Eric Barker shows the research: worker bees are not the most successful workers, and it's because they are focusing only on the work while ignoring their social needs and becoming unhappy in the process. Barker recommends this excellent TED talk by Shawn Achor: Another helpful post is Barker on getting organized/happy.

How do happy people stay happy? Eric Barker reports on an important technique: By deploying attention in more effective ways.

Your happiness is determined by how you allocate your attention. What you attend to drives your behavior and it determines your happiness. Attention is the glue that holds your life together… The scarcity of attentional resources means that you must consider how you can make and facilitate better decisions about what to pay attention to and in what ways. If you are not as happy as you could be, then you must be misallocating your attention… So changing behavior and enhancing happiness is as much about withdrawing attention from the negative as it is about attending to the positive.

As reported in Scientific American: "New research out of Carnegie Mellon indicates that feeling connected to others, especially through physical touch, protects us from stress-induced sickness. This research adds to a large amount of evidence for the positive influence of social support on health."

Don't attempt to become more beautiful, because it will backfire and make you anxious. This especially happens to women according to a new study. This is contrary to what happens when you aspire to become more intelligence.

Researchers at Oklahoma State University found that women with malleable beliefs about beauty—for instance, believing they could become more beautiful with effort—had a higher risk for appearance-related anxiety and were more likely to base their self-worth on their looks, as compared with those who have fixed beauty beliefs. They were also more likely to express interest in cosmetic surgery. The effects were not found among men. Whether a malleable belief is beneficial or not may depend on how realistic the pursuit is. Beauty ideals typically presented in media images—young, thin and photoshopped to be flawless—are unattainable for most women.