Research shows sadness can have health benefits. Sad people tend to be empathetic, listen more to others and make more reciprocal conversation.
A significant minority of people suffer from malfunctions in their brains that cause serious depression. This can be because of genes or environmental factors, and studies show that Prozac-type drugs can help them. But the rapidly growing majority of patients often have something else: mild depression, or what we used to call sadness.
Nowadays, it is considered bad to be sad - and so we still prescribe antidepressants. And yet there is an increasing amount of research to show that sadness is actually good for you.
A new European study suggests that depression in women has doubled over the past 40 years, while new figures from the Office for National Statistics show that more than four times as many prescriptions for drugs such as Prozac and Cipramil were dispensed in England in 2009 than 18 years before. But the scientific evidence shows that we should embrace sadness to live healthily.
Since the 1970s, psychologists have agreed that we have six identifiable emotions. Four are negative: sadness, fear, anger and disgust. The other two are happiness and surprise. Why did we evolve so many negative emotions?
The logical answer is that they have proved to our advantage. Experiments bear this out. Joe Forgas, a psychology professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, has found that feeling sad can make us behave more intelligently because of the way the mood affects the brain's information-processing systems. His tests have found that people who are sad tend to be more sceptical when they are asked to judge the truth of a range of myths and rumours. They are also more likely to consider people as individuals rather than stereotypes. And they are more convincing when they are asked to make a presentation.
In March this year, Forgas reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that sad people can be more empathetic company. He says that while people who are happy tend to talk about themselves a lot in social situations, people in negative moods listen more and make more reciprocal conversation.
Psychologists increasingly believe that when you are happy, you skim over reality: your brain is more likely to base decisions on accumulated experience and knowledge. When you are sad, you really do think more deeply: you pay more attention to new information in the outside world because something feels wrong and so you need to reassess your ideas.
Forgas uses this example: "Say you are in a group and you feel that you are not getting on, that you are not being accepted. You would probably find this upsetting . . . it would put you into a negative mood and it would cause you to pay better attention to what everybody else is saying, pull back a little bit. If you feel sad, it is basically like a signal, 'Watch out, don't push, adapt, pay attention'."
Research by Robert Sinclair, a professor of psychology at the University of Alberta, suggests that people who are exposed to sad thoughts do a much better job building circuit boards than those who are exposed to happy thoughts.
Nevertheless, we dismiss sadness nowadays as 'negativity', although things were very different a hundred or so years ago. The Victorians thought that 'melancholy' was an admirable hallmark of a sensitive, thinking soul. Keats wrote an ode to it. And Carl Jung called our negative emotions the 'dark side' of our personality, a place that we must explore if we are to become spiritually and emotionally balanced human beings.
In today's quick-fix world, however, we are encouraged to think that life should be easy. When reality stops us in our tracks, the easy answer is to reach for a pill. The natural state of feeling unhappy has been turned into an illness rather than a normal part of life that we should experience and learn from.
Indeed, an American study of 8,000 people who had been treated for depression suggested that a quarter of them were not clinically sick, they had just undergone a normal life event such as bereavement. Their symptoms, it said, should be left to pass naturally.
One expert in the field, Randolph Nesse, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan, argues that depression has its uses. It often interjects to tell us to stop what we are doing and to reconsider, he says. This can help when something awful happens, such as a job loss or relationship break-up, where it makes healthy sense to slow down to grieve, to reassess our lives and to make changes. We need to do what our ancient ancestors would have done and - metaphorically - retire to our caves.
But instead we live in a world that tells us that when life feels bad, we are ill. We are given chemicals instead of support and advice. Not everyone believes that this practice should continue spiralling. The backlash has been led by Professor Irving Kirsch, of the University of Hull. From studying pharmaceutical companies' own evidence from medical trials, he argues that drugs are no more effective for people with mild depression than placebo sugar pills.
In fact, something strange has been happening with placebo pills. Over the past few decades, these inactive sugar tablets have been 'curing' more and more people in the clinical trials of new drugs for mood disorders such as depression. German psychologists at Philipps-University Marburg report in the Journal of Affective Disorders that their analysis of 96 antidepressant studies shows the placebo effect may have doubled between 1980 and 2005. In one recent trial, placebos were effective for 60 per cent of patients.
It is not the sugar pill that is achieving this kind of cure rate; it is the power of human belief. Mass advertising by pharmaceutical companies has strengthened our belief in the power of pills. This, ironically, makes it harder for drug companies to bring new antidepressants on to the market because they are failing to work better in trials than placebo pills.
We are now learning how this placebo effect works. Researchers in China and Germany have studied the brains of people who feel better when they take sugar pills. Scans show reduced activity in pain-sensitive regions in the brain and the release of the 'feelgood' brain chemical dopamine. The power of belief - albeit belief in a fake tablet - enables the brain to treat itself.
Imagine what belief in the brain's ability to revive itself from periods of mild depression could do. But our reluctance to engage with our negative feelings means that we are getting trapped in a vicious pharmaceutical cycle.
Rather than chasing constant happiness and becoming depressed when it does not happen, we should perhaps relearn the ability to be content with our whole emotional spectrum. We need to reclaim sadness.
Happiest Times
SCROOGE would undoubtedly reject it as humbug but Christmas Day is easily the happiest day of the year.
According to research involving 45,000 iphone users who provided regular updates on their level of contentedness via an app, people are at their most content at 1.50pm on December 25 when, for most, the presents have been opened and lunch is being served.
By contrast, at 8am on January 31, presumably as the realisation of the cost of the festive period hits home, the population is at its lowest ebb.
The 'Mappiness' project, run by researcher George Mackerron in conjunction with the London School of Economics, received more than 3m responses over more than a year.
The app prompted users to record their activity, location and happiness up to five times a day. The results were fed into a so-called hedonimeter that tracked the nation's mood minute by minute, measured on a scale of 0-100.
The study confirmed a commonly held belief that the population's mood darkens during weekdays when most are at work before improving at weekends.
The Weather
Meteorologists can tell us how much rain has fallen, hydrologists how much has been captured. But the most important consequence of the inclement weather has long remained unquantifiable: its effect on our happiness. Until now, that is. Because scientists have found out that experiencing bad weather is about as emotionally unpleasant as having to do the washing up.
Using an iPhone app called Mappiness, researchers at the LSE and UCL have been able to map the nation's happiness over time and location. Downloaded almost 50,000 times, users of the app are asked every day to rate their state of happiness on a scale of 0-100 - as well as saying what they are doing at the time. The app then correlates the data with the weather at the users' position. And it transpires, after analysing a year's worth of results in the London area, that the grey clouds hanging over Britain over the past month will also have left a more metaphorical grey cloud - hanging over the nation's mood.
The results show that drizzly weather on average lowers people's happiness by half a point, not being sunny lowers it by another half point. Together, this roughly equated to the drop in happiness associated with doing household chores such as washing up. There is no data yet, mind, on whether doing household chores in the rain is even worse.
In contrast, a rise in temperature from 9C to 18C correlates to a one-point rise in happiness - the same rise the app found in people who told it they were relaxing.
Dr George MacKerron was one of the designers of the app. "The effect of weather is not huge, but it is statistically significant," he said. "Given people don't have control of the weather, we're pretty sure this is a causal relationship."
For those worried that this all sounds too fatalistic, the app also provides data on ways to improve mood, which are within our control. "Being with friends or a spouse versus being alone adds about five points," MacKerron said. So, if it's raining this weekend, the best thing to do is invite friends around. And make them do the washing up.
Wants and Needs
Who wants to be happy? Well, who doesn't? After a session this morning, it struck me that when we focus on chasing our wants, our level of happiness actually drops. The more we focus on what we don't have, the more deprived we feel. After all, inherent in the meaning of "wanting" is not having, and you cannot feel fulfilled while you focus on what you lack. That is a basic principle of spiritual study, especially Buddhism. So, here's the antidote: If you want to be happy, be grateful for what you have. Focus on that.
Studies of happiness and wealth repeatedly show that beyond a certain level of income or material prosperity, happiness levels do not continue to increase with increased levels of wealth. That is to say, once you have what you actually need (and maybe plus a little extra for security/retirement), you are set in terms of how your happiness level will be impacted. Other factors then become more central to your sense of happiness or fulfillment.
Too often, in a materialistic society, people can become myopically preoccupied or even obsessed with achieving greater levels of wealth and/or amassing the trappings that wealth can provide. While it can feel good to earn a high salary, and while there is nothing morally wrong with doing so, to expect that a higher amount in your bank account will keep you fully satisfied emotionally is short-sighted.
The key to happiness is this: The fulfillment of our needs, not our wants, is what makes us happy. Thus we would do better to focus on how much is enough to fulfill our various needs, and strive for balance in our lives. Distributing efforts across domains is wiser than being plugged into one area too much of the time. Beyond meeting our level of need, the extra effort in that direction tends to become excessive, distracting, and even stressful. For example, pursuing extra wealth when we are lacking in family connection reflects an imbalance, and is less emotionally rewarding than having less wealth but better relationships.
People are multi-faceted beings who have needs in various spheres or domains. There are general areas that those who study happiness tend to mention when talking about life balance and personal satisfaction. These areas are mental, emotional, physical, interpersonal, and spiritual. What any one person experiences as being enough in any one area, and how that might look or what form that may take in any one person's life, is what makes us individual. Different strokes, and all. But basically, when self-examining, we would do best to gain clarity on what do we really need in each area, and separate that from what we think we want. Then work toward fulfillment of those needs, while keeping our wanting in check.
A natural tendency with something that is rewarding is to want more and more. More is better, right? Well, not necessarily. There can be (and usually is) a cost to pursuing more over here while neglecting things over there. So be mindful of your natural human tendency to want more of a good thing - that impetus can confuse us and lead us off course. Such impulses are useful when resources are scarce and we need to strive to survive. But there thankfully is a limit when it comes to meeting personal needs, and that is what we need to keep in mind when pursuing happiness in the modern world.
Thinking
After millions of years of evolution, we have become the most complex thinking and inventive species on earth. Our penchant for invention has given us a great advantage. However, despite the time our species has resided on earth, we remain ill-prepared for some of the rapid changes that we ourselves have created. Our level of despair appears on the rise. An increased prevalence for depression is one of many warnings.
Comedian and social critic Robert Klein noted that society seems to be getting dumber. If by dumber he means (relatively) more ignorant as to how we view ourselves, others, and life, what might be done to change this trend?
I'll start this discussion with general principles for avoiding self-sabotaging. Then, I'll get into how we can use our knowledge of clear thinking to educate children to lead healthy and happy lives. The future of our planet may depend on this intervention.
A Cognitive Platform for Positive Change
Rational emotive behavior therapist (REBT), Albert Ellis, thinks that unrecognized but harmful irrational thinking is at the heart of many conflicts and forms of emotional distress. Indeed, the empirical research shows a strong relationship between harmful irrational thinking and human disturbance. This relationship seems to directly or indirectly touch the lives of practically everyone.
Our tendencies to think crookedly appear hard-wired, but we are not all equally affected. While humans better not blame themselves for these failings, Ellis has cogently stressed that they had, at the same time, better accept accountability for their own excess distresses, and to preferably learn how to overcome their biological limitations that contribute to these distresses. Is this possible?
Much could be done if we thought with precision. Indeed, Albert Ellis and Alfred Korzybski, the founder of General Semantics (GS), both viewed the language we used as capable of creating reality distortions and needless disturbances. For example, the verb to be is a catalyst for overgeneralizations. Tell yourself "I am unlovable,” and you’ve created a distressful false attribution from an overgeneralization. What does unlovable mean? Can this be universally true for all time? Asking and factually answering questions of this kind, can lead to clarity and relief from needless cognitive tensions that come from reality distortions. (This free downloadable book was written without the use of the verb to be: How to Conquer Your Frustrations.)
In many ways, we are categorical thinkers. This way of putting things into labeled boxes, sometimes fogs reality. Calling a child worthless is one example of overgeneralizing through categorical thinking. (When a child grows up being told that he or she is worthless, this labeling can become internalized and create a self-fulfilling prophesy.)
Both Ellis and Korzybski posited that we'd better try, to the best of our abilities, to use our intelligence and knowledge to help ourselves and others to think clearly. Our capacity for thinking our way to happiness opens major opportunities for millions to lead exciting, purposeful, lives.
What We Can Learn from Other’s Struggles?
Alfred Korzybski's war experiences and injuries drove him to examine why humans can build extraordinary physical structures but can't get along without almost constant conflict(s). In developing GS, Korzybski studied patients in mental institutions as part of his efforts to understand cognition in human disturbance.
Korzybski was a mathematician and engineer who applied this background to his examination of the ancient Aristotelian language system that pervades western thinking. He found the Aristotelian system to be an inexact and often confusing map of “reality”, often leading to misidentification, confusion, distortions, needless conflicts and human misery. Korzybski showed how Aristotelian static language formulations would better be replaced by a non-Aristotelian process language. For example, in the world of human discourse, when we think in absolute categories about human character and human worth, we’d best learn to think more conditionally, dimensionally, and in degrees. That is the difference between static and process views.
Albert Ellis' lengthy life-threatening childhood hospitalizations and parental absences drove him to devote his life to developing a more scientific, saner, more effective approach to human problems. In his earliest work, Ellis focused on the relationship between perceptions, beliefs, emotions, and actions which other theorists had ignored. He incorporated some of Korzybski's work into his own theories to help people make their lives better, specifically through the precise use of language to describe reality.
Cognitive Training for Early Education
“About half of Americans will meet the criteria for a DSM-IV disorder sometime in their life, with first onset usually in childhood or adolescence. Interventions aimed at prevention or early treatment need to focus on youth.” (For more information click on the source for this quote: National Comorbidity Study Replication)
Korzybski and Ellis both emphasized the need to educate people in the use of saner language and rational thinking. We remain far from that goal. Nevertheless, this goal is strongly worth pursuing if we are to see a reversal in trends from emotional disturbances that start early in life, toward a life of reason, reasonableness, happiness, and healthy lifestyles.
Korzybski and Ellis believed in the importance of teaching clear thinking principles starting with early education. Each contributed a piece to the puzzle about how this could be done. Korzybski investigated in depth the central role of language structure and content in human problems. Ellis focused on defining and treating specific belief systems that created emotional dysfunction, developing this into REBT.
Ellis went so far as to create The Living School where he added the ABCs of REBT to the school curriculum. His colleague, Dr. Bill Knaus, developed a positive, preventive, school mental health program that was later used at the school. This evidence-based program is now free to the public. (Click on Children's positive mental health program for information on the program.)
Someone compared getting agreement among individuals as the equivalent to herding cats. With that caveat, will we (will society) get agreement to commit the necessary resources to our educational settings to promote enlightened populaces that think clearly? Will we apply these principles to ourselves? The tools for saner living are within reach and may be necessary to insure our survival.
Here's The Science
Science has all the answers, right? Wrong. But it has a pretty good sense of things, a lot of the time*. So what does science have to say about the pursuit of happiness? A lot. Like, build-an-entire-industry-around-it, even-the-pseudo-scientific-stuff a lot.
1. Surround yourself with happy people
Or, at the very least, surround yourself with people who surround themselves with happy people. A longitudinal investigation conducted over 20 years in collaboration with the Framingham Heart Study revealed that shifts in individual happiness can cascade through social networks like an emotional contagion. That's right, happiness is kind of like a disease. (The researchers don't mean Facebook, btw, but physical, old-school networks — like live-in friends, partners and spouses; and siblings, friends and neighbors who live close by.)
"Most important from our perspective is the recognition that people are embedded in social networks and that the health and wellbeing of one person affects the health and wellbeing of others," conclude the researchers, noting that the relationship between people's happiness was found to extend up to three degrees of separation (i.e. all the way to friends of friends of friends). "This fundamental fact of existence provides a fundamental conceptual justification for the specialty of public health. Human happiness is not merely the province of isolated individuals."
Also worth noting: the researchers found sadness to be nowhere near as "infectious" as happiness.
2. Master a skill
This one is kind of a tradeoff: a study published in a 2009 issue of the 100% real Journal of Happiness Studies found that people who dedicate themselves to mastering a skill or ability tend to experience more stress in the moment, but reported greater happiness and satisfaction on an hourly, daily, and longterm basis as a result of their investment.
"No pain, no gain is the rule when it comes to gaining happiness from increasing our competence at something," said Ryan Howell, assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University in a statement. "People often give up their goals because they are stressful, but we found that there is benefit at the end of the day from learning to do something well."
3. Self-government is key
The same study that found mastering a skill could bolster overall, longterm happiness found that the minute-to-minute stresses of mastering a skill could be lessened by self-direction and a sense of fellowship. "Our results suggest that you can decrease the momentary stress associated with improving your skill or ability by ensuring you are also meeting the need for autonomy and connectedness," explains Howell. "For example, performing the activity alongside other people or making sure it is something you have chosen to do and is true to who you are."
4. Smile for once
Darwin laid it out for us all the way back in 1872: "The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it," he wrote. And recent studies — involving botox, of all things — suggest he was onto something. SciAm's Melinda Wenner explains:
Psychologists at the University of Cardiff in Wales found that people whose ability to frown is compromised by cosmetic botox injectÂions are happier, on average, than people who can frown. The researchers administered an anxiety and depression questionnaire to 25 females, half of whom had received frown-inhibiting botox injections. The botox recipients reported feeling happier and less anxious in general; more important, they did not report feeling any more attractive, which suggests that the emotional effects were not driven by a psychological boost that could come from the treatment's cosmetic nature.
"It would appear that the way we feel emotions isn't just restricted to our brain-there are parts of our bodies that help and reinforce the feelings we're having," says Michael Lewis, a co-author of the study. "It's like a feedback loop."
Either that, or botulism-to-the-face is like a shot of good feels? Let's just chalk this one up to smiling. Note that this is different from harboring feel-good happy-thoughts (more on that below).
5. Get therapy
First of all, a side note: if you think you might benefit from psychotherapy, but are too worried about what your friends and family will think, get over yourself and do it. Why? Because it works (especially if you find the form of therapy that's right for you).
Anyway: in an interesting twist on the age-old question of whether money makes people happy, psychologist Chris Boyce compared the cost-effectiveness of psychological therapy versus monetary compensation following instances of psychological distress. His findings, which were actually published in an economics journal, found therapy to be 32 times more cost effective at increasing happiness than cold, hard cash.
"Often the importance of money for improving our well-being and bringing greater happiness is vastly over-valued in our societies," notes Boyce. "The benefits of having good mental health, on the other hand, are often not fully appreciated and people do not realize the powerful effect that psychological therapy… can have on improving our well-being."
6. STOP IT. Stop trying to be happy.
If you take away one thing from this post, let this be it: to be happy, there's a decent chance you'll have to stop trying to be happy. Sorry to get all zen-master on you, but that's the way it is.
Never mind the fact that measuring happiness is a lot like trying to weigh an idea in pounds and ounces. Yes, there are ways to gauge happiness, whether chemically or with a questionnaire, but when you get right down to it, "happiness" means different things to different people, and is one of the single most nebulous ideals in existence — and one of the biggest downsides to this truth is that setting a goal of happiness can actually backfire.
Some of the most important research on happiness to emerge in recent years stands in direct opposition to the cult of positivity typified by bullshit positive-thinking self-help books that place a lopsided emphasis on setting grand personal goals of happiness. In a review co-authored in 2011 by Yale psychologist June Gruber, researchers found that the pursuit of happiness can actually lead to negative outcomes — not because surrounding yourself with positive people, mastering a skill, smiling, getting therapy or practicing self-governance aren't conducive to happiness, in and of themselves, but because "when you're doing it with the motivation or expectation that these things ought to make you happy, that can lead to disappointment and decreased happiness," says Gruber.
So be the zen master. Stop trying to focus on becoming happier and just be. Surround yourself with people not to become happy, but to enjoy their company. Master a skill not to increase your happy feels, but to savor the process of becoming.
Money and Happiness
Imagine that you woke up tomorrow morning to discover $1 million under your mattress. Leaving aside the obvious lumpiness issue, take a moment to think: What would you do with that cash?
If you're like many people, contemplating your newfound wealth would probably make you think about one thing above all else: yourself. A growing body of research shows that the mere whiff of money draws out our selfish sides, focusing us on what that money can do for us, and us alone. Perhaps you imagined buying a raft of new possessions: a faster car, a high-end gas grill with rear rotisserie or even a new house, with a fancy rain shower in your commodious bathroom.
It's hard to imagine anything nicer than shampooing in your private tropical rain forest. But studies by a generation of behavioral scientists show that material goods often fail to deliver lasting happiness. Fortunately, our ongoing research offers a host of ways to wring more happiness out of every dollar you spend. And what's more, you don't need to be a millionaire to reap the benefits of happy money. Changing how you spend as little as $5 can lead to measurable increases in your happiness.
But making these changes requires challenging some of our fundamental assumptions about spending. It's hard not to view buying a house — which most Americans continue to see as a central part of the American dream — as a sensible investment. But new research shows that purchasing a home buys very little happiness.
A study of women in the United States found that homeowners were no happier than renters, on average. And even if you're currently living in a cramped basement suite, you may find that moving to a nicer home has surprisingly little impact on your overall happiness. Researchers followed thousands of people in Germany who moved to a new home because there was something they didn't like about their old home. In the five years after relocating, the residents reported a significant increase in satisfaction with their housing, but their overall satisfaction with their lives didn't budge.
So, diligently saving up for a down payment might not be such a good idea if it means skipping after-work beers with friends or your annual Valentine's Day celebration at a favorite restaurant.
And dozens of studies show that people get more happiness from buying experiences than from buying material things. Experiential purchases — such as trips, concerts and special meals — are more deeply connected to our sense of self, making us who we are. And while it's anyone's guess where the American housing market is headed, the value of experiences tends to grow over time, becoming rosier in the rearview mirror of memory.
And experiences come with one more benefit: They tend to bring us closer to other people, whereas material things are more often enjoyed alone. (We tend to watch our new television alone on the couch, but we rarely head to a wonderful restaurant or jet off to Thailand solo.) Decades of research point to the importance of social contact for improving mental and physical health.
So, doing things with other people makes a difference for happiness, and our research suggests that doing things for other people can provide an additional boost. In experiments we've conducted around the world, including in Canada, the United States, Uganda and South Africa, we find that people are happier if they spend money on others. And we've found that spending even just a few dollars on someone else provides more happiness than using the cash to treat yourself.
If experiences increase happiness and giving increases happiness, can we combine them to create the perfect happiness intervention? We tried this in a recent experiment, in which we handed out Starbucks gift cards on a university campus.
We told some people to head to Starbucks and buy something for themselves. We told others to pass their gift card along to someone else. And we told a third group of people to use the gift card to buy something for someone else — with the additional requirement that they actually hang out with that person at Starbucks.
Who was happiest? Those who treated someone else and shared in that experience with them. So the cost of increasing your happiness may be as cheap as two cups of coffee.
Taken together, the new science of spending points to a surprising conclusion: How we use our money may matter as much or more than how much of it we've got. Which means that rather than waiting to see whether you find $1 million under your mattress tomorrow, you can make yourself happier today. Switching your spending to buying experiences — for both yourself and others — can lead to more happiness than even the most amazingly Amazonian rain shower.
Donald Miller
(Daily Beast interview with Donald Miller)
Q: Don, you’re a best-selling author with a huge following, but you stopped traditional writing to work on Storyline. Why?
A: I started Storyline after I’d accomplished all my goals and still wasn’t happy. I’d become a New York Times bestselling author, which was my goal from high school, and yet I was less happy after accomplishing my goals than I was before. So I began researching what really makes people happy and content. I found that it has nothing to do with fame or money and everything to do with the health of our relationships and our interest in our own work. Serving people rather than trying to impress them is the foundation. So I created a life plan for myself, then shared it with others and found that it helped them heal and recover from a life of pursuing success. Now I consider it my life’s work and, interestingly enough, it fills my life with a deep sense of meaning.
Q: So what’s Storyline all about - practically, what do you do?
A: It’s basically a company that helps people tell better stories with their lives. Through conferences, websites, and individualized training, we create life plans and career paths for people who want to live meaningful lives. That’s what makes us different, really. We start with the question, “What will make your life more meaningful?” rather than, “What will make you more productive?” We’re finding that more and more, very successful people don’t feel satisfied with their success and want something more. That something more is what we help people discover.
Q: What’s the difference between meaning and success—and why are you focusing on the former?
A: Our work really stems from Dr. Viktor Frankl’s research in the 40s and 50s. Frankl argued that what man wants most is a deep sense of meaning and he found that when they found that, their emotional health stabilized and they were able to enjoy life, regardless of their life circumstances. Every human being is searching for a deep sense of meaning and yet we’re all chasing success. We’ve confused one for the other.
Meaning is something we experience more than we attain.
Q: So what’s the key to finding meaning? Seems like a pretty tough thing to pinpoint.
A: Meaning is something we experience more than we attain. It’s like finding a nice, easy current in a river that carries you through life. And we begin to experience it when we have three things: 1. A project to work on that captures our passions and in some way serves others. 2. A community, family, or partner to share love with. And 3. A redemptive perspective on our suffering. If we can check those three things off on our to-do list, we will experience a deep sense of meaning. It sounds simple but it really works. So Storyline helps people figure out how to navigate and understand those three areas of life.
Q: Are you done with traditional writing, or is there a new book on the horizon?
A: There’s definitely another book. I’m working on one now called A Play for Intimacy about how we try to impress people to get them to like us and it only makes us more isolated because we can’t measure up to the image we’ve projected. It’s a book encouraging us to be more vulnerable and open as a way of creating more intimate relationships.
Personality
Despite the long-held belief that personality traits are set in stone, numerous studies have found evidence to the contrary. Now research reveals that a changing character can influence life satisfaction even more than economic upheaval.
Past studies have revealed that personality is the single biggest factor in how we perceive our own well-being, accounting for 35 percent of individual differences in life satisfaction. Research on well-being, however, has focused on less important factors, such as income and job status, because of the misperception that personality is generally fixed after early adulthood.
The new study, published in March in Social Indicators Research, investigated how evolving character traits relate to life satisfaction. Researchers at the University of Manchester in England assessed 8,625 people aged 15 to 93 at two points, four years apart. They measured the Big Five personality traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism) and tracked fluctuations in external aspects of subjects' lives, including marital status, income and employment status.
The data reveal that the participants' character changed during those four years at least as much as demographic factors, such as marital status or employment. And those small personality shifts were more closely tied to life satisfaction than the other indicators were. For instance, people who grew less agreeable reported feeling less fulfilled in life than they had felt four years earlier, whereas those who became more open reported greater contentment.
This study did not attempt to find out what caused the subjects' personalities to transform, but other recent work has shown that certain experiences can change specific traits. For instance, psychological trauma - such as that experienced by combat soldiers—has been linked with decreases in agreeableness and conscientiousness.
Scientists have also successfully designed programs to increase openness, which tends to predict better health and a longer life. A December 2012 experiment published in Psychology and Aging found that a training program increased openness among older adults. A different study found that openness grew with the enhanced bodily awareness that comes from dancing and possibly other forms of physical activity.
“Not only does personality change occur, but it is an important influence and a possible route to greater well-being,” says research psychologist Christopher Boyce, now at the University of Stirling in Scotland, lead author of the Social Indicators Research study.
Social Media Depresses
It’s a truism that Facebook is the many-headed frenemy, the great underminer. We know this because science tells us so. The Human–Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon has found that your “passive consumption” of your friends’ feeds and your own “broadcasts to wider audiences” on Facebook correlate with feelings of loneliness and even depression. Earlier this year, two German universities showed that “passive following” on Facebook triggers states of envy and resentment in many users, with vacation photos standing out as a prime trigger. Yet another study, this one of 425 undergrads in Utah, carried the self-explanatory title “ ‘They Are Happier and Having Better Lives Than I Am’: The Impact of Using Facebook on Perceptions of Others’ Lives.” Even the positive effects of Facebook can be double-edged: Viewing your profile can increase your self-esteem, but it also lowers your ability to ace a serial subtraction task.
All of these studies are careful to point out that it’s not Facebook per se that inspires states of disconnection, jealousy, and poor mathematical performance—rather, it’s specific uses of Facebook. If you primarily use Facebook to share interesting news articles with colleagues, exchange messages with new acquaintances, and play Candy Crush Saga, chances are the green-eyed monster won’t ask to friend you. But if the hours you log on Facebook are largely about creeping through other people’s posts—especially their photos, and especially-especially their vacation snaps—with an occasional pause to update your own status and slap on a grudging “like” here or there, then science confirms that you have entered into a semi-consensual sadomasochistic relationship with Facebook and need to break the cycle.
A closer look at Facebook studies also supports an untested but tantalizing hypothesis: that, despite all the evidence, Facebook is actually not the greatest underminer at the social-media cocktail party (that you probably weren’t invited to, but you saw the pictures and it looked incredible). Facebook is not the frenemy with the most heads. That title, in fact, goes to Instagram. Here’s why.
Instagram distills the most crazy-making aspects of the Facebook experience.
So far, academic studies of Instagram’s effects on our emotional states are scarce. But it’s tempting to extrapolate those effects from the Facebook studies, because out of the many activities Facebook offers, the three things that correlate most strongly with a self-loathing screen hangover are basically the three things that Instagram is currently for: loitering around others’ photos, perfunctory like-ing, and “broadcasting” to a relatively amorphous group. “I would venture to say that photographs, likes, and comments are the aspects of the Facebook experience that are most important in driving the self-esteem effects, and that photos are maybe the biggest driver of those effects,” says Catalina Toma of the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “You could say that Instagram purifies this one aspect of Facebook.”
Instagram is exclusively image-driven, and images will crack your mirror.
“You get more explicit and implicit cues of people being happy, rich, and successful from a photo than from a status update,” says Hanna Krasnova of Humboldt University Berlin, co-author of the study on Facebook and envy. “A photo can very powerfully provoke immediate social comparison, and that can trigger feelings of inferiority. You don’t envy a news story.”
Krasnova’s research has led her to define what she calls an “envy spiral” peculiar to social media. “If you see beautiful photos of your friend on Instagram,” she says, “one way to compensate is to self-present with even better photos, and then your friend sees your photos and posts even better photos, and so on. Self-promotion triggers more self-promotion, and the world on social media gets further and further from reality.” Granted, an envy spiral can unspool just as easily on Facebook or Twitter. But for a truly gladiatorial battle of the selfies, Instagram is the only rightful Colosseum.
Instagram messes more with your sense of time.
“You spend so much time creating flattering, idealized images of yourself, sorting through hundreds of images for that one perfect picture, but you don’t necessarily grasp that everybody else is spending a lot of time doing the same thing.” Toma says. Then, after spending lots of time carefully curating and filtering your images, you spend even more time staring at other people’s carefully curated and filtered images that you assume they didn’t spend much time on. And the more you do that, Toma says, “the more distorted your perception is that their lives are happier and more meaningful than yours.” Again, this happens all the time on Facebook, but because Instagram is image-based, it creates a purer reality-distortion field.
Instagram ups your chances of violating “the gray line of stalkerism.”
“If you don’t know someone, and Facebook is telling you that you have interests in common,” says Nicole Ellison of the University of Michigan School of Information, “you can see their profile as a list of icebreakers.” But that same profile is also a potential list of icemakers. If you meet a vague acquaintance at a party and strike up a conversation about a science article he posted to his Facebook wall, that probably seems normal. If you meet a vague acquaintance at a party and strike up a conversation about the eco-lodge he chose for his honeymoon in the Maldives, he will likely back away from you slowly. “And then,” Ellison says, “you’ve violated the gray line of stalkerism.” Instagram’s image-driven format gives you the eco-lodge but not the science article.
And arguably, you’ve violated the gray line of stalkerism simply by looking at those photos in the first place, even if you don’t reveal yourself in public as the sad lurker that you are. Each time you swipe through more images of people’s meals and soirees and renovation projects and holiday sunsets, you are potentially blurring the boundary between stranger-you-haven’t-met and sleazy voyeur skulking around the cabana with an iPhone. To be sure, daily acts of stalkerism are all but part of the social contract at this point. But stalkerism heavily diluted with links to articles, one-on-one messaging, Dr. Oz ads, and second cousins who still play FarmVille will always seem more palatable than the uncut version.
Magic Mirrors
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a liar mirror that makes you look happier than you are. The device, called “incendiary reflection,” “works with a camera to track a person’s facial expressions in real time.” It then tweaks those expressions, subtly lifting the corners of the mouth up and crinkling the area around the eyes to approximate the beginnings of a Duchenne smile. You look in the “mirror” and see an incrementally happier you, which kicks off a cascade of happiness and ultimately makes you buy things.
The looking glass of fraud relies on facial feedback theory, or the idea that the road between emotions and facial expressions goes both ways. To wit: How you arrange your countenance informs how you feel; forcing your face into a grin can actually brighten your mood (although being told to do so will probably just infuriate you). According to Tara Kraft, a doctoral student at the University of Kansas who has authored studies on facial feedback theory, the webcam of lies might work by tapping into our impulse to mimic others’ facial expressions. We observe a joyful visage (our own) and adjust our smiling muscles to match it, which makes us happy. (Option two is that we just like looking at smiley people—no mimicry required.)
In one study, Japanese researchers led by Shigeo Toshida asked 21 volunteers to perform a neutral task and then to rate how they felt while gazing into the pane of falsification. (They did not know it was in the middle of falsifying.) When confronted by slightly happier images of themselves, the volunteers reported a greater sense of wellbeing. The video was also adjusted to modify faces in a gloomier direction—perhaps not surprisingly, people encountering more rainy-day reflections told researchers they were unhappy.
What about the “buying things” part? Each person was also given a scarf to wear and placed in front of either a regular mirror or a speculum of dissemblance. Volunteers who saw altered, sunnier figments staring back at them were more likely to be enchanted by the scarf than were members of the control group. Toshida and his colleagues believe their device, given dominion over a dressing room, “could be used to manipulate consumers’ impressions of products,” persuading people to buy clothes they might otherwise turn down.
Uh oh. Then again, as long as our mirrors are going to lie to us, who cares if we are flaunting ugly threads? Let the charade play out. If my mirror says I’m happy and my scarf is cute, I’m not about to disagree.
A Happy Life or a Meaningful Life?
Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once wrote, “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” For most people, feeling happy and finding life meaningful are both important and related goals. But do happiness and meaning always go together? It seems unlikely, given that many of the things that we regularly choose to do – from running marathons to raising children – are unlikely to increase our day-to-day happiness. Recent research suggests that while happiness and a sense of meaning often overlap, they also diverge in important and surprising ways.
Roy Baumeister and his colleagues recently published a study in the Journal of Positive Psychology that helps explain some of the key differences between a happy life and a meaningful one. They asked almost 400 American adults to fill out three surveys over a period of weeks. The surveys asked people to answer a series of questions their happiness levels, the degree to which they saw their lives as meaningful, and their general lifestyle and circumstances.
As one might expect, people’s happiness levels were positively correlated with whether they saw their lives as meaningful. However, the two measures were not identical – suggesting that what makes us happy may not always bring more meaning, and vice versa. To probe for differences between the two, the researchers examined the survey items that asked detailed questions about people’s feelings and moods, their relationships with others, and their day-to-day activities. Feeling happy was strongly correlated with seeing life as easy, pleasant, and free from difficult or troubling events. Happiness was also correlated with being in good health and generally feeling well most of the time. However, none of these things were correlated with a greater sense of meaning. Feeling good most of the time might help us feel happier, but it doesn’t necessarily bring a sense of purpose to our lives.
Interestingly, their findings suggest that money, contrary to popular sayings, can indeed buy happiness. Having enough money to buy what one needs in life, as well as what one desires, were also positively correlated with greater levels of happiness. However, having enough money seemed to make little difference in life’s sense of meaning. This same disconnect was recently found in a multi-national study conducted by Shigehiro Oishi and Ed Diener, who show that people from wealthy countries tend to be happier, however, they don’t see their lives as more meaningful. In fact, Oishi and Diener found that people from poorer countries tend to see their lives as more meaningful. Although the reasons are not totally clear, this might be related to greater religious belief, having more children, and stronger social ties among those living in poorer countries. Perhaps instead of saying that “money doesn’t buy happiness,” we ought to say instead that “money doesn’t buy meaning.”
Not too surprisingly, our relationships with other people are related to both how happy we are as well as how meaningful we see our lives. In Baumeister’s study, feeling more connected to others improved both happiness and meaning. However, the role we adopt in our relationships makes an important difference. Participants in the study who were more likely to agree with the statement, “I am a giver,” reported less happiness than people who were more likely to agree with, “I am a taker.” However, the “givers” reported higher levels of meaning in their lives compared to the “takers.” In addition, spending more time with friends was related to greater happiness but not more meaning. In contrast, spending more time with people one loves was correlated with greater meaning but not with more happiness. The researchers suspect that spending time with loved ones is often more difficult, but ultimately more satisfying, than spending time with friends.
When it comes to thinking about how to be happier, many of us fantasize about taking more vacations or finding ways to avoid mundane tasks. We may dream about skipping housework and instead doing something fun and pleasurable. However, tasks which don’t make us happy can, over time, add up to a meaningful life. Even routine activities — talking on the phone, cooking, cleaning, housework, meditating, emailing, praying, waiting on others, and balancing finances — appeared to bring more meaning to people’s lives, but not happiness in the moment.
More broadly, the findings suggest that pure happiness is about getting what we want in life - whether through people, money, or life circumstances. Meaningfulness, in contrast, seems to have more to do with giving, effort, and sacrifice. It is clear that a highly meaningful life may not always include a great deal of day-to-day happiness. And, the study suggests, our American obsession with happiness may be intimately related to a feeling of emptiness, or a life that lacks meaning.
Helper's High
The Declaration of Independence proclaims that the pursuit of happiness is an unalienable right. Indeed, happiness is a universal human yearning—people of all ages, genders, shapes, and sizes want to be happy. And humans have shown themselves to be quite adept at pursuing happiness, devoting much of their money, time, and energy to this quest. But what about our ability to actually attain happiness? Well, that’s a different story. Finding the right path to happiness can be a challenge because, as research has shown, although we think we know the keys to happiness, we are actually not very good at predicting what will bring us joy.
Recently, a burgeoning field of research has helped resolve this happiness paradox by showing that prosocial behavior—voluntary behavior intended to benefit another—can boost happiness. Although acts of kindness directly benefit the well-being of the recipient, they also create a pleasurable “helper’s high” that benefits the giver. For instance, volunteer work is associated with greater happiness and less depression, and research has shown that performing five random acts of kindness one day a week (for six weeks) can increase your happiness. Moreover, at the end of the work day, if you more strongly feel that your work made a positive difference in other people’s lives, you feel more positively at bedtime. Even research on spending has uncovered similar effects: Those who spend money on others (versus themselves) experience greater happiness. So, telling people to do good things for others appears to be a good strategy for personal happiness.
However, our new research sought to show that even if people decide to perform an act of kindness, the way they approach the act can dramatically affect the helper’s high they experience. Specifically, when striving to help others, it may be much better for you to frame your goals in concrete terms than abstract ones, as this could increase your helper’s high. It’s an important insight because the bigger helper’s high not only makes you happier in that moment, but it more strongly motivates you to give again in the future—spurring a cycle of doing good deeds for others and personal happiness.
In our experiment, we first needed to know what people expected would make them most happy. We showed participants two similar goals: the abstract goal of making someone happy and a more concretely framed version of this goal—making someone smile. Next, we asked them how much happiness they thought they would experience if they performed an act in service of each goal. In line with the popular adage that one should “aim for the stars,” people predicted the loftier, abstract goal of making someone happy would create a bigger helper’s high.
However, a subsequent experiment showed that givers are actually better off if they frame their goals in concrete terms. In this second study, we gave participants 24 hours to perform an act of kindness. Half of the people were asked to make someone happy; the other half were asked to make someone smile. We found that, although people in both groups performed the same types of acts (such as giving gifts, proffering food and drink, or lending helping hands), those who pursued the bigger, abstract goal of making others happy ended up less happy than those who pursued the simpler, concrete goal of making others smile.
What’s more, across six studies with nearly 500 different people, we showed that this effect doesn’t just apply to the goal of making someone happy (versus smile), but to acts-of-kindness goals in general. We showed the same effect when the goals were about environmentalism (e.g., increasing the amount of materials or resources that are recycled or reused versus supporting environmental sustainability) and health (e.g., giving those in need of bone marrow transplants a better chance of finding a donor versus giving them greater hope). It did not matter whether a goal was designed to benefit an individual, a group, or society as a whole—the concrete goal still outperformed the abstract goal and delivered greater happiness to the giver. But what explains this difference in happiness?
We discovered that framing a goal in concrete terms makes a giver more realistic about their prospects of success. When expectations are too high, it can lead to disappointment and less happiness. But when you frame a goal concretely, you become more focused on how to achieve that goal and can better anticipate the obstacles and opportunities you might encounter along the way. This helps you set accurate expectations that your acts of kindness can actually live up to. Also, you tend to feel more confident that you’ve achieved a goal when it’s framed concretely, as the standards of success are less vague: It is pretty clear whether you have made someone smile, but harder to tell whether you have made someone happy. Rather than chasing lofty, abstract goals, we may be better off reframing those goals in more concrete terms. In this way, instead of hoping we stumble on happiness, we might walk right towards it — and do some good for the world along the way.
Measuring Happiness
My life has been enhanced this summer by the purchase of an app called Bird Song ID. It does pretty much what it says on the tin. If you hear something chirping in a bush, you creep up on it and record it. The app then tells you whether what you heard was a blue tit, a great crested grebe or whatever. As a result, I spend quite a lot of time these days crouching silently behind bushes, which probably reduces my appeal as a companion, but keeps me happy at no cost or trouble to anybody else.
My children view my wild excitement about this app with indulgence, partly because they think birdwatching is harmless, if sad, and partly because there is an app called Shazam that identifies pop songs and has been available, like, for ever.
I view their blasé attitude to digital technology with pity because I, not having been brought up with the stuff, am constantly thrilled by its magic. Bird Song ID makes me happy not just because it is the perfect tool for a birdwatcher with more enthusiasm than knowledge, but also because this astonishingly sophisticated piece of software costs about the same as a coffee. I would pay at least ten, and quite possibly 20, times that for the ability to tell that the small brown job hopping around in the bush is a brambling, not a dunnock.
The recent release of second-quarter economic data brought Bird Song ID to mind. The government’s statisticians announced that the economy had returned to the size it was before the financial crisis — in other words, from an economist’s point of view, Britain is no better off than it was six years ago, and because the population has risen significantly over the period, Britons are still, individually, quite a bit worse off.
Yet thanks to Bird Song ID and a wide range of free and low-cost facilities that my smartphone and computer provide, I am much better off than I was. I can access all the music I’m ever likely to want to hear for the cost of a small monthly subscription. I can design a gourmet dinner or find a recipe tailored to the sad remains in my fridge without ever buying a cookery book. I can research hotels around the world without ever buying a travel guide, find out what other guests thought of them and book them instantly. I can buy anything I want from anywhere in the world without ever going to a shop again. I can navigate without either using a map whose salient features are obscured by muddy paw-prints or shouting at family members for sending me down blind alleys and one-way streets. Technology has thus improved my life in countless ways at no — or minimal — cost.
Economics does a rotten job of describing all of this. It has a concept for the gap between the £2.99 I paid for Bird Song ID and the enjoyment I got from it — consumer surplus — but cannot properly measure it. Economists sometimes try to divine intrinsic value by asking people directly how much they would be prepared to pay for things, but in this area the answers are not going to be very useful. I can, for instance, access the internet, and thus the sum of human knowledge, for about £30 a month. How much would I be prepared to pay for internet access if somebody threatened to take it away from me? I couldn’t possibly say.
Similarly, economics doesn’t deal well with the rising quality and falling prices that technology delivers. The elegant flat TV that adorns my sitting room looks a lot nicer than the ugly cuboid job of a few years ago, delivers a gazillion times more channels and probably has enough computing power to launch a mission to Mars, but because it costs less, it represents a decline in GDP and — as far as the data are concerned — in living standards. Economics thus gives us an excessively gloomy account of what’s been happening to the world.
I’m not saying that the impact of technology on the economy is universally beneficial. There are some downsides to my litany of the joys of the digital age, largely in terms of employment. All those free apps represent lost income and jobs in the cookery-and-travel writing, map-making, music-and-book publishing and high-street retailing businesses. Yet history suggests that while technology destroys employment in some industries it creates enough of them in others to keep most people in jobs, and better-paid ones at that. And while as workers our lives may have got more uncertain, as consumers they have got immeasurably better.
So economic data should be treated with scepticism. They tell us useful stuff about the pace of economic activity, but they won’t capture the pleasure that can be derived from crouching behind a bush, waving a smartphone at a bird.
Buying Happiness
Never in human history has it been easier to purchase stuff: Trips. Gadgets. Food. If you live in a major city, you can find out a product exists and then have it delivered to your door hours later. We’re awash in a flood of hyperkinetic consumerism; a deafening buzz urges us everywhere to buy, buy, buy. Amid a torrent of one-click payments and rapidly accumulating credit-card points, it’s easy to lose sight of some simple questions: Does all this buying make us happy? And how can we maximize the extent to which it does?
These are relatively new questions for psychology researchers. The current, admittedly tentative understanding of which sorts of purchases make us happiest and why dates back only to 2003, when Leaf van Boven and Tom Gilovich introduced a key distinction (PDF) that drives much of the current research into this subject. On the one hand are experiential purchases, or “spending money with the primary intention of acquiring a life experience — an event or series of events that you personally encounter or live through.” On the other are material purchases, or “spending money with the primary intention of acquiring a material possession — a tangible object that you obtain and keep in your possession.”
Gilovich and van Boven’s study, and a bevy of others conducted since then, point to a simple short answer to the question of how to spend money in a happiness-maximizing way: buy experiences, not things. But now new research is complicating that picture by suggesting that some products may create as much happiness as experiences — and that nerds and hobbyists may get a bigger happiness boost from mere “stuff” than the rest of us.
There are solid reasons for researchers' emphasis on choosing experiences versus products, as Gilovich and two of his students at Cornell, Amit Kumar and Lily Jampol, explain in a literature review soon to be published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. At the most basic level, experiences tie more into our sense of identity, of who we are, than products do (which defines you more: your choice of hobbies and travel destinations, or your preferred brand of smartphone?).
Experiences are also more social: People are more likely to talk about them and derive more satisfaction from doing so. In one experiment, for example, van Boven, Gilovich, and Margaret Campbell asked participants to talk either about important experiential purchases they had made, or important material ones. Participants rated both conversations and their partners as more enjoyable when they talked about experiences. Studies have also shown that experiences are less susceptible to the “Keeping up with the Joneses” effect that makes purchasing things so exhausting — we don’t tend to adversely compare our experiences to others' the way we do with products.
But an increasing amount of recent research has started to focus on the overlap between objects and experiences, or what Gilovich and other researchers call “experiential products” — material objects which can also help generate meaningful experiences.
For example, while Gilovich said that he hasn’t yet conducted the research to back this up, he suspects there’s a category of people who will likely see a greater happiness bump at acquiring material objects than the rest of us: what he calls “connoisseurs,” and what the rest of us might call “nerds.” That is, for people who are really into a given type of object — whether baseball cards or scarves or video games or whatever else — “The experience of buying and thinking about buying is as big as the actual purchase itself,” he told Science of Us. Plus, “You then bond with other people who do similar kinds of things, like all the people at Comic-Con who have been in the news.”
The benefits of experiential products may in part be a matter of perception. Elizabeth Dunn, a researcher at the University of British Columbia and author of Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending, suggests that “Focusing on the experiential aspects of what you buy seems to be better than focusing on the material aspects.” That is, research suggests that seeing a TV or a bicycle as a gateway to great experiences will bring more happiness than focusing on their specs or comparing them to friends’ equivalent purchases.
Darwin Guevarra of the University of Michigan and Ryan Howell of San Francisco State also studied experiential products recently (PDF), and they found that these products appeared to provide as much happiness as “life experiences." It “was not actually what we expected when we started this series of studies,” Howell said — they expected experiential products to fall somewhere in the middle between products and life experiences. They argued that experiential products and life experiences provide happiness in different ways: the former primarily by bestowing a sense of competence (being good at playing video games or mountain-biking or playing the ukulele), the latter primarily by bestowing a sense of connection to others and the wider world.
Everyone involved in researching happiness and purchasing acknowledges it’s a young field with a pile of unanswered questions. What we know is limited in important ways: The literature is dominated by papers that focus on the “afterglow value” experienced after something is consumed, rather than the pleasure elicited by waiting for it (anticipatory value), or consuming it (momentary value), both of which have received scant attention. There’s some early evidence to suggest waiting for an experience is more pleasant than waiting to acquire a product, at least according to an as-yet-unpublished paper let by Kumar at Cornell, while Dunn has written that products, especially those that can be used multiple times, may provide more in-the-moment happiness (you only experience a concert or a vacation once, but you enjoy a coat every time you put it on).
Dunn is also beginning to look into another type of potentially happiness-enhancing purchase: paying to not have an experience. At great expense, some people buy or rent housing closer to their jobs to cut down on their commute time. Other people pay to have their laundry done for them, or to outsource chores using services like Task Rabbit. Is this a happiness-maximizing move? The simplest question to ask when pondering a purchase, Dunn told Science of Us, is “Will this purchase change the way I spend my time?” It’s a humbling question when you think about how we spend on objects — slightly more advanced phones, for example — where the answer is clearly "no," but it bodes well for the results of future studies focusing on paying to avoid laundry or house-cleaning.
Given how slippery a concept happiness is, how fiercely resistant to quantification, it’s no wonder that science can’t give us definitive answers on iPhone vs. Android, or on a slightly smaller apartment versus a 20-minute-longer commute. But research does suggest there are simple things we could be asking ourselves before we buy things: Will this be part of the story I tell about myself? Can I imagine myself telling an entertaining story about it to others? Does it tie into my identity in a meaningful way? Or, per Dunn, will it change how I spend my time?
A few of these questions — perhaps coupled with a deep breath or two — may help soothe the worst symptoms of Amazon overload.
Seth Godin on What We Pay Attention To
Your mood vs. your reality
Who is happy?
Are rock stars, billionaires or recently-funded entrepreneurs happier? What about teenagers with clear skin?
Either what happens changes our mood... or our mood changes the way we narrate what happens.
This goes beyond happiness economics and the understanding that a certain baseline of health and success is needed for many people to be happy.
The question worth pondering is: are you seeking out the imperfect to justify your habit of being unhappy? Does something have to happen in the outside world for you to be happy inside?
Or, to put it differently, Is there a narrative of your reality that supports your mood?
Marketers spend billions of dollars trying to create a connection between what we see in the mirror and our happiness, implying that others are judging us in a way that ought to make us unhappy.
And industrialists have built an economic system in which compliance to a boss's instructions is seen as the only way to avoid the unhappiness that comes from being penalized at work. And so fear becomes a dominant paradigm of our profession.
Those things are unlikely to change any time soon, but the way we process them can change today. Our narrative, the laundry list we tick off, the things we highlight for ourselves and others... our narrative is completely up to us.
The simple shortcut: the way we respond to the things that we can't change can instantly transform our lives. "That's interesting," is a thousand times more productive than, "that's terrible." Even more powerful is our ability to stop experiencing failure before it even happens, because, of course, it usually doesn't.
Happiness, for most of us, is a choice. Reality is not. It seems, though, that choosing to be happy ends up changing the reality that we keep track of.
Some Suggestions
Gretchen Rubin
Be kind to your body. Physical experience colours your emotional state. Don't battle through life with small discomforts that build up and cause you to suffer. Take care of your health and diet and get enough exercise and sleep, but also pay attention to ailments. If you have an aching shoulder, see a therapist; if high heels cause you pain, have the conviction to remove them from your life. Small nuisances around the body can get to us over time, and drag us down more than we realise.
Self-knowledge is essential for happiness. Spend time thinking about what's important to you. If you believe everything you read, shopping and going to nightclubs should make us happy - some people hate those things but go through the motions, trying to fit the model of what it is to be "fun".
They end up pretending to have fun, and being really uncomfortable. If your definition of fun is a night in with a face mask, do that, and know that it's okay.
Be flexible. Keeping promises you've made to yourself can become a burden if you do them because you "should". If you're a night owl struggling to be productive in the day because society says you have to go running before work, you're setting yourself up to feel a failure. Look at it another way. What has worked well in the past? What about changing your routine? Don't be bound by other people's template of satisfaction: figure out what works for you.
Create a shrine to your passions. Possessions that are invested with meaning have a role in a happier life. Gather things that you associate with something you love - sport, music, sewing - and display them thoughtfully. If you have all the things involved with that hobby in one place, you're more likely to engage with it. It also projects your identity in a tangible way, allowing others to get a better sense of who you really are. You'll feel "known", and that's good.
Invest in relationships. They all matter. Try to strengthen existing ones, and create new networks. We all get caught up in things we have to do and don't make enough time to forge and keep connections. Keep family traditions: show up. Throw a party and invite someone new. Start a book group with friends or talk to someone in a local cafe.
Gretchen Rubin is a blogger and the author of The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle and Generally Have More Fun.
Paul Dolan
Question how you evaluate what makes you happy. Ask someone about their day, and they'll complain about their job, their boss, the commute. Ask if they like working at their fancy company and they'll say they love it. We do this with many aspects of our lives - creating a narrative where we judge our day against the things we think should make us happy but that are falling short. What we think makes us happy is often in contrast to what actually does.
Pay attention. We think that by adding things to our lives (more money, more sex, a better relationship, etc) we will find happiness. The mistake we make is that when something good does come our way we do not pay attention to it for very long. We constantly make projections about how much happier we'd be if, say, we had a pay rise. If we paid attention to that good fortune if and when it came off, we might be happy, but the novelty soon wears off.
Happiness is not just about how you think about life overall, but your experiences during it. Much of what we know about how to be happy comes from studies that use big questions about how satisfied we are with life in general. In fact, we should be paying more attention to our experiences, moment by moment. These experiences can capture the richness of our daily lives, including the purpose and futility we feel as well as more "emotional" states of pleasure and pain.
Embrace "purpose". We spend too much time evaluating what we're doing ("How am I making an impact?") and not enough allowing ourselves to enjoy the flow of experience. It's important to recognise that an experience is worthwhile in itself. Last year I spent some weeks teaching my child times tables - the sense of purpose and feeling good didn't just come from reflecting on my role on completion of the task: it was fulfilling while it was happening.
Change what you do, not how you think. Happiness can be created by design. For example, we know that activities such as listening to music and new experiences can make us happy, but we still don't do them. Make it a habit to set aside time to do something you know makes you happy.
Paul Dolan is a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics and the author of Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life.
Ruby Wax
Don't chase happiness. It's important to accept that it is usually fleeting. A lot of us spend our lives trying to repeat or recreate the moments when we were happiest. If you do get to experience real happiness, enjoy it, savour it, appreciate it for what it is rather than trying to extend it in a deliberate way. If you spend a lot of time trying to chase the circumstances that made you feel that way, you are bound to feel let down and will miss opportunities to appreciate - or even notice - the best parts of the present.
Keep your sense of humour. If you don't have a sense of humour about life, you can't pick yourself up. It's the best way to deal with pain or unfairness. When you're in the midst of something that feels like an assault, or are distraught, finding a glint of something funny helps. I don't mean cracking jokes, more "switching on" the comedy in life. Laughing, even to yourself, feels good physically - it's a relief and gives a hit of energy. If you can make others laugh, or laugh with them, everyone feels closer, less lonely.
Find your tribe. When you feel really low, isolating yourself is the most damaging thing to do (but is usually all you feel capable of). Being sociable is much easier with like-minded people who you can be yourself with, who lift your spirits. People with drink addictions go to Alcoholics Anonymous, but most people have nowhere to go, so it's not easy. It could be a book club, or taking up fishing - find the people who like what you like.
Happiness is feeling good about who you are. We're all peacocks, and we need to figure out which colours to show. A lot of it comes from accomplishing something, any small challenge that helps you find some self-esteem. I practise mindfulness and that helps me. Don't go with the crowd, or what's expected. For me, sometimes it's about finding a quiet place where my brain can settle down, and not apologising for it; other times it's drinking martinis.
Sleep as much as you can. Sometimes it feels as if we're all in competition to see who can survive on two hours' sleep. People really underestimate the power of sleep. After a solid 12 hours, everything looks better. It's often the case that things consolidate and start to resolve themselves in your mind while you're sleeping; the brain puts things in filing cabinets for you, so you can actually enjoy more of life rather than being overwhelmed by it.
Ruby Wax is a comedian and the author of Sane New World: Taming the Mind.
Vanessa King
Give to and help others. Neuroscience shows that when we help others it activates the reward centre in our brain in the same way as receiving a gift does. It also means we're focusing on something other than the minutiae of our own lives, not dwelling on things that make us unhappy. Helping is a really good strategy for forming connections, which makes us happy. And the happier we are, the more likely we are to help others, and so it continues.
Ask for help. Reaching out for help or support is not just for when we're facing difficulties, but also when we are working towards things that are important to us. So we might ask a colleague or friend to be a sounding-board or to share their experience. This makes them feel valued, and boosts their wellbeing too. We also show our human side, our vulnerability, which helps build a connection - they're more likely to open up to us in return, building closer bonds.
Get started. As human beings we have a fundamental psychological need to feel a sense of mastery, of progress. But often, when we have something we'd like to achieve, we procrastinate. The more we put it off the more complex it becomes in the mind. Trick yourself into starting by spending a short time, even five minutes, doing something towards a goal. After the first step progress is easier, and each subsequent one moves us towards a sense of reward.
Use your natural strengths. Studies show that identifying our "signature" strengths and finding new ways to use them can have a lasting impact on our happiness. Our strengths come naturally to us, and are often energising, easy to learn and inherently enjoyable. Sometimes we don't recognise them as they're so natural and we tend to focus more on our weaknesses. Figure out at least two "signature" qualities you have (not things you've learnt), then try applying those more and in new ways.
Invest in experiences. We often choose to spend money on possessions rather than experiences because we think they'll last longer. Possessions can give a short-term boost but often we adapt to them quickly. You might really want a new handbag, but six months later do you have your eye on another? The boost from experiences lasts longer. You not only enjoy, say, a weekend away or learning something new at the time, but also enjoy the memory over and over.
Vanessa King is a business consultant on positive psychology and resilience and a board member of the charity Action for Happiness.
Matthieu Ricard
Understand that happiness comes from within. We often mistakenly pin all our hopes, fears and blame on external conditions that are out of our control. At the same time we vastly underestimate our power to control our own happiness. We should never underestimate the power of the mind to generate our happiness. Human beings can be miserable in paradise or feel a joy about living even in the most adverse of circumstances. The mind can be our best friend or our worst enemy.
Realise that happiness is not a given. It must be learnt and fostered. It's about dealing with thoughts and emotions, but also about being able to recognise and distinguish between negative, destructive ones and positive, constructive ones. Using meditation, you can train the mind to minimise the instinct towards hate or jealousy and cultivate positive emotions and thoughts. In turn, this gives us freedom, inner strength and a sense of balance.
Don't strive alone. You can't hope to build happiness in a bubble, and there is no such thing as successful or selfish happiness. We're all inter-connected, so can only build true happiness with others. Altruistic love is the most significant, fulfilling and useful state in which to exist. Nothing is more powerful than having good intentions for others.
Try to exist in a state of simplicity, where you can see what is important. For me, the heart of spirituality is about understanding the way the mind works, and the ability to let it rest and not be pulled in different directions by trivial things. Inside a calm state of mind you find a kind of inner simplicity.
It's a place where there are no inner conflicts, hopes or fears. It makes troubles seem smaller and allows the things that feel meaningful to float to the surface.
Learn to watch your stream of thoughts. Picture worries as birds flying across the sky, representing freedom, serenity and strength. The blue sky is always there. If you don't allow fears to multiply, the birds won't take over: you can still see the sky. You'll find they don't bother you that much. A state that doesn't entertain rumination leads away from depressive thoughts and cultivates happiness.
Money
The founder of the Terra Firma, private equity company said that the industry had become a bit like Beverly Hills. “As people get more successful, the divorce rate goes up,” he told an investment conference in Amsterdam.
The financial veteran bemoaned the change of culture in the industry. “The one constant I’ve noticed is that the people I interview for jobs have, over the years, become less and less happy,” he said. “Interviewing private equity people makes one feel like an agony aunt — no one seems satisfied and everyone seems envious and critical of everyone.
“As one private equity person put it to me, ‘If I’m performing at a nine and a half, why should I be surrounded by people who are only sixes?’ Meanwhile, he told me his wife was a five — surprise, surprise, they are now divorced and his senior private equity people have quit.”
Mr Hands said it was time that the private equity industry in Britain had some therapy. He advised his colleagues to make some radical decisions or they would get rich while feeling under-appreciated and unfulfilled.
Mr Hands is feted as a legendary dealmaker who overcame dyslexia to win a place at Oxford. He also has a reputation for delivering sermons to the industry. The executive is a regular on The Sunday Times rich list and made his first fortune buying and selling pubs and betting shops. He has lived in the tax haven of Guernsey for about six years but insists it has nothing to do with money and is more about lifestyle.
Mr Hands said that he thought “unhappiness” existed in the private equity industry because most people were working in firms where they had become cogs in “hugely successful money machines”.
In an interview last week, he said that when he was in Paris he favoured Le Taillevent, a restaurant where the main beef dish costs €138. He claimed yesterday, however, that he pined for the early days, 20 years ago. “The few of us who were in this industry ate in modestly priced restaurants and drank modestly priced wine and held our conferences in three-star hotels. We had a great time,” he recalled.
“Now, those of us still in the industry go out to ludicrously expensive restaurants and drink ludicrously expensive wine and hold our conferences in five-star hotels.”
Mr Hands said that the industry needed to get back to its foundations, pointing out that he had turned down multi-million-pound offers from banks to found Terra Firma. He added that the sector needed fewer “highly paid number-crunchers and more entrepreneurial businesspeople”, with a good sense of humour. “In every good marriage, you need to be able to laugh. As every singles advert says, Wanted: GSOH,” he said.