Month: December 2010

The results are in.  And the result, of the happiness battle of the sexes, is……

A draw!  I know, boring!  But unfortunately, men and women usually score approximately equal in happiness studies.  There’s the odd study that puts men slightly higher, and the odd one that puts women slightly higher, but most studies fail to find a difference in happiness and gender.

What these studies all measure though, is the average.  What is interesting is that women experience more unhappiness and negative emotions; more sadness, anxiety, shame and guilt.  This is balanced out by their experience of stronger and more frequent positive emotions.  So women experience a greater range and intensity of emotion than men, but when averaged out, it’s about the same.

There are other differences too.  Another study investigated the link between happiness and gender by following a group of people over the course of their lives, and found that women tend to be happier in early life, and men tend to be happier in later life.  The authors suggest two reasons for this.  Firstly, women are more likely to have met their goals for their ‘goods and family life’ goals (the stuff and the family they want) earlier in life, while men reach them later.

The second explanation is the proportion of men and women in marriage or committed relationships tends to change as people get older, because the husband tends to be older than the wife.  And as we’ve already seen, marriage is a potential cause of happiness.

So when it comes to happiness, the sexes come out equally.  This saddens me, for it disputes one of my earliest scientific predictions.  When I was 6, I hypothesised that “boys rule and girls drool.”  Alas, my theory fails to find support once again.?

Refs:

Diener, E, Suh, E. M., Lucas, R. E., Smith, H. L. (1999). Subjective Well-Being: Three Decades of Progress. Psychological Bulletin, 125(2), 276-302

Nolen-Hoeksma, S. and Rusting, C.L. (1999). Gender differences in well-being – In Kahneman et al (1999) Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, New York: Russell Sage Foundation

Plagnol, A. C. & Easterlin, R. A. (2008). Aspirations, Attainments, and Satisfaction: Life Cycle Differences Between American Women and Men. Journal of Happiness Studies.

Autonomy refers to the amount of control you feel you have over your life. How much of your life are you in control of? How much are you able to change? You probably have full control over many things. For example, your living room. You can paint it and arrange it however you desire. Some say you can even use Feng Shui to channel powerful chi energies, ostensibly using only your couch and television set. How’s that for control?

Let’s try another example: how your time is spent between 9-5 each day. How much control do you have over that?

In terms of happiness, autonomy is a huge factor – one of the biggest. Some researchers studied the happiness of 900 Texan women as they went about their day. Here’s how the results roughly looked:

There’s a general upward trend, but the happiest times are clearly lunchtime and after work; the times of day when you are free to do as you please.

Autonomy might be everyone’s favourite goal. Millions of people go to work every day, dreaming of a time when they don’t have to. We’d love to win the lottery, so that we’re free to do anything. We covet retirement as the holy Mecca of freedom, and want it as early as possible.

And we’re right in pursuing this goal. A nursing home called Arden House, rated one of the best in the US, was the stage for an experiment in autonomy. One group of residents were given more autonomy – plants to water, choice over how the rooms were arranged, and a reminder of their responsibilities towards themselves. A second group was given plants that were watered by the staff, and a speech stressing the staff’s responsibilities over them. The high autonomy group then became happier than the low autonomy group. More than that, eighteen months later, the high autonomy group had more people left in it! (15% mortality versus 30% in the low autonomy group).

But there’s more to autonomy than having physical agency to do things. In Switzerland, many policy decisions are made by referendum, but some areas have greater right to demand a referendum than others. A study found a link between the extent of this right and the happiness of the people. In fact, the difference in happiness between the most autonomous area and the least was about the same as doubling a person’s income.

Speaking of income, money is the first thing to come to mind when people think of autonomy. When you think of rich people, do you think of Monaco, beaches, yachts and cocktails? Or do you think 80 hour weeks, pressure, stress and, well, cocktails again?

The potential is there, true. The more money you have, the more control you can have over your life. But autonomy and money don’t necessarily walk hand-in-hand down the beaches of Monaco. Autonomy is more important. We know this because it accounts for twenty times more of the variation in happiness than income. Not only that, but people with low income but high personal control are far happier than rich people with low personal control (statistically, the difference is 7.85 out of ten compared with 5.82).

One thing is clear from all this; if you can come up with ways to increase the control you have over your life, you’ll get happier – even if you don’t have as much money coming in. You can even become happier than you would be if you got rich, but had to work unreasonable hours to earn your money. Good news!

Now, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I have a strange urge to rearrange my living room…

“A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor’s book”- Irish Proverb

“It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.”- Gandhi

It’s quite a curious topic, health. I notice that some people want it, while some people aren’t bothered. Or at least, there are other things they would rather have instead of it. It’s quite interesting to find out where people put health in their list of priorities.

Most people put it below taste; that’s common. They eat for pleasure first and function second.

Comfort is another common priority over health. It’s much easier to sleep in for an extra hour than get up and do some exercise. I would know, I’ve done it a million times. I’m sure your familiar with the process; at the relevant time, your alarm goes off, screeching it’s awful, high-pitched message into your sensitive morning ears. Reluctantly, you wake up. Then, all of a sudden, your bed becomes 100x more comfortable, and you can’t seem to leave. Strange, how that happens isn’t it? I have found that this is a universal feature, built into all mattresses.

But, after a while, you learn to get past it. However, doing so takes effort. Health often requires that you give up certain pleasures and comforts right now, in exchange for another pleasure that only comes to you further down the line.

It’s this ‘further down the line’ part that’s the problem. It’s against human nature to defer gratification, because we’re programmed to conserve energy. Our bodies are evolved for use in an African Savannah; if you manage to find the same amount of comfort there as you do in a centrally-heated house with a double bed, duvet and a magical mattress that gets more comfortable between 6-7 every morning, then you’re on to something good!

Simply put, if you find a warm, safe place, your body will tell you to stay there. It doesn’t know that you’re not an active hunter-gatherer, that you can be in this safe, comfortable place whenever you want. It doesn’t know that if you don’t get up now, the only possibility of physical effort will be if the lifts are still jammed at the office.

It takes a while to subvert this instinct, especially when the payoff isn’t really defined to us. We have a vague, wispy concept of something called ‘health’, but what does that really mean to us? Maybe being ‘fitter’, more able to run around. Maybe less chance of some disease coming further down the line (and we can change later, plenty of time for that). The benefits that come right now are harder to figure out.

I won’t bother listing the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. But all of these things should directly or indirectly lead to happiness, surely. And to a point, they do; people who suffer illnesses or disabilities report that they are less happy than people who don’t. No surprise there, but what is surprising is the adaptation to chronic disability. Over time, people gradually become more accustomed to it, and happiness starts to move to its previous level; although it does not quite return to where it was previously. That finding was based on serious disability (where people had to stop working).

And the relationship works both ways; being happy is good for your health. Happy people have stronger immune systems, resist the flu more easily, and take less time to recover from surgery. Part of the reason for this is probably lowered stress. The “stress hormone” cortisol increases blood pressure, and reduces the immune response. But when happy, you get the opposite effect; blood pressure and heart rate fall.

Amazingly, self-reports of happiness can also be used to predict how long a person will live. In 1932, new nuns coming into the American School Sisters of Notre Dame were asked to write an autobiographical portrait of themselves. These were stored away, until some psychologists came along and decided to rate them for how much positive feeling they revealed. In 1991 the psychologists caught up with the nuns, and over the next nine years, 21% of the happier nuns died, while 55% of the least happy died. Remarkably, how happy a person is in their 20s is a powerful predictor not only of general health, but of how long they will live.

This doesn’t mean you can lie in your bed instead of exercising! It just means that maybe there’s some truth to that Irish proverb after all.??

Refs:

Rosenkranz, M et al (2003). Affective style and in vivo immune response: Neurobehavioural mechanisms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100, 11148-52.

Ryff, C & Singer, B. (2003). The role of emotion on pathways to positive health. In Davidson et al Handbook of Affective Science. NY: Oxford.

Danner, D., Snowden, D. & Friesen, W. (2001). Positive emotions in early life and longevity: Findings from the nun study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 804-13.

“Happiness is neither within us only, nor without us; it is the union of ourselves with God.”- Blaise Pascal

“When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.”- Sigmund Freud

Are religious people happier than atheists? Freud, as you read in the quote above, did not believe so. He wasn’t a big fan of religion, seeing it as a neurosis, creating guilt and suppressing sexuality. However, Freud was also not a big fan of putting his ideas to the test. Luckily though, other people are, and now that happiness can be reliably measured, we can finally put this idea to the test.

The research, it turns out, actually contradicts what Freud believed – there does indeed appear to be a link between religion and happiness. Several studies have been done, but to give an example, one study found that the more frequently people attended religious events, the happier they were; 47% of people who attended several types a week reported that they were ‘very happy’, as opposed to 28% who attended less than monthly.

In practical terms, religious people have the upper hand on atheists in several other areas. They drink and smoke less, are less likely to abuse drugs, and they stay married longer. After a stressful even like bereavement, unemployment, or illness, those who worship don’t take it as hard and recover faster. All of the above are likely to be beneficial to a person’s happiness. Additionally, religious people, as a result of their beliefs, have a greater sense of meaning, purpose and hope in their lives.

Could this be divine intervention? Alas, these studies can’t inform us as to whether there is a God, only that people who believe in one tend to be happier. There are variables that need to be controlled for – religious people have communities that provide social support, and a belief system that provides structure to their lives and may alleviate some fears to a degree, such as the fear of death. So all we know for sure is that religious people tend to be happier than non-religious people.

Come on, you didn’t expect all the answers, did you?

Refs:

Myers, D. G. (2000). Funds, Friends and Faith of Happy People. American Psychologist. 55(1), 56-67.

“There was never a child so lovely, but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.“?- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.”?- Franklin P. Jones

The link between children and happiness is one of the more controversial areas of happiness research.  Studies show that spending time with children brings about roughly the same amount of happiness as doing housework.  In other words, not so much! More than that, the overall effect of children on happiness is slightly negative.  

The main study of children and happiness tracked the mood of 900 Texan women as they went about their day.  The activities they did were then put in rank order, based on mood.  Taking care of the children also caused about the same happiness as surfing the web and checking emails.  Incidentally, the study did find some more predictable findings: the activities that brought the best moods were sex, socialising and relaxing, and the ones bringing the lowest moods were commuting and working.

To most people, this is indeed a controversial finding, and one that goes against every intuition they have. But to me, it makes perfect sense. I’m a 28 year-old male with my feet firmly planted in bachelorhood. I see children as noisy annoying little things that have ruined one too many cinema experiences. But other people go nuts for them, picking them up, responding to every utterance the little things make with equally nonsensical replies, putting pictures of them everywhere, and generally saying “aaaaaawwwwwww” a lot.

I don’t get it, personally. Maybe one day I will, but I do see that there’s a discrepancy between what the research says and what people intuitively believe. Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, proposed three reasons that the scientific research contradicts our intuitions:

1) Expected Value. We put a lot of value on things that are expensive and that we put a lot into. That’s why selling a product too cheap can be a bad idea – it might be seen as low quality. Because people put so much of everything into raising kids, it is natural to assume that there’s a big payoff from it – whether or not there actually is.

2) Selective Memory. Gilbert puts it best: “One ‘I wub you, Daddy’ can erase eight hours of ‘no, not yet, not now, stop asking’.” In other words, you can have many lows, but when you think back, you tend to just remember the highs.

3) Huge Time Investment. So much time is spent raising kids. If you spend that much time doing any one thing, you’d have to pass on doing a load of other things that might make you happy; so of course your day-to-day happiness would take a slight hit. The positive implication is though, could you spend so much time doing any other one thing and still be as happy? That’s his implication, by the way, not mine; I can think of lots of things!

If I could add a fourth one, it would be that this measurement of happiness is based on a specific definition of it, which we talked about in a previous article. The results might have been different if other measurements were used; for example, one that takes into account how much meaning you feel your life has. Perhaps children give your life a greater sense of meaning and purpose; even if they don’t bring more pleasure overall. 

Refs:

Kahneman, D., Krueger, A. B., Schkade, D. A., Schwarz, N., & Stone, A. A. (2004). A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: The day reconstruction method. Science, 306, 1776-1780.

“Loves seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.”- Mark Twain

“A man doesn’t know what happiness is until he’s married. By then it’s too late.”- Frank Sinatra, from ‘The Joker Is Wild’.

Who are you more inclined to believe on this one, Sinatra or Twain? Two famous names, two opposite opinions. But who’s right?

As it turns out, ol’ blue eyes was wrong on this one. Some researchers decided to compare marital status with happiness, and found that married people, on average, score significantly higher than people who are single. They also found that cohabiters, on average, are happier than singles. And lower on the happiness scale even than singles, are people who had once been married but no longer are – for whatever reason.

There’s a lot of debate over why this is. One side of the argument is that marriage causes happiness – you get married, you get happier. This makes sense; marriage is a convenient way to meet many of our needs and wants in one shot: companionship, sex, children, financial stability, and so on. Not to mention love, the reason people are supposed to get married in the first place!

Then there’s the other side of the argument; happier people are more likely to get and stay married. If you’re temperamentally happy, you’re more likely to attract a partner, less likely to argue, and generally just an easier person to get along with. So maybe marriage doesn’t create happy people, but happy people create marriages? This makes sense too.

What’s the answer? Well it’s basically a little of both. Not only are happy people more likely to get married, but also married people become happier. In studies where people’s happiness has been tracked over time, there were noticeable increases after the tying of the knot.

What’s interesting, is that after that initial spike, there’s a gradual decline. Marriage gives a boost in happiness, which slowly starts to fall, reaching its lowest point when the kids reach the teen years. Once the kids have flown the coup, happiness returns to its pre-marriage level.

Presumably, this period where happiness declines is where the advice about ‘making marriage work’ comes into play. They say, you’re not supposed to take from a marriage, but to put into it. They say it takes work, and compromise, after the honeymoon period has worn off. Apparently people have recently been listening to this advice, at least in the UK, where the divorce rates in 2007 were the lowest for 26 years. However, some analysts suggest the reason for this is not romance, but the higher cost of divorce and settlement, which I suppose is the cynical interpretation. No one knows for sure, so I’ll let you make up your own mind on that one.

Refs:

Haring-Hidore, M., Stock, W., Okun, M. A. and Witter, R. A. (1985). Marital status and
subjective well-being: A research synthesis. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 47, 947-
53.
Lucas, R.E., Clark, A.E., Georgellis, Y, Diener, E. (2003).Reexamining Adaptation and the
Set Point Model of Happiness: Reactions to Changes in Marital Status. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology. 84(3), 527–539

Can you measure your happiness like your temperature?  Is it possible to accurately say who is happier than who?  When I told people I was writing a chapter on measuring happiness, I got skeptical reactions.  A lot of people don’t see happiness as something that can be measured.  They say it’s too abstract, too subjective, too hard to quantify.  So if you’re skeptical, I don’t blame you, but hopefully I can convince you otherwise.

Methods of measuring happiness range from deceptively simple to extremely complex.  The more complex the method, the more accurate the results are.  The simplest way is to just ask people how satisfied they are with their life on a scale of one to ten.  More complex ways range from questionnaires that are 20+ items long, to brain imaging scans using state-of-the-art technology.  In the middle-ground are the ‘life-satisfaction’ questionnaires; these measure the specific definition of happiness described in the last section, and that that’s the definition I’ll be using here.

When we’re in a happy state, it’s something we can feel physically.  Now, we could find a way to measure that physical feeling somehow: maybe with brain scans, heart/pulse rates, or something like that.  We’d then get a nice, objective way of measuring happiness.  But the problem is, there may be a difference between the objective measurement of happiness and your subjective experience of it.

For example, some people are real adrenaline junkies. They love bungee jumping, performing in front of crowds, and diving out of aeroplanes. Others can really do without that kind of thing.  An objective measurement can tell us the status of our physical body, but not necessarily how happy we are with that status.  Imagine believing you are happy but being assured that you are not, or vice versa; this seems OK for something like temperature, but incorrect for happiness.

Therefore any measurement of a person’s happiness has to include their evaluation of their own state- we just need a way to quantify these evaluations.  This is why happiness is measured with questionnaires and scales – you’d miss important information if you measured it only as a physical feeling.

Sources of static when measuring happiness

The way to measure these evaluations is to use a specially designed questionnaire. Going over the process of how these questionnaires is designed is beyond the scope of this book, but it involves starting with lots of potential questions and finding the best combination through many studies and lots of statistical analysis. But once they are made, the problem of accuracy comes up; are people good judges of their happiness?  The problem is a slippery one, because we’re rejecting a purely objective definition of happiness.  We’re in the realm of subjectivity, where happiness cannot be completely separated from peoples’ own standards.

Imagine two completely identical people, in two completely identical alternate universes.  They have the exact same lives, experiences and feelings, in every single way, except one; one of them is more pessimistic in his judgement of his life.  Our subjective measurement would show him as being less happy, but is he really less happy than his alternate self?

In one sense he cannot be- he has the exact same life, experiences the same good emotions, and feels the same amount of pleasure.  On the other hand, if his pessimism means he wants more, shouldn’t that dissatisfaction be included when measuring his happiness?

In other words, shouldn’t people choose their own criteria of what they’re happy with?  They should, but standards can be fickle.  Today I’m happy with my house, tomorrow I want a bigger one.  Maybe the day after that I don’t want a big house anymore.  Our happiness measurement would detect these fluctuations; like static picked up along with the ‘signal’ of happiness we’re trying to tap into.

This is not such a bad thing.  The way we consistently judge our lives affects our feelings of happiness.  If you regularly use a higher standard to judge your situation by than what you have achieved, you’ll get less happy.  This is called negative self-talk and it’s what some types of therapy work at fixing.  Likewise, if you lower your standards of judgement, you’ll tend to get happier with what you have; this is generally known as appreciation or gratitude.

There are other sources of static too, like ‘impression management’.  If someone going on a date asked you for advice, you’d be quite a troublemaker if you suggested they be as unhappy as possible.  Happy, positive people are more attractive, so you might expect people to report a happiness score that they view as being attractive.  This explains why you get higher happiness scores if you do surveys by interview than by post, and even more so if the interviewer is of the opposite sex!

Mood might also cause some static.  Imagine being asked how satisfied you are with your life when you’ve just had the best day of your life, compared with your worst.  You’d probably be rational to a point, because you’re specifically being asked to look at your life overall, but the way your day went would definitely have an impact.

These sources of static cast a shadow of doubt of the measurements.  We need some more objective things to compare our scores with, to make sure that the signal coming through the static is strong enough.

Cleaning up the Signal

To find out how much signal is getting through the static, the questionnaires of happiness must be compared with objective things that already we know are related to happiness.  Because such a large amount of research has been done in this area, I’ll only give a quick overview of this work.

First of all, if you give someone a happiness questionnaire twice, one month apart, the results are very similar. This consistency shows that people don’t just respond randomly, and it suggests there is more to the results than people’s mood at the time of answering. Of course we would not expect the results to be identical, because many things can happen in a month, but we would expect a correlation.

Emotions and feelings are processed in the brain, so that’s another good place to look.  As you probably know, the brain is split up into two hemispheres.  You might not know, that the left hemisphere is associated with positive emotions and feelings, and the right hemisphere with negative ones (to be specific, the left- and right-prefrontal cortices).  If you record brain activity when people watch funny films, the left side lights up; during sad films, the right side activates.  People with injuries to the left side are more likely to become depressed, and people with damage on the right side can actually get an increase in good feelings. So how do happiness questionnaires compare with brain scans?  Well, it turns out that people who score higher on happiness questionnaires actually have more activity in the left hemisphere. (3) So these questionnaires are related in the correct way to brain activation – another sign that they do what they are supposed to.

As mentioned previously, there’s a chance people might lie when completing these questionnaires, and say they’re happier than they are to give a good impression.  This can be tested for by asking friends, family and independent observers to fill out the questionnaire as if they were the person in question.  My friends and family would know if I’m happy, and random people would have some idea.  They wouldn’t get the same exact score as me of course, because they aren’t me (so few of us are in fact).  But for happiness measurements to be taken seriously, they have to correlate with friend and observer reports – and they do.

Another objective thing to compare against is the ultimate symbol of happiness – the smile.  Look at the picture below:

A ‘real’ smile, called a ‘Duchenne’ smile, is where the eyes wrinkle up on the outside along with the smile.  If someone isn’t smiling with the eyes, they’re probably faking it. See the crow’s feet on the guy’s eyes, indicating a real smile. The girl is only smiling with the lips – no crow’s feet = not a real smile.  As you’d expect, people with higher happiness scores tend to give more Duchenne smiles than people with lower scores.

Hey, it works!

Even though it might have seemed far fetched to measure an abstract thing like happiness, with a questionnaire, of all things, there really is a signal coming through the static.  All the evidence points to that signal being happiness; or at least, something it’s logical to label ‘happiness’.  It’s not a perfect method, but the signal to noise ratio is good enough that these questionnaires can be useful.

How would you define happiness? Is it an emotion? A state of mind? A decision? Is it a reaction to things that happen to us, like pain, or is it something we can create ourselves? It’s tough to define happiness, because it’s a very abstract, subjective concept. Whatever it is though, it’s a powerful motivator – almost everything we do is motivated by how much happiness we think we’ll get from it.

Even though happiness has such a big role in our lives, we don’t seem to spend much time thinking about what it is. Most people just take it for granted, but others haven’t been satisfied with that; philosophers have been pondering on happiness for thousands of years, and in the last couple of decades, scientists have been studying it too. All of this work has given new insight into what happiness is, why it’s there, and most importantly, how to get
it.

Everyone intuitively knows what happiness feels like, and people are also quite good at telling you what will make them happy. Try asking them. You’ll probably get responses involving money or the opposite sex, but if you’re lucky you might get a more thoughtful response. If you’re very lucky, you might get some good ideas for future Christmas presents. If you ask what happiness actually is, however, you get less detailed replies and the occasional blank face. People don’t ponder this, because it doesn’t seem like useful information for everyday life.

So what is it?

Well for starters, there’s a strong element of subjectivity to happiness. Different things elicit it for different people. Listening to 80s power ballads might make me happy, but not you. OK bad example, everybody loves power ballads. But you get my point. So when trying to form a definition of happiness, it’s best not to focus on the specifics of what causes it in different people – there’d be too much information to make sense of any of it. Instead, we have to look at what all these different things have in common. The most obvious commonality is pleasure. If you find bike rides, massages or films pleasurable, then you’d probably agree that these things make you happy. Also if you think of the last time you were really happy, you’d probably say it was pleasurable. But
despite what my ex-girlfriend might claim, pleasure isn’t always a short-lived thing. You could distinguish between short-term but intense pleasure, like elation or excitement, and more enduring but less intense feelings, like contentedness, relaxation, or the feeling that you are part of something meaningful, bigger than yourself.

And what’s the hidden commonality behind short-term and long-term pleasure? It’s that something, or things in general, are going better than might be expected – or better than some alternative. So it seems reasonable to include pleasant feelings somewhere in the definition of happiness. I mean, it’s hard to imagine the opposite, pain, being part of it. Or is it? Can you think of an example of when a person could be in pain but be happy? (That doesn’t involve PVC and whips, thank you very much…). What about if a climber fell off a cliff but survived? He might be in great pain while he recovered in hospital, but at the same time be happy to be alive.

Happiness is more than just a feeling

The man who survives falling off a cliff can’t feel happiness at the same time as the agonising pain, but on judgement, comparing his situation to a grim alternative, he might be happy with it. There are many other examples and counter-examples you might think of, but one thing seems clear; it’s possible to be happy without feeling happy. Look at it this way; if I say ‘I am happy to see you!’, I’m talking about a feeling (well, either that or I’m lying). If I say ‘I am happy with my life’, I’m not talking about a feeling, I’m making a judgement.

Why? Because I can completely experience the event ‘seeing you’, whereas I can’t experience ‘all my life’ at once. All I can do is compare all the positive feelings I tend to have with all the negative feelings I experience. Or maybe I’d compare my current situation with some expectation I hold. Either way, my happiness when seeing you is something, it exists in some physical way. My happiness with my life does not exist as such; it only reflects things that do exist (or did).

So there’s something else to happiness beyond mere feelings, something cognitive. It’s not really a valid question to say which one of these two things – positive feelings or positive judgements – ‘is’ happiness; they are different levels of the same thing. If you define happiness as a feeling, you would conclude that happiness is erratic; shifting up and down, minute-by-minute, in response to whatever is going on (or not going on). Your conclusion would be correct, but limited, because you would not know whether a person is happy with all the ups and downs.

For example, one couple in a volatile relationship might like the drama. Another couple might enjoy a relatively boring but stress-free life. But on balance, both couples might be equally happy with their relationship (although each will not understand how the other can be!).

Because feelings and judgements are two levels of the same thing you would expect there to be some overlap. And there is. This is why you get people saying ‘happiness is a decision’ or a ‘happiness is a state of mind’. By deliberately altering judgements, the part of feelings that overlaps with it will start to change too. You see this in people who take cognitive-behavioural therapy; they learn judge situations in a different way, and it’s about as effective as prozac at making people happier, given enough time. Likewise, it’s natural that if you do a lot of things that result in the feelings of happiness, then over time this will affect your judgements of how happy you are. That’s quite obvious; when you sit and reflect you’ll have more happy memories on which to base your judgement.

Scientists have focused their work mostly on the judgement definition. They prefer to study things that are stable over time: if feelings were used, the research would be all over the place. Also, judgements are a higher-level definition; judgements can tell you about feelings, but feelings can’t necessarily tell you about judgements.
Psychologists have termed judgements ‘Subjective Well Being’, or ‘life-satisfaction.’ They’ve also come up with other definitions and explanations for happiness, but this subjective well being is the one with the most research behind it. So I’ll focus on that one in this book, but I’ll continue to just call it happiness for consistency.
The real advantage defining happiness in this way is that it gets around the subjectivity problem. When you judge your life, you take into account the things that make you happy, and when I judge my life, I take the things that make me happy into account. If we are able to use our own judging criteria, we could compare our happiness, if there was some way to measure it. Well there is, and in the next section we’ll look at how it is been possible to quantify happiness.