a cruel mistress.

Intellectually, we know for certain that nothing in life stays the same, yet emotionally, we are somehow programmed to believe that it will. And when serious illness strikes, it always arises in the unique context of an individual’s life — past, present, and anticipated future.

We all have three lives — past, present, and future — and as we approach the end of our life, all three aspects come into sharp focus, each demanding attention and scarce energy.

We are acutely aware of all the events from our past that are sources of pride and perhaps more acutely aware of those that are sources of regret, hurt and pain. At the same time, we are balancing all of the stresses and joys of today. And finally, there is the future that we had so confidently planned and that now is evaporating before our eyes. It is not easy to live three lives at once.

And yet, people do find the resolve to address the many issues that require attention. And when practical matters such as wills, banking, insurances, and property are addressed, people typically wish to focus their energies on the important issues of life — relationships. For many, their relationship with family members, friends, and their God becomes the sole focus of attention.

Equally, many use the opportunity to reassess their relationship with themselves and may regret paying too much attention to that critical voice in their own head that always seemed to find fault and was quick to highlight weaknesses and deficiencies.

Maybe, this is a good time to accept ourselves for who we are, and to unashamedly love ourselves for the first time in an unconditional and non-judgmental way.

To those close to us, if we say thank you, I’m sorry and I love you, we have said it all.

Much is written in recent years about the concept of a bucket list — things that we might like to do if we know that our life expectancy is severely curtailed. People who engage in this fantasy from a position of good health often speak about such activities as sky-diving, trekking in Nepal, cycling across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, visiting the Taj Mahal, or taking a boat trip across Sydney Harbour.

All are very laudable and worthwhile pursuits. In the hospice population, the responses are radically different if no less laudable and worthwhile. People tell me they would give away all they possess if they could sit at their own kitchen table and enjoy tea and toast with close family and friends, sleep for one more night in their own bed, or have a take-away meal with the grand-children.

Looking at a future life in which they will play no part, people often ask if they can bring a planned event forward. Hence, Christmas dinner is served in October, birthdays and anniversaries are celebrated months before the calendar date and wedding photographs are taken weeks or months before the wedding. And, why not?

Hospice is the great enabler. Hospice doesn’t make it happen but creates the space where people can make their own miracles happen, and they do. The capacity of the human spirit to triumph in the face of over-whelming adversity is a joy to behold.

Nobody wants to receive a diagnosis of a life-threatening disease. We can’t always control what happens to us but we can always control how we react. In the words of Victor Frankl, “between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Hospice simply tries to create and hold that space, with love.

By Tony O’Brien who is a consultant physician in Palliative Medicine, Marymount University Hospital & Hospice/Cork University Hospital and clinical professor of Palliative Medicine, University College Cork

All views must be tolerated, even Catholic

Fr Paul Connell, president of the Association of Management of Catholic Secondary Schools.

EARLY one morning I was cornered by Rónán Mullen. It occurred in the local Spar shop.

Rónán spotted me and approached with a complaint about media coverage in RTÉ. For those who don’t know him, Rónán Mullen is a senator and a passionate advocate for a Catholic ethos in what is known in some quarters as “family values”. He has plenty of other interests, but the family values thing is what he is best known for.

On the morning in question, he was, as is his custom, polite and precise about his subject matter. He knew I didn’t work for RTÉ, but he wanted to get his point across. I was just waking up, gently feeling my way through the dawning hour, but Rónán was going at full pelt.

He tagged after me as I picked up the bread rolls, cheese and milk, all the way to the checkout.

After I paid, I found myself with my back to the window, next to the door. He didn’t intend to corner me, but that’s how I felt as he continued to make a point. Beside me, the automatic door kept wooshing open and closed because we were in its sensory zone. For a fleeting second I thought I hadn’t woken up at all and was caught in one of those dreams that hover just on the right side of nightmare.

That morning encounter came back to me recently as I saw coverage of Mullen’s re-election to the Seanad. He was returned to the national university panel, and the result drew some shabby criticism on social media.

The main thrust of the negative comment was bemoaning how educated people could vote for somebody with Mullen’s arch-conservative views. The senator might well have responded by asking how could alleged educated people who consider themselves liberal have such contempt for other views, simply because that don’t chime with their own. But he didn’t because he’s a polite chap.

What the abuse — and some of it did descend to that level — highlighted is that some who see themselves as liberal are nothing of the sort. Instead of being open to accommodating all views, they would prefer if voices contrary to their own are silenced.

Not too long ago this was exactly how the Church ran the country.

All contra voices were silenced or marginalised. Honourable men, such as the communist Michael O’Riordan; and the once minister for health, Noel Browne; fell victim to that stuff at national level. In communities up and down the country men or women who stood up to call out what they saw as wrong in the prevailing order suffered a similar fate.

For the last decade or two we have been undergoing the cultural backlash that inevitably follows a long period of subjugation. Today, that manifests itself in some quarters as an intolerance towards those who appear to carry the flame for the values of a church that dominated for so long.

Those who profess allegiance to the values of the Church — particularly in areas of reproduction and sexual morality — now see themselves as under-represented in public life.

There is some evidence to support that view. Politicians who might be of a conservative bent are often reluctant to voice their views for fear of how it might be received in the media.

In such a milieu, a figure like Mullen is to be welcomed. He openly represents a view in the Upper House, albeit on a mandate that is confined to graduates of some of the State’s universities. It is important that voices such as his are listened to in order to discern the views of those he represents. While this is unpalatable to some, a liberal society is one in which all views are heard and tolerated.

This isn’t always easy. Last Wednesday in the Dáil, Danny Healy Rae set out his stall as a climate change denier.

“God above is in charge of the weather and we can’t do anything about it,” he said. In appearance, if not delivery of his speech, Healy Rae could have cut something of an Old Testament figure, enunciating how ‘God works in mysterious ways’.

Much of the reaction has referenced the TD as an embarrassment. Yet he is as entitled to his view as is Michael O’Leary, who vehemently disputes some of the science around climate change, yet he escaped any derision.

Perhaps it was Healy Rae invoking God that got up the noses of many. Notably, there was precious little outrage about the absence of anything on climate change in the agreement to govern reached by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

Just recently, I found my own tolerance for free speech tested to the limit when I read of an address by Fr Paul Connell, president of the Association of Management of Catholic Secondary Schools.

He told a gathering that dismantling the Catholic ethos of schools would leave children in a moral vacuum and in danger of despair. Catholic schools, he said, have been playing a vital role in helping young people grow in faith.

“The alternative is a vacuum that can express itself in nihilism and the growing phenomenon of self-harm,” he said.

The good priest appears to labour under the misapprehension that his own religion holds the exclusive keys to spiritual health and morality. This infers that children who are educated outside a religious ethos are condemned to a life less lived.

Or, as Paul Rowe, the CEO of Educate Together, responded in a blog: “At its heart is the idea that only a religious perspective can engage with the hopes, feelings, and the spiritual and emotional life of a human being. It implies that a child or person without a religious perspective is somehow deficient or less complete as a human.”

For those whose children are being educated under patrons like Educate Together and other multi or non-denominational bodies, Connell’s address can be interpreted as offensive. For anybody interested in values such as equality of treatment for all, it could be interpreted as entirely alien.

For most people, however, the view expressed is largely irrelevant in today’s world. While the Church has demonstrated excellent political skills in retaining control of the vast majority of schools in the State, its role as the ultimate authority on moral behaviour has long since disappeared.

There was a time when Connell’s kindred spirits from the old Ireland would have disseminated an identical view to his — secure in the knowledge that it would go undisputed.

Those days are gone. Today, all views must be tolerated, even those that stretch tolerance to its limits.

Michael Clifford

75 year study on happiness and here are the results

What if there was a study dedicated to unearthing the secrets to a happy and purposeful life? It would have to be conducted over the course of many decades, following the lives of real people from childhood until old age, in order to see how they changed and what they learned. And it would probably be too ambitious for anyone to actually undertake.

Only, a group of Harvard researchers did undertake it, producing a comprehensive, flesh-and-blood picture of some of life’s fundamental questions: how we grow and change, what we value as time goes on, and what is likely to make us happy and fulfilled.

The study, known as the Harvard Grant Study, has some limitations — it didn’t include women, for starters. Still, it provides an unrivaled glimpse into a subset of humanity, following 268 male Harvard undergraduates from the classes of 1938-1940 (now well into their 90s) for 75 years, collecting data on various aspects of their lives at regular intervals. And the conclusions are universal. 

We spoke to George Vaillant, the Harvard psychiatrist who directed the study from 1972 to 2004 and wrote a book about it, in order to revisit the study’s findings. Below, five lessons from the Grant Study to apply to your own pursuit of a happier and more meaningful life.

Love Is Really All That Matters

It may seem obvious, but that doesn’t make it any less true: Love is key to a happy and fulfilling life. As Vaillant puts it, there are two pillars of happiness. “One is love,” he writes. “The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.”

Vaillant has said that the study’s most important finding is that the only thing that matters in life is relationships. A man could have a successful career, money and good physical health, but without supportive, loving relationships, he wouldn’t be happy (“Happiness is only the cart; love is the horse.”).

It’s About More than Money and Power

The Grant Study’s findings echoed those of other studies — that acquiring more money and power doesn’t correlate to greater happiness. That’s not to say money or traditional career success don’t matter. But they’re small parts of a much larger picture — and while they may loom large for us in the moment, they diminish in importance when viewed in the context of a full life.

“We found that contentment in the late 70s was not even suggestively associated with parental social class or even the man’s own income,” says Vaillant. “In terms of achievement, the only thing that matters is that you be content at your work.”

Regardless of How We Begin Life, We Can All Become Happier

A man named Godfrey Minot Camille went into the Grant study with fairly bleak prospects for life satisfaction: He had the lowest rating for future stability of all the subjects and he had previously attempted suicide. But at the end of his life, he was one of the happiest. Why? As Vaillant explains, “He spent his life searching for love.”

Connection Is Crucial

“Joy is connection,” Vaillant says. “The more areas in your life you can make connection, the better.”

The study found strong relationships to be far and away the strongest predictor of life satisfaction. And in terms of career satisfaction, too, feeling connected to one’s work was far more important than making money or achieving traditional success.

“The conclusion of the study, not in a medical but in a psychological sense, is that connection is the whole shooting match,” says Vaillant.

As life goes on, connections become even more important. The Grant Study provides strong support for the growing body of research that has linked social ties with longevity, lower stress levels and improved overall well-being.

Challenges –- and the Perspective They Give You — Can Make You Happier

The journey from immaturity to maturity, says Vaillant, is a sort of movement from narcissism to connection, and a big part of this shift has to do with the way we deal with challenges.

Coping mechanisms — “the capacity to make gold out of shit,” as Vaillant puts it — have a significant effect on social support and overall well-being. The secret is replacing narcissism, a single-minded focus on one’s own emotional oscillations and perceived problems, with mature coping defenses, Vaillant explains, citing Mother Teresa and Beethoven as examples.

“Mother Teresa had a perfectly terrible childhood, and her inner spiritual life was very painful,” says Vaillant. “But she had a highly successful life by caring about other people. 

Creative expression is another way to productively deal with challenges and achieve meaning and well-being. 

“The secret of Beethoven being able to cope with misery through his art was when he wrote ‘Ode to Joy,’” says Vaillant. “Beethoven was able to make connection with his music.”

Silence in the face of history’s worst evil

Following a ground-breaking case in Germany last week, in which a former Auschwitz guard apologised for his crimes, Andrew Nagorski looks at the refusal of many former Nazis to say sorry.

 Seventy years after the Nuremberg trials, something truly extraordinary happened in a German courtroom last week. Reinhold Hanning, a 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard, who will go down in history as one of the last of Hitler’s perpetrators to be charged for his role in the Third Reich, offered an apology.

Hanning declared he was “sincerely sorry” and “ashamed” that he had belonged to a criminal organisation that committed mass murder and countless atrocities, and that he had never done anything to prevent such actions.

In today’s world, that hardly sounds like a startling admission. But it is almost unprecedented for those who have been charged with carrying out the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes since the end of the Second World War. To say this is a case of too little too late is a vast understatement. Nonetheless, this does not diminish the significance of Hanning’s remarks.

They matter particularly because there are only a dwindling number of Nazi war criminals still alive. For the Nazi hunters — the government investigators and prosecutors along with the freelance operatives who have tracked and exposed the perpetrators — this magnifies the role of these remaining court cases.

They offer a last chance for confronting not just the legal but the moral issues that the perpetrators have so consistently tried to dodge in the past. And for providing the also rapidly dwindling number of Holocaust survivors the chance to face their tormenters.

Right from the beginning, most Nazi war criminals never apologised for anything. At age 27, Benjamin Ferencz was the chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trial of the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the special squads that conducted mass killings of Jews, gypsies and other civilian ‘enemies’ on the Eastern Front before the killings shifted to the gas chambers in the camps.

As Ferencz told me during an interview for my book The Nazi Hunters, he still vividly recalls the protestations of Otto Ohlendorf, one of those condemned to death, that he was only doing his duty. After his sentencing, Ohlendorf told him: “The Jews in America will suffer for this.”

Even one of the most notorious architects of the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann, organiser of the mass deportation of Jews to Auschwitz and other concentration camps, portrayed himself as a mere functionary who had no animosity towards his victims.

He told the Israeli police investigator who questioned him after the Mossad abducted him from Argentina in 1960: “I had nothing to do with killing Jews. I’ve never killed a Jew. And I’ve never ordered anyone to kill a Jew.” That gave him “a certain peace of mind”, he added, although he was under no illusions about his ultimate fate. He was the only top Nazi to be tried and hanged by the Israelis.

For Germany’s most famous Nazi hunter, the behavior of those relatively few mass murderers who were ever held to account for their crimes was exasperating for another reason. Fritz Bauer, a German prosecutor from a secular Jewish family who had spent most of the Nazi era in exile, returned after the war determined to make his countrymen face up to the horrors committed in their name.

To that end, he orchestrated the Frankfurt trial of 22 former Auschwitz personnel in the 1960s — not the big bosses, but the people who had tortured and killed prisoners on a daily basis.

During a trial that featured a procession of survivors who testified in agonisng detail about their ordeals, Bauer vented his frustration. In an interview, he pointed out that the prosecution had been waiting “for one of the defendants… to address the witnesses who had survived and had their whole families annihilated with one humane word… it would have cleared the air.”

That never happened.

Ferencz, now 96, pointed out that right after the war, this refusal to admit guilt or show any compassion to the victims was widespread.

“I never had a German come up to me and say ‘I’m sorry’, all the time I was in Germany,” he told me. “That was my biggest disappointment; nobody, including my mass murderers, ever said I’m sorry. That was the mentality.”

Germany has come a very long way since then. The Holocaust and other wartime atrocities are routinely taught in schools; as a whole, the country now has a commendable record of facing the darkest chapter in its history and seeking to atone for it. That is in large part the product of the efforts of Nazi hunters like Ferencz, Bauer, and others who pushed for such trials, not allowing the past to be buried along with its victims. But those who were most directly involved in the machinery of death were largely immune to any appeals to conscience.

Jesus said when he was crucified: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

The Nazi criminals knew all too well what they were doing. It is only now that at least one is admitting as much.

Andrew Nagorski, a former Newsweek foreign correspondent and editor, is the author of The Nazi Hunters, which will be released on May 10.

Ireland finally confronting mental health ills

In the 1970s and 1980s, Olivia O’Leary reigned supreme in Irish journalism.

A formidable broadcaster, the undoubted queen of current affairs, she was a woman in a world of men who commanded enormous respect for her analytical and interviewing skills.

She was fearless.

Olivia O'Leary has revealed her battle with depression during her 20s.

So when such a figure admits to having been floored by depression, to having been unable to get off the sofa, to even get up in the morning, when she speaks candidly on radio of “sitting on a train, and missing my stop as I couldn’t motivate myself to stand up and get up”, there is a generation of men and women aged 40-90 who sit up and listen.

“When somebody in the public domain talks about depression and anxiety, particularly when they are honest and discuss how they developed techniques to manage it, that they learnt to lead a full life with it, that is huge, it is everything that we in mental health services are trying to do,“ says Paul Gilligan, chief executive of St Patrick’s University Hospital.

O’Leary is just the latest in a line of Irish public figures who have broken the omerta around mental health difficulties. She said she was inspired by the courage of Longford/Westmeath TD, Robert Troy who stood up in the Dáil last week and outlined his recent struggles with depression and anxiety.

In recent years, Niall Breslin, aka Bressie, has become the uncrowned patron saint of mental health, while Majella O’Donnell’s disclosure helped a whole generation of older women admit that it’s OK to divulge that they can’t cope.

GAA stars Conor Cusack, Aisling Thompson, and Martin Shanahan spoke to another cohort of the population, as have Mary McEvoy, Marian Keyes, and Brent Pope.

John Saunders of Shine Ireland, which supports people with mental ill health, says that by speaking out, such celebrities unknowingly “provide a model for everybody to talk to family and friends, to their GP”.

“They become a conduit to the conversations that need to be had around the country,” says Saunders.

Saunders and Gilligan believe that as a country, we are only in the nascent stages of understanding mental health and how important it is to manage it.

“But by having more conversations like Olivia O’Leary and Robert Troy have started, we will also begin as a nation to learn what is normal stress and what requires help,” says Saunders.

“As this conversation continues we will begin to differentiate between the stress that is like having a cold and the stress that needs expert help; we will learn how to recognise and manage changes in our mental health.”

The refusal to admit that you or a family member is experiencing depression or anxiety is one of the last taboos in this country, say both experts. This taboo may have lost some of its shame in recent years but a stigma is still engrained, says Gilligan.

We are a country that up to about 10 years ago, chose to lock up our most distressed, to often write them off at a young age, he says.

Research undertaken last year by St Patrick’s Mental Health Services shows that our shift in attitudes of late might not be as seismic as we’d like to think. Only 53% of survey respondents agreed that people with a mental health difficulty are trustworthy. Another 67% agreed that Irish people view being treated for a mental health difficulty as a sign of personal failure.

Gilligan says a deep contradiction exists. One in four people suffer mental health difficulties in their life, which means everyone knows a family member or friend that has experienced such distress, yet such above mentioned opinions around trustworthiness, reliability, and ‘failure’ endure.

Saunders says the silence around mental health has bred this ignorance and made life harder for those suffering. That is why, he says, the likes of O’Leary and Troy are doing a true public service by squashing stigma and by opening up about what they are doing in their lives to help prevent relapse.

Claire O' Sullivan

How happy are you?

Greed is good: Gordon Gekko played by Michael Douglas in 'Wall Street', was eventually jailed for illicit trading, despite having his own plane, money to burn and notoriety.

How happy are you? If the answer is, "Well, who is?", you're not alone. Last month, the World Happiness Index of 2016 ranked Irish people just 23rd in the world out of 158 countries, despite our relative affluence.

A recurring theme in studies of happiness is that prosperity and success does not translate into happiness. In fact one recent UK study found that affluent London boroughs such as Camden and Islington reported the lowest levels of life satisfaction in the country.

But why is it that despite prosperity and individual success, so many people report low contentment? A new book suggests that, in fact, these qualities are closely linked.

Raj Raghunathan is a happiness researcher and professor of marketing at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business, where he has taught more than 100,000 students a course called 'What are the determinants of a fulfilling and happy life?'. In the past five years, he has given 1,500 successful students - those with superior IQs, greater drive, high critical thinking ability and a better work ethic - a "mental chatter exercise" in which they kept a diary of their thoughts for two weeks.

The students expected 60-75pc of their thoughts to be positive, but most - up to 70pc - were negative.

"Their negative mental chatter fell into three main categories: feeling inferior, lack of love and connectivity with others, and lack of control over themselves and other people," says Prof Raghunathan.

In his new book, the researcher reveals the traits of successful people that can get in the way of happiness and explains what to do instead.

Need for control

It's a familiar scenario we see in ourselves or other successful people: the need to control other people and situations - and it's worse if you're a "maximiser", someone with the irrepressible urge to make things better.

This leads to unhappiness in two ways. First, trying to control someone's behaviour leads to "psychological reactance", when people do the opposite (you attempt to control your spouse's diet and he/she responds with pizza binges to spite you).

Second, it leads to "power stress", where you get angry and frustrated when others fail to behave in the way you want. Plus, our decision-making suffers because we drive away those who disagree with us and surround ourselves only with those who don't mind being controlled - "yes" people.

What to do instead: Build your internal control muscle. Countless studies have found that being in control of ourselves rather than others - internal control - leads to increased levels of happiness. Developing internal control is like building a muscle - the more you exercise it, the more it grows and strengthens. Starting small is best. Practise maintaining internal control when tiny things disappoint you, such as rain on your holiday or your child bawling their head off in public.

Try labelling your emotions without trying to control the situation or person, and then move on. For example, "I'm feeling frustrated because I'm stuck in traffic, but that's okay because I can't control that."

Desire for superiority

Studies have found that people who are higher in status are more physically and emotionally healthy. But striving too hard for superiority can make us unhappy. First, it can lead to mimicking the competition, which minimises our authenticity. Your neighbour runs 100m in 20 seconds, so you focus on running it in 12 to beat him.

But you're much better off having an internal yardstick for comparison, or you will be tempted into moving away from your own strengths to do what he does.

Superiority is also hard to measure - how do you know you're the best drummer or teacher out there? - so we use "extrinsic markers", such as fame or wealth, to measure our status. That makes us materialistic - and numerous studies have found that as materialism goes up, contentment goes down.

What to do instead: Practise extrinsic gratitude. Gratitude lists are all the rage because they have been proven to work. But rather than emphasise how well you have done and what a great job you did, practise being grateful for all the small things and people that came together to bring you a favourable outcome. That kind of extrinsic gratitude connects you to people, while striving for superiority can isolate you (especially if you're always going on about your achievements).

Try self-compassion, too. This is being pioneered by Dr Kristin Neff at the University of Austin, Texas. She says that when you experience a failure or let-down, treat yourself like you would a good friend. You can even write that "friend" an email or letter explaining why they needn't feel ashamed or disappointed for whatever mistake they made.

It's touchy-feely, but has been shown to work.

Wanting to be loved

Those in intimate, long-term relationships with a significant other fare well in the happiness stakes, and love and connection have been shown in studies to be a critical human need. But for many people who strive for success before happiness, a healthy need for connection can become neediness.

In studies, high levels of neediness correlate to unhappiness, anxiety and depression, and can make us overly concerned with what others think. This can manifest as a hunger for fame or accolades and become a self-fulfilling prophecy by turning people off being around you and triggering loneliness, which leads to more neediness.

What to do instead: Check your ECR rating. This stands for Experiences in Close Relationships (find out where you are on the scale at happysmarts.com/e/alpha/survery2.php) and relates to the attachment style you developed growing up. It can help you understand whether you tend toward neediness or a healthy need for connection.

Be an "otherish" giver. While the successful and miserable tend to show desperation and neediness for love, the happy and successful tend to focus on the need to love and give.

Research by business psychologist Adam Grant, author of Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, suggests that giving more - materially and emotionally - can make us happier.

But he distinguishes between selfless givers who give so indiscriminately that they burn out, and otherish givers who are more likely to be successful because they take care of themselves as well (and don't want or expect returns).

WILL IT MAKE ME HAPPY?

Age?

Yes. Warwick University research has identified a U-shaped curve in happiness levels over a person's lifetime, starting out high in their 20s, then hitting a low at around 46 before rising again in later decades. An ONS survey this year found those aged 45-59 reported the lowest life satisfaction, while happiness peaked between 65 and 79.

Money?

Up to a point. Research presented to the American Psychological Association in 2014 found that emotional well-being increased with income, but only up to pounds 45,000, when most people's basic needs were met.

Job?

Yes. "We get satisfaction from developing mastery over something if it corresponds with our talents and abilities, and helps us experience the phenomenon of flow - when time stands still because you're enjoying something so much," says Prof Raghunathan.

Research by psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky found that career goals rather than money correlated with work happiness.

Love?

Yes. A Harvard Medical School study tracking 268 men from 1938 to the early 2000s found that the strength of their social relationships determined the happiest 10pc.

Stuff?

Depends. Research by Cambridge University found that those who spent their money in keeping with their personalitie were happier. So when introverts spent at bookstores for example, and extroverts at bars, both groups were happier.

Anna Magee