Fernando Sarrais, Adjunct Professor of the School of Education and Psychology, has published the book graduate "Temperament, character and personality" (Ed. EIUNSA. TECONTE). This work is the result of the experience of many years of dedication to helping people to be happy, and in it, the psychologist tries to draw attention to the importance of the psychic world, of the personality, to live the most satisfactory life possible.

This book, as you yourself say, "is the fruit of many years of experience in helping people to be happy". But isn't there a "lack of focus", especially among young people, on what is meant by happiness today?

Young people understand happiness as having a good time. To do so, they do things that produce pleasure because they are accompanied by pleasant feelings. Thus, it can be affirmed that young people seek happiness through affectivity, which is very intense at that age, producing transient, unstable and sensation-dependent affections.

It is worth remembering that happiness is a consequence of the love of the free will. Love is a coin that has one side, positive feelings (peace and joy), and a cross, which is suffering, of an intensity proportional to that of love. Today's young people tend to reject suffering and end up renouncing love.

As it is very difficult to love the bad, love is always of the good. This relationship makes it possible to give the recipe for happiness: to do good out of love and freely. But it turns out that doing good is more costly than doing evil. The effort to do good causes suffering and produces unpleasant affections, for this reason young people today tend to do bad things more frequently, which make them feel good or stop feeling bad in the short term deadline, but which in the medium and long term deadline produce dependencies that diminish their freedom and, therefore, prevent them from being happy.

Where does the core topic reside to achieve that happiness, in the balance between what?

The core topic to be happy is to love, which is an act of the will. One can only love the good, and for this reason it is said that those who love bad things are because of a certain part of good that they have. The fear of suffering is the greatest enemy of love and of the will. For he who is dominated by affectivity, and especially by negative emotions such as fear, cannot be free in love.

It is the whole person who loves and is happy. People with the greatest capacity to love and be happy are those who achieve a stable psychological balance, which coincides with having a mature personality. It is a balance between reason, will and affectivity. It must be an orderly balance in which the preeminence is of the reason, which is the one that knows which is the way of the good.

Immature or neurotic people have a disordered balance because reason and will are at the service of affectivity, which seeks to feel good or not to feel bad at the moment, even if they feel unhappy afterwards.

If we look at the increase in mental illness and addictions in recent years, we see a breakdown - and perhaps at an increasingly younger age - in this balance. How can it be restored?

For decades, Western society has been based on the Economics of consumption, which is accompanied by a psychological development of needs of well-being and pleasure to be consumed. Since ancient times it has been known that things and actions that produce pleasure have a high risk of producing addiction. Therefore the Education of the personality must try to balance this inclination to pleasure with the development of a strong will that allows self-control and thus to be able to choose the good, even if it does not produce immediate pleasure, because it is the condition of happiness.

The only way to develop a strong will is through daily effort and suffering. From this derives the well-known saying "he who wants something costs him something". It is surprising to see that nowadays many people apply this saying to achieve a ten body, which provokes the admiration and appreciation of others, but they do not do the same to have a ten psyche, which allows them to love with intensity and fidelity in spite of the suffering it entails.

It is necessary to promote a correct Education of the personality so that young people have enthusiasm for a positive inner person project , which has a more important role in achieving a happy life than the project of physical appearance or professional success, which are currently the most important goals for most young people.

With regard to educators - parents, teachers - what are the messages that need to be worked on?

That happiness depends especially on the way of being. That subjects with a negative personality, dominated by negative emotions, or unbalanced are very prone to do evil, to addictions and to suffer mental illnesses of subject neurotic.

That the achievement of a positive or mature personality depends on developing a strong will that makes them masters of themselves and, therefore, inwardly free. This goal cannot be achieved by any other way than to suffer with good humor the daily effort to do what must be done.

These messages that have to do with virtues, values, often go against the current, since talking about effort, will, sacrifice, Withdrawal, is less "fashionable", less "attractive" than talking about immediate satisfaction, caprice, easy success, consumerism, popularity, or the short deadline. How should we work on this?

Although there are few of us who are aware of the error of consumerism, hedonism, materialism, self-centeredness to achieve happiness, we must have the courage to continue speaking and writing to awaken society as other people have done to defend civil, minority and ecological rights.

It is necessary to put grains of sand to achieve a good pile over time in this psychological ecology, which curbs anguish and depression and increases the Degree of happiness of citizens. It seems unbelievable that it is repeated again and again that "money does not give happiness" and instead society becomes more consumerist and for that money is needed.

Psychologists are talking a lot about a new personality trait, resilience, strength to endure suffering, as a factor core topic for happiness. They have discovered it by observing Filipino and African children who are always smiling despite lacking almost everything. In contrast, Western children and young people suffer frequent tantrums when they do not have things that their friends have.

When should you start working on it?

From the beginning of life. Children cry as soon as they are born because they suffer the inclemency of the physical environment and the discomfort of their physiological needs. From that first moment of life, adults must teach them what the proverb says "we must learn to put a good face to bad weather", for it they must be good models for their children suffering the discomfort that they produce with good humor and not giving in too quickly to relieve them all the discomfort that comes with living. What is not learned as a child is harder to learn as an adult.

Parents seek, through the Education, that their children have their own personality, with criteria that allow them to discern between good and bad, and that, freely, seek and pursue what is good and beautiful. But external agents, many times, do not make it easy for them.

The external agents currently make it difficult, so parents must make more effort to give their children the vaccine against consumerism and hedonism. To do so, they must live themselves what they preach. Then they should make sure that their children go to schools, clubs, associations where the basic pedagogy is the effort to be good.

How important is presentation to the learners of good role models?

It is curious to see how in today's society there are many ambivalences at the cultural level, which create confusion. On the one hand, consumerism, pleasure and the rejection of suffering are promoted, and on the other hand, movies, video games and comics present strong and brave heroes with great capacity for suffering. This ambivalence is pushing young people to take refuge in the fictional world where they are strong by identifying with the heroes to escape from real life where they suffer for being fearful and cowardly and, therefore, frustrated and unsatisfied.

Let's see if someday these fictional heroes are not necessary because they can see them in everyday reality in their parents, educators and friends, and, by identifying with them and imitating them, they do not have to avoid reality.

Another ambivalence of Western society is the admiration and desire for freedom staff together with the great diffusion of addictions, dependencies and obsessions. Let's see when the models of real people with real freedom and inner independence, who are not emotional puppets of the consumption of pleasures to achieve passing pleasant feelings, are rewarded and spread.