Like I said in a previous article, positive psychology strives to understand, create, and spread happiness. There are so many books on this that it hardly needs another article. My question is how this can affect the gay community and its members. As said before, I will try to apply well-known aspects of happiness to our unique community. I see five cornerstones of happiness in life – the physical, temporal, survival, relational, and spiritual cornerstones of a happy life. I can’t go into each of them in one article, so in this article I will deal with the physical and temporal cornerstones. In the first section of the article I will only discuss the most basic cornerstone of happiness. It is the first and most basic cornerstone, but if you do not start here, you will never reach the others. This cornerstone is the physical. Unfortunately, our sexual orientation doesn’t change anything; we still have to look after our bodies like everybody else.
ACTIVELY GROWING INTO HAPPINESS
The physical cornerstone of happiness involves your diet, sleep, exercise, stress, and sexuality. If I hear these things, my heart misses a beat. How many times do we have to hear the words diet and exercise? I don’t have the time or the energy to count calories or go to a gym. I agree that you should look at your health, but diet and exercise give me stress just by thinking about them. I guess I am a bit over my preferred weight, and that stresses me even more. I hear the same things over and over again, and all I know is that the diet industry and the exercise industry make a lot of money off of us. How many gadgets do you have? I own them all: exercise bike, treadmill, shaker, stirrer, electro-belt, heat-belt, and whatever sounds easy. I have also tried a few diets: low calories, no protein, just protein, no carbs, just carbs, both protein and carbs but not at the same time. So believe me, I will not get on your case about this. You know, and there are more than enough people telling you, that you have to look after your diet and do some exercise. I will leave it at that.
